Rising from the Sea Bed

Thought I'd post some poems. Two of them (Portrait of Ray and Steerage) were published on Every Day Poets (Poetry?) which is now defunct and they can't be read, not even in an old fisherman's cache. They have been locked away in Davy Jones' locker on Atlantis Island for the past 18 months. It's about time they were brought to the surface--so here goes:

Notes From an Aquarium

Sea Life

Her delphic gaze holds sway

in monochrome relief,

contemplating some unknown folly submerged

in a floating world of obsidian depth.

An arc of old rope hangs aimlessly in the spotlight,

perhaps in lieu of an eel, or two?

Purple sea plants wave synthetic adieus--

the stage is set, but the fish have forgotten their cue.

Portrait of Ray

In the tunnel, children point and shout
as the giant ray steals past the glass--

the skirts of its fins ripple black to white,
a priest's surplice caught in a summer breeze.

To squeals of delight, it soars above us.
I take a photo and examine my catch--

a blurred underbelly in UFO livery,
two spaced-out gills mildly surprised,
either side of an alien mouth, aghast.

Steerage

At the bottom of the pool,
a nurse shark lies obsolete,
grounded--
a spent reactor cooling off,
its grey fuselage groomed
by a cordon of pilot fish.

We inch our way across by measured line,
while younger eyes look out for signs
of lethal geometry cleaving the surface
or a turtle emerging as an atoll awash.

Blunt flippers cause a stir of hope,
as they brush and bump the side of the boat--
oblique marker for their endless relays.

But most of us are looking beneath our feet,
at the shoals of small fry as they
fritter in and out of the fantasy wreck.

And in that gloomy arena of Victorian brick,
once the dearly beloved dolphins' crypt--
my mind turns over a century,
and makes that sandy bed a cemetery
of White Star Line dinner plates,
face down.

A Fountain of Polemic

I've got a bad summer cold. There's nothing worse, believe me. I mean it's so unseasonal--no good pretending its hay fever either--everyone twigs you've got a stinker of a cold and thereby assumes you must have a really unhealthy lifestyle, etc. Ho hum. Anyway, it's put me in one of those moods where I won't be taking any prisoners. No, not today, thank you. The muskrat gland is firing on all cylinders (not to mention the mucus reserves) but perhaps one better not mention anything like that--as it could seriously gross out one's Canadian readership, etc (if I have any.)

Here is a poem on a local landmark which has been in the news recently:

Lament for the Mazda Fountain

You were a carbuncle on

the face of the Valley Gardens project,

the wrong sort of heritage,

an awkward pensioner relative,

who has out-lived their welcome,

expensive to keep--

far too prodigal with water

and often the wind blew your voluminous jets 

hither and thither and people walking by

(including the odd wino)

got soaked as a result.

You sported their colour, but alas,

the Greens were never

likely to be enamoured of your

implacably ugly basin with its dreadnought

steel-plating from a coal-fired age--

you were always destined to be an affront to

the ideology--deemed not fit for purpose

(well, you are electric, which

combined with water makes you a rum mix of elements.)

They wanted you out of sight

marooned in Hove Lagoon for the duration

while they commissioned

a nice sustainable water feature

just like that one to commemorate

Diana in Hyde Park--oops,

perhaps not.

You were an obstacle in the way

of their blandscape nirvana--

their picturesque schemes
to plant new traffic roundabouts 
the shape of ciabattas with pretty paved

areas here and there, the significance of which

remains a puzzle to most pedestrians.

Above all, you were in the way

of the cycle path they wanted to build

and everything has to give way to cyclists now,

(although Brighton cyclists are a feral

bunch and rarely keep to paths or give way,

or even understand the symbol for it.)

I’m probably one of a small percentage

who has always been a fan

of your lumbering industrial chic

with all its design fails,

brazenly ensconced at the end of Victoria Gardens,

like a vision from a bad steam punk hangover,

your light show cancelled long ago,

your electric rings splattered with pigeon guano,

looking more suited to boiling an ostrich egg, perhaps.

Anyway, I always enjoyed the spectacle of your lavish jets of water

refreshing that arid corner.

There are rumours of a reprieve now those

Green despots on the council have been weeded out.

Indeed, why should they be the ones to decide

what's good or bad for Brighton?

The beast in all its naked glory (that tree isn't growing out of it btw, just a bit of tromp l'oeil)

So I took my poem down...

It's been a while. NaPo got in the way of my musing. I also took the previous post down as I got a pub for the poem featured in it, 'Bellwether-by-Sea', a satirical take on Hove's status as a marginal seat. Well, it was marginal at the time I wrote it, but towards the end of the month everyone was reckoning it was a shoo-in for Labour, which proved to be correct. 

You can read it in issue 17 of Alliterati which is devoted to political themes (if you don't mind squinting hard enough at the pdf format and fiddling with the little magnification widget). They've chosen a dessicated typewriter font that seems to be in at the moment. All the other contributions, including some intriguing art work, look effortlessly cool next to mine. My poem is trying a bit too hard--like Ed Miliband in those televised debates. It also seems too polite and neat for words. If it was having tea, its little finger would be raised and the sips would be noiseless. (Not sure if that analogy applies to Ed, as he's famed for his inelegant scoffing.) 
Anyway, within this Alliterati gathering, so to speak, everyone else seems to be biting into the rims of chipped mugs, squeezing out the last drop of soured milk from the warped carton (well, the mag began life as a student rag after all). Hmm, does milk still come in cartons? Perhaps not, too nineties for words. Anyway, I'm very proud to be included in the magazine--an old rat bag like me who can recall actual milk bottles made of glass. Oh yes and they would fit snugly inside duffle coat front pockets, if I remember correctly.

Here's another poem to make up for the one I took down. It's about election night, a rather singular take on it, you could say. I was followed recently on Twitter by a Lib Dem policy wonk called Nick. Hmm, don't they have any other names? Yes, they must be desperate for followers of any ilk, so I tweeted the link to my soundcloud reading soon after. Hope he got off on the last few lines :)

Nocturne written on Election Night, May 7th

I watched Cameron's car,

the armoured Jaguar taking him to the count,

as it purred along Oxfordshire

country lanes pitch black and as smooth as

Guinness--red tail lights flashing--

and this time we were the passengers

cocooned inside--trying to read our destiny

in the passing shadows.

I fought the desire to gather the dark silence

of that road and coat you in it

spill the questioning bleakness

into your mouth--a passionless

droll slit--my tongue gaining entry

like a ballot sheet needing to be folded

over again--stamping you afresh

with a meretricious kiss

forcing you to concede as we laboured ahead,

our physical union bound by

a coalition of drunken senses

blinkered by carnality

making us inseparable in that uncertain night--

desperate to escape the gloom

cast by the last exit poll.

My tongue was too engaging to ignore--

offering to lick your stubby pencil

held on a tight leash just before

you marked your cross in the booth where no one

could ever swing a cat--and then only then

was it free to spool around yours,

a fluent consort for the counting hours,

making each of us drool over unexpected results

after the joint declaration--

as partners in the last dance

before the Lib Dem House of Cards

collapsed and a weary Nick

was left standing alone

in his boxer shorts.

April is the month of NaPo so--

Here's a poem I've written for day two of NaPo and it's topical :)

Bellwether-by-Sea

The Tories have already been--

you missed the Chancellor of the Exchequer

he was down the road--kneading dough in Pizza Express

oh, and the Prime Minister has already delivered the post,

while you were still buttering your toast--

and the Home Secretary, what’s-her-name,

was last seen assisting with a blow-dry

in ‘Off Yer Head’--

Parliamentary day-trippers parachuted in

playing at being ordinary folk,

hopeful of getting votes.

We are a bellwether constituency by the sea,

where the mad castrated ram,

Floreat Hova,

picks its way over potholes and pavement cracks,

and barges into blind cul-de-sacs,

its little bell ringing so you know

where it’s at and swing-o-meters

can be duly calibrated

along with squeaky weather vanes, pointing

in all directions.

Fat cat bottoms

sit uneasily on marginal seats,

musical chairs up for grabs

in the time it takes to wipe noses on sleeves--
that reminds me--where are the Greens?

Not heard a peep--

I fear they may have withered away on the vegetable patch

where the irate bin man has parked his lorry.

As for Labour, the activists can be

seen night and day tweeting en masse like

hungry baby birds in the bright

red nesting box.

The reviled Lib-Dems have traipsed west

in hair-shirts, socks and sandals

and all they can rustle up is a moth-eaten carpetbagger,

while miracles of miracles,

in shambles

a Monster Raving Looney candidate--he gets

my vote. Quick, count the ballot papers

before they are fed to the goats--

Labels

A visit to Brighton Museum and Galleries has inspired me to write about labels. In this day and age we are obsessed with labels and in some instances, fear them. The two newly re-vamped galleries/exhibition areas at the museum are a triumph of the curator's art. Some of the items on display often seem secondary to their own labels and context. 

There is nothing more embarrassing than having a lot of old stuff in a collection that has been donated willy-nilly over the years. Like old family relics in an attic. They look untidy and when people look at them they imagine all sorts of things and you can't have the hoi-polloi doing that. I mean, they don't know what's good for them. Everything needs to be re-labelled and put in its proper context.

Imagine you've inherited a lot of grave goods from Peru or a batch of shrunken heads from Borneo. Well, to start off you don't show them--at all. You hide them in a warehouse and hope that someday they may be forgotten for what they are--spoils from a colonial era. Then you install a lot of touch screens with confusing buttons that will enthral all the seven year olds and baffle the adults. You start collating stories about all these diverse ethnic communities and they are all nice stories, which have been eviscerated and packaged for general consumption, so they have as much guts left inside them as those dented old mummy cases in the Egyptian side gallery. 

Everything has its context and its label and is suitably dumbed down. Hmm, not so very different from the Islamic State bull-dozing it's own ancient artefacts, cleansing or smoothing out its historical timeline. Perhaps we are all at it, one way or another, Re-interpretation is the disease of the 21st century. We are not allowed to gaze on the cabinet of curiosities and wonder why any more. Children are encouraged to click buttons and turn over one word captions--history re-written as a baby board book. Museum curators have the last word. There may be a place to display your postcard of opinion. But those opinions are strictly curated. At times, I feel there is more 'telling' than 'showing' going on in Brighton Museum.

A prime casualty of this particular brand of curator's fallacy has been the fashion gallery, but I'll rant about that another day, perhaps, as it isn't really news. Nothing has changed in that gallery much since the beginning of this century. I'm waiting for an iconoclast to come along one laundry day and throw out all the safety-pinned punk as well as the Ben Sherman shirts, along with Norman Cook's donation. Just because I'm sick of the sight of them. 

There has been a wholesale cleansing in the ethnographic gallery. Space has been cleared so that we can go down on our knees and beg forgiveness for what our misguided ancestors have done. I am missing so many beautiful artefacts in here. Artefacts that I used to like to sketch. Even the wonderful carved figures (early 20thc) of the colonial planter in his pith helmet and his sidekicks who once looked back at us through other-worldly tribal eyes and still had the ability to speak to us, have vanished from their glass box. They do not fit the labels any more. In fact the word 'tribal' has been banished to that shameful lexicon of yesteryear.

I do not remember much Islamic art in this collection, but now a third of the gallery is taken up with a display about Islamic culture. The only remotely old things on display are some fragments of tiles from a mosque with reproduction copies beneath that you are permitted to touch. The African section was dominated by a huge table football game and more touch screens. There was some connection being made between football and Africa which I didn't quite get. The other part of the gallery is taken up with a huge grey desk and seating area with some infernal machine that ought to be touch-screen but isn't--in fact you have to operate a weird qwerty keyboard that talks back at you in an alarming manner. Listed on screen are a considerable archive of resource materials about ethnic cultures and religions. Watched one film made about the Kachin diaspora from Burma. No doubt a persecuted sect in their own country, but there was no mention of this. Perhaps persecution is too political. All content here is presented in a strictly happy-clappy format.

The new 'Oceans' gallery, which replaces the rather muddled one about corsetry, body image and gender, is more of a success. Mainly because it utilises a lot of the stuffed birds/skeletons and eerily-preserved sea creatures from the Booth collection. Turtles wearing thick overcoats of 19thc shellac dangle from wires. Thanks to Hirst and those girlie taxidermists beloved by contemporary art buyers, stuffed animals have now become chic curiosities All the dubious animal world trophies blunder-bussed to near extinction by their original collector, are having a bit of a renaissance in this gallery. So that is something to celebrate, possibly.

I'm ending with a picture of a pair of gold ballet shoes. Possibly a relic from Les Ballets 1933, bank-rolled by the collector Edward James, for the sake of his promiscuous wife, Tilly Losch, but I could be wrong and that could be libel. On second thoughts, I should probably go back and look at the label.

Preface

Uh, am back on Blogger after a bit of gap. Has it really been five years since my last post? Hmm, feels like ten, somehow. Also, I cannot unfollow all those blogs I was following years ago as the widget has been confiscated. I did follow someone's advice on 'how to unfollow' on their blog, but it didn't work for some reason. Perhaps Blogger got there first and snipped all this 'unfollowing' tendency in the bud, as they think it's not cricket, or something. Tough if I want to start following something new and want to let people know that I'm following it. Tsk, all because I'm too embarrassed to admit that I followed the Lily Rose Allen blog all those years ago. And she's posted less than I have. It's a true Marie Celeste of blogs. I have one of those too. I left it on my profile as a curiosity, for people to puzzle over. It is the blog with the totally-impossible-to-remember-name about Mary Vetsera, the teenage lover of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria. It still gets the odd hit, mainly from Hungary, according to the stats. However, if you do happen to come across it, don't read it, just look at the pictures. 

Ah, yes stats. Hmm, not bothered about those for the moment. I mean, I'm still feeling my way here. Very much a work in progress. Oh and I appear to be writing this in Pacific Daylight Time, which must be a bonus and sounds much sexier than GMT.

I know a lot of blogs recommend stuff, but you won't find that here and I won't be monetising either--I'll probably be moaning about something I'd otherwise moan about on Facebook. So be warned. Anyway I want to wrap up now, as I think this is quite enough for one day (or night depending on PDT etc). I'll end with a poem, I think. NaPo is coming up in April, but I'm not sure if I can manage one poem a day. Last year I crashed and burned in the middle and then recovered and limped on to the end like one of those marathon runners in novelty costumes. I did make it. Perhaps I'll make it on here, too. Bye for now.

Caffè Nero Sketch

'a primo cappucino, please'--

weak tea versus two expresso shots

in a milk white face--

a livid Anne Boleyn  about to lose it.

Her portcullis raised,

I'm swiped with a look of contempt--

she would have preferred a little hesitation,

squirming on the spike

of some shambling prevarication--

she lays down a tray sopping wet, 

a saucer with rattled spoon

and returns to the scaffold--

knocks and bangs, rams in and twists

and so begins the slow rich torture drip

of an executioner’s bitter enema

as the steam pipe whines

to a shriek and the raven flaps its wings.

My traitor’s cup is set before me

a fine head of speckled foam blooms over the lip--

‘Anything else?’

(I could do without the smirk)