Tag: #toblerone

on a grey saturday, and made plans to break plans

well it was, like it is today, a grey januarian saturday. i was semi-dry-janning. waiting in for a parcel. cancelled a vague plan to cycle, running out of daylight, rain and wind coming in. so i went climbing with a pal and then we got ‘pan-malaysian’ food and presumably drank soda or water or something else disappointing like that. why am i suddenly hungry?

an old flame left my close fire door ajar

there is a bit of poetic licence going on here… the door was actually jammed wide open. close is a funny word. is it more than one word, or a single word with different pronunciations and meanings? it juxtaposes both with ‘open’ and ‘distant’ and lends a tender ambiguity to the line. and there the repeated idea of flame and fire, doubling down on warmth. i also like the way it feels to say this line, almost mono-sylabbic, little phonetic bubbles.

arranging strange loquacious fragments, enjamb / ment. meant cement, ‘a bag on the heid’, revolt and foment

well this is mostly just playing with the noises that repeat in words. range pops up twice, then variations of ‘meant’ with different meanings.

what am i talking about though? i suppose arranging strange fragments is what i am doing in the poem. taking a load of phrases and sounds and trying to arrange them in an interesting and meaningful way.

the enjambment line is a very stupid joke. i remember the high school english class where i learned about the concept of enjambment and immediately wrote my shortest poem:

enjambment

enjanmb-

ment

by n.n. benn (aged 13 3/4)

and the ‘cement bag on the heid’ is a call back to a band i was in when i was in my early 20s, called the stupid idiots. it was based on a rhyme my collaborator, mahrooq, included in a song called ‘we run the show’. I borrow frequently from earlier works over the course of the poem. this is one of the great advantages an artist gets from being undiscovered – freedom to continually self-plagiarize.

i console myself by thinking humans are but plankton or a moss / coating the globe, turning air from one form to the other

sometimes the self-defeating selfishness of humans really depresses me. the waste, and the mad rush to create waste everything else. i think every privately owned car is a policy failure, never mind every billionaire.

even more stressful now as artificial intelligence promises to press every ounce of precious metal onto silicon chips, burn every drop of oil and gas, and chain-react every uranium atom.

but organisms have always changed the earth’s atmosphere. when the first life formed on the planet, the atmosphere was bountiful… for microbes which lived in scorching acidic springs. we are not the first (and we won’t be the last) species to expand into all the space available to us, using all the resources we can pillage, resulting in our planet becoming inhospitable for our species.

despite being individually conscious, on a species level we are not smarter than trees.

we all rely on the good souls who forgive us.

this line, or variations thereof, goes on to recur 23 more times in the poem, but this is its first outing. however, it was actually first written at the end of january 2024 in the form:

the stress of january can lead to bad decisions:
we all rely on the good souls that forgive us

january is always a stressful month for me. lots going on. not much sunlight. always working at the laptop, dark outside, wallet sore from christmas. all heading towards some nasty deadlines at the end of the month. not much time to think things through. anyway. in the midst of this chaos, someone made a snap decision that i disagreed with.

i thought – we can disagree, but we don’t need to fall out. i didn’t raise it again. it wasn’t my decision to make, and it barely affected me.

and i’m not saying i am the good soul here. my thought was more: i make mistakes, and i don’t think fair people would hold that against me. and further: to forgive is a great thing. we are the products of our circumstances. we all live in two worlds, the mental and the material, and we all have completely different experiences.

i am reminded of the old joke: don’t judge someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. as then they will be a mile away, and barefoot.

anyway, those who carry grudges are the ones who are most harmed by them, and have the most to gain from forgiveness.

woke is a post colonial attitude that assuages my white guiltmade in china by terracotta serfs:

it is good to be woke. i am in favour of recognising people’s struggles, but sometimes it seems in society that the only political agency we have to back up this wokeness is to consume x type of product rather than y.

i do try and research brands that are ethical. but i am no saint. not at all. i am selectively blind to the suffering i (indirectly?) endorse by buying products from producers unknown, in circumstances i choose to be ignorant over.

and even if i do manage to only buy ethical products, what does that say of the many people who can’t afford to do this? a few well meaning middle class people buying organic soya milk doesn’t stop the amazon being deforested for palm oil.

so sometimes it feels like our options are to try and be good, achieve nothing, and live with cognitive dissonance. or to choose ignorance and have a shot of being happy.

from the overhung underpass on green holds, in one

i used to be in a band when i was in high school. mostly fell out of touch with the guys after we all embarked on our journeys into adulthood. but over the last year, i got into a good routine with my old pal, our former bassist, bouldering most weeks at 7ish am. we were both having transitional years. making plans for the future. navigating new relationships. he has now gone up north to be a rugged mountainman. i miss him and i’m looking forward to visiting in the spring.