Category Archives: semi-formal

Weekend read: SF poem: RHL, ‘The Uncertainty of Light’

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On an asteroid
there was an alien artefact.
If such it was… a droid…
I’ve no idea, in fact.
Its metal (leg?) seemed (deployed?)
and so I touched it, but responses lacked.

Once there were women; once I was a man
(touching a leg then always brought response)
before the search for life and light began
to change me into this dark renaissance.
The teacup storms on which I’ve tossed,
when she or I have bitched and bossed
till all the loves I’d ever marked
were all the women that I’ve lost.
They chose the certainty of Dark
over the uncertainty of Light.

The joys of life are what’s uncertain:
hopes of what’s behind the curtain,
knowing the results will grate
of things that you anticipate,
knowing your life could be wrecked
by what you never could expect.
And though you think you’re circumspect,
you can’t deflect, inspect, collect.
Knowing the harvest is unknown
with crops that grew from deeds you’d sown,
while all your greatest hopes and dreams
will be exceeded by the future’s smallest gleams.

Because change never stops, you find what matters
is never really known.
You may get verbal assurance of your future status,
but was it “throne” or “thrown”?
The only certainty would be
if, offered immortality,
you feared what such an altered world would lose, would save,
and chose instead to go into the Dark
with furnace no less dark than the grave
wherein there lies no risk of further blight.
Most people choose the Certainty of Dark
over the Uncertainty of Light.

But we who strive to stay alive
long enough for rejuvenation
hope, hope only, we will thrive,
post-humans in a re-Creation,
unknowing what our ape-based genes
will do with power dominance,
with war, with sex, Earth mined and undermined,
but glad to take the chance.
How else can we see scenes
of how it all turns out — destroyed? refined? —
unless we scrape through, level up with wounds and scars
and watch a world we love and leave behind?
So at last I am here, between the stars,
transiting the darkness of the Void,
the empty galaxy’s apparent night,
chanting the mantra that keeps spirits buoyed:
Let there be Post-Humanity’s own light!

Between the spiral arms in the near-void
there’s still thin light of distant galaxy and star,
still specks of dust, rarely an asteroid.
Earth left (millennia in old Earth years ago),
I cross the dark immortally, beyond, afar,
through what is darkness only to Earth-eyes
which myriad wavelengths up and down can’t know,
but which I now apprize.
Light here abounds,
and boundlessly surrounds, astounds.

Take the smallness from slight,
take the bad from the blight,
take the fear out of flight
and you’re left with the light, the light, the light.
We stumble from dark caves of night
into day, trying not to tumble;
our parents the dark; post-humans the light;
ourselves just the stumble.

*****

This poem (published in this week’s Bewildering Stories) is a response to conversations in which people have expressed pessimism about the value of life extension, rejuvenation, cryonic preservation and resuscitation… anything beyond the certainties of a clear end to life after a normal lifespan. “How will you… why would you… what if they… you won’t understand… you won’t have…” Ah, but everyone who has immigrated into a foreign culture has done this: had to learn a new language in order to find a job and start making friends and find out how everything works. Some of us are comfortable doing this; some people aren’t. I’ll take the uncertainty, and enjoy its discomforts… because it’s just so interesting!

Photo: “Into the Light: The Future is Uncertain” by tenzin.peljor is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Annie Fisher: ‘Grumpy Grandad’s Nursery Rhyme’

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Cock a buggery doodle doo!
I’m bending to lace up this buggery shoe!
You’d be buggery bad-tempered too
If the buggery cock
Woke you buggery up
At buggery, buggery five twenty two!

*****

Annie Fisher writes: “When our grandchildren were very small, we would sometimes visit to help with child care. The children would often burst into our bedroom early in the morning yelling ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ (Probably encouraged by their parents). On one occasion my husband was staying with them for a few days without me. On the second day he sent me a text at the crack of dawn. The text read ‘Cockabuggerydoodledoo!’ and so I understood that his day had already begun! I thought ‘cockabuggerydoodledoo’ (a case of ‘expletive infixation’, Google tells me) had irresistible rhythmic force.
My poem is, of course, based on the traditional nursery rhyme:
Cock a doodle doo!
My dame has lost her shoe,
My master’s lost his fiddling stick
And knows not what to do.“

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry (this one appeared in Snakeskin) for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/

Photo: “cock-a-doodle-doo.” by alyssaBLACK. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal: Annie Fisher, ‘Today I’ll be a Slug’

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I’ll flow
slug-slow,
go naked
(naked’s fine).
My only mission
is to glisten.
Watch me shine.

*****

Annie Fisher writes: “I wrote the slug poem a year ago when I was on a writing retreat on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. I was writing all sorts of other stuff on the retreat and that little poem popped into my head during a free-writing morning splurge. I guess the idea of slowing down, going with the flow, being true to oneself and letting one’s inner radiance shine is very much in keeping with the vibe of Iona, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.
I do love short poems. I’ve had others published on Snakeskin, including:

SONG THRUSH, MAY MORNING

Bird at my window, early, early,
Something to say, to say, to say,
This morning will not come again,
Make the most of today today.

That poem plays with the fact that the song thrush repeats its song. I sometimes sing it with some friends as a round using a tune we wrote. Here’s one other from the Snakeskin archive which I’m rather fond of:

GRANNY ON THE NAUGHTY STEP

Granny sits on the Naughty Step
Thinks about what she has done
Wishes she’d been a bit naughtier
It might have been fun…”

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/

Photo: “Banana Slug – A Series” by goingslo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Semi-formal: RHL, ‘Hunting’

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The Osprey splashes, misses, and flies by
skimming the waves, rising, five yards away.
What’s its success rate? Does it care?
The Stingray searches, gliding, mouth to sand
five yards beyond the shallows where I stand.
Its Roomba-work’s its own affair.
The water splishes, burbles random rhythms.
The sun confuses, over-hot, then hidden.
The Oystercatcher calls. The Osprey rocks
on its branch in a casuarina,
flaps down-beach to another.
Along the margins of the shore, alone, each stalks.
They hunt for food
and I hunt them for what they mean, or could.

*****

There are elements of the sonnet about this semi-formal poem: it’s in iambics (though with uneven lengths of line); it has rhyme (though some only slant rhyme, and not patterned); it has 14 lines and a final couplet (though not with a clear volta where you would hope, after the 8th line). But I think the disjointed nature of the poem, its stop-and-go lines of different length, is suitable for the nature of the hunt: the searching, the sudden swoop, the pause, the restarting. In that sense the form is appropriate for the subject matter, and therefore good. It may be that I was too lazy to beat the whole thing into pentameters with a regular rhyme scheme… but it may also be that this was the right place to stop for this particular poem.

‘Hunting’ was originally published in Obsessed With Pipework, and has just been reprinted in Green Ink Poetry (motto: “We Welcome Chaos, Calamity, And The Natural World. Hope Punks & Witches” in their current collection with the theme of ‘Forage’.

Photo: “Osprey” by Mick Thompson1 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Light verse: Edmund Conti, ‘Man O’ War’

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The men of war
in the man o’ war
(and the many more)
who rode the ship’s bottom
where the admirals put ’em
would often think
this has to stink
If we ever sink
we’re sunk.

At least
that’s what
I think
they thunk.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I guess I was thinking if there is a Man O’ War, then there have to be Men O’ War. And where would they be put to be kept out of the way until called on. One idea led to another, one simple rhyme led to more, and voila!”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

Photo: “The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805” by lluisribesmateᥩ is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Poem on Poetry: ‘Poets Do Tricks With Words’

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Poets do tricks with words,
play games, weld rhyme,
but we don’t do this nicely all the time–
we’ve also anger at unfairness, anger hot-white
at wasteful power, at greed and spite,
where fear meets selfishness, drives right and left
to persecution, torture, war and theft.

Each trick sticks bricks, fixed and unfixed,
into an apartheid verbal wall
that warbles claims to separate
sense from nonsense–though we appreciate
all’s one, all’s all the same,
word walls are just a Jenga game,
and all bricks fall.

We can play games with words,
thread and unthread them in a silly tangle,
loom and illuminate light warp, dark weft,
wrong them and wring them ringing through a mangle
as sometimes the only way
to find a new way to say
things said ten thousand times before:
how brightness has a rightness,
whether in the sky, the sea, a face or an idea.

So cook with words, mix, bake,
packing in raisins, nuts, half cherries for a cake
with flour just enough for a pretence
that it’ll hold together and make sense.

*****

Formal? Free? The arguments about the appropriate structure for poetry in English never seem to end. The semi-formal compromise has been around for a long time: take the rhythmic, rhyme-rich ramblings of Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ from 170 years ago, or Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, written in 1911. To me, the test of good verse is that it is easy to memorise and recite: the ideas and imagery have to be memorable, but so does the expression, word for word. The tricks may vary by language and culture, but whatever tricks the poet can manage to achieve memorableness are legitimate.

‘A Summer Night’ was in my English A Level curriculum <cough> years ago, and the middle section which I still know by heart encouraged me to run away from school. (I was found trying to sleep in a phone booth while waiting for a morning train, and brought back to school at 2 in the morning.) The poem’s semi-formal structure has always appealed to me with its rhetorical power, and over the years I’ve often used that freedom when writing about poetry, as in ‘Some Who Would Teach‘ and ‘Inspiration 2‘ and ‘Memorableness‘.

‘Poets Do Tricks With Words’ has just been published in Orbis, edited by Carole Baldock.

Photo: “National Fruitcake Day” by outdoorPDK is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Edmund Conti, ‘The Straight Skinny’

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To say that only I am fat,
To say that I am only fat,
To say only that I am fat,
To only say that I am fat,
Is not to say, however, that
They equally are definitive.

One statement says fat’s mine alone,
One says no other trait I own,
One just has a plaintive tone,
And–overlooked and overblown–
One just splits the infinitive.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I guess this began with the observation that ‘only I am fat’ and ‘I am only fat’ have different meanings depending on the placement of one word. Which made me wonder if placing ‘only’ in other parts of the sentence would change it again. Which it did. Why did I use ‘fat’ as a trait? Well, it’s an easy rhyme and people can relate to it—in themselves or others. Also, it gave me a good excuse for the title.
I thought writing the second stanza would be trickier, but the rhymes just fell into place. And noticing the split infinitive and using it saved the poem. Assuming it was worth saving.”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

His poems have appeared in several Potcake Chapbooks:

Tourists and Cannibals
Rogues and Roses
Families and Other Fiascoes
Wordplayful
all available from Sampson Low Publishers

Photo: “Why Am I So Fat?” by morroelsie is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Poem: ‘True Believers’

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A visionary dies an ignoble death;
prophets arise
who transmute his tale to a fairytale,
uplifting, wise,
and establish themselves to receive as
on his behalf, cash from pilgrims, believers–
all of it lies.

One of the new believers rashly tries
to challenge the powers the fairytale calls Evil,
strikes at the Powers That Be, is caught and dies,
dies an ignoble death… Prophets arise
and transmute the events into a new fable,
glory surpassing the skies.
At a cost, of course, they spread out a table
for all to gather and feast. They, the deceivers,
live yet again from the wealth of the true believers;
one of whom…

*****

I love seekers after Truth, Knowledge, the Meaning of Life, no matter where they are led in belief or unbelief. I loathe those who come after them to distort the message and extort innocent followers. But it’s all an old, old story.

This semi-formal poem was first published in Snakeskin – thanks, George Simmers!

Photo: “Megachurch” by Silly Deity is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Short poem: ‘Convalescence’

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Demonic nurses, finding little sin,
all leave my bedside. Doctor Death comes in.
He looks around, “I’m only here
To get a rough sense of the atmosphere. ”
“Please, don’t get up…”
He sits. “Not healing with your usual speed,
Eh, you young pup?
You’ve got a few years left still, don’t you worry.
Take all the time you need.
I’m in no hurry.”

*****

I wrote this in mid-2020; I think Doctor Death was in all our minds at that point, though I didn’t catch Covid myself for another couple of years. The poem was published in the current issue of Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Rick Bates!

Photo: “1974 Madhouse with Vincent Price playing Dr Death 9599” by Brechtbug is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Poem: ‘Full Disclosure’

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“The trouble with this growing old,” he said,
“You lose so much . . . and you get what instead?
If you can hang a bath towel on your tool
it’s wasted when you’re in an all-boys school.
Time was, I’d come — as you’d expect —
with just a look, a touch.
Now, not so much.
The only thing that gets me full erect
is feeling flesh firming from kiss and grasp;
so all my work is trying to make her gasp!
I need her climax if I’m to get sated.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. He waited.

*****

This semi-formal poem was published in the Lighthearted Verse subsection of Formal Poetry in that wonderfully rich and varied magazine, Better Than Starbucks. Where else could you find such a variety of areas of expression as BTS’ Regular Feature Pages?
Free Verse
Haiku
Formal Poetry
Poetry Translations
Poetry for Children
International Poetry
African Poetry
Experimental, Form, & Prose Poetry
Poetry Unplugged
Fiction
Flash Fiction & Micro Fiction
Better Than Fiction (creative nonfiction)
The Interview
Interviewee Poems
… and From The Mind of Alfred Corn

And tolerant enough to put up with my verse on occasion! Unfortunately they have announced they are going on hiatus… hopefully they will be back in 2023, as they have been a truly excellent outlet for all manner of poetry and prose.

Photo: “Mystery Man meets a friend” by mossimoinc is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.