war poetry

poets operating in your area
have taken ten per cent off gdp
put out and pensive
(to be is to be)
we work best from the trenches
the snipers are barely interested
in no man’s land i meander
absorbing vile inspiration
trying to get my head
in your to cross hairs

write poetry like nobody is watching, i often think to myself, as nobody watches. its a niche choice of endeavour. there are almost certainly more poets than there are readers of poetry. that’s why i make my blog posts to cutting and pithy.

as a poet

at work once an i.t. guy
told me his wife was employed
as a poet!
a real life poet and
(poet and educator)
this man changed my life.
unfortunately,
via a mishandled data migration
that caused me to career
onto life’s soft verge
in a slow motion car crash.
my poetry remains unsuccessful.

i won’t bore you with the time i took on too much at work during lockdown and ended up having two years of burnout and misdiagnoses. it encouraged me to make a lot of changes in my life anyway. i think i’m getting to a better place. its fun writing poetry anyway. maybe that will never be my profession. but reducing my hours at work has at least given me time to do it.

the you/me confusion

you know,
when you want to please
to mask, to be accepted?
you know,
i mean, why do we say you
when you clearly mean me?
when i clearly mean me
when i mean to say
i’m a people pleaser…
but i’m not good at it.

do you ever find yourself saying, ‘you know that thing where…’ and then you find yourself describing your own strange anxiety or neuroticism and you think to yourself: this was me i was talking about the whole time. we talk about ourselves specifically in this universal manner. we put our situation into the listener, and ask them to empathise, and forgive, but we don’t have the strength to say: i am weak. i need your validation.

the failure and possible redemption of language

we don’t yet have the language
for the time in which we live
the 2010s, the 2020’s,
don’t feel lived in like the 90s
like naturally stressed 501s
two sizes too big
in every direction
y2k was the last mass adopted nickname
there is no confidence yet
in the unfolding millennium
so i propose a radical redetermination
y2k of d2k,
then d2k.1,
now 2k.2,
or, i posit “point two”
in practice

i mean obviously i don’t expect this to be taken on. its quite abstract. but i hope i can at least draw attention to what is a serious problem. we can’t be going around calling this the 20’s, it’s preposterous.

but you never know. this will probably go viral. by next week i will undoubtedly be a very famous poet and everyone will agree that this is d2k and maybe even that this is y2k.25? anyway, if we are going to live in the future, we should start talking in a befitting manner.

vulvic pud

fruit forward vulvic pud, touched,
lingered upon, picasso pubic crumb
a tender rebirth, but is this the beginning or the end,
reprise: why does your love hurt so much?

i was out for dinner with friends at a fancy italian restaurant, and honestly, the dessert was so obscenely vaginal it could not have been an accident. luckily we were are liberal, open minded people and we were not offended.

it was also a very rainy day.

actually existing capitalism

life under actually existing capitalism continues;
a unique combination of boring and stressful.
face it, i’m never going to be a hot porridge-man
i think trusts are somehow fundamentally immoral
for tax wheezes and to sneeze-on late diseases
build car washes and slag heaps on the green belt!
speed eden’s fall to it’s infernal conclusion

i don’t want to be too political, but i don’t like the world that much. i don’t claim to know how to fix it. but it’s just not that fun. work i mean. we spend years in training, like 13 years of school, then maybe college as well, you’d think we’d be like smart enough to make the world work without everyone spending most of their waking life just trying to keep on top of their emails.

an odd feature of actually existing capitalism, is that the essentials of life, you know, shelter, food, raising a family, entertainment… are priced as luxuries. lots of jobs just don’t pay enough to support such things. i don’t claim to understand economics. but that seems to me like an abject failure.

culinary weekend

gloriosa, parliament sauce,
crises on the high seas
a paddling pavarotti leaves
in degrees of blue cheese
graduates to a sextet roundtable gaff christening
make the dog wait late to get out in the rain
halved iced raw lobster twitching
piled up plates in the kitchen

was there a thing about the three tenors and high c’s? sometimes i read this poem back and i haven’t much of a clue what was going through my mind. i think this was about my girlfriend’s flat warming but honestly. it was a tough time. maybe we just leave it at that. need to get better about oversharing…

in my second novel, tentatively titled ‘sleaze in san estaben’, there is a character called pavolvia who is loosely based on pavorotti. except it turns out he isn’t really italian and has a gruff new york accent. and he’s a bit of a sex pest. man i need to spend more time working on my novels.

baby-boomin’ woomin’

all my life, baby-boomer woman
have told me i’m good looking
and from hereon in such women
shall be my heroines

growing up, women of my parents’ generation were always telling me i was handsome. women of this generation remain the most likely to smile at me unprompted in the street, even when i’m not walking a dog.

but mainly, i am prone to echolalia, and the day i wrote this i just had the couplet stuck in my head all day and i felt like i was going insane. now, a year later, i’m quite comfortable making a conclusive diagnosis of insanity.

the pb

race day nerves, alert,
waiting for the call to stool
and then a heady wait for armistice
two centuries less a decade,
my heart rate for eighty-six minutes
wobbly, aching legs, perplexing personality test
pleasant materteral assessors suggest i am for def. autistic

i ran a pb in the half marathon this time last year. this time this year i ran a pb in the 10k. 38 mins. it was a windy day. my legs are still aching from it now. as they were from the half last year.

then i went for my autism assessment, which was actually very stressful. like custom designed to really stress an autistic person out. which is the sort of person i am.

save for what?

my good friend steev had a job when teenaged
saved up, quit, bought a guitar with his wages
said to me once: what are you saving up for?
lately i think about that a more and more
and the other recurring dream
loading the trolley with all the treats
and waking up before i eat them

i have mentioned my friend steev before. i went climbing with him early in the morning before work for a year or so, until he moved away last winter. we were both going through transitions of one sort or another.

we were in a band together when we were much younger, and it must have been around that time that we had the conversation about saving up.

when does one find contentedness? i was thinking about that a lot. and the autism diagnosis was forcing me to look at my life in a different way.

i decided to work less. spend more time on art. poetry, music, this blog. and i am working on redrafting some long form prose for publication. i wish i could work more on this stuff and less on employment still though.