Brief Silence

The silence of the classroom, when the children

have all departed, tries to fill the spaces

vacated by the absent children. You

could hear a pin drop, not to say the laughter

at Friday afternoon’s surreal red herring.

The only things now left from this week gone:

some rubbish on the floor, the odd lost ruler,

a pencil case, some chairs that weren’t pushed in,

and too much marking. Piles of books

awaiting comments, tick and marks.

The silence settles. ‘This is it,’ I think,

while contemplating eight miles on my bike.

Uphill. The calm after the storm, before

the next storm. Take it in. Breathe out. Ride home.

[Another abandoned poem, April 2016; writing about 1997-2003]

Free Will* (It Isn't in the Script)

Romeo and Juliet cannot

elope to Gretna Green when Act One ends,

and Desdemona can’t seek marriage guidance

counselling when Othello has his tantrums.

Hamlet’s depression can’t be remedied

with meds, or therapy, or meditation,

and Oberon can’t take his grievance over

the Indian Prince to the Small Claims Court.

Lady Macbeth can’t rid her hands of blood,

and laugh and sing and dance with gay abandon,

and Prospero is not allowed to turn

his old foes into frogs, or four-wheeled pumpkins.

Petruchio can’t do the washing up

then give a pair of trousers to his wife.

Beatrice and Benedick can’t take themselves

behind the bike shed to relieve their passions.

Sir Toby Belch cannot go full-on de-tox,

renounce the drink and go to AA meetings…

…And you and I, we all must live our lives

according to what’s written in our scripts.

*as in Shakespeare

[Trawling through an old notebook, and once again I came across a sizeable stack of abandoned, half-finished, unrealised, and ultimately forgotten, almost-poems. This is one of them.]

One

I decide I need to write a poem about Death.

Ten Poems About Death, I muse.

Seems like a nice round number.

‘Here Death,’ I call.

‘I’m writing a sequence of poems about you.

Any comments?’

But Death does not reply,

because Death is not real.

As in corporeal real.

Death itself exists.

Obviously.

But not the corporeal personification of Death.

Anyway.

I’m not so keen on the idea of the actual personification of Death.

Bit too spooky.

But then Death does appear.

He is not wearing a hooded black cloak.

He is not carrying a scythe.

He is not a skeleton.

He is, in fact, a T-shirt.

It is, in fact, a T-shirt.

‘Death is a T-shirt?’ I say out loud.

Yes, I am a T-shirt, says Death.

No, not really.

T-shirts don’t talk,

even ones which represent Death.

‘You’re not the personification of Death, though,’ I say,

while staring at the writing on the front –

The Second Law of Thermodynamics –

‘you’re a T-shirt,

and a T-shirt is not a person.’

The writing on the front of the T-shirt changes.

That’s where you’re wrong, it reads,

and underneath there appears a convoluted explanation

about how a T-shirt which is able to communicate

by expressing its thoughts on the front of itself

is a form of personification.

Sod personification anyway, says Death,

in his T-shirt way.

You’re so humancentric.

The T-shirt is a manifestation of Death,

or, to be more accurate,

the words on the front of it are a manifestation of Death,

or they were,

until they re-manifested themselves

as a convoluted explanation.

Then

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

appears once again

on the front of the T-shirt.

‘What about accidents?’ I say.

And accidents appears on the T-shirt,

followed by,

Nobody likes a smart-arse.

I pick up the T-shirt with

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

And accidents

Nobody likes a smart-arse

written on the front.

I realise I should have mentioned

suicide as well as accidents to Death,

but then remember

Nobody likes a smart-arse,

which pretty much covers

every other eventuality.

I put the T-shirt on.

It’s a one-size fits all.

‘Oh, very funny, Death.’ I say.

Yes, Death is hilarious

appears on the front of the T-shirt,

I decide against wearing it outside of the house

and spend the next hour and thirty-seven minutes

trying to persuade Death

that if he’s/it’s going to assume

a corporeal form which communicates

in the medium of ever-changing written words,

then a notebook would be far more convenient,

and obvious,

than a T-shirt.

In the meantime

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

And accidents

Nobody likes a smart-arse

reappears on the T-shirt

and, beneath it,

Live 2018

as if it’s the name of a band

touring an album.

‘Very funny, Death,’ I say, again.

I’m basically a comedian

appears,

but not on the T-shirt;

the words appear on the page

of the notebook in which I am writing.

‘Oh, very meta,’ I say.

Death’s words vanish

and are replaced with

I have work to do.

Why don’t you get on with writing

your second poem in this series?

Perhaps you could make that one like an actual poem,

with rhymes and metre and whatnot?

Instead of this stream of consciousness

which is very prosaic, really,

isn’t it?

And then the words vanish altogether,

before I have a chance to mention

that the stylistic modality of this poem

was a deliberate metaphor for

the death of poetry,

or perhaps The Death of Poetry.

The words on the T-shirt are still there,

and I go for a walk in the autumn sunshine,

notebook in hand,

sensing the imminence of winter in the air.

Plastic Concerns

I’m clearing up last night’s Scrabble

and waiting for the toast to pop up

when the title for an unwritten poem

pops up, unbidden, into my head.

I wonder what structure and tone

the poem will take.

Will it be a mirror

which reflects the meandering

narratives of Kirill Medvedev?

Or a string of opaque images

like Paul Emery?

Maybe I’ll try my hand at an original poem

in the style of me?

I think this last one impossible.

All of my poems are a concatenation

of every poem I’ve ever read,

ending up with whatever my latest poem is.

Ordinarily,

when such a word as concatenation

jumps into the forefront of my mind,

I’ll dismiss it,

unless I’m being deliberately Gilbertian

for comic effect;

but I’m not feeling that brand

of funny today.

Then I remember Sheila’s comment

about my father:

Sometimes, he would come out with a really long word,

and I would wonder if he was making it up.

Making up for a lifetime of absence,

these days he’s rarely far from

the forefront of my mind,

and so concatenation it is,

a tiny acknowledgement of my father,

in a poem which has nothing to do about my father.

Perhaps that explains its appearance,

the word having stayed hidden in my mind

after I’d encountered it

in some dense historical tome,

or a book about politics;

or possibly one about the impending

environmental devastation

which is currently doing its sprint finish,

due to overtake us any day now –

unless it already has –

although we won’t realise it has

until we see it reach the finishing line,

ahead of us,

as we come in last,

in a world-sized stadium

filled with the impotent

harrumphs of a lifetime

of social media tantrums.

I interrupt myself

in order to put on my shoes.

I’ve recently decided

that I prefer writing with my shoes on.

I don’t know if the wearing of a pair of shoes –

or, rather, the pair of shoes,

as I only have one pair –

has a beneficial effect on my writing,

but it’s an oddity

which I’ve gradually come to acquire;

one of those idiosyncrasies which evolve

over time,

like always writing in pencil,

or having to start every notebook

with yet another poem

about the starting of a new notebook.

The evolution of who I am:

the concatenation

of largely inexplicable habits

whereby I become

an ever more complicated

and ridiculous version of myself;

the unconscious becoming

of a unique, complex belief-system

according to which I live my life.

It’s fortunate that I’m not the new Messiah,

or other people might also start believing

that it is imperative

to buy every album release

which contains a contribution from Johnny Marr,

along with having to wear shoes while writing poetry,

or having to use a knife and fork

to eat sandwiches.

Plastic Concerns was the title.

It’s less a metaphor, and more a pun,

and puns have very low status in poetry,

unless you’re from Japan,

where puns are an acceptable form of expression.

Perhaps therein lies the ambiguity

which I feel towards this title:

I like it as a pun,

but as poetry,

I find it unacceptable.

There is a cacophony of despair

at the discovery of a new continent of plastic,

the latest triumph of human ingenuity;

a cacophony which seems as ubiquitous as plastic in the oceans.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

each now has an entire cavalry

at its disposal,

although I don’t know which regiment

this thing belongs to:

War? Pestilence? Death?

Having discovered this new continent –

the Continent of Plastica,

or perhaps Plasticopia

(no, it’s definitely Plastica) –

I react as I always do to such things:

with a not-quite-detached

Well, then.

Eventually,

after stumbling across the suitably ominous video of Plastica

online for the nth time,

I wondered,

Whence all the plastic?

and stumbled, in my subsequent search,

across a statistic which I hadn’t seen mentioned

by any of the concerned posters:

46% of Plastica is made from

discarded plastic fishing nets.

And the majority of the rest of it?
Other fishing gear:
the ropes,
the crates,
the baskets,
the spacers.

Exhortations abound:

Give up plastic bottles!

Tick.

Give up plastic bags!

Tick.

Give up straws!

Tick.

Recycle! Reuse! Sign petition!

Tick, tick, possible tick.

Give up eating fish!

FFS, you vegans are so…

…preachy.

So extreme.

Around 100 million sharks

are killed each year

as bikill,

the by-product of fishing;

fishing with plastic nets.

There’s a picture of a deformed turtle,

one of the four holes of the plastic packaging apocalypse,

from the Regiment of Beer Four-Packs,

strangling its shell.

It’s a picture we look at

while ignoring

the sky-high photograph album

of dolphins, whales, sharks,

fish, fish, and fish –

and turtles –

which have all been killed by bikill

in the pursuit of marine cuisine;

maritime mass murder;

the unintended consequence

of battered cod,

or whatever fish ends up in the kitchen.

Without our plastic bottles,

our plastic bags,

our plastic straws,

our recycling plants,

or our online petitions,

the Continent of Plastica will continue to expand.

Perhaps the campaigns –

to ban plastic bottles,

to ban plastic bags,

to ban plastic straws –

will be 100% successful,

while, amid our empty self-congratulation,

Plastica grows and grows and grows,

so that,

come 2048,

it will be left to float above the dead ocean,

and all of our plastic concerns for that ocean

will be seen,

by our grandchildren,

for what they really were:

plastic concerns.

Around 100 million sharks killed every year

Seafood may be gone by 2048

46% of the tonnage of the plastic garbage patch is fishing nets, the majority of the rest is composed of other fishing industry gear