Tulip: final variation

Drift

A break in the rain, but the pink snow of blossoms continues. When they slap you damply in the face, you really do not care that they are pink and deeply metaphorical. We've had a three-day weekend and I failed to get much done, tired out by work. When 'time off' is so precious, this feels like a terrible failure. Hard to set a course and hold to it, not to feel trapped and blinkered, not to hold so tight it hurts, but still to hold - holding on and letting go, both together. I read a novel that spins me in its sad tale, a poetry chapbook that, on second reading, opens itself and invites. These at least - the spark of response, the trap of preference - these whisper, you exist. You and the drifting blossoms, damp and pink and metaphors for something.

Poetry writing month

I don't think I could have done 30. Well, maybe I could. But I did do 20, having come back from holiday and remembered Na/IntPoWriMo ten days into April. Phew, that was interesting and rewarding, if more so for me, I'm afraid, than for this blog's few and now probably fewer readers. Twenty's probably as many poems as I'd written  in my life before, so it's not too surprising that most of them didn't do it.  And I knew, really, that I mostly don't have the wild and playful imagination or the musicality that make a poet, being someone who tends to  think and write in long, rolling, discursive periods. 

A lot goes on in my head, lots of push and pull, tunnelling and soaring, but it's all pretty literal and straightforward - not poetic. Not poetic, at least, by the most specific definition. There are other definitions. In a way, I think, all writers who write with the whole of themselves are poets, must bring to their writing a quality of attention and of opening that we  most associate with poetry. That's why I'm so glad to have done this. 

I found it demanding, absorbing and really quite wonderful to try and write a small poem every day. While I laughed at myself for feeling every time that I'd got something and then realising, once it was done, that I hadn't, it wasn't a laughable enterprise in the current and dismissive sense of that description. The endeavour to write poetry, however successful or unsuccessful, if you give it your all still takes you to that place, deep and far into the heart of words and feelings, as far as possible from the fast and skimming tempo of life in 2010. It's difficult and precious and can probably make me a better writer. So I shall try to keep on doing it, but rarely, I suspect, in public.

Flight of the tulip

Nature being weird and wonderful on May Day. Many more examples of such beauty and weirdness, on a tree-sized scale, and of playful and artistic human responses are on the May Festival of the Trees, hosted this month by British blogger Jasmine at Nature's Whispers.

Sleeper

Lay your sleeping head the other

way, you're not my love

My seat-neighbour is sleeping.

Jiggety-jig at the traffic lights,

weeeeee at the corner -

not a good driver today,

but he's still sleeping.

He's well to the far side of sixty,

in a smart suit and everything,

with a briefcase, the mega-brick kind,
resting on his lap and his hands,
his very clean, white hands,
folded on top.
Where's he going, I wonder, it's a long
way to Penge, an hour or more.
Sunglasses, can't see his eyes,
but they're shut, presumably.
An enigmatic figure!
Weeeeee, another corner. We collide
in the seat, but he's still sleeping,
still and rather stiff. It's unnerving,
in fact: what if... not asleep, but dead?
- on the bus, next to me, dead?
No, no, surely, he's warm, very warm
where we touch. How long does
it take for a corpse to go cold?
On the next bend, I shall nudge him,
hard this time, see if he moves.
Weeeeee.... and nothing. Nothing!
Oh my god, is he breathing?
Watch carefully, narrow my eyes.
Yes, I think so, breathing,
I think so. Here's another bend, and lean
with all my weight and jiggle
(I hope no one's watching me).
Ah, movement! What a relief!
Yes. Sighing, refolding his hands and
the next time I look
he is sleeping again, sleeps
through Elephant, East Street,
Walworth and Camberwell,
Denmark Hill and Goose Green and
up the long rise of Lordship Lane.
When I get off he's sleeping still,
sleeping all the way to Penge
(I hope that's where he wants to go)
- south-east London lullaby.

Short one

Magnolia,

nearly over.

Election

1910 election poster  (must be a really strong door)

General Election leaflets through my door. Two of them mention dog poo - definitely a national issue. The candidate for the traditional Party of Privilege is a personable young woman with a record of activism for local community causes. Go figure. The Iconoclastic Party has a suave-looking older man, an international lawyer. If he's iconoclastic in any way, he's not telling. The Governing Party's candidate, the sitting MP, is a government minister. They're not saying much, and nothing at all about the candidate, whose reputation is particularly sullied. You'd never know we live in an increasingly unequal society teetering on the brink of economic and environmental catastrophe.  The voters would rather not think about that, so no one wants to be the first to mention it.  It's all completely unenlightening. So I'll be voting, then, on the basis of my unchallenged personal prejudices. Fortunately, mine are entirely righteous prejudices - like everyone's. 

I always vote, am not a cynic, just sad.

Sign

At the pale edge
of morning,
habit stumbles forward,
but the shape and colour
of yesterday
are a dead flower
trodden into the pavement -
regret's uneasy stain
the only signpost
to another day.

Full blast

April's crescendo:
still not enough to wake my
hibernating heart?

I'm there! I shouldn't boast, but I have to tell you: nothing makes me prouder than being included in Wood s Lot.  I suppose it makes me feel that I make a tiny contribution to something - an ideal and an aesthetic - that I hugely value.