the inevitable tock // when we close our eyes

Tags

2022, 20th century, 8*, afternoon, banshee, blood, blue, brown, capitalism, Carol, childhood, dream, eyes, faces, fields, garden, gold, growing, history, landscape, life, maelstrom, measure, mist, object, objectification, orange, plane, production, sapphire, sky, sound, space, storm, summer, sweet, time, whorl, World War I

                                                the inevitable tock

                        this queasy land
                        life out of time, this dreamscape
                        with waist-high mist

and then a uni-prop dhrined straight across the sky one endless summer gardenoon

                        made a whorl
                        brown and bloody fields
                        and jar-sweet marmalade

                        wherein history appeared
                        as proliferated objects
                        space now only a measure

                        the face appears
                        in the eye of the storm
                        tarnished blue and palsy

                        measuring gossamer gold
                        between always-contestable markers
                        from an impossible sapphire cap

                        only retrospectively glimpsed now
                        as screaming banshees
                        back in the maelstrom

when we close our eyes

time by Carol Redford; used with permission – thank you

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: the reach turned to love
afternoon & Carol & garden & sky & time wormhole: time
blue & gold & life wormhole: Journey
brown & capitalism wormhole: travel // when I die
childhood wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – An Old Piano
dream wormhole: Candaka
eyes wormhole: Four Noble Truths
faces wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
fields wormhole: ‘and is there homage …’
history wormhole: the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament
mist wormhole: taking birth
orange wormhole: nowhere / that can be seen
sound wormhole: long / road
space wormhole: under the blue and blue sky
storm wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
summer wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Rain

the reach turned to love

Tags

2018, 20th century, 7*, breathing, childhood, Dad, doing, growth, identity, letting go, love, question, reaching, role, secret, self-confidence, society, space, speech, superhero, walls, world

                told that he was the man of the house now
                he felt he had to do something; when the

                engine was turned off, and being in the front
                seat, he said “Daddy, can’t you just come back

                home” and didn’t hear that it’s not as simple
                as that because: he’d asked the adult question,

                took responsibility (how it works…); this
                is what Dads should not do, they should

                come back because they are Dads; why
                does this have to happen to us; and ten years

                being a be-cowled and frustrated superhero
                in a world where things just happen secretly,

                he wondered (does it work); there was something
                wrong, there are somethings wrong, in the world,

                and there was definitely something wrong with
                this 20th century, I am not sure there is a Man

                of the House to be – the wall just sticks to my
                foot when I swing to kick, my lungs are already

                full when I breathe           –           and           there
                is                      no                     space; for

                fifty years I have built this world toxic to my
                sense of worth and undermined to my sense

                of identity; there is nothing fruitful with
                discontent in my heart as long as I cannot

                step outside to see that it is not just about me;
                the hurt which reaches for vindication must

                release, the reach turned to love

 

supporating out of Bodhisattvacharyavatara Chapter VI – verse 10 … (when adversity strikes), if anything can be done about it what is the point in getting upset about it; if nothing can be done about it what is the point in getting upset about it.

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: tram
breathing & speech wormhole: prose piece 2 from POEMS 1927 by William Carlos Williams
childhood wormhole: La Route, Effet d’Hiver, 1872
Dad wormhole: to rescue something
doing wormhole: Hastings: neither all or nothing
identity & love & walls wormhole: …zzh-vvttP*–… … …
letting go wormhole: it’s / not what you do or what you say / if it ain’t got that swing
society & world wormhole: faulteous beings
space wormhole: horizon
superhero wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra

 

tram

Tags

2017, 20th century, 6*, boulevard, buildings, concrete, ground, passing, people, progress, Rome, sound, steel, tram, tremors, wheel, windows

                                                                tram

                                tonnage
                                rollson rollsoff
                                each point of
                                steel wheel
                                on steel rail

                all along the boulevard
                                the floating boat of people
                                                making progress

                                broiling tremors
                                in the concrete
                                ground all around
                                and up the talling
                                windows

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
buildings & windows wormhole: breakfast
passing & sound wormhole: letting them go
people wormhole: amniotic avenue

 

and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call

Tags

19th century, 2016, 20th century, 8*, access, air conditioning, alley, architecture, back, balcony, bay window, being, black, blindness, blue, burgundy, carlights, chimney stacks, clouds, compromise, contemplation, cross-section, distance, down, Eastbourne, eyes, facade, Ford Cortina, foreground, front, Have, height, hierarchy, history, hope, hotel, houses, inside, life, living, outside, passing, pier, pipes, privacy, prologue, promenade, sea, seagull, seeing, sky, society, sound, streetlight, sun, time, tree, up, Victorian houses, walking, walls, waves, white, windows

                and naerrgh a mention of a seagull’s call

                prologue

                the fetch of uneventful league to
                mingle with pier piles nonchalant;

                the borderline lightbulbs strung for
                decades between promenade lamp

                and stack of height and white façade
                of black-wrought balcony for where to stay

                setting

                frontage shows the way-to-look-
                ing blind to what is seen amid

                all the detail of hierarchy, eye
                turned to what it hopes, while

                rear windows, set central in
                the shapèd drop, look inward

                to find the fit to be; in time
                the rear extension of amenity

                cut fresh cross-sections of life
                turned 90° deep with windows

                unadorned; but then
                were added storey, creating alley

                to hidden access whenever
                contemplating the corners

                that encourage right angle
                where you can serve your

                down and truncating down-
                pipe blind to abutted wall

                perambulation

                                but, I’m in luck

                eye caught by extractor flaps
                in the foreground venting downwards

                venting upwards, sun neatly off
                the downpipes to the right

                on the left long-painted white pipes
                rusting, and between, a leafing tree

                undecided which way to lean
                the background, the monolith back

                of the seafront hotel, conditioning
                air; later, passing the backs of

                houses-become-their-own-entrance,
                seagulls perched at rest

                on the chimneys, I caught
                the tail of a reg-D Cortina with

                burgundy-deep fins and round
                tripartite lights, smaller

                than I remember

                epilogue

                oh, yes and a Persian-blue
                chimney stack with off-white pots

                under sky-blue sky
                and wisps of cloud

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: looking ahead
architecture wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
being wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
black & blue & Have & living & passing & society & walking wormhole: Sheffield Park Gardens
burgundy wormhole: pine // gladioli // [&] wisteria
clouds wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
compromise wormhole: after all
Eastbourne wormhole: city streets
eyes & life & seeing & time wormhole: 1964
history wormhole: looking / ridiculous
hotel wormhole: and // do your ears burn red?
promenade & sea wormhole: Bexhill 140215
seagull wormhole: do I
sky & white wormhole: travelling // arrival
sound & sun & windows wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – reaping
streetlight wormhole: ‘charcoal grey-slate sky …’
Victorian houses wormhole: red / lacquer / door
walls wormhole: certainly a Captain, / but not America
waves wormhole: place

 

looking ahead

Tags

2015, 20th century, 8*, age, attention, cypress, dark, daughter, dress, duty, eyes, facade, father, field, fields, green, hair, horizon, house, jaw, land, left, lifetimes, medals, mouth, portrait, Remembrance, sienna, sky, smile, standing, war, white, youth

                                                looking ahead

                at 18 he peered frightened and gentle –
                the high forehead and round jaw of all
                his youth, but that his mouth held duty

                faintly pursed on the left, in reserve and
                to attention, although the epaulettes were
                (the wings of a choirboy) – at the strips

                and strips of field and fields of umber
                and sienna and the deepest darkest green,
                as high as the land was wide, and it was

                wide, to the white-washed house perched
                on the higher horizon flanked by European
                cypresses, at home in the fields; at three

                she looked above the horizon, hair in all
                direction to the sky, the purse to the left,
                in attention and wan smile from above

                the ruffled dress (soon to be outgrown with
                every crumple-ene); the medals were worn
                on the left side, the eyes up to the right;

                they stood together to attention, in profile
                before the wet facades of eleventh hour,
                eyes forward, eyes down, pursed and still

 

three photographs in the house of an old friend: her father when newly enrolled in the army shortly before World War II – he served in Africa; herself in her then-best dress in the very early 1960s; father and daughter standing on a wet street collecting for Remembrance Day …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
attention & smile wormhole: dear Lucy
daughter wormhole: mother and daughter
eyes wormhole: addictive
father & lifetimes wormhole: granny
field wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
green & white wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
hair wormhole: immeasurable love
horizon wormhole: Bexhill 140215
house wormhole: slightly / uphill
mouth wormhole: over-pink cagoule
sky wormhole: low afternoon
war wormhole: memorial

 

‘God, who am I …?’

Tags

2014, 20th century, 7*, distance, faces, girls, history, horizon, identity, library, lost, madness, motion, Nightmare, presence, progress, reading, sitting, sun, sunlight, Sylvia Plath, talking to myself, TH Huxley, thought

picked over, cajoled, placed this way and that, gazed at the upper corner of the room, and eventually written from entry 33. of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962; Plath wrote this, I merely … Plath wrote this, but the failure is mine, all mine, I tellsya!

                God, who am I?
                I sit in the library tonight
                the lights whirring
                girls everywhere
                reading books
                faces

                And I sit here without identity
                There is history to comprehend
                before I sleep

                Yet back at the house
                there is my room
                full of my presence
                There is my date this weekend:
                believes I am human –
                only indication that I am whole
                not merely a knot
                without identity –

                I’m lost!
                Huxley would have laughed
                What a conditioning this is!
                Hundreds of faces
                beating time along the edge of thought

                a nightmare
                no sun
                only continual motion
                If I rest inward
                I go mad

                There is so much
                in different directions
                pulled thin
                against horizons too distant to reach

                To stop with the German tribes
                and rest awhile: but no!
                On, on, on, through ages of empires
                ceaseless pace
                Will I never rest in sunlight again?

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: 20th century
faces wormhole: jump start
history wormhole: tragic and archival
horizon wormhole: twilight / and parasols down / within minutes
identity wormhole: between
reading wormhole: reating & wriding
sitting wormhole: all the sandstone / reflections in the / marble-blue troughs
sun & Sylvia Plath wormhole: concordance
talking to myself wormhole: a nice grey woollen picnic blanket
thought wormhole: divergent // direction

 

20th century

Tags

2013, 20th century, 4*, beach, Have, progress, waves

                20th century

                spreading wide over
                the flat beach each

                wave mad-scampering
                like crawling fingers

                to damp new-sand but
                never swashing back

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: Virginia
beach wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
Have wormhole: prelude: // travel
waves wormhole: wasted –

 

Virginia

Tags

2017, 20th century, 5*, chess, inside, retirement, society, teaching, thought, Virginia Woolf, writing

                                              Virginia wanted
                                to dispense with tale-tell-all
                rough-carved and ugly in ungainly moves
                                across the cornered chessboard

                                              but what
                                of the train of thought she thought
                as more essential than denouement
                                and in and in she went

 

retirement #9: I understand this much: that Virginia Woolf was nurtured in, but wanted to bridge out from, the more of [patriarchal] social imperialism; it has waited this long for me to appreciate her need and courage whilst emerging from the more of unattributable results/problem-solving-backwards managerialism in what should be public (not political, not (someone’s) personal (career)) service (not done-deal) into retirement, in an era when it all seems to be lurching horribly right again; read the whole sequence as it extricates itself from customs: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: to rescue something
retirement wormhole: strain
society wormhole: darkness
writing wormhole: brown corduroy shirt / and dark redwine tie

 

to rescue something

Tags

2017, 20th century, 7*, anxiety, blue, chair, childhood, Dad, depression, dining room, divorce, Eglinton Hill, family, feeling, Genesta Road, great aunt Mary, life, purpose, talking, Thames, visit, windows, World War

                Mary came to visit one year,
                I think before Dad left, sense

                of anxiety and visitation to
                get things right; we gathered

                in the dining room, she sat
                regal in one of those blue

                wing-back chairs to one side
                of the fireplace; they talked

                of things and the way things
                were while the war built up

                and the way things are now,
                we crawled about under the

                legs of the chairs while they
                talked, through the tunnels

                to rescue something with
                several teddies in tow; we

                kept one of those blue chairs
                when we moved, I remember

                sitting in it feeling the coarse
                knap and the horsehair stuffing

                in the lonely bedroom with
                my back to the high windows

                anxious about the purpose
                to do with my life … is

 

quite naturally, but unforseeably, this was written quite considerably, and apocryphally, after: green-wine, but then everything knits together eventually

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: ‘hope for things to come’
anxiety wormhole: ‘never look up’?
blue wormhole: occa / s / i // o / n / a // l // l // y
childhood & Dad & divorce & Thames wormhole: south horizon
depression wormhole: what wounds have you got?
Eglinton Hill wormhole: alighted
family wormhole: familiasyncopation
Genesta Road wormhole: work
life wormhole: darkness
talking wormhole: embodying
windows wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams

 

‘hope for things to come’

Tags

'scape, 2016, 20th century, 4*, bay window, buildings, Eastbourne, grey, history, hope, life, looking, promise, rooftops, shops, storey, time, white

                     stories above shop fronts look
                     outwards bay and grey, their white

                     capped finials preserved in spike
                     for the due middle between the

                     beginning of ground floor promise
                     and the rooftop end of ‘hope for things to come’

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: Doctor Strange II – … things are the same again
buildings & history wormhole: listen willya
Eastbourne wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
grey wormhole: carpet worn / to the backing – poewieview #30
life wormhole: what life went on
looking & time wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] by Mark L. Redford – from arm to nature, doing nothing
rooftops wormhole: 1967
shops wormhole: constant hummm
white wormhole: trellis / and wisteria – poewieview #29