I started out alone, No numbers and no words. The people gave me food and clothes. I loved the sun and birds.
And when I reach the end Numbers and words all done, Have to be fed and dressed again, I’ll love the birds and sun.
*****
This is one of my favourite poems, for several reasons: First, it extols the combination of curiosity, enjoyment and acceptance that I believe is appropriate for this thing called life. Second, it is simple in expression: simple words, simple rhythm, in iambics with simple full and slant rhymes. And third (and perhaps most importantly) it is easy to memorise: it has lodged itself in my brain without any effort or even intent on my part and, as this blog frequently claims, that is the essence of poetry.
‘I Started Out Alone’ was originally published in Bewildering Stories in 2019. More recently it was included in a batch of my poems that Michael R. Burch spotlighted in The Hypertexts for August 2024.
No matter how seemingly affable, a priest always hopes to be greased; while others, invoking hellfire, have us wait for our trip in the hearse and preach in their suits neatly creased, these fishers of men that are gaffable, in this world that they’ve made mud and mire. That the point of a flock’s to be fleeced can only be said in light verse; for religion is simply so laughable it’s amazing it’s not yet deceased.
*****
Isn’t it amazing that the Pope can claim to have voluntarily taken a vow of lifelong poverty, and millions of his supporters who live in involuntary poverty send money to support him living in a palace? Is it different from a billionaire politician soliciting donations from his impoverished supporters? Is the human need to glorify the tribal god and the tribal leader never going to end?
The pipes and women wail and skirl, deaths following the flowering girl. Ancient tales of love and war show costs of dimple or a curl.
Tamil spear tips illustrate intent before the towering gate; bangles slide on her young wrists; kings make war when made to wait.
Gods and goddesses choose sides: a Trojan steals a youthful bride. Who Trojans were we’ll never know – Greeks burn the city, once inside.
A lovely face, a swelling bust – and treasure, fame – inspired by lust kings storm the ramparts, steal the girl, before, like all, they turn to dust.
*****
This poem was inspired by a blog post in ‘Horace & friends’ on ‘Doing without consolation – Tamil poetry, Yeats and Simone Weil‘. The author, Victoria, touches on a lot more topics than my small piece does; visit her blog to see how Yeats’ “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / Her mind moves upon silence” connects to ancient Tamil as well as ancient Greek poetry…
My poem here is in iambic tetrameter (with some liberties taken), rhyming AABA in English ruba’i form. It was published in the current (August 2024) Snakeskin, issue 320.
Illustration: The Fall of Troy by Johann Georg Trautmann (1713–1769)
Ghosts twitter in my head like the memory of predawn birds. Digging below my present house I find a structural supportive past with rock veins to be mined. Upstairs the future isn’t fully built or roofed. Has someone goofed? The Architect is vague on final thirds.
*****
I am finding many ways to say I don’t understand existence at all; this is one of them.
This short, semi-formal poem was published recently in The Lyric.
The Universe with which we grapple searching for structure, meaning, is no apple with glossy skin outside, substance beneath, where deep within its core it meets our needs to find its meaning: seeds. No, it’s an onion – peel off the outer sheath of sensory impressions, and you uncover explanations coming first from mystic revelations and then from faith’s and Science’s professions. Research from Galileo through to Quantum realms reveals, and contradicts, and overwhelms until you take away the final layer and find: there’s nothing there.
*****
I’m a Militant Agnostic: “I don’t know, and neither do you!” We keep searching and probing, the certainties get disproved, new lines of enquiry open up… and off we go again, Quixote-like, because we’re humans. This poem rhymes irregularly, and is in iambics of different line lengths. Semi-formal.
‘Layered Understanding’ was first published in the Shot Glass Journal #43.
A life is a bubble: somewhere the Grand Druid dips his wand into the universal fluid and then a new life is formed, floating on chance breezes until it – pops – and the thin skin coating falls back to earth as mere drops, the shape and rare rainbow glint gone to air, and the bubble is where?
Earth is a bauble in the universal flux, as it foams, boils and freezes, just dust from God’s various mucks, sneezes afloat on chance trans-solar breezes.
The humans babble, rabble rising from the rubble of other lives cut to stubble, they burble some Bible as they gab, grab and gobble, cobbling conning towers of Babel and Hubble, their progress hobbled by their wobbly bobble, reams of hopes, dreams and schemes just a bubble.
*****
Sometimes a chance-occurring phrase in some moody mode of thought lets me ramble wildly through tangled words and ideas. It’s not amenable to regular form, but it’s fun. It seems in the spirit of Spoken Verse, though I’ve never performed. The earliest poem I wrote in this style is from over 50 years ago… which is 30 years before I ever had a poem accepted for publication. I was definitely out of step with the non-verse that then controlled the poetry industry to the exclusion of almost all actual verse. Things have eased in recent years, and dozens of poems from those early years have since been published. (Note to struggling young poets: Don’t give up! But have another career that pays money!)
Anyway, ‘Life is a Bubble’ only needed a couple of years to be published in 2024 in The Lyric.
Gods! Admire us; we’re your virus formed of land and sea. Air and fire take us higher, a plague now breaking free; a wild agent of contagion through the galaxy; death-defying, modifying… infecting all we see.
*****
This brief poem was recently published in Bewildering Stories. Humans have already spread round the planet into all ecosystems like an uncontrollable virus; and now we’re seeing the beginnings of a far vaster expansion, presumably entailing endless mutations as we go. It’s going to be a wild ride and, once we’re established and self-sustaining off-planet, I don’t see anything stopping it.
(To those who don’t share this world view, I apologise for what must come across as a religious rant. Maybe it is. We’re all trying to make sense of a life that refuses to be pinned down, and quantum physics shows no more common sense than do tales of angels and demons.)
Having predicted the future in vague outline, I admit I think the future is unpredictable in detail. It is chaotic and formless… which is all the more reason for imposing what form we can in writing about it. Form is a good antidote to formless times. And understanding why we developed our cultural techniques over millennia, why we love song, dance, rhythm and rhyme, is useful in preparing ourselves for an unpredictably evolving future. We developed our cultural strengths for good reasons, and they speak to our evolving ape core. Yes, things will keep changing; but for good or ill we are social beings, and our rhythms and harmonies are part of what keep us grounded in society and prevent our mental collapse.
To poets, lovely Denmark’s not a friend: there’s too much commonsense, it’s too prosaic. These blonds just blindly make life a bland blend; but life should be a salad, a mosaic. Long live the Christiania anarchists! Bare feet, graffiti, dog shit, broken glass! Runaways, pushers, folk on Wanted lists, the type you’re careful around when they pass.
Well, maybe I exaggerate… I love museums, bike lanes, all the walking streets, orderly lines where people never shove, the clean green parks, the clean stores full of treats… And after all, I write in sonnet form: a lovely, useful, ordinary norm.
*****
I wrote this sonnet last month in Denmark, and it was published in the June Snakeskin, an all-rhyme issue. (I’ve tinkered with the title and one of the lines…) The opposing arguments for personal freedom and social responsibility are hardly new, and I agree with both. Perhaps I need to reread Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy‘… <downloads> <peers>… hm… no, too much religion.
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!
The days have come unhooked from passing time, its little Brio trucks are off their tracks; the past and future mix to make their rhyme, with pieces placed at random in fresh stacks. Clear memories blend their present, future, past. The days stretch out, and yet the months fly by – you turn in circles, facing first, not last. As childhood deepens, old age pools go dry. Behind its smoke and mirrors, whores and pimps, its harshly lovely playful attitude, reality is thinning – you now glimpse an indescribable infinitude. The game is won – your enemies are no more, yet you don’t end it while you max your score.
Form in Formless Times 