Premonitions

Pain and Pane

Pain and Pane

I am living in a Duke of York world
fraught with mood swings and random changes.
When I am up, I am up, and when I am down,
well, then I am down, and every so often,
I meet in the middle and am neither up nor down.

At night I swim among the constellations
and the stars net silver sequins in my hair.
By day, I walk along a piano’s keyboard
and replay life’s ups and downs like scales,
practicing them, again and again.

I no longer know who or what I am.
I only know I exist right here, at my desk,
my table, in my bed, looking out through
a window that has opened in my head,
a window that serves as a mirror.

I step through it, and go back to my childhood
in Wales. I recall the sunny days of sea and sand,
but also those days when sunlight fails, clouds
gather, and the west wind conjures rain and gales.
Such pain as I press my nose against the window
pane, and watch the raindrops falling again.

Lost

Lost

Where can it be? I put it
somewhere safe, but I
can’t remember where.

So many things grow legs,
go absent without leave,
walk out of my world.

I am slowly losing control.
My life will soon be left
in somebody else’s hands.

They will control my wants
needs, and necessities.
Then I too will be lost.

Placed somewhere safe,
perhaps, there to lie forgotten,
abandoned, secure, perhaps,
but who knows at what cost.

Swings

Swings

They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.

A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.

Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.

There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back to whatever reality I left.

But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?

Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.
 
Wish it or not, my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Alien Nation

Alien Nation

I used to love the trees, the way
they stood there, patiently,
through all four seasons,
bending to the will
of weather and wind.

I planted many of them,
cultivated them,
watched them flourish,
treated them as siblings,
stood beneath their branches,
my back against a trunk,
their life force flowing
through me, renewing me,
as leaf-filtered sunlight
freckled hands and face
and danced in my heart.

Now, I fear them.
People have treated them
so badly, polluting water and air.
I fear their darkness,
their slow-burning anger,
their dryness, the ways
in which they gather,
shutting out the sunlight,
whispering dark secrets,
plotting to destroy us.

I fear the fire they have stored
in root and branch, a fire
that may one day come
to burn us out and leave
the land for their offspring.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Black Saturday

Black Saturday

Doubt and Despair

1

This is the day we go into ourselves
to work out who we really are.

It is the teeter-totter day
when the world balances on a knife-edge:
Yesterday, the dark deed was done.
Today the body is in the morgue,
far from the crime scene
where black and yellow ticker-tapes,
keep sight-seers seeking thrills at bay.

Today, there is no centre to hold.
Things gyre and gimble in the wake
of troubling scenes misinterpreted,
called fake, and deliberately misunderstood.

The unfortunate lie chained so they can’t
escape. Take these chains from our hearts,
the watchers say. Take these irons from
our wrists, your knees from our necks.
Forsake your vicious choke holds.
Go away and leave us alone.

2

A birch tree lies on my power lines,
and I am powerless.

No phone, no radio, no tv,
and all because of a snow-laden tree.
Why did this happen to me?

“It’s a day, man, a day.
It’s nothing but a day.”
“Imagine,” says my wife, “being
without power all your life.”

I clench my fist and pump the air.
Nobody sees me. No one seems to care.

A ghost’s voice echoes in my head:
“Stop moaning, bro,
at least you ain’t dead.”

Sun, wind, melting snow.
The lame tree rising, slow.
Then, at last, the lines are free.
Power is back again.
I breathe more easily.

3

For forty days
I have wandered in this wilderness,
walking from room to room,
climbing stairs,
descending to the basement,
sitting at the computer,
sitting at the table,
writing in my journal.

I have watched the minutes
as they turn into hours,
the hours turning into days,
days into weeks, then months.

How long, I ask, oh lord, how long
before peace and love, friendship and joy,
return to this world
where they used to belong?

4

A turkey-vulture flew
over the house this afternoon,
hungering for who knows what,
as I too hunger for things
I have forgotten
and no longer know.

Freedom to walk
in now forbidden places,
freedom to shop for groceries,
to stop at the liquor store,
to buy wine and beer,
other things that I adore.

For forty days
I have sailed in this Noah’s
Ark of a house.
Like John the Baptist
I have lingered here for forty days.

Strange and wonderful are thy ways,
oh lord, in heaven, where souls and angels
admire your beauty and sing your praise.

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality
or
The Coconut Shy

Aunt Sallies, all of them, sitting there,
in front of the camera, virtual statues,
three whole rows of coconuts gazing
vacantly out of the screen or sitting,
mute like swans, with sound and vision
turned off so nobody will know that
they are there in name only, or perhaps
it’s a pseudonym, a nickname, hiding
the true identity of the sly persona
shying obscurely away from the camera.

Shy, yes, but only at first. The ice breaks.
Conversation flows. A jabberwocky of noise
breaks over headphones, crackles in ears,
meaningless, at times, as the air waves wander,
break up, people switch on or off, or,
having said their say, go mute and fade away.

I think of monkeys, climbing to the top
of the temple steps, sitting there in rows,
plucking at the fur of the friend below them,
then cracking between thumb and index finger
the fleas and other creatures they have found.

And that’s what they will do with the work
that other people present to them – nit pick,
quarrel, pick minor squabbles, disagree with
a noun here, an adjective there, a dangling
participle over there, see, quick, give it
a flick, a twist of the wrist, that’s what
the showman said. There. See? Gone now.
And doesn’t that feel so much better?

Now I sit among them, my own effigy
staring back at me like a death mask in life’s
Madame Tussaud’s virtual wax works,
Jolly Roger, another skull-and-crossbones
faking it for the camera that tells no lies,
even though I despise the shown falsehood –
of ‘stand together or we fall alone’ and yes,
I feel myself falling, toppling off the saw dust
piled into the metal cup, to lie on the ground,
battered and broken, but the show must go on,
though, for me, that’s the final curtain.

Sound of Silence

Sound of Silence
Cara Anam, p. xv

Where do the deer go
when they leave their tracks
behind them and pass out of our sight?

We lose them when, like school children,
they scale the snow bank,
stop at the roadside, and look left,
right, and left again, then walk sedately,
one by one, across the road, and blend
into the dark woods opposite our house.

Too many friends have walked a similar way,
crossed the great divide, and lost themselves
in the unknown that lies there, out of sight.

All too soon, we will be faced by that same
decision, whether or not to cross.
Our paths already tell us where we’ll go,
but the hands of our body clocks don’t yet
point to how, or when.

Click here to listen to Roger’s reading.

Waiting for Godots

Waiting for Godots

What do authors do when they send manuscripts to agents or presses? They have several choices. For example, they can listen to the sound of silence. Listen carefully to the paining above. What does it say to you? Absolutely nothing. Quite. It doesn’t communicate. It’s the sound of silence.

Another choice, they can read and re-read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Alas, in this case there are many Godots out there and all of them are super-busy gazing at their navels – and I don’t mean oranges. Some indulge in the wonderful world of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” and we all know what the answer is to that question. And we know what happened to Narcissus when he saw himself in the river water. Or have we forgotten? Our failure to share cultures is also a sound of silence – two solitudes, gazing at each other, neither one having anything in common with the other one, except maybe the weather. And we can’t always agree on that.

A third choice, they can climb into their dustbins, Queen’s English for garbage cans, and stand there waiting for someone to put the lid on so they can go back to sleep. Allusion / elusion – you don’t know what I am talking about? Well, maybe we are living in two separate solitudes. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

A fourth choice, they can take up painting, and scribbling, and drawing, and doing all sorts of things. But, if the phone rings and you don’t recognize the number – don’t pick up the phone. It’s probably a fraudulent scam call. And if you don’t know the e-mail address, put it in Spam and then block it. It’s probably some bot from another country trying to trap you into giving them your bank account details and signing your savings away. Whoever it is or they are , I doubt if it’s an agent or an editor!

Challenge

Challenge

What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

The months change but the challenge never does. How does one stay alive? How does one survive? How does one pass the time from one minute to the next, one hour to the next, one day to the next, one week to the the next, and one month to the next?

I faced a challenge this morning. I got to the shop and could not climb over the piled up ice to reach the slippery step that led to the salted sidewalk that led to the shop’s entrance. Fortunately a kind young man took my arm, and helped me upwards, onto the sidewalk. He waited while I shopped and brought me back down to the car, arm in arm, and carrying my shopping. I gave him a poetry book, Septets for the End of Time, as a reward.

What will be the next big challenge? I honestly don’t know. Starting the snow blower at -20C, perhaps? Blowing the snow and avoiding a slip, a fall, a sit down on a snow bank from which I cannot get up? Who knows? I don’t. I need more medicine – will my biggest challenge be finding that the pharmacy has again run low on my medication and I have to wait for my renewals? I have just had a blood test – three months late – and I don’t know what the results will be? Will that be my biggest challenge – coming face to face with a negative result that demands more action? I just don’t know. Driving out the other day, I met a speeding car on my side of the road, in my lane, coming straight towards me. The driver was staring at his cell phone, one hand on the wheel, eyes down, concentrating on something that certainly wasn’t the road. I swerved aside, towards the snow bank, honked the horn, and he looked up, eyes wide with shock, and swerved away. Brown trouser time, I guess, for that unfortunate individual.

It would be so nice to have a smart answer. My biggest challenge will be to find a solution to the chess problem that has puzzled me for years – how to defend Queen side openings when Black. My biggest challenge will be to draw the cards for a perfect hand of cribbage. My biggest challenge will be to pay the grocery bills as the prices rise. My biggest challenge will be to pay the dentist’s bills when I have no dental coverage and the savings dwindle every month. My biggest challenge will be how to avoid the pain in my teeth now that I can no longer afford the dentist. My biggest challenge will be to crawl to the telephone and get help if I manage to fall in the kitchen and cannot get up.

So, what is my greatest challenge over the next six months? Living from day to day, without falling downstairs and killing myself – how about that for an answer?

Digging the Snow

Digging the Snow

I have had a snow blower for some time now. It means that I don’t have to dig the snow. I just get the machine to blow it. But what if the blower doesn’t work?

This winter the local radio station has been filled with stories about snow blowers breaking down, snow blowers catching on fire, snow blowers not starting, snow blowers breaking their shearing pins. All of this has been caused by the weight of the snow, its depth, the compilation of snow on snow, ice pellets on snow, icy rain on snow.

The other day, I went out to blow the snow. It was so heavy that I likened it to wet quick sands on the beach. I could hardly get the blower out of the garage. When I did, I couldn’t move it, forwards or backwards, without enormous effort. I sat on the back of my car and cried. Here is the related post https://rogermoorepoet.com/2023/01/18/luminescence/

For many people of my age, and younger, this is heart attack time. Blowing snow, digging snow, clearing snow, shoveling snow. I know the song – “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” But who clears it? Who digs it? Do you dig that snow? Hey, man, dig that snow. Cool, eh? Chill, man, chill.

So where did the snowman go? To the hospital with a heart attack? Who knows? But one thing I do know: digging snow has become one of the things that I fear. And why shouldn’t I? I am at that age when things happen. And here’s what I mean – https://rogermoorepoet.com/2023/02/10/and-if-we-fall/

No. I don’t want to become a fatality on the statistics page. I don’t want to ‘fall to rise no more, as many others have done before’ – a tribute to Over the hills and far away, that one. So, let it snow, yes. But not too much and let us avoid that bleak mid-winter when ‘snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow on snow’. Christmas Card whiteness I can take – but not the chest wracking heave of heavy snow, weighing my shovel down, puling me down, burying me.