Memories

Heartbreaking

Heartbreaking

How many have broken their hearts,
reading what I have written, as I have
broken mine, reading what others wrote?

My words reach out, naked, stripped
of false trappings, fake images,
my flesh and blood damp on the page.

Who knows where my words will land,
on fertile ground, on desert sand, or will
they lie on dry, stony paths, infertile?

So many people now scorn living words,
preferring those dull dry three-word chants,
fists clenched, or raised, that hypnotize.

Their love of words, thoughts, ideas, life
have been coffined in confining boxes,
cardboard castles, corrugated cans,
that they lock, then throw away the key.

Comment: Thank you Moo for your painting – Words fall like leaves and drift away. It make a fine companion to the poem.

What’s the story behind your nickname?

Daily writing prompt
What’s the story behind your nickname?
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What’s the story behind your nickname?

A long time ago, while Franco was still alive, we lived in Spain, where I was researching my doctoral thesis. Our two bedroom apartment did not have washing facilities for dirty clothes other than a hand wash in the basin and a pegging out on a clothes line outside the bathroom window, that gave on to an inner courtyard. A very good friend suggested we take our dirty washing to her local laundry. The custom in Spain, at that time, was to print in black ink as much of the name of the customer on each item of clothing as was necessary for the clothes to be recognized.

We handed our dirty washing over early one morning and the receptionist told us it would be ready later that afternoon. When we returned, a neatly wrapped parcel of brownish-pink paper, all tied up with colored string, awaited us. We paid our laundry bill, picked up the parcel, and carried it home.

When we got there Clare opened the parcel. Everything smelt clean and the clothes, hers and mine, positively glowed. They were all very carefully folded. Clare picked up the top item, a pair of my Y-front underpants, held it up, and started to laugh. When I asked her why she was laughing, she pointed to the three black letters that distinguished our clothing from anybody else’s in that city – MOO. “Oh Moo,!” she said. And I have been called Moo ever since. And that s why my paintings bear that name – Moo. Oh yes, the above painting is a self-portrait of Moo. Look closely and you may just be able to see him in there. Clare, by the way, is now known, within our family, as Mrs. Moo.

PS – Please don’t tell this story to anyone else. We wouldn’t want everyone to know about it.

Modern Society

Daily writing prompt
What would you change about modern society?
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What would you change about modern society?

Good question – what indeed? First, define society. It’s not as if a single society dominated the world. Do we then distinguish between the world, this geoidal planet on which we live, and the multiple societies that inhabit this world? If we do, then what right do you, or I, or any other individual have to change any or all of the world’s cultures and societies? And how do we change them?

Many ways have been tried in the past, very few successfully. The Spanish Inquisition burned many books and censored others. Other book burnings and spurnings have taken place, and in some places, they are still happening. But are they effective in the long term? Good question. Short term, maybe. Long term, I am not so sure.

Do we limit education, and by extension, knowledge, to a few , limited people, who believe what we believe, and do what we want them to do? That has been tried as well. Short-term successes, but long term disasters. As well as depriving people of education and books, we can also enslave them. This is still happening in many places.

So, another definition: what do we mean by change? Change for the better? Change for the worse? Change for change’s sake? Change for the betterment of our own selves and the devil take the hindmost? And what do we mean by modern? So many questions – so few answers.

Albert Camus once wrote that he was ‘optimiste, quant au monde, pessimiste quant a l’homme‘ – an optimist where the world is concerned, a pessimist where humankind is concerned. Personally, I am not sure that this particular thought stands up any longer. Is it still possible to be optimistic about a planet that we are capable of blowing to smithereens, a planet, moreover, that is currently suffering from wind and rain, fire and flood, famine and war, pandemic and a pollution like none we have ever seen before?

How can I change the world? I am just a single human being. Well, I am a married one, actually. But I only have one vote. I rather fear that single vote (votes don’t marry and produce offspring) will have little effect on my ability to make any change at all to modern society.

Pass the soap and a towel, please, as a certain person said a long time ago. I want to cleanse my hands and purge my soul. I am too old a dog to try and learn new tricks.

Voices

Voices

I forced my characters
into the roles that I chose for them.
Sometimes they complained
and refused to obey me.

Late one night, they came
and knocked on the window
that opens in my head when I dream.

They started to complain
about how I was treating them
and demanded that I change my ways.

I listened as they yapped, and yammered,
and strewed their growing pains
on the counterpane before me.

When I woke up, I remembered
what they had told me and I wrote
down their stories in their words, not mine.
Then they came to life and spoke through me.

Comment:
This poem and the next one both came from yesterday’s prompt – what do you listen to? The act of ranting, based on a prompt, often generates imagery that can then be used in either poetry or prose. The secret is to cut away the dross and find the gems that are often hidden within the rant. This leads, in my opinion, to enhanced creativity.

What do you listen to while you work?

Daily writing prompt
What do you listen to while you work?
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What do you listen to while you work?

While I was actually working, although I never called it work, because I thought of it as a vocation, I listened to the complaints of the administration (often about my way of work). I also listened to my students (all too often their complaints about the system and the way they were being taught and treated). And then I listened to the problems that were daily laid before me in my office by these same students. These, problems and students, were many and varied. One day, I designed a label for my door that announced: Office of Creative Solutions. And yes, I provided many innovative and creative solutions to problems that, to young people, especially my students, seemed almost impossible to resolve.

Then I retired. At least, like an ageing horse, or an unwanted donkey, I was put out to grass. And in that clover-filled meadow, I grazed at leisure and worked no more. But I did have time to write and so I became a creative writer. At first, when I started creative writing, I forced my characters into the roles that I had chosen for them. Sometimes they complained. Then, one day, or maybe it was one night when I was dreaming, a host of my characters, minor and major, came knocking on my door. They carried a big arrow that had, written upon it, Office of Creative Solutions. They pointed it at me and began to complain about how I was treating them. I remembered the poem I had memorized as a child – The owl, he was a wise old bird, the more he spoke, the less he heard. The less he spoke, the more he heard. There never was such a wise old bird.

I remembered how I had listened to my students and how, by listening, I managed to find creative solutions to their problems. So, I listened to those characters as they yammered away. One by one, they told me their woes, and their problems. Then, the following day, I rewrote everything I had written previously and wrote the stories down in their own words, instead of mine. When I listened to them, I allowed my characters to tell their own stories, and to speak for me and through me.

Sometimes, when I run out of voices that come in the night and tell me what to say, I cannot write. Then I take a paint brush, and I start to paint. What do I listen to when I paint? I listen to the brush as it moves itself over the canvas. I listen to the colors as they demand attention and tell me where to place them. I listen to the paint as it says ‘just here, not too thick, not too thin, a swirl please, gently now.”

Now, when I am not working, I listen to flowers, trees, the wind in the willows, the songs of the falling leaves, and the voices of birds.

What’s your favorite [card] game?

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
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What’s your favorite [card] game?

Well, it’s so easy to get bored with board games, so my favorite card game is sending and receiving e-cards for all sorts of occasions. Costs nothing, other than the initial membership / subscription fee, arrives almost instantly, often elicits an unexpected response, keeps me in touch with my friends all over the world, no quarreling over who is winning or losing, because when card and reply arrive, we are all winners, and there is very little lost in the post, like those letters that are still turning up from the WWI trenches. Missing, believed lost in action, didn’t refer only to those poor souls who strayed into no man’s land and never returned.

And let’s go back to counting the costs for a moment. While I love real cards sent by mail, and I just love opening them and reading well-known hand-writing, there is something incredibly sapping about the rising cost of stamps. the ever-longer delivery delays, the enormous rise in the cost of the card itself.

And the delivery delays? Well, I sent myself a card, the other day, by the old-fashioned method. It took nearly ten days to arrive. I think that it was sent by a slow sled driven by half-starved, rebellious huskies, to the north pole, and back, possibly via one or all of the -lands – Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, or Newfoundland. Two of those places I have visited, which, by a simple sum of subtraction, means that there is at least one that I haven’t. Oh dear. I was never very good at maths or math or mathematics, or spelling either by the look of it.

And the one really unbeatable thing about playing the game of sending e-cards by e-mail: you never have to lick the banana flavoured gum on those horrible envelopes. Remember that taste? Now gone forever, though the taste lingers on in my memory.

One Small Corner

One Small Corner

 And this is the good thing,
to find your one small corner
and to have your one small candle,
then to light it, and leave it burning
its sharp bright hole in the night.

 Around you, the walls you constructed;
inside, the reduced space, the secret garden,
the Holy of Holies where roses grow
and no cold wind disturbs you.

 “Is it over here?” you ask: “Or over here?”
If you do not know, I cannot tell you.

But I will say this: turning a corner one day
you will suddenly know
that you have found a perfection
that you will seek again, in vain,
for the rest of your life.

Comment: This is the title poem of the book One Small Corner – A Kingsbrae Chronicle, written at the first Kingsbrae International Residences for Artists (July, 2017), and published on Amazon – Kindle that same year. This is the video that accompanies the poem. https://www.kingsbraeartscentre.com/ – turn up your sound. My thanks to all those involved in that first residency and especially to Mrs. Lucinda Flemer, Geoff Slater, and my fellow resident artists, Ruby Allan, Carlos Carty, Elise Muller, and Ann Wright. One Small Corner, along with some other publications, can be found by clicking here. Special thanks for the making of the video itself go out to Geoff Slater, Jeff Lively, and Cameron Lively.

Ghost Train

Ghost Train

I remember the little electric railway
that ran on a single loop around
the kitchen table, diddly-da-diddly-da,
just like a real train, except no smoke,
no puff the magic dragon, no sense
of a schedule or arriving and departing
when circular time is meaningless,
as are the numbers on the sundial
when the sun isn’t shining,
or the hands on the clock’s blank face
when the numbers are missing,
and you don’t know whether you are
looking in time’s distorting mirror
or are standing on your head
in the Antipodes, and all the while
the clock hands are marching round
and round, tick-tock, and there is
no track by which time can be tracked.

And the runaway hands go round the track,
and the electric train goes round the table,
 and the ghost train hoots whoo-hoo,
as it vanishes into the timeless tunnel,
then exits, the engineer, like Rip Van Winkle,
grown old with a long beard, and the carriages
all covered with cobwebs, and skeletons
leaping out of the compartments,
then sitting beside the travellers
as they snore on their seats.

Comment: Another poem based on a prose prompt. What a great source for poetry those prompts can be, when you don’t take them too seriously and allow your imagination to run riot and your memories to flow. Not automatic writing, but writing that springs from an absurd, surrealist approach to the crazy world that surrounds us. Rain that causes the yucca plant to grow, then falls so hard that it is battered to the ground by the very thing that gave it life. And so it is with my memories of the many trains on which I have travelled and with which I have played. Once upon a time, I couldn’t conceive of life without the railway. Where is it now? I haven’t been on a train for more than fifteen years. Strange how their ghosts flit through my dreams at night: fast trains, slow trains, the wrong train at the wrong time taking me to the wrong place in time. Ah, the poetry of trains yet, “ni temps passés ni les trains reviennent.” And you can give yourself a glow of satisfaction – thank you Tommy Reed – if you recognize the quote, and two more if you know who Tommy Reed is. I use the present tense because, although long gone, he is ever-present in my mind.

Today’s painting – another gift from my friend Moo.

Past Times

Past Times

When I was young, I used to watch
my fox terrier chasing his tail,
running round and round in circles,
never quite catching it,
but never giving up his high hopes
 of catching that little rag-tag of a bobtail
that dangles there behind.
 
Round about and out and in and out
all day that silly dog did spin,
spinning in prose and then in rhyme,
until I lost all track of time.

Comment: I loved a part of one of my prompts, so I turned it into a personal poem. The second stanza is based on a poem by Thackeray. I learned it in my youth. Learning poetry and remembering it, another past time from past times. I also love playing on words. Imitatio is one of the rhetorical devices used traditionally by poets. To imitate, is to express one’s admiration of another person’s work. It should not be confused with plagiary / plagiarism, which is something entirely different. Anyone who has followed my writing, on this blog and elsewhere, will know that I echo the words of other poets and that I do so deliberately, to praise them and acknowledge their creativity and their continuing influence upon my own poetic world.

Today’s Cartoon – A Time Apart – by my friend Moo who is very generous with his art..

Situations

Situations

I am sitting at my desk, typing to you.
Many thoughts are running through my head.

I am checking the weather regularly –
high winds and rain are due soon.

Clare has just walked past the window.
She waved at me, but didn’t ask for any help.

The washing is almost dry and needs folding.
 We need to tie down the umbrella and porch chairs.

The cat has just walked across my keyboard.
I correct her footprints. They have typed false words.
 
Now she has discovered the dried blood on the floor.
It soaked into the boards when I cut my arm last night.

I meant to clean it up this morning, but I forgot.
I can hear her tongue rasping as she licks it up.