and do your ears burn red, or do you,
washing dishes, with those same clothes
rotting under your armpits, still talk
about visigoths to your pathetic self
and divine nothing? I put you in a book,
because a girl with blond hair told me
about you one night eating grapes in the
twilight kitchen, the planes of her face
growing darker; two years ago, with those
same clothes, stood in the doorway of the
old hotel watching a girl named Ann, with
wet hair walk beside Lake George; acrid,
now, with the stench of dried sweat and
your long black hair, your hands puffed
and creased from the hot water; tell me, do your ears burn red?
bevelled up into bas-relief out of entry 120. of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962
sits in the chair
for a thousand miles slacked that ten thousand sit-ups allow
hands hold the tablet
with strategic fingers relaxed
that the deadweight has been let go
playing bejewelled deft as rounded knuckle and
veinéd forearm allow
‘aitches’ touch on quite a few boat-ties to my past: ‘Herbert Road’ was the local shopping high street where I lived in London until I was 19; it is in Plumstead which spreads south over the crest of ‘Shooters Hill’ and merges into Woolwich down to the river Thames; ‘Hillside’ is one of a little cluster of houses where I settled to raise a family and grow a career in Crowborough in the late 1980s – that same 80s that, mean-and-all-the-while, Thatcher was creaking open that casket (‘can’t read the label – “–ora’s Box”?’) which left me alien to my own background and lost in my own riverbank mist, save for the miraculous peek of haiku and the deadened gaze of bay window …
`haven’t published a tag cloud poem in a while: they’re made up of the larger tags of my work built up over the years – this one emerged into a series of haiku[esque] pieces of work – almost inevitably; this one was particularly difficult to form, the tag-words didn’t run off each other smoothly – I must admit I left a few words out; the green links are to those respective tags, the different sized fonts determined by the number of ‘topics’ that pertain to that tab … nerk!
the always-aslant encounter
of humans and street
making their lives
in the grounds they see
making their lives in the grounds they are given
constant encounter
as variable as the daily
for those who see
elliptical to the happenstance –
the skyline to the treeline
the glide to the cobble
the palm to the point
the both-step-aside to avoid each other’s path
and collide –
Hopper saw it
and Colan saw it and Strange had already
stepped into it
stepped through it stepped out again
moment
but now
his pupils are that much more round the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street
the face in the orb implied
that everything had changed and that
things
would never be the same again
I am psyched that the first trailer for the Doctor Strange film has just been released; I think this is going to see me lose my 56 year old jaded-cool; I am more excited about this than I was for the Batman movies, even though Batman is my character (oh, sorry, didn’t you know?), (in fact, I envisage Batman, ideally, as more akin to Doctor Strange, the character should be more mystical than he is generally presented); I am glad to see the trailer dealing with kaleidoscope-reality, this has a lot to go for it from the start; Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One is a genuinely creative piece of casting but I hope she is not as ‘explainey’ and active as this trailer suggests (or even as dynamic as she was Gabriel in ‘Constantine’, a female sage should have more devastating effect but with less of the door-slamming); (and talking of door-slamming: I was disappointed that the trailer starts of with the ubiquitous iron door slam portending dire catastrophe for gawp-eyed Humanity, I was hoping Doctor Strange, at least, would approach tale-telling differently, but I suppose superhero movies have hit their formula now, no one’s going to play with it with that much money going in … mind you, Stark’s humour, and the first Avenger’s humour were interesting innovations, I might hope for something innovative in Strange, not humour, so much, as power through deft and understatement, rather than grunt); the round loft-window gave me The Smile at the end; Cumberbatch has a Good Walk as he broaches realities, he has the right eyes to see-through fingers for the part as well; I once hoped that David Lynch might write and direct Doctor Strange … that would have been interestingly different and so right … it was not well-received (have a look in the comments section of https://longboxgraveyard.com/2012/11/28/76-superhero-greenlight-doctor-strange/) … actually, dab’n’abbit, here is my tender, but I’ll settle with what this film seems to promise:
Dr Strange operates in worlds which are ‘mystical’ in the sense that they function within natural laws and forces which are alternate to our own – they are worlds which we just don’t get and it would be better for us that we didn’t know about them so we can continue functioning ourselves. And yet Stephen Strange is of and from this world – he is all too human but has mastered the Mystic Arts. He therefore lives between the two worlds – the physical/political and the occult worlds – or rather he lives amid, at the same time. He is ‘strange’ because he bridges these two worlds, and this is the central pull of the character for me. In comics the ‘occult’ world was depicted fantastically (the floating-island footsteps of Ditko, the swirls of Colan) because it was a visual medium meant for younger audiences (growing up); but the occult world doesn’t so much ‘look’ strange (like a childishly re-arranged physical world), in fact it isn’t even a different world it is the same world ‘seen’ (and ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ and acted in) differently. What was equally attractive about Dr Strange (and under-used in the comics) was the depiction of the character in ordinary, recognisable surroundings but knowing he was actually operating in a world out of the space-time continuum. I would conceive that Strange’s ‘battles’ took place while he was strolling through a park, while walking on the street, in the blink of an Eye (herm). I once heard David Lynch talk about how he achieves perspectives in his work by ‘filming through the eye of a duck’ meaning that he doesn’t just film ‘lineally’ he films simultaneously/alternately – he shoots a scene/whole films which physically depict one narrative but which affectively show an alternate landscape in which they play out. What better ‘mise-en-scene’ist than David Lynch to depict the life of a character who has ‘mastered’ the arts of living bridged across two worlds-in-one? No need of CGI, no need of costumes, not even much need of action! I know, I know, not the ingredients for your standard superhero blockbuster money-maker. But they have been done and will continue to be done under their own momentum. Dr Strange has always been a peripheral character because he is so … strange. Perhaps this would be time to make a different take on the comics-to-film translation formula …
Anyhoo, I wrote a series of poems tracking Doctor Strange through a key set of issues written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Gene Colan; (Dr Strange #6-13 (Feb 1975-April 1976)); these issues are some of the best comics I have ever read; they were also seminal in shaping me to become the significantly un-noticeable writer I have become to this day; I posted them in 2012 and then re-posted them again in 2014 because I thought the film was immanent – it wasn’t; but, dammitall, I like these babies so I’m going to post them again, spread out until November 4th …
the velvet sleeve crumpled
from out the musty landscape
the silken collar waven white
from the green velvet bodice
the cinnamon-milky neck from
tremulous-springy collar bones
the chilled-pink ear that
directs her gaze newly upwards
as her sister guides with held
hand-unto lips-engorged sky
past the gaze of brother into
her eyes her eyes from which
berry-sweet new chordings
can be found on the guitar neck
