my uncomfortable life

Tags

2019, 6*, abandonment, activity, anger, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, breakdown, broken, career, closed, compromise, contentment, context, Dad, disappointment, expectation, experience, eyes, feeling sorry for myself, frustration, greed, hope, injustice, laziness, life, management, no voice, people, politicians, powerlessness, Principal, requirement, resentment, self-cherishing, self-confidence, self-doubt, self-esteem, slogans, society, spin, teaching, thought, Tony Blair, turmoil, waiting, words, work

                I did not know contentment
                at work, what was required,
                what I thought, I never wholly
                got my teaching … sorted

                turmoil, and even when not
                outwardly angry, I was
                closed off and unapproachable,
                carrying anger and resentment

                like a thorny bush tied
                to my back since Dad left
                and people were ‘phony’ and
                society was stupid and words

                were insincere and all activity
                was a compromise and my equals cheated
                and laziness was always greedy
                and hope was rude and the politicians

                were tricksters and Tony Bliar
                and managers slogan-shifted like there was no tomorrow
                and the Principals
                wouldn’t know what to do with good practice if it writhed around suggestively on their desk in front of them and made them delicious promises of future dangerous liaison                      

                and by default I am
                at least disappointed, usually frustrated
                and often impotent-angry with them
                when they invariably reference me

                (and they always reference me)
                or when I am actually wronged,
                and then I’ll blow, beyond all immediate context
                because I have already been smouldering,

                waiting for the wrong to happen,
                expecting the wrong to happen,
                experiencing the wrong happening
                even before it has manifested;

                and I am right, it is wrong
                and compromised and greedy and unprincipled
                what they have done, even
                when they haven’t

                given expression to it, in fact
                especially when they haven’t
                given full expression to it
                and are sloganising and spinning

                that what is happening
                is entirely something else;
                and the powerlessness of
                not being able to have a voice

                no appeal to a universal
                right and wrong … built me up
                with no recourse and, I get broken;
                look at my tired eyes – my uncomfortable life

 

Bodhisattvacharyavatara VI, 3: A mind which walks with, which harbours, which is in the grip of, which is poisoned with anger and hate can neither establish nor enjoy any state of calm or peace, any sense of well-being or equipoise, any contentment, any resolution, neither can it feel any joy or delight, any sense of kindliness or love, nor can it sleep or rest, when the shard of aversion and hate is stuck and buried deep in one’s heart; but … I have retired now, I, am coming through

 

 

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

abandonment wormhole: south horizon
breakdown wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
career wormhole: it’s / not what you do or what you say / if it ain’t got that swing
compromise wormhole: raised brow
Dad wormhole: the reach turned to love
eyes wormhole: The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams
life & society wormhole: the old man;
management wormhole: how to teach
people wormhole: Puerto del Carmen
teaching wormhole: and … // … sound
thought wormhole: so, how long is, a piece of string?
waiting wormhole: all // are // none
words wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
work wormhole: Vue de Pontoise, 1873

 

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anxiety

Tags

2017, 6*, anxiety, emptiness, everything, experience, falling, identity, imputation of inherent existence, letting go, life, perception, ripple, secret, seeing, self-grasping

                there is always so much more
                to anything to everything than
                meets the sclerotic I and that

                is always precisely nothing less
                than I can never see despite the
                thousand drops that plop and

                lose their secret identities and
                ripple endlessly throughout
                the turbid panorama in which

                they should really take their
                identity could they ever let go
                what they ever grasped and

                never really grasped amid
                their tumbling and freefall
anxiety

 

 

 

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

anxiety wormhole: the sitting room
emptiness wormhole: glancing up from the text / searching for ground …
identity wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
letting go wormhole: letting them go
life wormhole: so / do I keep on writing now I’ve retired, or … / Rumplestiltskin
seeing wormhole: it’s all about…;

 

dream I // dream II

Tags

2014, 3*, arrival, blue, experience, explanation, giving, hill, identity, looking, people, poem, reflection, retirement, school, tarmac, teaching, time, town, waking, windows

          dream I

    I had to get to school
    from the college halls
    in a town I didn’t know
    or what I was doing there

    I was already late
    but making my way
    past blue window reflections
    on honeycomb tarmac

    I realised I was going the
    wrong way up a hill people looking
    at me in my teacher’s clothes they
    knew the school is not here

    I am in an area I do not know
    so I go back down the hill
    trying to show that I know
    what I am doing I can see

    the whole town spread out
    like a city the different areas
    the school is there somewhere
    and I need to get myself there

and yet woken up now I’m not so sure I do

          dream II

    my chance to teach
    I explain everything

with little clever phrases like poems
    but each time

    I have to explain yet further
    taking hours, not

    holding them I gave of my
    of my own experience but it wasn’t

    theirs, they started leaving
    before I could conclude

retired now I’m not sure I ever arrived

 

 

 

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

blue wormhole: pass and / fro
giving wormhole: six paramitas
identity wormhole: I keep / waiting to be discovered and get lost in anticipation
looking wormhole: over-pink cagoule
people wormhole: memorial
retirement wormhole: Virginia
school wormhole: step
teaching wormhole: make your rickety / constructs strong with / unbending grids / of attention and wide- / open grates of let
time wormhole: tragic and archival
windows wormhole: windows // and balconies

 

too greedy

Tags

2013, 6*, air, ambition, attention, breathing, coffee, distraction, experience, fruit jellies, love, passing, people, poem, sandwich, sitting, smoothie, staying, sugar, talking to myself, town, walking, walls

                you know, mark, you can be
                too greedy, not from the coffee
                or the four DVDs, not from the

                ploughman’s sandwich nor the
                pear and peach smoothie, not even
                from the bag of fruit jellies that

                now you’ve opened you’re
                probably going to have to finish,
                but from wanting to carve a poem

                out of every damn experience you have
                sitting on every damn wall in
                every damn town you visit while

                every damn person walks past thinking
                you’re a bit damn weird … but then,
                nah, I don’t quite think so, as long as

                you seep into the observation and
                don’t ride it through somewhere else,
                and you can check the ambition

                with enough wide-open love to breathe,
                you could sculpt poems out of
                the very air where you stay put …

                … and, besides, I’m getting one
                hell of a sugar-buzz from these
                sugar jellies … will I never learn!

 

 

 

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

air wormhole: retirement
attention wormhole: in the / Citadel / Park / a leaf / new / ly fell
breathing wormhole: landscape of cloud over London / with differing depths of grey
coffee wormhole: too much in arrival
distraction wormhole: may the supreme and precious jewel bodhichitta … // … take birth where it has not yet done so … // … where it has taken birth may it not decrease … // … but may it increase infinitely
love wormhole: slow enough / to have love
passing wormhole: morning sun
people wormhole: where else
sitting wormhole: the goldilocks stance
talking to myself wormhole: where it has taken birth / may it not decrease …
walking wormhole: ‘avenue of wraggled gorse tops …’
walls wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams

 

south horizon

Tags

1959, 1967, 1979, 1993, 1999, 2011, 2012, 7*, abandonment, anger, Bowie, childhood, Dad, discovery, divorce, drum, evening, experience, horizon, light, London, Margaret Thatcher, memory, Mum, Nan, pain, parents, perspective, purple, rhythm, river, saxophone, shift, Shooters Hill, south, texture, Thames, travelling, words, world

                south horizon

                out on the river
                the purple is shifting

                but in the evening-bulb light
                the world-shaping words

                of grown ups
                is shifting uncontrollably

                but,          no; it’s OK          look
                there is rhythm, there is

                a saxophone, a hi-hat – shflpt –
                in the crack there

                where words sift
                where worlds shift

 

I submitted this to an online magazine; they didn’t want it; I’ll publish it here again with the copy that supported it:

about the poem: on my eighth birthday (in 1967) my Dad arrived home late from work; my parents had one of their last arguments; my Dad left home that night; I couldn’t remember much of what happened that night – what was said, how much I heard, how much I understood – but I realised that worlds could change quite quickly that night; years later, in 1993, David Bowie recorded ‘south horizon’ on his ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ album, but I didn’t really get to know the piece until 2011; hearing it etched that experience back into my memory – bevelled it up, almost – but it also supplied textures and chord changes to the memory that allowed me a perspective that held me from being just angry or hurt; (‘the river’ is the river Thames; we lived on Shooters Hill in SE London from where we could hear and breathe the river)

author bio: Mark Redford was born in 1959 and grew up in South East London until he bolted to university (like a bat out of hell) in 1979, hot from Margaret Thatcher’s election victory; London was never the same every time he returned back; his mother, who had brought him up with her mother (his Grandmother), died in 1999; since then he has travelled back to London frequently to find the previous 40 years, but only seems to find them when he writes down what he saw; you can see what he sees (possibly better than he can) at: https://mlewisredford.wordpress.com/; if you bump into him there, give him some directions would you?

 

 

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

abandonment wormhole: monument to vainglory
Bowie wormhole: new-found love – poewieview #36
childhood & Thames wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
Dad & divorce & texture wormhole: beepbeep
evening wormhole: alighted
horozon wormhole: 1966
light wormhole: so pleased to see you again
London wormhole: 1967
Mum wormhole: 1967
Nan wormhole: work
purple & river wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
travelling wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
words wormhole: breathing out
world wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – agricultural show

 

just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …

Tags

2013, 2016, 6*, accountability, air, breathing, broken, career, dialectic, encounter, experience, fantasy, oxymoronic, pavement, practice, Principal, recognition, results-led education, sidelined, skill, slogans, staring, talking, teaching, time, voices, words

                just saying, is all VI

                agh; the Principal
                walking this way
                can’t avoid it have
                to talk to him; ‘how

                ARE you?’; and to
                my reclacitrant ‘OK’
                he tells me my
                experience and skill

                count for a lot and
                I walk away staring
                at the edge of the
                pavement trying to

                fit the words to
                decades of sideline;
                why didn’t I just
                scream in his face

                that his word and
                his breathing are
                oxymoronic to each
                other as I so often

                fantasise doing; but
                I am broken by this
                place in which these
                OK-spores are air,

                I have no leverage
                of dialectic from
                which to speak, so
                easy to evade my lob

                and practice by
                referring the Briefings:
                ‘a little precious’, ‘not
                a team player’, ‘ask him

                about his children’,
                ‘doesn’t affect results’,
                ‘doesn’t make sense’;
                smile and shift-agenda,

                endear by using his
                own name, slip in a
                Slogan and, there,
                a free and frank

                exchange which
                has left me accountable
                for my own outbreath
                …

 

as of September 2016 I am retired early from teaching – without prejudice – because I could no longer find any more inbreaths to keep practising; the encounter happened about three years previously, the humanomanagerialasphyxia virus took hold about 2001 beginning an odyssey with no resolve; now I teach myself to breathe again by embracing … no resolve; the next ‘just saying, is all’ will be about life inside the plastic bag over my head, I know it, I’ve written in, I’ve breathed it

 

 

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

air & teaching wormhole: this aching // and spacious dichotomy
breathing wormhole: sleep now
career wormhole: travel
practice & time wormhole: interim
recognition wormhole: happen//ing
results-led education wormhole: teached / in the ass
talking wormhole: familiasyncopation
voices wormhole: did I get old?
words wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya

 

tripping up to / London town

Tags

2013, 4*, experience, identity, knowing, London, looking, lost, notice, passing, travelling, walking

                                                                               tripping up to
                                                                               London town

                                              you don’t notice
                                              what you experience until
                                              you are aware of what you know

                                                              … it’s the best way to find yourself
                                              all about town; but if you
                                look too much at

                                              what you pass you get
                                              very lost very quickly
                                              and experience     less

                well, that’s what I find
                down any route I take

 

 

 

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

identity wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
London wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
looking wormhole: the writing’s on the wall
passing wormhole: nothing to say
travelling wormhole: constant hummm
walking wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction

Tags

1967, being, consciousness, countryside, dark, experience, farm, flower, garden, identity, kiss, knowledge, life, light, living, London, mind, now, pattern, petals, plants, pond, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, uncle, unconscious, vallisneria, water, writing

 

INTRODUCTION

The Boats of Vallisneria.   Not the fishing fleet of some remote principality or the landing forces of an invading alien.   Vallisneria is an aquatic plant, the roots of which grow in the soil at the bottom of shallow waters.   The pistillate flower is found at the top of a long stalk which grows up through the water towards the light of day.   Upon reaching the surface, the petals unfold in sheer abandonment to expose the stigmas that await the procreative advances of its male counterpart which is the staminate floret that grows below the surface in a large bract.   When ripe, it emerges and floats to the top where three small petals unfold and curl back to produce the three tiny boats that keep the stamens afloat where, through the movement of the water, the stamens gently kiss the stigmas of the awaiting flower in that final act of consummation.

But this small volume does not concern itself with the morphology or physiology of vallisneria or that of any other flower, in fact there is no direct connection between the title of this book and its contents.   Suffice it to say that the mind is a pond, but a pond of such depth that the sediment of our experiences lays in the bottom in utter darkness.   Every so often a thought is born and speeds hastily from the soil in which it grows to the light of consciousness.   After a brief spell of blossoming the flower returns to the depths taking with it a little food that is the knowledge of the eternal ‘now’.

I am a farm labourer, not because I was born to it (for I am a Londoner by birth) but because I desired from an early age a completion of my being that I knew I could not attain in the artifices of town life.   But soon I fear I shall be leaving the farming life, not through desire or choice, but through the evolvement of that particular pattern that is laid down for each and every one of us, the unalterable pattern that we must all follow no matter how limitless our own personal bounds of freedom.   I shall however, still be living in the countryside and will retain the sense of fulfilment this way of life has afforded me until the end of my days, no matter where I go or what I do in the years to come.

It was while gazing vacantly at a pool one evening two years ago that I first beheld the boats of vallisneria and thought of them as random thoughts released from the depths of the mind for brief spells in the light of consciousness, and it was then that I decided to capture these thoughts and to the best of my ability place them on paper.   This small book then, is a collection of thoughts, a collection of the reflections of a farm labourer who has reaped more than corn from his own particular way of life.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

1967 & mind & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
being & identity wormhole: zero
garden & life & London & writing wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
knowledge wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
light wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23
living wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft
thought wormhole: between thoughts
water wormhole: aghh – we’ve been infected / it’s spreading through the system / we’re losing our files … / it’s taken out the processor … / I, I can’t open with this program anymore … / it’s scanning me – / I’ve got to buy a Virus Protection Program / from it …

 

‘went up to London and what did I see; …’ – poewieview #7

Tags

1966, 2016, Bowie, colour, dress, ethic, experience, flowers, Hammond organ, Have, lemon, living, London, mauve, mist, sound

went up to London and what did I see;
a Hammond organ ssmrrraeesshl everything,

spent it all to see
just how far I could be without; found basement security

far mistier than lemon far damper than mauve and too bad
three times descended

an ethic that tendered a dressed relief more colourful
and flowery than cotton

 

written with the train tickets I found amongst the scattered Do Anything You Say, 1966; Good Morning Girl, 1966; I Dig Everything, 1966; I’m Not Losing Sleep, 1966

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

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

Bowie wormhole: Saturday
Have wormhole: currency: / assent for statement – / ‘smakin’alivvin’
lemon & mauve & mist wormhole: David Bowie – Iris
living wormhole: poessay X: soul love
London & sound wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915

 

sit / and move

Tags

2013, being, continuing, emptiness, experience, freedom, letting go, nothing, posture, practice, sitting, travelling, wanting

 

 

 

                                when sitting I sit
                                a posture and dwell …

                                I am travelling now
                                what do I experience …?

                                in both I miss
                                the empty centre

                                of nothing happening
                                but wanting makes it so …

                                I suppose I’ll just keep on
                                sitting and moving

                                until I stop or maybe
                                better

                                stop wanting that I can sit
                                and move more freely

 

 

 

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

being & letting go wormhole: left alone
emptiness & practice & sitting wormhole: the practice
posture wormhole: training the mind
travelling wormhole: 50 mph