Saturday 30 December 2017

Crevice crumbs

My subject matter gets ever more ordinary!  My last poem was centred on nakedness in a public changing room and this present one is about crumbs!
     This too is related to my daily swimming experience, but this time out of the changing room and into the cafe for my obligatory cup of tea.  With the tea (depending on who is making it) I get a couple of those little foil wrapped biscuits that are part of the cup of tea experience.  I tuck one of the biscuits into the side pocket of my sports bag for later use as a base for my home made yogurt, while the other is a treat that I allow myself.  It was the breaking of this little biscuit that prompted the poem.
     I suppose in some ways this is a poem about the writing of a poem, a meta-poem, because while having my cup of tea I try and write something in a small 9 x 14 cm notebook that I have with me at all times.  what I write in this book is usual banal in the extreme, something about the weather or what I am going to do, or more often something I have not done.  But the idea of the writing is to write something, anything, in the hope that a free flow of words might bring something to the surface which can be useful for a poem.  This works sometimes.  Other times, it is just pages of irrelevance.
     For some reason, after the biscuit broke as I was taking it out of its foil wrapper and half the thing bounced on the page on which I was writing, instead of brushing the tiny crumbs away I just looked at them.  Part of me was simply resting after a particularly impressive catch to stop the floorward half of the biscuit from reaching its target, but the other part was thinking about bits and pieces that get caught in the pages of books and are discovered later.  Receipts used as bookmarks, torn pieces of paper, references, comments, newspaper, insects, leaves, photographs, sand, dirt, blood, phone numbers, cloth, ribbon, food, a tiny shell, book marks, money, cards - those are just some of the things that I can remember finding.  There are also the more poignant items when you find something of a parent or a grandparent inside a book that was once theirs.  Or indeed of friends who are still very much alive but far away.
     Whatever the reason for my musing, I decided to leave the crumbs there and wonder if I would ever go back and if I did would I remember leaving them there for me to remember that I left them for that purpose.  So to speak!
     As I say in the poem,
               Should I return,
               as, having written this, I might,
                                        I am conscious that I am deliberately making something out of nothing, but it is also a playing with a concept of memory.
     I am well aware that when I re-visit some of my writing, I read it almost as a stranger - though an oddly prescient one.  Although I cannot directly and precisely relate to all the exact circumstances of the production of each piece of writing, I am certainly strangely in sympathy with the writer!
     I always enjoy experiencing,
               what another me laid down
               for future memory




Crevice crumbs




They’ll stay where pages meet.
Detritus, smaller than a nit.
Memorials to where a biscuit broke,
fell, bounced, but did not hit the floor,
but left some shattered bits to
trail along the notebook’s seam.

Slight specs, like foxing,
on the newly filled-in page.

I turn that page
and run my nail along the crease.
I feel a tiny crunch.

And start another leaf.

This notebook waits for distant eyes
to come back through and glean
the words that have been missed,
that could, perhaps, feed thought anew.

Should I return,
as, having written this, I might,
will I observe small rubble
from a crumbled rusk
and struggle to recall
why it’s still there?

Or turn the pages, losing
what another me laid down
for future memory?



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Friday 29 December 2017

Changing Room Scenery


The original idea for this poem came from an exchange of views about the use of the word 'bum' in another of my poems called 'Misophonia'.  The discussion caused me to cut the word and find another way to say what I originally said.  And there it might have ended, but for the fact that, every day I go to the local pool and complete my metric mile of 60 lengths of the pool and in changing in the communal changing room, I realised that I get to see a lot of bums!  I was also reminded of Bismark's comment that, "I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring."  To be frank, most men (going on my experience of changing rooms) are not improved by nakedness; most of us do not have the ability to remove clothing and become 'Nude' rather than just starkly naked!
     The following poem might have been kickstarted by my use of a vulgar word, but then I wondered, after seeing the bottom of the man in the poem, how many times and in what ways I could use the synonyms for rear-end in a piece of short writing.
     As you will see from the poem, the writing became something more and perhaps less than that.  Or just different.  Anyway, the poem is a response to general nakedness rather than a specific piece of flesh, though the detail is actual!
     I debated about this poem being something for general consumption, rather than a personal piece of writing attempting to write within verbal limits, but eventually, after a number of edits I felt that this was something which could benefit from wider circulation.
     In my blog Cardiff to Catalonia (Cardifftocatalonia.blogspot.com) I speculated about how much time I have spent in swimming pools and came to the conclusion that 2 seconds out of every minute of my life, waking and sleeping, is spent swimming!  This is a significant chunk, and it is therefore not surprising that a number of my poems are related in some way to the pool and my progress through it.  That being said, I aways hope that I manage to point to something beyond the everyday quality of the subject matter.
     I am sure that, even with the revisions that I have already made to the poem when it was first written, this is one of those pieces of writing which will nag at me and encourage further edits!






I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring. Otto von Bismarck
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/otto_von_bismarck_149423
I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring. Otto von Bismarck
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/otto_von_bismarck_149423






Changing Room Scenery




His face was nondescript,
his body masked inside unstructured clothes,
a short and stocky man.
I’m not much good at guessing years -
but well beyond the boyish stage.

His baggy shorts came off
and all his clothes,
to show a belly just a bit too big,
about to overhang.  And,
set against the front, the back:

a bubble butt, absurdly pert,
coquettish, almost feminine,
with faded, lightish-blue tattoos
cut in on either cheek.

His finest feature saved for
changing room inconsequence!
For uninvolved, indifferent male eyes!

But, all men look, you know.
We’re none of us so confident
comparisons can be ignored
without defensive thoughts.

How many squat thrusts
have to be endured
to mould such buns? 
And why?  For whom?
A tattooed arse! 
The remnant of a reckless youth?
Bravado?  Invitation?  Threat?

For some,
the body’s a construction site
where the unsettled architect
must form, and form again the
seagulls’ wings of mound and dip,
of blood and muscle, sinew, sweat -
to show that fullness and concavity
can say so little, and so much.


 




Thursday 23 November 2017

The Victors

Having showered after exercise, one feels bright and clean and fully justified in having a celebratory cup of tea - especially tea made to my specific requirements by the well-trained staff in my local swimming pool's cafe.
     This isn't Britain and so, in spite of it being late-ish November, it is perfectly possible to sit outside in shirt sleeves and soak up the sun and scribble a few notes for possible write-up later.
     This idyllic picture is only spoilt by the number of unseasonable flies that seem to relish freshly washed skin in the same way that I enjoy my tea!  Frankly, I feel cheated.  We are brought up to regard flies with a certain loathing as disgusting insects that feed on filth and dissolve that filth with the enzymes in their own vomit which they then suck up.  So why is the squeaky clean me such a target?
     Flies obviously have a certain fascination for me as this is not the first time that they have been the subject of one of my poems.  I suppose I am interested in the way that their lives seem to be linked to ours in many ways and yet at the same time completely separate.  And their speed of life is so far removed from ours - the lazy way in which they seem to be able to avoid a swatting hand; we must be so slow and clumsy to them!
     Anyway, the number of the buzzing pests alighting on my knees (yes, I am still wearing shorts!) prompted me to write.
     The title links to the ending of the poem and perhaps ironically references human vanity.





The Victors




How flies
(those airborne harvesters of death
sucking their way towards the bone)
enjoy
my soaped fresh flesh!

They sense decay
beneath the skin:
memento mori banqueting.

The autumn sunshine crafts a day,
shielding the cold within its warmth
as subtle as a bone-stroked breeze
that cannot move the emptied trees.

A seismic shift of my great limbs
as drink is brought up to my lips
disrupts the feeders’ tiny feasts,

but gravity will drag them back
to what must always be their world.




 

Wednesday 22 November 2017

Misophonia

Given the political situation inside Catalonia today, it is hardly surprising that a good god-fearing socialist (you will noice all of those words were with small letters) such as myself should find himself going up to Barcelona to protest about the clear injustices that the right wing minority National Spanish government inflicts on us.

It was one such demonstration called to show support for the Catalan political prisoners and for their release that prompted the following poem.  It is not however political.

As I have now been to a number of political demonstrations I am wise in the ways of them.  I have found that there is a great deal of standing up and waiting, so I now brin with me a collapsable chair so that when I and my friends have found our 'spot' I am able to participate while saving my legs and feet!

Coming back from the demonstration by train I end up in Gràcia metro station to get my train to Castelldefels, where my bike is waiting for me in the bicibox which will get me home.

Grácia is an unpleasant metro stop where the amount of walking between platforms is inordinate.  And when you get to the platform you need you find there are no seats but only a metal pole on which to rest your weary bottom.

When I finally got to the platform I needed it was packed and I was lucky to find a seat - well, a bit of the pole on which to wait.

It was then that I realize that the person next to me was eating crisps.  Metro stations are full of hard surfaces, hard curved surfaces that can amplify certain noises.  Like eating crisps.

I think I share with my father a general dislike of watching poeple eat, and certainly of hearing them.  I am not paranoid about it, but I notice that I am sometimes disturbed.

This poem is a response to the experience.




Misophonia





If she’d been opposite,
two sets of silent metro tracks away
and leaning on the rail that
stands for seats on Gràcia,
I could have looked and liked
what I’d have seen.

Her dinky boots
and sprayed on jeans;
her long dark hair and
elegantly tended nails; her full
red mouth lipsticked to
just this side of slut, and
slim & tall.

I grabbed the first (and only) space
I found to rest my bum.
And she was next to me.

And she was eating crisps.

Each one.
Apart.

And in that sullen silence
crowded strangers keep while
waiting for a train,
each crisp’s demise became
a cut through quiet, like
a blackboard’s finger’s nail’s decent
on my raw soul.

Each solitary crisp -
sought out by fingers’ pince -
observed, a moment;
placed and crunched
excruciatingly.

I thought to move but
reasoned that to stay and suffer
would ennoble more.

And stay I did.
And fought the urge to slap
her bag, and hands, and face.                                 
She made the packet last
until her train drew in.

She left,
and rumbled off.
There was a silence in that sound
that resonated deep within,
and I, if not exactly happy,
was content to wait,
a little longer,
for my train.