Impossible Object

I have an image in mind which I don't actually, entirely feel this poem addresses/ illustrates. The image is rhombuses, overlapping and sort of cascading.


Another, similar image are the Penrose Stairs (Thanks SMO...), which, upon putting the name to the recollection, I duly wiki'd. That was where I harvested much of the terminology; Impossible Object, conflicting proportions, etc.


The title and last line come from The End by The Doors, one of the bestest songs ever. Some content comes from Simple Twist of Fate by Dylan.


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Elaborate Plans



At once descending and rising


a spark tingle to the bones


an Impossible Object


neon burning bright


mere two-dimensional depiction


light busting through


conflicting proportions


the visual paradox


conical future, naturally expanding


mathematically beautiful


infinite and promising


so limitless and free.

striking syllables into smooth verse

'Pale horse' is borrowed from the King James bible via West Wing...:
' And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him '

Rickie Lee Jones is one of my favourite singers, she's a natural and so I find the way she seamlessly and expertly fits clusters of syllables that would be clumsy if sung by you or me, into the bars of the melody. Bit like those guys who sell you coconut milk straight from the coconut, yeah... you know the ones. They hack away the extraneous husk with a machete. Rickie has a phonological-metaphorical machete. Yeah.

I have a small collection of heavy items I use as paper weights and I think I thought one was a key but it's not it's a hook. It's cast iron I think, very pleasingly dense. I think the reason I like trucks/ lorries is similar to why I like paper weighty things; they are substantial, reassuringly chunky. The American-built ones (trucks not paper weights) one sees here in Argentina are particularly appealing because even their aspect is one of funky chunk. Chevrolets and Macks and Fords.

Another of the paper weights, the latest in fact, is a perfect cylinder, I guess it's some kind of washer. If coconut husk was being hacked, its pieces might fall into a perfect cylinder, which might be a kind of funnel, kind of like those things on combine harvesters which are basically funnels and receive the sorted wheat not chaff. Nature has a channelling plan, as I, The Poet Lorry Ate, have pointed out before, in Uniting Bullet. So all that chaff or coconut husk or detail goes somewhere. Nothing is wasted. As someone once said.

'Albatross' is a Rickie Lee Jones song.

'Unbearable levity' - Recognise that? It's yer Milan Kundera innit.

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Good Horsemen


watching a battered truck rumble over the flat planet
is as a heavy key and a perfect cylinder into which
chaos is necessarily vacuumed, making it artistic.

this is rickie lee striking syllables into smooth verse
hammering out the sharp dents, the funnel, the slipstream
unbearable levity, the need for more than a sea swell.

inside the earth we cannot see and so imagine
breathing evil, rasping death, galloping hell;
palm outwards, receive a good signal.

recipe of gliding albatross who knows the way
for the way is the eddy of wind and the warmth
gulf stream above and apart from pale horse.

Better Late Than Never

Certain words and the feeling of the letter mentioned in my last post in its entirety brought to mind two of my favourite songs, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads. So I decided to lace some of the word from the letter with lyrics from these songs with a nest of my own words. Yes I did just say a nest of my own words. If you look for the lyrics of the two songs I mention you'll see the overlap.

After having written the poem I was reminded of another Van the Man lyric, 'I'll watch the ferry boats and they'll get high', from Sweet Thing, possibly his best song ever. I wanted to include it, for I guess obvious reasons, but though I like the imagery, the mood doesn't really fit my versicals.

Looking at the songs and feeling their meaning made me realise that hope is there but hard to see glimmering in lots of poetry, musical and otherwise. Somehow Astral Weeks seems less negative than Once in a Lifetime, but then it's also more balloon-like in its abstraction which to me makes it more meaningful, by which I mean when I listen to the song I feel meaning rather than understand meaning. Whoa. Far out.

There's an extended maritime metaphor which I had to take care not to let carry me away - I wouldn't want to be spirited away by the waves to an island of cheesiness, would I. I think 'the waves convey a limit' works though; sort of a pleasing contradiction. Then there's the ancient belief that the earth is flat and if you sail too far you'll fall off the edge beyond which monsters lay in wait to gobble you up. Ultimately thought it best to limit the influence of that particular stream of thought... Though it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the world is in fact flat, so there.

Not convinced the title works, if I think of a better one I'll change it. Surface tension is something I learned about at school in biology. It's what the molecules do at the top of a glass of water, they form a kind of film or skin, which creates that bubble effect. I've always found that interesting. I use it in the third stanza and interwoven is the idea of the self or ego or id or whatever as a vessel or shell, so that even though our outer self may feel a bit lost (at sea), the inner us is intact, benign, in the same place it always was.

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Surface Tension

The pressure of the past presses on the chest,
harries as the eternal search for home
raining cliche resembles shafts of light:
Time doesn't hold us nor is she after us.

The shell-vessel, bobbing on the precipice
teetering as it drifts further, the buffeting winds
capricious, squalls which whip the shell toward
or away; mood is not weather though, we forget.

We forget and let, let go of the reins and sink
the drowning eyes cast upward, shafts of hope
still visible, the surface above the shell of tension
promisingly simple, sheer as satin, cliched.

Engulf the future, embrace the doubt
way up in the heaven, better late than never
so far away, the horizon seductive in its symmetry
let self re-appear, a home on high.

Be not drawn, the waves convey a limit
gaze turns to hypnotic state but the distant line
remains forever afar, the ancient sailor knew
he would stay back in healthy fear.

Tumbling through time

There were some communication difficulties which combined to make my reading of a letter almost exactly a year late. Finally reading it was pleasurable, because as a whole entity it felt like a dart through clutter and the content was poetic, whether it was meant to be or not - I suspect not, which makes for better poesy.


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Reading a lost letter

The weight of the written word
came tumbling through time
a sure rod through chaos
words borne by a lost lover
knocked off feet, it took a while
to realise that hope was present
present in the word and so
the reader set about mining
digging away the obscuring dirt
to uncover the hope.

The sheer intensity of the bond
so deeply held, immovable
deep as the regret in the letter
the pedestrian delay, the
frustration present in the mere term,
logistics, obstacles; but even the deep
even the sheer clouds the shafts
of light, erroneous dismissal of simple.

Gushing

I got back home a bit - Er, yeah - drunk. I have been obsessed recently with PJ Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, and obsessed with PJ for a lot longer. I'd been listening to her online, the way I know how, on iTube and also at guardian.co.uk, where she has a couple of studio performances. Listening to her and her band of old geezers makes me inordinately happy and being able to watch them makes me even happier. It's quite too much how I love everything about her. Really quite sad, but quite happy too. Since discovering Let England Shake, my computer's screensaver or whatever it's called, is her sporting a rather fetching head dress, which looks like it's been made from ostrich feathers. This weekend I was further pleased to discover more You Tubes of her singing whilst wearing said head.

So, getting back home, drunk, watched a couple, possibly my two favourites at the moment, the guardian video of The Last Living Rose backed up by her old geezers, all of them well turned out and her with her reddish Dorset nose. The good thing too about the studio vids is seeing their instruments (missis); pleasingly sturdy.

The video-videos, I mean the music videos, the ones produced to be marketed as visual accompaniments to the music, are also rich. 'The Glorious Land', probably my other favourite at the moment, starts with a simple shot of a huge tree, an extremely English scene, very simple, very very beautiful. And I've always had a bit of a thing for women with very black hair. Hence 'bulbous english trees, black hair'.


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bursting

is there anything, we ask in our desolation,
is there a reason, enveloped in sorrow we lament
and are sincere and bowed and scraping
in pathetic limbo, in a tunnel of fear.

strands surge forth, the tunnel made strands,
streaming in glorious love and array
galloping strident as the red on the nose
and rhythmic strumming of weeping joy.

bulbous english trees, black hair
woman most devastating in this very
moment this very particle of faith
chanting poetic, wielding drily.

concocting her own verse, her own,
her own, craters, moon landing,
continental shift is nothing in her wake,
is there anything, is there, is there.

cry unabashed, lyric on, score forth,
is there anything, keep the cry and the flame
is there anything, she wails and is wrapt
is there anything more beautiful than her.

Twirl and spin

This is another one influenced by a TV show, I know, I'm so... something. The show is Deadwood, the episode the penultimate one of season 2. Whereas one might possibly be able to argue that watching West Wing is required for much of my versicals, I don't think the same could be said for this, at least I think I hope not.
The episode is particularly poignant because a child has died, but a sense of release or relief of build-up of anxiety is common in the series, which is full of feuding, strategising and blood. The music at the end of each episode somehow reflects this sense of release and as with all the HBO stuff, the soundtrack to the credits and show is as good as the dramatic content. As befits the mid-late 19th century American gold-rush setting, the melodies are blue-grass, country, folk etc., all of which are right up my alley missis. The episode in question ends with 'Hey Willie boy' by Townes Van Zandt - Great. It seems interesting, maybe, that some of the lyrics are:

Hey willie how you gonna feel
When the leaves turn gold
Beneath your heels
Twirl and spin never gonna fall
Fallin just won’t do at all
No that wouldn’t do at all

- which I only realised after I'd written the bit about falling. Er, probably not all that spooky at all.

These were the original first two stanzas of the poem but I decided to jettison them:


there was a wooden prairie house
and what with the bonnets and all
we moderners may have thought
how quaint and primitive.

a psalm, numbered, catalogued,
the word, given forth as by town crier
and the preacher man stood back
almost losing his footing.

- There are echoes of my other stuff, 'soul forgotten', 'core of the earth' plus my seemingly never-ending theme of The Past and how life was... cheaper? Something like that.

I often/ usually pen the title then the poem but this time I added the title at the end (just now in fact), having forgotten about titles.

I recommend the TVS song - Unfortunately I couldn't find an original (i.e. by the man himself) version on iTube but...

Oh and in case you're in wonderment, yes, the 'sole' - 'soul' thing is deliberate. What a saddo.

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Wood and Water


we were shown the bubbling brook
beneath booted feet, sprung forth
around the sole and later a man
scaling a wooden stair, cradling a child.

in those days things were different
in those days men were men younger
child and adult, never the twain,
teenless times and more mortality.

why were we shown the water
seeping and gurgling from the earth?
because atop the stair a question is answered
on the landing breath is caught, stock taken.

the water is shallow and the landing is slight:
the surface; the soul forgotten
all the while the climb of the stair
and the surging of the earth's core.

the volcano eternal and ancient
gradual and emoting, profound
beneath surface tension, way beneath,
leading up to the trickling seam of future.

loss of foothold is not perilous
slipping up, bowled over by
things close to the face of the planet
emanating irresistibly, sucked in we are.

sucked in we are drawn out
layers, rings as in the redwood
and the man who carried the child
his love was in the centre of the trunk.

Portals between Here and There

I was having a bit of a sleep-deprived day and looking out from my balconcito, listening to music, some of my favourite tunes: I Will Follow You Into The Dark by Deathcab For Cutie, Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and The Commotions, Shame and The Desperate Kingdom of Love by PJ Harvey.

I live on the fifth floor and though there is a building somewhat higher than mine right opposite, mostly there is a feeling of relative space, compared to other, more modern urban environments where one is hemmed in and the sky is blocked out. So in the vast expanse of air, there were tiny bits of fluff floating, little dandelion-esque white things. In said high-rise opposite, in the floor diagonally opposite and below mine, there's an old lady who is always always there. She has birdcages in the window and a big fluffy golden retriever.

I found myself thinking, as I watched the old lady pet the old dog, he probably sleeps a lot and is probably quite used to the old lady. Probably pads from room to room, idly eating and sleeping. Facile observations perhaps but I suppose the underlying sense is 'Does his life matter, does hers, these two old forgotten souls'. Bit dramatic of me. And yes they do matter, as much as Einstein's and Obama's and mine and yours.


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Sometimes - Othertimes

sometimes the sheer weight of molecules
is overwhelming
othertimes there is love in every single one
burgeoning, coalescing perfectly.

sometimes i am not so much sucked in as frozen out
inside-out, alien, viscerated, unalmalgamated.
othertimes president obama and the dog in the old lady's flat across the way
are equal because both are part of the plan and plan there be,
even though i am not privy and being in the dark is O-K.

sometimes the wisping particles of lighter-than-air vegetation
are buffeted by the same eddies as I, my aloneness as that heavy air.
othertimes plankton we may be but our power is Other;
mass relative, in this universe heavy, in another lighter;
lighter than the oppressive crowd, the stench, the bank queue.

portals between Here and There are spoken of by PJ key-change
and glimpsed in Waits husky contortions,
hailed by Deathcab, mined by Cole and Commotions,
Here is the noise, There is the music.