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Chaos Theory
Chaos theory: it states that we don’t know what we’re doing and it wouldn’t really matter anyway, even if we did, because life lacks meaning, chance rules, and Lady Luck with her lusty locks attached to her forehead and she, all bald and hairless from behind, must be caught as she arrives, because later is much too late, and when past, she’s gone for good and our good luck’s gone with her, and we’re left for ever, sitting there, head in hands, bemoaning all that milk spilled before we ever had a chance to actually taste it.
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The sword of Damocles
hangs above your head
supported by a fragile thread.
Scissor-tailed birds around you fly
and Fate’s sharp knife is standing by
to sever your thread and watch you die.
If you’re up to your shoulders in tragedies
whatever you do, don’t drop to your knees,
for if you do you’ll surely drown
and that sword will bring you down.
If the sword falls you mustn’t grieve:
for we’re all bound by the webs we weave.
Our lives are shaped by what we believe,
and also by what we build and leave.
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Time A Theory of the Absurd
I wonder what I’m doing here, so far from home, sitting at the bar, with my beer before me, my face distorted in half a dozen fairground mirrors, surrounded by people half my age, or less, all smoking, cursing, using foreign forms of meta-language, gestures I no longer recall: the single finger on the nose, two fingers on the forehead, the back of the hand rammed against the chin with a sort of snort of disapproval. It’s way beyond my bedtime, yet I am held here, captured, body and soul, by foreign rhythms, unreal expectations of a daily ritual that runs on unbroken cycles of time: morning brandy, pre-lunch wine and tapas, home for the mid-day meal, a brief siesta, back to the café for a post-prandial raising of spirits, more blanco, then back to work at four and struggle on until seven or eight when the bar routine begins again with pre-supper tapas and tinto. Time, comprehended in this new life-cycle, lacks meaning. Time, in a cycle I have long abandoned, is absurd as well.
I think of my creative writing in terms of visual, verbal photos. I create snapshots in words and these snapshots come from everywhere that I have been. For me, they are precious moments caught and frozen forever in the camera of the poet’s eye. Visual and verbal, they illustrate the life I have lived and the things I have seen. These are the phenomena on which my artistic life is founded.
I am not a philosopher by any means, but I have over time developed an artistic philosophy. It started a long time ago at Wycliffe College with my A level studies of French existentialism and continued later in the Graduate School at the University of Toronto, where I studied the origins of existentialism as they are expounded in phenomenology. Both these movements have influenced my life and my writing. Bakhtin’s chronotopos: “Man’s dialog with his time and place” has also been a great influence on my creative thinking. My art is indeed my dialog with my time, my place, and the people who inhabit them.
One Small Corner is the record of my stay at the KIRA Residence in St. Andrews-by-the-sea, New Brunswick, Canada. I was selected to be the only poet in the first cohort of Resident Artists and during the month of June, 2017, I was able to work full-time on this collection.
This is the original version. It is much better than the revision that I posted earlier.Sometimes, when we revise, we lose the freedom of thought and association that comes with the early version. Message: keep your variations and keep an open mind. Over-elaboration is the poet’s worst enemy.
Wingless in Gaza Street
amputees deprived of flight they flutter grounded in the gutter
galley slaves chained to broken oars they ply blunt stumps relentlessly
shorn of strength and beauty their once glorious shuttles weave dark circles
my mouth is a full moon open in a round pink circle bone and its marrow settle in subtle ice
futile fragility of the demented heart pumping its frequency of fragmented messages
frail beauty torn from its element of air this brightness of moths drowning in inky depths
the seven o’clock news brought to you from an otherwise deserted street.
Was that where my life went, a spent candle trailing dark studies among the packed lines of your poems?
And you, was your life gutted by that same guttering candle by whose light you scrawled your tight black spider rhymes?
Were they all meaningless, your insights and my words? So few now know who you were and what you represented and I, your scholar, a mere shadow of your shadow struggling in the straggling light of a far-off continent, far from content at knowing so much about you. Intent I was on spreading light and the word to a world that thinks the two of us absurd.
Our world is spinning on its edge, placed on the perimeter of space, and going nowhere. Specks of dust we sit and contemplate the vastness of what exactly: our fortunes, our spirits, our houses, our power, our lands? Out there, in the vastness that surrounds us, worlds without end will never know we existed.
Bleak and blank our names, our deeds, our status, the statues they raise in our praise. And what of our thoughts, those sparks of electricity that link us lip to ear and mind to action and each of our actions transformed by a dance performed by circling planets that shape our wills?
Who programs that universe now? Who plays what trivial games of snakes and ladders in which we are the dots and dashes, pinballs among a million trillion strings of flashing lights?
Photo by my good friend, Geoff Slater. Books by yours truly, who stayed on the bus and believed.
To be a writer ….
He who would true valor see, let him come hither. One here will constant be, come bad or fair weather. No line length can him fright, he’ll with a paragraph fight, and he will have a right, to be a writer.
Those who beset him round with dismal stories, do but themselves confound: his strength the more is. There’s no discouragement will make him once relent his first avowed intent, to be a writer.
Rejections nor bad critics can daunt his spirit. He knows he at the end will a book inherit. So critics fly away, he’ll fear not what they say, he’ll labor night and day to be a writer.
Comment: John Bunyan tempted me and I fell into temptation. In fact, as my good friend Oscar Wilde once said: “I can resist anything except temptation.” So, ladies and gentlemen, change the he to a she or the pronoun of your choice, turn the writer to a sculptor, stoneist, poet, playwright, painter, novelist, dramatist, comedian, song-writer, singer. Breathe deep. Believe in your own artistic talent and remember: “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” Remember this too: “You’ll never get to Vancouver by bus, if you get off the bus at Montreal or Toronto.”
Couldn’t find a picture of a cross-bill, so I found some genuine humming birds instead. Listen carefully: you can hear them hum.
Crosswords
I wander a vacant, black and white wonderland of empty, accusing, crossword puzzle squares. Most mornings, I sit at the kitchen table, head in hands, puzzled by the news and the crossword puzzle’s clues.
Outside my window, crossbills squat on the feeder, squabbling, heads turned sideways, blinking,
and winking sly eyes. A yellow-bellied sapsucker hops over syrup-sticky squares. His hand-carved chess board
glistens as feasting flies swarm beneath the sun.
My own thoughts are rooted in a stark, new reality. They walk wordless through threatening spaces where unmasked people wander grey, concrete streets or walk in shops, in the opposite direction to arrows, painted on the floor to guide them.
Cross-words, cross-purposes: why do some people obey the current laws while others ignore them and risk their health as well as the health of others by doing what they damn well please, in spite of the scientists who beg them to do otherwise? Like the puzzle’s clues: I just don’t know.
Comment: Well, last year was a year like no other that I can remember. It is so easy to dismiss it as an aberration, but we shouldn’t do that. Hopefully next year will be better. But it might get worse. Let’s look on the bright side and hum along with the song the humming birds are humming: “Yesterday is history, today is still a mystery, but what a day it’s going to be tomorrow.” I still can’t workout how or why some shoppers just head up the shopping aisles, walking or pushing their carts in the wrong direction. Nor how they can stand for five minutes at a time choosing a breakfast cereal, one hand on the handle of their angled carts, another poking at the cereal boxes, and the aisle totally blocked. I also love the people who still handle every apple in the box before choosing just one of them. For apple you may substitute grapes, pears, avocadoes, tomatoes. Oh the joys of ageing in an age of skepticism and pandemic. Mind you: if life is, as Albert Camus always insisted, absurd, or if it is, as Calderon told us, nothing but a dream, I guess none of it matters anyway. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux / we must believe that Sisyphus is happy!
rogermoorepoet 