This poem is an example of what rain can do to you!  It rained yesterday and it rained today.  I sat inside (sic.) the café and watched the rain run down the wall to ceiling windows - which allowed me to see further rain fall freely outside as well.
     My tea arrived (without biscuit) and it wasn't made as strongly as usual.  My mood darkened.  The only thing that brightened this dull day was the cover of my new orange Chinese shop notebook.
     I did not wait, pen poised, for inspiration worthy of an opening page to strike, but started scribbling my usual inanities about the weather; something I had recently read; the purchase of one of my books; kids smoking just outside the front door of the cafe, and musing about the arty photograph I took of car headlights, reflected on concrete, through the rain streaked window in front of me.  It was not for nothing that the course I did last year with the Open University was Art of the Twentieth Century!

I mused that the photo might look good (i.e. even more arty) in black and white and commented,  "Experiments: making the best of a crap day."  So I took another photo.

     And then, because I sat for a moment with my chin resting on a hand, the idea for the first lines of the poem came to me: tactile inspiration.
     The body of the poem then came together over the next few pages in my notebook and gave me something substantial on which to work when it came to the computer.
     
     I suppose that it is natural for those of retired years to think about age and ageing.  I can remember as a school student learning snippets of poems by Yeats in which age was referred to as a caricature, a tattered coat upon a stick and other unflattering epithets.  When you are very young you can talk about the effects of getting older, but not truly understand until you know fully and totally that, for example, you will never, ever play squash in the way that you once did.  That is in a past that really is over - not, you understand that I was any good, but I achieved a satisfactory level of mediocrity.  And given sports and me, that was an achievement.
     I don't mean to belittle age, or to treat the advancing years as if all they are, is a series of endings.  I have written more poetry since I retired than I have written in the whole of the rest of my life.  And you, my reader, will have to judge if that is a good or bad thing!  I know, as far as I am concerned, my poetry writing has become one of the main inspirations in my creative life, and for that I am appreciative.

     So, this poem is about ageing, loosing weight and thinking about what my generation is making of the process.
     The reference to Dylan Thomas is only two words long, which firstly, is all you need for something so famous, and secondly, I think that I stay on the right side of the copyright laws.
     The title, as I am sure you will recognise, is a mis-quotation of one of my favourite movie lines from one of my favourite films.

Sorry, Mr. DeMille, I’m not ready for my close-up.

How like Cyrano’s nose

is that skin hanging

from my chin?

The answer?  Not at all.

His, was his, by rights.

Mine has been well nurtured

through the years:

excess/restraint; restraint/excess.

Until the elasticity

no longer copes, and

body’s cloth no longer cuts

itself to fit.

My jeans were made

for a much larger me;

they’re wearable with a

stout leather belt,

using the final hole –

the belt was long to start.

Alas, I am not Kayan,

so metal coils

can’t hide the flap;

while leather collars

link to things

I’d rather not pursue.

As each gram goes, I know its loss

will add to my apparent age,

as fat-plumped skin deflates,

to show the years I am.

I know that there are

exercises, guaranteed

to . . .

           

            But, what’s the point?

Is it an obligation

laid on us, as Baby Boomers,

(Leading Edge) to cheat

advancing years?  To show,

as well as say, that we are

different from the generations

gone before – and so much

luckier than those that

come behind?

If we decline to take

the ‘go gentle’ approach,

then what must take its place?

What adverb-adjective shall

we supply to act as motto

in the time we drag with us

throughout a different age?

I wonder how many times I have mentioned that I am of the Baby Boomer Generation and added that I am Leading Edge, it certainly seems to be something which has a firm place in my mind.  Perhaps it becomes even more significant to we individuals as we watch the world patently not fulfilling what our earlier lives led us to expect.  Something further to ponder on.

I am a firm believer in the importance of small things.  For most of us, whether or not the last person to use the loo put the toilet seat down, is of far greater moment than whether or not the beleaguered President of Brazil is going to survive the latest scandal and with her, the country too.  No, how you squeeze the toothpaste tube; how you place your knife and fork when you have finished your meal; which side you put the glasses and a million other things govern most lives.  Somebody saying, 'thank you' sincerely = a good day; the Euro approaching 80p = who cares?
     Which is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned, or that I am not concerned with what is going on in the world today.  The first refugees being returned to Turkey = I am ashamed to be European.  But this poem is not about the big things, it is about the little things, or one little thing: the biscuit you get when you order a coffee, or in my case, a cup of decent tea in my local leisure centre.
     The splendid lady in our leisure centre cafe greets me each day with the encouraging, "¡Hola, guapo!"  She did so today and then realised that they had run out of the little foil wrapped biscuits that she lavishes on me.  She did not know that I have saved 'extras' to cope with such deprivation, so I just shrugged and went to my accustomed seat.
     The poem is really about what happened next.  In my notebook, after I had written a few lines of notes, I wrote "Is there a poem there!  I laugh as I write!  Tho', there again . . ."  I really did laugh out loud at the thought of writing about something so seemingly trivial, but I have developed the possibility expressed by those three dots and written the poem, so it will be up to you to decide if it was worth the effort!

Vergüenza

He asked the English word for it,

and I responded, “Shame.”

“Then I am shame we have no

bis-quits for you tea!” he said.

But with a flourish of his hand,

triumphantly revealed three

mini-Oreos in saucer cupped,

like three, black, resting, ladybirds.

And like a hungry swallow

I swooped down and ate them all.

           

Where was my diet then? 

           

            There are

exceptions to my regimen:

and ‘unexpected treats’ is one.

He did not know (how could he,

I am sly about such things)

that I had stockpiled

‘extras’ from the previous weeks,

from all those times

when I’d been gifted two

‘bis-quits’ instead of one.

My ‘regimen’ (just see above)

will not allow my eating both,

and so one’s tucked away,

(end pocket in sports bag)

for just such opportunities.

Broken?  Yes, most certainly.

The bag is bumped

and squashed and strapped

and pushed.  But my bis-quits

retain integrity, at least

in outward form,

through the unruffled,

foil-bright skins that

hold the crumbled, jigsaw-skeleton

of what was firm and whole.

My pen attempts a moral –

but Oreos (even very small)

have left a flavour in my mouth

that satisfies enough.  

Toni has never really got over the fact that I have written not one, but two poems about flies!  "When," he asks, "are you going to write about something normal?"  I fear that this poem will not satisfy or answer that question.  Though I have to say that I did enjoy writing it!                    

This poem was written because I should have been writing something else.  Not, this time, for the Open University - though the next extended essay is waiting for finger on computer keys even as I post this - but another poem.  The idea for the poem came to me as I was swimming and had disappeared by the time that I was changed.  The only memory left was of loss!
     However, the one thing that I have learned is that writing, writing anything, is better than writing nothing.  Sometimes I can write myself out of an impasse by talking about the weather and so on.
     The basic inspiration for this poem was dull people.  I don't really know if they are truly dull in their lives, all I could see, as I was drinking my tradition cup of tea after my equally traditional swim, were people just sitting there.  Not even talking.  Just being.
     While people were being, well, people and irritating me because they were not doing anything exciting and worthy of commemoration in a poem, I couldn't help noticing the single palm tree.
     The weather was not wonderful.  It was almost sunny, but the light had that brittle quality when it hasn't really decided what to do with itself.  There was an occasional breeze which didn't do much to the people at the tables, but it had a dramatic affect on the fronds of the palm tree.
     I watched, fascinated as a dance that would have put a troupe of professional belly dancers to shame.  I was particularly taken with the fact that a single gust of air, presumably from one direction could produce such an interesting variety of movement in a single tree top, almost as if there were half a dozen winds just aiming to make the palm more interesting!
     And in our cafe area nothing happened and nothing moved.
     It was the contrast, that I have mentioned before in my poetry, between the dynamics of a heavily constructed area of glass and concrete and plastic and the world (no matter how constricted by human activity) of the natural that I find interesting.
     Also, the fact that everyone, apart from myself, was ignoring the frenetic exhibitionist display by a tree taking every advantage of an unimpressive breeze to produce what I describe in the poem as an 'exultation' also struck me.
     I hope that the ending of the poem does not seem like something added for what I describe elsewhere as 'gravity', but as something which the poem leads up to.  How far that is true, is of course, up to you and your reading of what I have written!
     By the way, although today actually is Sunday, the poem was not written on that day - hence the first line!

It depends on what you want to see  

Today has something of a Sunday feel.

Uncertain and transitional.

A time waiting for something else.

As though this space, this ‘here’

is just an ante-room, a vestibule

for something more significant.

The people all looked posed:

set tables and set chairs;

as if they’re waiting for a script

to give them back the lines

they do not speak.

The random breeze is brisk,

but nothing moves in this

constructed space, until

a young man’s hand

runs through his hair

and liquefies his scalp.

But that soon falls

into its lacquered place –

and all is still again –

            with just a twitch of

stray, tie-strings that bind

the giant parasols to rigid poles –

inverted exclamation marks –

forcing eyes towards a tree,

dwarfed by perspective,

distancing the outside view:

            a palm. 

           

                        Alone

            with wrinkled, crumpled,

frond-scarred trunk

with the bulging pineapple

of old leaf base, with sheath and petiole,

cross-hatched with fibrous hair.

Flamboyant, sprouting-fountain-firework.

Every youngster’s crass attempt

to crayon-capture a strange tree

placed on a yellow blob

within a scrawl of blue. 

What we feel as a push of air

is made more various

by palm leaves’ tilting vanes.

No unity of action here,

the green-splayed crown

becomes an exultation!

Each open fan, and one to one,

a dance in ragged symmetry.

The topmost fronds are synchronised,

they take the force along

spines curved and serpentine.

With flipped back heads

they spit derision, silently,

into an empty, placid sky.

The time-won, chaos

of the writhing tree

mocks our own swift

methodicality,

as we seem neatly sat

or slumped.

Now that I look,

I see that we’re contained

inside the tables’ gravity.

At some far distance

we must look as if we’re dead:

just meteors inexorably trapped

somewhere within a universe

that mostly thinks,

if it should think of us at all,

as if we were not there.

I have also completed a new version of Poems in Holy Week.  The last set of Poems in Holy Week, called Clocks of Dust were published in Flesh Can Be Bright, this year's set called Rites of Arrested Time will be published in the next volume of my poetry called . . . the eloquence of broken things . . . which is scheduled to be published in early Spring of 2017 by PRAETORIUS BOOKS.

praetoriusbooks@gamil.com

Swimming Pool Archaeology

I wrote myself to relevance in my notebook!  In other words I started off with something like a reminder to myself and then moaned about an idea which had come to me while swimming and had then entirely disappeared from my memory and finally something about the weather.  It was only after a page of banality that the title for this poem came to me.

     Swimming takes up a frighteningly large percentage of my waking day: I know this because, in an idle moment, I did a little sum on the back of an envelope (the whole traditional thing) and worked out roughly how much time I spent going to the pool; getting changed; swimming; getting showered and dressed, ready to have my post swim cup of tea and complete some sort of writing in my notebook.  I have no intention of telling you what astonishing period of time this takes up during a year, but it does explain why a significant proportion of my poetic work takes its experience directly or indirectly from the swimming pool!

     Those of you who swim will know that, although swimming can be a fixation, it is, essentially boring.  You just go up and down a swimming pool.  I don't even vary my stroke, it is overarm all the way.  For sixty lengths.  A metric mile.  Job done.  It fulfils some sort of need in me, and a day feels empty if I do not do my swim, but I also recognise that it is boring.

     So, your mind tends to wander.  Strange thoughts and preoccupations fill the space and you sometimes have to remind yourself of the rhythm that is keeping you going - or the mouth full of water tells you that you need to pay more attention to the mechanics of water propulsion!

     As you are basically following a black line for your lengths, a black line on white tiles, anything which is not black or white tends to get your attention.  This is why any detritus tends to be noticed by the length swimmer.  The list of rubbish that forms part of one of the stanzas of the poem is a cumulative one, I have never seen that amount of stuff in the pool at any one time.  Our pool is kept clean and I wouldn't want anyone to think that the excellent staff do anything less then their jobs!

     But you do notice things and this poem, is like many of my poems, in being one of observation.  Observation and speculation.  At least, that is what I was aiming for.  It is for the reader to tell me whether that has been achieved!

    I have to admit that I really like the title.  I find it satisfyingly complicating!

Swimming Pool Archaeology

How long, after a normal day,

does it take the pool to purify?

And what exactly counts as ‘pure’?

The cheek-by-jowl of swimming

is not kept apart by

distance, floats and lanes;

our intimate immersion makes communion

much more visceral than lip-smudged

chalices, passed hand to hand.

We skim the clear-slab-world

and need no radar to discern

narrative debris lying there, beneath.

Under more weight than dirt can press:

scrunches, threads,

earrings and hoops,

sequins, tabs,

plasters and hair –

and other stuff too small to stop

our eyesight passing through.

I saw, during one turn,

and recognized by shape,

that which had floated off the day before:

inadequately fixed

to my wrist band,

a paper rectangle,

with printed number. 

One-o-one?

A passing thought:

I could stop.

Retrieve the artefact,

because . . . 

What is the point of keeping

something of no worth?

What purpose could it serve?

Where would it rest

during remaining lengths?

Would it survive transition to the air?

It was mine (on loan),

then lost, now found.

It was authentication

of an effort made;

a small thing

in a small-thing world,

that binds our little

lives with something,

almost like sense –

            and I had turned

and swum into the straight.

The Smartwatch Martinet

does not encourage pause.

And I swam through my

metric mile.

And then forgot.

Was my quick glance

enough to certify

the number’s truth?

How did it make

the purifying night?

Or was I making sense

of randomness,

again?

I have also completed a new version of Poems in Holy Week.  The last set of Poems in Holy Week, called Clocks of Dust were published in Flesh Can Be Bright, this year's set called Rites of Arrested Time will be published in the next volume of my poetry called . . . the eloquence of broken things . . . which is scheduled to be published in early Spring of 2017 by PRAETORIUS BOOKS.