Writing - How would you know...

My Superpower

July 19, 2024July 19, 2024humanist55

My superpower is solipsism
I think
I can’t be sure
but too much around me
is just as I would have it be
the supermarket always has
the brand of orange and mango juice
I have come to like above all others
and on the rare occasion
they might have run out
I am persuaded
– by myself
that I created this opportunity
to try something different –
a new flavour of juice
perhaps a smoothie
or I will try some new
health drink that I have
conjured into being
for the sake of novelty
and to maintain the idea
of progress, for others
if not for me.

But maintenance!
Nobody knows the burden I carry
keeping the world spinning
trade flowing – barring the
odd bottleneck in the Suez Canal
after all insurance companies
need to be relieved of their funds
and payout now and again.
This is all day-to-day stuff
I can do that in my sleep
indeed I have to do that
else my night-time
would be a blind spot
on the orbit of the earth.

But lately I have felt guilt
seems I may have taken
my eye off the ball
let things slip…
I know there have always been
hungry people in the world
and that I cannot avoid that
but global warming like the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
What was I thinking?

Or is it possible that other
Solipsist’s exist in conflict with me
are we fighting for control
pulling strings from behind the curtain
blindly unaware of the others
due the blinkered nature of our “gift”…
If only I knew that to be true
how much stress would be lifted
the knowledge that I had done enough
that I did not loose all the ills
upon the world, that there is
more than hope left in the box.

And there is my dilemma
am I even the solipsist I imagine myself to be
could I not choose to cease believing
lay down the burden
step out of my solipsistic bubble
and just be a regular guy
somewhere in the crowd…

Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ^ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’)^[1] is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. (Wikipedia)

I am posting this for Open Link Night over at the dVerse Poets Pub, where Sanaa – sanaarizvi, is the host. I wrote this in my writing group where we try to stick to the convention of referring to “the Narrator” when commenting on work thus allowing for the fact that the piece may be fictional and not (necessarily) autobiographical. In this case, I would be horrified if anyone thought this was me and not a whimsical thought experiment on what it would be like if Solipsim were a reality – my reality…

Dancing a Whirling Dervish

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024humanist55

Here and there
life clusters
amidst the random
Brownian motion of
atoms and molecules
drawing them
into an order
all it’s own
combating entropy
for their allotted lifespan
they dance defiance
like whirling dervishes
celebrating passionately
their moments in the light
poignant in the knowledge
that entropy
will win in the end
their parts
deliquescing
into the dark
lucky if they
leave a tiny trail
to mark their passage…

Over at the Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to riff on the paintings of Alma Thomas – I chose: Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish (1976), acrylic on canvas, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

False Dawn to Sunrise…

July 12, 2024July 12, 2024humanist55

At five, I wake with the false dawn
the call of nature at three
an hour of chasing Morpheus
two hours of fitful sleep
haunted by the illusion of wakefulness
the battle is lost to the new day
and I rise before backache sets in
who needs more than six hours sleep anyway

Seen from space
the line between night and day
looks sharp enough
but on the ground
the scattered rays of the coming sun
diffuse through the atmosphere
gradually dissolving the dark
and banishing ancient and childhood fears

Finally the buildings opposite
lose their grey and acquire a yellow tinge
that brightens to ruddy Welsh gold
as the sun peeps over the horizon
and for a moment, filtered by atmosphere
we can behold the true god
whose gravity rules the solar system
sustaining life through the burning up of its body

Children may sleep through
the transition from night to day
but as we age, the need for sleep diminished
the penumbra of consciousness and light attune
and though we may lie next to another
we awaken alone in the liminal space
that exists between false dawn and sunrise
before we rise – another day to face…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, challenges us to write about Dawn writing in the poetry style of the A L’Arora, a form created by Laura Lamarca:

4 stanzas (or more)
8-lines per stanza (can split with line break after 6)
only lines 6 & 8 are to rhyme as x,x,x,x,x,a,x,a; x,x,x,x,x,b,x,b etc
no syllable count per line

Poetry Subject: Lamarca’s A L’Arora derives from “Aurora” – Italian for “dawn”

Bread and Apples

July 10, 2024July 11, 2024humanist55

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, kim881 in Poetics was interviewing Sarah Connor a long-time member of the Pub. I never had the privilege of writing to one of Sarah’s prompts but it is clear from the interview and from the fragments of Sarah’s poems chosen by Kim, that it would indeed have been a privilege and so I hope to honour her with this poem…
The italicised lines are from Sarah Connor’s poems “Apple” and “ ‘No mail – no post’“

There is a wholesomeness to apples
I used to say I could live
on bread and apples alone
but diabetes now rules
my diet – fruit sugar is
still sugar nevertheless
and most bread, though staff of life
creates a sugar spike for
which I must later atone.

If weather be kind, apples
fill out from flower-size fruit
the white flesh crisp, fine-grained
though Discovery surprises –
the flesh by red skin stained
the taste a fizz of champagne
I must now sip one by one
no longer scoff by the pound.

Sourdough is the only bread
eaten in moderation
some secret from its magic
starter’s generation
baton passed from batch to batch
less sugar, less spike it’s said
and there is more flavour too
yeast fed on the flour itself.

And as a poet, I hope,
just this blank space – this white page
will be fleshed out with words –
the starter of my poesy
will slowly feed on today’s
thoughts and swell the dough, my loaf
which baked on the page will raise
a wholesome, healthy poem.

You Will Leave a Lacuna…

June 14, 2024June 15, 2024humanist55

…And while thy willing soul transpires

Willing! You think me willing?
And that my soul transpires…
T’were nearer the mark to assert
my body glows with rage

At every pore with instant fires,

Blushes at first
when I your base desires
didst early espy but soon
‘twas anger coloured my face

Now let us sport us while we may

Sport you say
with you the hunter
and no doubt I the prey
but you have made me furious

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

I refer you to my previous stanza
furious not amorous
– we or I at least – are not animals
forever chasing food or mating

Rather at once our time devour

You see you even now confuse
the act of mating
with that of eating
but I will not join you at your table

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

An age at least
would be too long
to tarry in your lascivious presence
in fact I will not waste another hour

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,

My strength will henceforth
be employed in resisting
your siren call
and enjoying sweet silence
when you are gone

And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life

Oh snake I see you now
taking my maidenhood
with rough strife
no thought to later
make me your wife…

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run…

Enough! Begone you tiresome poet
you can’t try your wiles on a Yorkshire girl,
a girl from Hull – and you should know it
and yet…
when you are gone…
you will leave a lacuna…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

We studied the poet Andrew Marvell at school and I suspect that more than one of us callow youths committed the poem “To His Coy Mistress” to heart in case these lines of seduction might someday prove useful in our own future seduction attempts…
Having just watched Bridgerton, Season 3, I was perhaps channelling the feisty women challenging the rather weaker men in reframing this response to lines from the poem.

Written for Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at dVerse Poets Pub, who tonight challenges us to elaborate on a fragment of up to 13 lines from another poem – to “Elaborate Lacunae in the Fragment or Keeping Things Whole“

Ten Second Theatre

June 12, 2024June 12, 2024humanist55

Driving up the hill
through the village
a ten second drama
plays out to my right
– a baby boy
comfortable in the crook
of his grandmother’s arm
receives a hurried kiss
from his mother
as she turns to walk down
the hill to the bus stop
the baby stretches out his arm
towards his departing mother
once more going to work
more bewildered than upset
but his grandmother
steps back indoors
before possible tears
leaving the pavement empty…

Over at the dVerse Poets Pub, dorahak is hosting Poetics and invites us to write about Liminal spaces using one of the following senses of the phrase.

In general, a liminal space can be looked at in three ways:

1) as an empty structural space (an overgrown, ruined fairground, shuttered department store once familiar like K-Marts here in the U.S., an abandoned shopping center or mall, a silent nighttime hotel corridor); OR

2) as a place of transit (a hotel lobby, an airport terminal, or a parking garage, gas/petrol station or a city street at night); OR

3) a passage in a more abstract sense, e.g., New Year’s Eve, a decade’s close, a birthday, anniversary, or holi(holy)day.

Let there be light…

June 6, 2024June 6, 2024humanist55

People talk about writer’s block
– about being over-faced
by the blank page
but to sit down with a blank page
and pick up your pen is to
dive into the liminal space
through the portal of the page
breaking the smooth surface
making a splash
wearing the threads
of previous thoughts
oft rehearsed but still
essentially, feeling naked

We swam in the waters of
Mahon harbour on a night when
the little side bay was filled
with phosphorescence
took a hand full of water and
slowly released it back into the main
and in our hands
and in the falling water
individual creatures gave forth a
tiny burst of light.
but swimming through their midst
the lights coalesced
into a ghostly glow around our bodies
all semblance of individual
creatures, words or events
subsumed into the glow

Later rowing our cockleshell boat
we traced our path with
pools of light left in our wake
where the oars had dipped in
and disturbed the
creatures distributed
in the depth beneath
motion was transformed into light
pale radium green, glowing
under the Mediterranean sky
– and to think
these motions are
always present
the glow – the pools of
light even when we can’t
see them – blinded by
the greater light of day.

The light of luminescence lives
in my mind as a memory
fixed by processes
still unfathomable to
the very minds that
try to comprehend
– axons and nuclei
and who knows what
– as ungraspable as those tiny
light-emitting creatures
like words on a page they
appear unpredictably
have their moment
and disappear into
the stream of time
into the past
as we authors swim
across the portal
climb out on the
other side of the pool
and only then
turn and look at
the patches of
light we have left in our wake
astounded at the
words filling the blank page…

Tonight is Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub and msjadeli is our hostess. I wrote this in my AWA writing group a few weeks ago and it seems to follow on from my post before last – contemplating the process of poesie…

Lovers’ Eyes

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024humanist55

She feels the eyes
of women who’ve loved her
adorning each part of her…

Tonight, our host over at dVerse Poets Pub is lillian in Poetics who, feeling nostalgic on the occasion of her 8th anniversary hosting at the bar, has resurrected for the third time, an ekphrastic prompt provided by the artist Catrin Welz-Stein. Catrin has enjoyed providing the inspiration for the pub-goers twice before and enjoys the interaction. I picked one of the four pictures which Catrin kindly allowed us to use…

Reading Aloud…

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024humanist55

I like to read out loud
to turn tiny marks
regimented on the page
from text to sound
filtered through eyes that read
brain to comprehend
a mouth that shapes my voice.
Poetry or prose the
writer laid words down
wrapped round meanings
all their own but
which we readers too
may catch and breathe
out into space between
mouth and ear
reader and listener.
Even reading aloud alone
brings out meaning, makes it clear
and once peeled from the page
I sit and let the words hang there…

Can’t Stand the Rain…

May 31, 2024May 31, 2024humanist55

We sit under the tin roofed veranda
as far back from the splattering waterfall
falling from the rusty edge
into the sodden road before us

Every few minute the dog
keeping us company “ahems”
or “harrumphs” to express his
boredom and disapproval of
the ceaseless deluge.

The drip-drip intensifies
to a rat-tat-tat
heralded with a crack
of lightning overhead

The dog whines and
covers his eyes with a paw
yet peeping out spots
a desperate rat swimming past
a deep throated growl precedes

his leaping forth with a splash
the dog obscures his target
frantic ripples quickly
flattened by the rain

Returning to our side
shivering and shuddering
the dog slinks away at a shout
from the house owner – our host
No good stray he mutters

Tina Turner’s singing
I Can’t Stand the Rain
is now an earworm
the novelty of monsoon washed away…

Over at the Poets Pub our host Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft challenges us to write using as much Onomatopoeia as possible to enhance the sound of our poem…