Dear Humpty had no business Sitting on that there blooming wall I ‘ave to say he caused me great distress I warned him he would have a fall “You have hostylo-pirosis! The doctor said! You are thin-shelled and may not survive if down you come…” “Life is for living my Soldier friend! Come have another tot of rum – Life’s too short and I intend To live it well up to its very end!” And so it was that Humpty died My mates and I, we tried and tried And for the doctor we did send But none of us could Humpty mend And in the end, all as could be said Was that Humpty Dumpty was a blooming Good Egg…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Poetics, invites us to to give secondary characters a voice. Choose a character from a well-known story, myth, book, fairy tale, movie, play, or even song who is not the lead character. For example, John Updike wrote a novel about Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother (Gertrude and Claudius, 2000). Tom Stoppard wrote an absurdist play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead based on the minor characters who were Hamlet’s childhood friends.
1- Apologies if this post is mostly about health, but it is axiomatic that older people have a lot to say about health issues LOL… So I finally had not only the diagnosis on my Achilles tendon but also the prognosis – no operation (the break is where the tendon joins the muscle and apparently you can’t sew into muscle…) so it’s the boot for at least 6 weeks!
I don’t need to go back for 6 weeks and then they will see how its doing – meantime I can lower the wedges in the boot, week on week. The bad news is I have to wear it in bed as well 😱😱😱
2- Grateful to Barbara’s Amazon Prime for getting a sole extension, overnight, for my right foot, which levels up the extra 2″ on the left hand boot. You won’t know, because I have never shared it here, but I already have a permanent splint on my right foot due to an accident in 1999! What a pair! (Of feet)
3- The inventor of Velcro – all the above mobility/medical aids utilise Velcro and I added some extra bits to tidy the looses ends and increase the effectiveness of the retaining straps (I can recommend an excellent American firm that makes all kinds of useful fixings if anyone is interested…)
4- work – for being accommodating – although they probably should have sent someone to work with me and then I might have avoided the accident…
5- My AWA Writing group starts up again today – yyaaayyy!
6- This week’s reflections image:-
Rheims Cathedral from our recent roadtrip to France. Modern glass-curtainwalled buildins are great for capturing reflections of other buildings…
7- Barbara continues to play her part, washing up each night and making her own cups of tea which has to be good for her…
7- The Polar Vortex is collapsing – courtesy of El Nino – it is very early for this to happen, so meteorologists don’t really know what is going to happen – if this happens later in the Winter (and it is not a given for every Winter) then it can lead to severe weather and snow in all places North but as it is so early in the season, all bets are off. If you want to see a great film that lauds the dedication of one meteorologist to getting the forecast right, and also explains why British weather is so particularly difficult to forecast, watch “Pressure” its on Netflix now and gives the build-up to the D-Day invasion…
8- Another entertaining film I just watched is “Tetris” about the machinations around the game Tetris at the collapse of the USSR…
9- Weed of the Week?
Three years ago, we took a holiday just before Christmas, to Quarteira, Portugal – a seaside resort and fishing port. At the far end of the beach, a single leaf from what I took to be a Prickly Pear cactus, was growing right at the seaward edge of the dunes at the top of the beach. I probably broke any number of laws removing it, but my reasoning was, that (like weeds) it was in the wrong place, and one bad storm would uproot it and wash it away. Anyway, I brought it home and over 3 years, it has grown like a rocket! You can see the single leaf it started from above (no prickles on this proto-leaf). I am not sure, looking at the leaves whether it really is a Prickly Pear, their shape doesn’t seem quite right – ant cacti experts in the house? I have offered it to Beverley my daughter since she loves cacti and Barbara doesn’t! It has been fun raising it so far and I will continue to see how it grows for her…
10- Thanks for this fabulous community which encourages one to count one’s blessings even in the ,ost trying times…
Have the best, most bodacious, most exciting week y’all can manage – avoid trips, seriously…
Georgia O’Keeffe, New York Street with Moon (1925), Carmen Thyssen Collection, Madrid, and Detroit Institute of Arts
The pigeons are returning home to roost in the soot-stained, blackened-timber shell of Dalton Mills. After a slim picking day, absent – the bread-crumbing gifts of grannies now tucked snugly up indoors with Winter coming on, the pigeons are wasting away huddling disconsolate in the Yorkshire drizzle beneath whatever shelter they can find in the arson struck building that once stood in for Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders.
Keighley’s real Peaky Blinders, members of the warring Top Enders and Bottom Enders are gearing up for another night of selling drugs in their respective territories. Mid-level dealers rev their Subaru’s while they wait on telephone orders whilst Kingpins glide about overseeing their business in black Range Rovers with darkened windows and street-runners huddle, hoods up, like the pigeons trying to stay out of the rain in doorways and anything overhanging…
In Sainsburys car park, Roy pushes a train of supermarket trolleys from the far reaches to the entrance ready for the next customers to fill with shopping. Roy was a little slow at school but he has found his vocation, happily pushing trolleys around – for twenty years now. Everybody has seen him at one time or another but even the few that give him a wave do not know his name.
Across the traffic-churning foot of Cavendish Street, the Polish food shop requires its customers to suck in their breath and to steady themselves before threading the narrow canyons of its too-packed shelves towering up, laden with lines from the home country but also offering continental comfort to other mid-European countrymen, sausages of twenty different sizes, shapes and flavours, kefir from before it had its moment, beetroot-pink horseradish and large jars of sauerkraut, poppyseed cakes and bread, and of course, varieties of vodka behind the counter along with strong lager for the builders and grafters who cannot afford spirits.
Cavendish Street, once the purview of mill-spun wealth, the architecture reflects that time-passed – ornate carved stone details and a glass-canopied shopping arcade down one side – now home to money-laundering barber shops with outrageously blinging chairs and scant customers, the bored staff sitting and doom-scrolling on their phones. They never see the money that flows through the business, courtesy of the drug gangs but receive a regular weekly wage no matter how quiet the days and Winter evenings.
Nestled amongst the barbers’, charity and pawnbroker shops, Three Little Birds display fantastically decorated cakes and tasty dainties and offer classes to cake-crafters in how to achieve the magic. Is this delight a sign of a new era of opulence, or does it not matter what surrounds this niche business…
On the other side, tucked under the bulk of the multi-storey car park, the owner of the yarn shop and his wife are happy to work in one place at last, their son has taken over the recycling business and they supplement their wool sales with Keighley folk, topping up their tans under the UV lights upstairs and exchange news of the latest foreign holidays, taken or projected – news of dance or body-building competitions where a good tan is key to success…
The constellation of traffic lights at the top of Cavendish Street where it meets Skipton Road, blur and streak in the rain-wet road, cycling endlessly through red, amber and green and directing the flow of rush-hour traffic as commuters crawl home leaving the town to the citizens of the night, home-staggering pub goers, drug seekers and drug-dealers, the odd sex-worker and the lost and the homeless. But arriving at the side entrance of the Carnegie funded library, the poetry group are arriving for their monthly foray into words read and words imbibed. Catriona, Christina, Kevin, Tommy, Tony and Phil, Angel and Andrew, Dee and a welcome return of Bee is Happier taking a break from restoring her house to hang with fellow poets and have a Christmas drink next door in The Livery Room. Each reads their contribution and this one is saved till last…
Keighley Library Poets
We poets come here not to read books But to share poems with compadres An ever bright, creative band that looks To build and share our poesie ardour Applauding with gentle oohs and ahhs Celebrating our small group of stars Listening and gently enquiring As to what lies behind the writing No pressure and we take our sweet time Certainly there’s no competition Guided instead by intuition For friends and their poetry sublime In Carnegie’s gift so splendid Our monthly poetry meet is ended…
And with the poets wending their way home, pleasantly befuddled by alcohol and friendship in equal parts, Keighley, cupped at the bottom of The Worth Valley, slides once more into night…
I missed the deadline for dVerse Poet Pub’sMelissa Lemay in Poetics but the first of the uncharacteristically angular, architectural paintings by Georgia O’Keefe, resonated with a prose poem I have written for this month’s Keighley Library Poetry Group. The poem is written in the shadow of Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood – in particular, the closing passages where he puts the town back into the night. ITSO Under Milk Wood was my suggestion for this month’s theme – I look forward to seeing what other people make of it… A radio play it might be, but Under Milk Wood is full of poetry as well as actual poems by the Reverend Eli Jenkins, vicar and town poet, and my offering includes a poem I wrote abour the Keighley Library Poetry Group.
Under Milk Wood is such a rich and inspiring piece of poetry/drama, that I listen to it at least once a year – you can listen to it here.
1- A hypograt first, and dominating my headlines in every way – I have now had the physio, the Emergency room doctor, an orthopaedic doctor, and finally, an ultrasound scan – all of which is to say, it is now conclusive that I have ruptured (they won’t say broken, because its not a bone) my Achilles tendon, which is as close as I am going to get to the greatest warrior and hero of the Greek army in the Trojan War…
2- I have a boot which looks like it belongs to a StarWars trooper, and I now have great sympathy for Medieval Knights getting in and out of their armour…
The boot has a stack of wedges under my heel to angle the foot down and give the chance of the tendon reconnecting by itself…
3- The Orthopaedic surgeon can now decide on a course of action – from my advance research on Google (AI) – it appears that surgery is avoided for older people like myself (really – is that me?) although there are less invasive keyhole procedures. The alternative is wearing the boot with wedges that I am now wearing in the hope that the tendon will reconnect by itself. Against this, as I see it, I wasted nearly two weeks before going to the doctors – not because I am a typical doctor-avoiding man, but because it just didn’t feel that bad – more like a sprain, so I thought I would give it a chance to heal by itself. However, I wonder if the gap is now too big for the tendon to self-heal… I hope to hear from the surgeon early next week…
4- A former Weed of the Week returns since it has now developed a plume? Flower? Although if this is the flower – what is the corn-cob that develops lower down the fully grown plant – is there a biologist in the house?
5- Since the TToT is a place for reflection – in particular on things we are grateful for, I have decided to start a new photographic thread – things that are seen in reflection. This first one is from when I was in my early 20’s and living in a squat in Brixton. If that sounds very Bohemian, I did have a proper job, manager in a restaurant in central London – my first venture into catering (if you haven’t seen Tony – about Anthony Bourdain – go see it – it’s streaming now). These two friends, who I have completely lost touch with, held up the mirror which was lying in the back garden for a bit of trick photography. I do remember the girl on the right was French and diminutive dancer…
Note the very full head of hair – fully red too lol
6- I am getting back into a writing flow again – yesterday I finished a poem for November’s Keighley Library Poets. It was my suggestion for the prompt to be: Write a poem In The Shadow Of (ITSO) Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. This was a radio play but it contains many passages of pure poetry prose as well as several poems by the Rev. Eli Jenkins (one of the characters). The language is an inspiration to poets everywhere. If you have never heard it, you can listen to the definitive Richard Burton version below – go on, put your feet up with a cuppa, close your eyes, and treat yourself… I will share myITSO poem after the Library group meeting…
7- Barbara has had to respond to my incapacity by doing more, for which I am very grateful, but I hope it will serve to dissolve some of her own incapacity and lift her depression…
8- Tracking shows that my three mini-poetry books arrived in New York and my friend Akua, confirmed that she received them!
9- The Autumn continues to be mild (well you couldn’t expect a post from an Englishman without reference to the weather – by which standard, Miski is almost naturalised English) and I haven’t had to wrap our olive tree in frost-proof gauze yet…
10- Thanks for all the well wishes about my leg from you lovely people…
Poets driving their partners mad onomatapaeing in the bathroom the bedroom every b’ing room leaving their careful sprinkle of words in maddening messes on floors on desks and dining room tables
Don’t get me started on allitering papering, notebooking back of fag-packeting and not just analoguing on paper penning, pencilling biroing and brushing but phone and computering Google Keeping Wording and Notebooking Self-reminding messages and Whatsapping words in the wee small hours from Dictator apps…
Poets burrowing into the web to prompting and challenges near and far, chapbooking and self-publishing “Editor seeking with a view to “proper” publishing” slamming and live meeting to largely enthusiastic audiences or those long-suffering partners
Imagist or metaphoring epic realist or lyricisticly minimalisting their themes in seventeen syllables from social satire to inner deep-digging from amorosing to tragedising politacalling or environmental consciencing – raising the banners – poets just can’t – keep their pen in their pants…
1- I completed my three Mini Speculative Poetry books! I showed you the first one back in June…
The Fold Book – folded…
Note the AI-created circuit board image complete with a heart-shaped computer chip…
2- Weed of the week – if a weed is a plant growing where its not supposed to, then this moss, growing in our outside doormat, is a weed, but sometimes it enhances…
3- In times gone past, pieces of limestone “pavement” were broken off to adorn the tops of walls – it wouldn’t be allowed now… From a house in our village.
4- My leg is slightly better – I think I tore the muscle or ligament in the left calf and if I keep it elevated and rested, the swelling goes down and I hope the injury is repairing…
5- We had the dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Live yesterday with poets from as far apart as Pakistan and the US tuning in. I read Wonder which I have put in the previous post. I am hoping that Reelika will one day be bold enough to join us and Misky, Miky – wherefore art thou Misky…
6- Gelli slabs arrived this week which are used in various forms of Monoprinting – watch this space
7- Elections in America and Israel are happening soon and we might be able to stop holding our breath… Zelensky has said he will acquiesced to Trump and Putin’s demand that he hold an election in Ukraine by saying he will certainly hold one if Putin agrees to a 60 day ceasefire – so that ain’t happening…
8- Our Autumn is set to remain mild, however, yesterday and today, we have been in the grip of the second named storm in so many days – the first passed over Misky and this one, though passing over the north of Scotland, has produced strong winds all the way down here…
We are near to Leeds and the windspeed this morning was still 30mph…
9- Received new codeage from Clark to whom many thanks for keeping us all going
10- Thanks to everyone else who contributes to this arena of thankfulness and to our latest Hostina Reelika…
I wrote this poem for the monthly meeting of the Keighley Library Poetry Group. As their name suggests, they are a Real World group of poets and most of them have little or no online prescence. The theme this month was Wonder, which was also the theme for National Poetry Day. The first three lines of stanza 2 became part of my poem Occasions to Tear Up – which I posted earlier, here… I would say that Joni Mitchell’s Shine was definitely an influence on this, and other poems of mine…
I wonder at the world at the state we have gotten into wonder polluters and their enabling politicians can live with themselves wonder what their grandchildren will make of their legacy
Wonder at the wonder in a newborn’s eyes at the questioning of the future in the eyes of the soon to depart whether a lifetime of belief or disbelief will soon be vindicated
Wonder at young love and at those who make it through decades or find love in their seventies fresh wonder blossoming wondering how one love is sufficient for some and others can never garner enough
Wonder at the fishermen who risk their lives to put food on our tables and at the machines that cut trees with less risk to the lumberjack the miners ever endangered in the deeps underground
Wonder at the artist who sees the world differently and the poet who finds new word orders to describe the world order from lyrical nature to twisted destruction
Wonder at the gardeners who plant with faith that each new Spring will be kind to their crop and the Truffle pigs who do not fear the forest fire but live to sniff out treasure beneath the next tree
Wonder if we will develop the tools to see an asteroid coming in time to cling to our loved ones wonder whether life started in the hell of deep-sea gas vents before working its way up to the light
Wonder if there are others out there swinging round other stars too far to ever have the chance of meeting us wonder if the speed of light is the limit or wormholes can send us across the galaxy like cash in Pneumatic Tube Transports
Wonder if global warming will fry the world or counterintuitively tip us into the next ice age wonder whether to stock up on woolly jerseys and snowshoes or buy shares in sunscreen
Will I die in my sleep at a ripe old age in possession of all my marbles or be crushed on a Bradford road by a road raging, queue jumping petrolhead – I wonder…
Wonder how Joni Mitchell knew when enough was enough when she wrote Shine…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, lillian is hosting Live, OpenLinkNight, when we can post a poem of our choice – I wrote this for Akua Lezli hope’s Mini Speculative Poetry Book challenge…
I lie here languid as a lily of the field in the reverie of an artist’s model I may look demure what with my rosary between my hands as requested by his nibs but he also tipped my negligée strap from my right shoulder baring the nip “The perfect mix of seductive and saintly” according to him I am really just here for the money and if there are extras once he has had enough of painting I get a little more… I know I’m his favourite model ‘cos he always asks for me and gets cross so they tell me if I’m otherwise engaged of course, he’s married which is a relief really I hate it when they get all enamoured and desperate and I have to explain – it’s the single life for me, ducks… The only thing’s strange about modelling for artists, is how they stare at you so intensely – and yet it’s like they’re not really seeing you…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics, invites us to a haunting selection of ekphrastic prompts, with a stipulation of 31 lines or less as the only limitation…
Juan Luna was a famous Filipino painter, who shot and killed his wife and mother-in-law and severely injured his brother-in-law. He was later acquitted as the crimes were considered to be “a crime of passion.”
While many believed the painting to depict his late wife, Paz, art historians assert that the physical features are that of Angela Duche, who was a favorite model of Luna’s.
According to legend, owners of the painting suffered misfortunes such as illness, bankruptcy, car crashes, and other tragedies. It is believed that at a showing of the artwork in the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in 1987, a spotlight bulb directly over the painting mysteriously exploded. The painting is currently housed at the National Museum of the Philippines.
I realise that my TToT’s have become vast and sprawling of late, understandable when covering travels, but perhaps placing an undue demand on you lovely readers and so I am trying to rein in a little this week…
1- Due to my travels I missed out on the TToT meme of photographing the second bookshelf down on the right-hand side of the right-most bookshelf as you enter the room – which in the case below, is my bedroom/study…
In this case, the shelf is for art books…
2- Grateful for the view from the smaller of our kitchen windows (we live in an upside-down house, so the kitchen is upstairs) and here shows the lovely early morning Autumn sunshine. Hypograt, the view is being overtaken by a Christmas tree which a neighbour planted in the graveyard many years ago. During our 6 month abscence during covid, said neighbour curtailed the top of the tree, but, as trees will do, it simply sprouted a new crown which is now well past the kitchen window and I include a shot (with different weather altogether) from a mere 15 months ago to show how fast it grows…
3- Going to the cinema – we have a choice of Northern Morris Cinemas in two of our local towns – independents who struggle but are surviving, albeit with slightly sticky carpets in the lobby, and The Ilkley Cinema, a posh independent with three rows of settees for seating (so quite small audiences in two screens) and where pizza, cake and coffee are brought to your seat! I went to watch “Pressure” about the conflict between and American and English meteorologist to deliver the right forecast and allow the D-Day invasion to proceed – excellent! A tribute to meteorologists…
I really must work at smiling for selfies but in my defence, Barbara had not come (though they gave a credit note) and my grandson, who I was waiting for) got the time wrong , reading 17.15 as 7.15pm and arrived as I was leaving…
4. At the risk of inflaming Clark’s bulb envy, the last in the bulb succession for the year flowered this week, the Spider Orchid Lily. I showed them to you last year, when they were a late planting yet still flowered in July so I expected them to be earlier this year, but here we are in October, after an admittedly late Summer/mild Autumn…
5- Hypograt – Barbara cannot bring herself to go out today as planned, which means that I will be working on my mini-poetry book project instead. I would much rather we were going out – depression is the pits…
6- The last few weeks have been so busy that I have hardly got any writing done, you may recall that I had to get up at 5am to complete my Deadlines short story last week, however I managed to write for one of the dVerse Poets Pub prompts this week which you can read here. The Deadlines story was my second attempt at a piece of fan fiction and although I didn’t flag it as such, I was surprised that none of the commenters picked up on it! I can’t link to the Deadlines site because it is closed to non-participants but I realised I can make it available to you here – see if you can guess the book it is a fan-extension of…
7- I am still getting dribs and drabs of Poetry Postcards arriving (though I still have about 10 bonus ones to reply to) – its nice that the festival putters on…
8- Grateful for the TToT since, as well as the lovely people it connects me too, it acts like a kind of diary – which was after all, the original idea of a Blog…
9- I did manage to write a poem for my Keighley Library Poets Group which will be meeting on Tuseday evening. The prompt was Wonder which was also the National Poetry Day prompt for this year. Keighley library was the beneficiary of a £10,000 grant towards its construction, by Andrew Carneige the Scottish born millionaire who made his fortune in America and used it to promote literacy by building many libraries all over Britain – bless him…
10- Hypograt – I fell over in a building site, an old Department store, Brown and Muff, known eventually as “The Harrods of the North” after it was bought by the House of Fraser which owns Harrods in London. I was checking some measurements for my boss who bought the building to convert into appartments. It could have been worse, everybody else had just left the building but I was not badly hurt and picked myself up and am now nearly recovered from a merely sore calf – it did though, make driving home that day feel as if the clutch was twice as stiff as normal going home that day and it reminds me that I need to write a lone-working safety policy for the factory where I work! Incidentally, another hypograt, we are applying for SALSA Accreditation, without which some wholesalers will not buy from us. We had the mentoring day which is like having a mock exam, lol! We have a lot of work to do to pass but – and here is the hypograt – it may make my bosses take seriously, some of the things I have been telling them need doing…
Hmmm… Not sure I was any less sprawling in this week’s TToT – but as Archy the Cockroach in “Archy and Mehitabel” was wont to say “wothehell wothehell” (Archy – a reincarnated Free Verse poet, communicates with the humans in the newspaper office where he lives, by jumping, with great effort, on the keys of a typewriter which they leave primed with a sheet of paper each night – he cannot work punctuation or capitals…
Wishing you each and every one, the very best possible week to come…
