Intertextuality

Rage, Rage 32 & 33

Rage, Rage
32

I miss
the swish and roar
of my incoming,
outgoing breath.

I miss
those Full Moon fingers
tinkling the tides
of my inner being,
making me strive
to keep myself alive.

My body’s house,
devoid of gnomes,
wolves, and pipes,
lies vacant and silent.

The full moon’s
rampant skull
empties the sky of stars
and fills my mind
with cratered shadows.

33

Strange creatures hide in the mist
that overcomes my brain.
I see the sudden flash
of sharp, lusting midnight teeth,

My heart turns into
a time bomb ticking
its irregular beat
in the cavity of my chest.

Am I a victim, then,
as Camus suggests,
or just another assassin?

A suicide bomber, perhaps,
with explosives strapped
inside my rib-cage
rather than round my chest
in a hidden vest?

Tick-a-tock
and tickety-tick-tock,
I can hear and feel
the arrhythmic clock
alarming me
as it arms itself in my chest.”Tick-a-tock
and tickety-tick-tock,
I can hear and feel
the arrhythmic clock
alarming me
as it arms itself in my chest.”

Comment:

So, Moo has just come back from wherever he’s been and wherever it was, he’s not telling me. However, he does say that I look All Shook Up. And he’s humming Elvis Presley songs at me. And the above painting is his suggestion for me for today. “Thank you, Moo. And welcome back.” He nods at me. “Good to see you two,” he says. “You spelt that wrong,” I tell him. “I didn’t,” he says. “We all know you’re a split personality and I am saying that I am pleased to see both halves of you again.” Oh, dear, you can never win with Moo. He always paints a different angle or comes round in a wiggling circle. “Ha!” he says. “At least I don’t paint myself into corners.”

Am I a victim, then, as Camus suggests, or just another assassin? Interesting suggestion. We are either murderers or victims. But I haven’t murdered anyone, that I am aware of. And I don’t feel myself to be a victim. So what is my dear friend Albert on about? Alas, he isn’t around to ask. I just have to read his books and see myself left wondering.

I guess it was all different in Paris, in the 1940, during the Nazi occupation. Anyone can talk a good game, but what do you do when the Gestapo knock on your door at 2:00 am? Good question. Existence precedes essence. We live. We survive. That’s Jean-Paul Sartre. And so is this – “L’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il fait.” Man is no more than what he does. So there you have it. It’s never what you say you might do, or how you relate things in respect – it’s all about what you are doing right now. So – ask yourself that vital question – “What am I actually doing?” The answer you give will tell you a lot of things about yourself – if you are honest in what you say.

Bleak Mid-Winter

Bleak Mid-winter
from
All About Angels

The reverse side of a tapestry this fly-netting,
snow plugging its tiny squares,
clotting with whiteness the loopholes
where snippets of light sneak through.
Black and white this landscape,
its colorless contours a throwback
to earlier days when dark and light
and black and white held sway.

Snow piled on snow.
The bird-feeder buried and buried, too,
the lamps that can no longer shine
beneath their cloak of snow.

The front porch contemplates a sea of white,
wave after wave cresting whitecaps,
casting a snow coat over trees
with snow-filled nests standing
shoulder-deep in the drifts
while a slow wind whistles
and high and dry in the sky above
the sun is a pale, thin penny
drifting through ragged clouds
hat threaten to bring more snow.

Comment:

A Golden Oldie, or rather, a Black and White Oldie, from when New Brunswick winters were colder and much more snowy. The iterative thematic imagery in the poem links to the hymn, In the bleak mid-winter. There are several reminisces of the hymn within the above lines.

It used to be sung as a an entry hymn in the Christmas Carol Services at King’s Stanley Church, along time ago, when I was in school. The procession would exit the vestry and move slowly though the church towards the altar. The first verse of the solo was sung solo. Then a duet followed. Then the whole choir joined in. I remember doing the solo one year, when both our lead singers were stricken with some form of laryngitis. We drew lots and I got the short straw.

The unique drum accompaniment that day was the sound of my knees knocking together, backed up by the loud beating of the heart in my chest. I preferred hiding in the choir, to stepping up out front and leading it.

Last year, we used our snow blower on three occasions. This winter, we have yet to use it. If during the next month or so I am forced to wake it up and shake it out of its cobwebs, I will be sure to sing “In the bleak midwinter” as I plow my drive. Alas, there will be no choir to accompany me. Those days are long past, and in the past they must remain, as the Flower of Scotland reminds us. They will be singing that in Edinburgh on Valentine’s Day. And Scotland will need a strong brave set of hearts to upset the invading armies from south of the border.

Wild Life

Wild Life

I see green grass
Small ponds
Winding roads
Patches of sorrow

Turquoise blues 
Hills to climb
Softness
Strength 

Flowers blooming
A small animal
Covered in feathers 

An eye
Keeping watch
Purity of white

Ekphrastic Poem
©
Yolande Essiembre

Comment:

My good friend Yolande Essiembre sent me her Ekphrastic poem after viewing this morning’s painting by Moo. Wild Life II is a better representation of the colours of the original. However, Moo added in some (what he calls!) helpful touches – the black shapes that reinforce the suggestions of the original. Yolande wrote her poem based on Version I – but with the stronger colors of version II. Magic – oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. And all artists weave their webs of deceit. As Cervantes says – Tanto la mentira es mejor, cuanto más parece verdadera. / The closer it approaches the truth, the better the lie.

Imitatio – imitation – one of the bedrocks of classical rhetoric. “Imitation is the best form of flattery”. Flattery, yes, but what we find, in art above all, is that there exists only one original. However good the copy, the flattery – the imitation, if you prefer – it is never as good as the original. The original of this painting exists in one time and one place. The two deceptions are not the original. In fact, Wild Life I no longer exists because Moo has repainted it. It has turned into Wild Life II.

So many questions – which version do you prefer – I or II? De gustibus non est disputandum. There is no arguing about taste. Which is the better version? Well, each viewer must choose. But remember, each version is a deception, and each deception is a lie. And there is only one original. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

But we can, I hope, agree on one thing – Yolande’s verbal version (which I publish here with her permission) is verbally picture perfect. It is how she sees the painting. It is what the painting means to her.

Thank you so much Yolande. Moo and I hope to publish your words and visions more often. With your permission. we will do so.


Rage, Rage 20

Rage, Rage
20

Words emerge
from the silence 
of blood and bone.

They break that silence
the day they are born.

Silence, once broken,
cannot be repaired
and a word once spoken
cannot be recalled.

The greatest gifts –
knowing how and when
to sink into silence,
knowing how to be alone
in the middle of a crowd,

So many word-worlds
smothered at birth
and those worlds, dismissed,
forgotten, still-born,
their names never spoken.

Comment:

So, are you paying attention? Did you notice anything? Has something gone missing? Moo tells me that he doesn’t think anyone will notice what I have. Can you prove him wrong? Good question! Whatever, as they say, or “So what?” as Miles Davies plays. Or, as Buddy Holly once sang “I guess it doesn’t matter any more.”

Moo wants me to tell you that he painted this painting last night. He calls it No More Blues. Guess what? There are no blue shades in it. Cunning, eh? And daylight hours are back up to 9:30 – 9.5 hours sunlight on this cold, wintry day. And it is cold at -14C. On the other hand, Moo’s painting is toasty warm and you can hold up your chilled fingers and warm them on his painted fires.

As for me, I am having great fun preparing my writing for competitions that I never win. I am also paying to enter them. But I choose carefully nowadays – so many publications and competitions want so much money just for sending them a manuscript they will possibly never read and probably (nay, almost certainly) reject. I am so happy that I do not have to live off my earnings. I have 17 books on KDP Amazon and guess what? I received $3.61 in earnings in 2025. And I must declare it on my tax forms. I hope it doesn’t send me up a tax bracket!

I guess it’s a case of Fly me to the stars and let me see what writing pays on Jupiter and Mars. Not much probably. I bet they don’t read poetry in any of those Mars Bars I am always reading about. That said, I wonder what language Mars Barmen speak? And do they have Mars Bar Flies, like we have Bar Flies here on earth? Oh the wonders of language and the Joy of Words. The Joy of Six, as well – and that’s Sex in Latin. Get the joke? Oh, to be multilingual, now that spring’s a coming. Easy now. Don’t get too excited. And look at all those little white angels flying in Moo’s painting.

Rage, Rage 18

Rage, Rage
18


I nod off again and dream
of a summer beach,
burning sand, tide way out,
sparkling waves, clouds moving,
inaudible, as they drift by.

I dream of my beginning
and find a forlorn formlessness
that sought the solace of sound
only to discover waves and wind
as I drifted on an amniotic sea.

The wind of change has blown.
I awake and pick up my book.

Voltaire –
“Si jeunesse savait,
si vieillesse pouvait.”

“If youth knew,
if age were able to.”

Comment:

The wind of change has blown and, by all accounts, it is still blowing. A Nor’ Easter here, swinging down from the Arctic and bringing us cold weather, ice, and more snow. Driving isn’t too bad, for the roads are cleared regularly, especially when schools are in. Most enterprises have cleaned, salted, and sanded their premises. Some haven’t. Yesterday, it took two people to move my shopping cart from the shop to the car, a matter of about thirty yards. The wind was so strong. It tussled and tugged, drove me where I didn’t want to go, and two people stepped in to help me. Then I discovered an undug doorway. I parked my car at a sharp upward angle, on the snow. A man offered me his arm. I said no, but he stood beside me, hands held out to help, just in case. Leaving that same shop, I was accompanied by a young lady who insisted on carrying my bags, taking my arm, and leading me to my car. The dangers of falling on down hill ice were even greater than going uphill.

I dream of my beginning, more and more often nowadays and now-a-nights. I know, spell check underlined that word. A neologism, not a proper word. But I like it, for though I dream by day, nodding suddenly into a shallow sleep, it is by night that I really do my dreaming.

At night, I find I can roam a world that has become hostile in the light of day. I can, and do, dream of my childhood on the Gower Peninsula. The fields are still there. My grandmother walks among the bluebells, and together we tell the time by the old dandelion clock. The larks still rise on Bishopston Common and Bluebells, Cowslips, and Primroses still hide beneath the trees. The sands at Brandy Cove are still clean. There is no pollution in my dreams and no oilers clear their tanks in the pristine waters of the Severn Estuary. There is no industrial haze and, on a clear day, I can still see, from the steps of the bungalow, Ilfracombe, across the bay.

And the people – my family and friends are still there. My uncles and aunts, my cousins, all young still, my parents and my grandparents … and all my dogs return, one by one, from their canine adventures. At night the cows can be heard crunching grass, and wheezing in my dreams. I met one, once, on a night trip to the outhouse – we had no indoor plumbing. And, on one memorable night, I stepped into a wet, warm cow patty, left like an anti-personal landmine, just outside the back door. I still shiver as I think of that warmth creeping up between my toes. No amount of wiping has ever really removed it. It haunts like the ghosts of summers past that drift at midnight round my room. waiting to be plucked from the air.

Rage, Rage 10

Rage, Rage
10

My body’s house
has many rooms
and you, my love,
are present in them all.

I glimpse your shadow
in the mirror, and your breath
brushes my cheek
when I open the door.
Where have you gone?

I walk from room to room,
but when I seek,
I no longer find
and nothing opens
when I knock.

Afraid, sometimes,
to enter a room,
I am sure
you are in there.

I hear your footsteps.
Sometimes your voice
breaks the silence
when you whisper my name
in the same old way.

Comment:

Rage, Rage – and still I rage against the dying of the light and, like Dylan Thomas, ask the ageing of this world not to go gentle into that dark night. Yet, as my beloved and I age, we watch day’s shadows growing longer, and night stealing steadily along. What can we do?

Well, since the winter solstice, we can start counting the minutes as each day adds a minute or two and gifts some more light and strength to the sun. Sunrise today – 8:03 AM. Sunset today – 5:09 PM. That means 9 hours and 6 minutes of sunlight. Well, it would, if it weren’t cloudy, with a cold wind, and a dropping temperature. My guess is that it will get dark much before it ought to. And that’s not nice – no respect!

Of course, my beloved is a sun bunny and a Leo, and she perishes in these shortened days. I was born in them and they don’t affect me as badly as they do her. But I can still Rage, Rage, because there is so much to rage about – icy streets, the usual potholes, roads that hide ice beneath a thin covering of snow, some strange drivers who don’t seem to have bought winter tires. Oh yes, I love them. One came twisting and turning down the same side of the road as me only this morning. Luckily he hit the snow bank before he hit me. But, I ask you, what was he thinking?

So there’s Rage, and Rage Rage, and also Road Rage. Way to go! I think we should call a national rage day and all stay home for 24 hours, just to cool us all down for a bit. Oh dear, that might lead to cabin fever – and that would be an out–Rage.

Rage, Rage 7

Rage, Rage
7

Blood of my blood,
my daughter’s daughter,
time is not on our side.
 
I sometimes wonder
if I’ll survive,
if you and I
will ever meet again.

When we talk online
I see you trying
to understand, to hold
my image in your mind,
to figure out this shadow
that moves and talks
on the computer screen.

Words, born from old Welsh
melodies, bring poetry
to my heart, place music
on my lips.

But they fall short,
and fail to satisfy
my need to reach out
and hold you.

In spite of that I still survive
and live in hopes to see you
in our realities of flesh and blood.

Commentary:

When I first came to Canada, such a long time ago, I communicated with home by means of air mail letters written on special air mail paper that came in very thin, foldable envelopes. Very rarely I communicated by means of very expensive telephone calls of a limited three minute duration. How times have changed. Now via Skype (as was), Team (as is), Messenger, FaceTime, and other means, we can have unlimited face to face conversations, free of charge, with people on the other side of the world. And yet, face to face and screen to screen, there is still something missing. The cat senses it. She stares at the screen and sniffs – then she bristles and hisses. She fails to understand a known voice that has sound and movement but no smell.

And yet, what we now have is so much better than what we had before. Communication is so much easier. We have generated a generation that works in the audio-visual world, not in my preferred world of written verbalization. How we have changed. I can do so many things, in my head, that the younger generation cannot do, even with pen or pencil and paper. However, when my computer fails me, or my cell phone acts up, it is to that younger generation I go, because they dominate this new world in which we live.

I gave one of my academic articles to a friend the other week. “I can’t read this,” he said. “Tell me, what’s it all about?” I started to explain. “Hold on,” he said. He asked his AI program to read my article and generate, in words a 14 year old could understand, the main contents of my not-so-easy-to-read academic writing and thinking. About thirty seconds later, the analyzed contents appeared on the screen before him. I threw my mind back to when Coles Notes were forbidden. “Anybody caught using Coles Notes will be given an automatic F.” Then I looked at my own article, analyzed perfectly, and set out in the very way I had planned it, albeit with a simplified vocabulary – and the longer words explained in a sort of appendix. Quite simply, I was blown away.

Then my mind went back to my childhood in Wales. No running water, no electricity, no indoor toilets, no telephones, no television, a radio with limited stations and programming … imagine what we have come from – imagine where we are going. My only questions – will we control it or will it control us? And you know what it is. The clarion call goes out across the centuries. – Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall guard the guards? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Each generation must find its own answers to those questions. And the sooner you do it, the better because it’s not going to be my problem for much longer!

Rage, Rage 2 & 3


Rage, Rage
2

These problems start the day
you realize you are alone.
Your beloved goes away,
for a holiday,
to be with your daughter
and grandchild.

Now the house and the cat
are yours, and yours alone.
No problem you say and
everyone believes you.

You jumped in the car,
drove daughter, and child,
holidays done,
to the airport.

Your beloved went with them,
her holiday about to begin.
And that’s when it all began.

3

When I come back home
from leaving them at the airport,
the front door stands open.

I thought I had closed it
when we left.
I tip-toe in and call out
“Is anybody there?”

Echo answers me –
‘… there, there, there …”

Commentary:

Raymond Guy LeBlanc, one of my favorite Acadian poets, published his poetry book, Cri de Terre, in 1972. My painter friend Moo, who also likes Acadian poetry, borrowed the title and changed it slightly when he painted this painting – Cri de Coeur. Earth Cry / Heart Cry.
What is all creativity, visual of verbal, but a cry from the land or a cry from the heart? Sometimes it is more than a cry – it becomes a clarion call, a shout out, a calling out.

So many of us are born with creativity in our hearts. So few of us carry that creativity, be it verbal or visual, into the adult world, a world that all too often grinds us down and sifts us out. We become grey people in grey clothing sitting behind grey desks beneath artificial lighting, doing grey jobs that slowly turn us into nine to five (or longer) dusts.

Moo has promised me a series of red paintings for this sequence. We shall see how he does. Red for anger, red for age, a red flag for danger, a red rag to wave at the raging bull of life, to provoke it, then bring it under control.

Nadolig Llawen – Welsh for Have a Joyous Festive Season. You can add other languages, as you wish. But above all remember Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s words – “Life is a dream and dreams are nothing but dreams.” One day, we shall all wake up. Artists and dreamers, grey ghosts and people of straw and dust.


Carved in Stone 72 & 73

Carved in Stone
72

Is this world I create real?
Of course it isn’t.

It exists only in my head,
and on the page,
but perhaps, one day,
you too will see
the things I have seen.

Yet the world I describe
is as unreal as the words
from which it is woven.

73

Heraclitus once wrote
we can never bathe
in the same river twice.

This is the Catch 22
faced by all poets,
to remember,
and to try to recreate.

Shadow hands on cave walls,
colored pictographs on gesso,
hieroglyphics on papyrus,
ink on paper, raw words,
and in the end,
everything reduced
to these three little letters
carved in stone –

RIP

Commentary:

If you have read this far, we have walked a long journey together – 73 verses that comment on life and the meaning of life. Hard reading in places, easy in others. I trust you have enjoyed the journey and found some stops and resting points along the way in which to contemplate the ways in which the threads of your own life intermingle with mine.

Throughout this journey, I have tried to use a four step process. (1) Verbal – the poems themselves. (2) Visual – photos that intertwine with the verbal. (3) A Commentary – that goes beyond the verbal and visual and opens up the ideas a little more. (4) A Dialog between myself – the poet – and Moo – the visual artist who has so frequently loaned me his paintings when he thinks they illustrate my words.

It’s been a topsy-turvy journey through what Bakhtin calls a world of carnival, where little is at it seems, and the world is turned upside down. That said, we have a clear choice – to slide down the downside of this life, or to scale the upside, to contemplate, with joy and happiness, the world from those heady heights.

Blessings. Pax amorque.
And thank you for travelling with me.

Carved in Stone 61 & 62

Carved in Stone
61

Water through the water clock,
water off a duck’s back,
the waters of life,
continually flowing,
trapped in our children
and their children,
and the love we create
never lost, just circling,
like the hands of the clock,
like the planets and stars.

But who will wind up
the clockwork universe,
and tend the mechanism
that balances planets and stars?

What will happen
when the clockwork
finally runs down,
the last candle is snuffed,
and the water clock dries up?

62

Whoever, whatever remains
will be left to contemplate
Ozymandias with his two vast
and trunkless legs of stone,
standing in the desert.

“Look on my works,
ye mighty, and despair.”

Commentary:

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Well, Moo does have a sense of humor after all. I thought he did. From Ozymandias to the meaning of “works” to the destiny of the work we did. What a journey. It goes from the joy of the children who build a snowman to the warm spring wind that melts him to the crows and the dog who do what crows and doggies do. Intertextuality – the links between verbal and visual and think about it – such strange things happens in Moo’s creative mind.

But what do we leave behind? Think about it. Only the wake of the ship in which we sail. The wake – that white trail we leave behind us, on the surface of the sea, slowly vanishing as we also vanish, pulling away into the unknown that always lies ahead. Moo is right – so many things disappear out of the frame of the painting. “There are no pockets in shrouds” said the preacher in the hospital where I took my father, so long ago for treatment.

And even if there were, how would you fit a snowman, several crows, a cardinal, and the rear end of a dog into the pocket? “Contemplate Ozymandias with his two vast and trunkless legs of stone, standing in the desert. Now contemplate the fate of the snowman. Now look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”