None Of Our Poets Brushed Their Teeth That Morning

Ian MIan M Posts: 123
edited November 2005 in Poetry, Prose, Music & Art
Drinks with Mary: the sad prospects of the post-graduate.

Study some more, put it off, be disappointed, get stuck in a job you hate for the doors it might open for you.

Gravitate towards the blackhole city where you pay to live, pay to work, pay to earn, pay for a slow, painful death.

Or give up your leafy suburban dreams to live for your well-being, live like a dog - earn to be kept by another.
But that'll be your only degree in freedom.

It was a sad night with lonely prospects for she and I. If we were in it together, perhaps we could help each other out. But we live in post code apartheid as far as middle class dreams take us.

Interpretation. Put my head up to the wall, try my patients, make me sad.



The sun rolls over; face down in the horizon it sinks
And the shade cast by its predictable demise
Causes the breath to be held; draws the blood to the eyes

The moon rises as a spirit in judgement
No constant she reflecting her lover's gift of light
To guide her impure skies; reveal the thief in the night



"Come Clean" - pity, hunger in the mirror
Her face taut to your reflection
"Come Clean" she said turning to her pressing concern
Pumice to skin newly raw

"But I've committed no crime;
I am not he that should be blamed -
In my odour, in my fever, in my sight
(Though blemishes there may be)
I am as pure as you, as we in unclean purity"

Exhaustion plain, confused conviction
By her look and mine, lost to eachother
Lost to ourselves in vain

As if in separate dreams in our concern we turn away



3/11 ... Orion: huge, obscene
Comet trails below the belt
Led me home in the morning.

Lit the pensive fox, the nervous black cats,
The steamed lenses, the busy woodlouse
White vinyl pinched thumb & fore finger
Explorers of trails regularly trodden.

His tongue and throat Macallan-ed,
Fire-spat ears a-rung.
Winter-Autumn leaves left in the damp tracks.
Orion smiles, gingerly stepping the journey round:
A quiet night.

4/11 - give me time to pick the right words from the tree in my back garden. If you can wait for me to choose the best ones, then at our leisure, we will eat like kings.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • FinsburyParkCarrotsFinsburyParkCarrots Seattle, WA Posts: 12,223
    A great big meteor flared past my window last night at ten to eleven, just as I was switching on my radio, accidentally nudging the tuner to a different AM setting. As the on switch kicked in , I heard a phone-in show, airing. Some caller based in Newcastle was phoning London about a meteor in the sky.

    That was 3/11.
  • twin2twin2 Posts: 894
    This was very interesting to read.
  • I think the only parts that detract from the entire piece are the two rhyming triplets, otherwise there are some superb images, the power of the vitriol here is just so raw you can't help but get sucked in.

    If you haven't, I would suggest:

    Nausea - Jonh Paul Sartre
    The outsider - Albert Camous

    and keep posting, we need it here
  • Ian MIan M Posts: 123
    thanks all.

    elf - it's five pieces stitched together. I quite liked the triplets (rhyming makes me feel like more of a genuine poet), what did you think was wrong with them, if not their context? Be sure to visit the big communist metronome on the hill in Prague. Very existentialist ;)
  • Ian M wrote:
    thanks all.

    elf - it's five pieces stitched together. I quite liked the triplets (rhyming makes me feel like more of a genuine poet), what did you think was wrong with them, if not their context? Be sure to visit the big communist metronome on the hill in Prague. Very existentialist ;)

    well therein lies the problem with rhyme, it's decptively poetic, which makes it less real, less powerful, and harder to relate too, because it's easy to get bogged down in abstraction when everything is driven by the rhyme

    there's nothing wrong with them,
    but when you say something like, "causes the breath to be held"
    you've clearly only worded it like this to rhyme, not because the meaning is different, it's just too easy for most of us to write things that sound a lot better than they feel, or roll easily off the tongue, but don't stir anything past that.

    Actually I've returned from Prague, and I spotted the TV towers in Bratislava, Budapest, and Bucharest as well. The soviet stamp on every city.
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