Category: Poetry

This post contains poetry, either mine or someone else’s

Reading Poem A Day

A reading project, read one poem a day. The basic rules are…

Loose: Read new poets
Loose: Read diversely, this is less of a rule and more of an underpinning or assumption. There doesn’t seem much point otherwise.
Firm: Favourite poems don’t count. Favourite poets may, however.
Firm: One month block on the following:

  1. Anthologies
  2. Chapbooks
  3. Collections
  4. Periodicals and
  5. Poets

So if I pull something by Norman McCaig out of “The Rattle Bag” tomorrow, I can neither read Norman McCaig nor “The Rattle Bag” until after Feb 2.

Perfect

Everything is perfect,
Your creation is complete
and as it should be.
This moment, the light,
the breeze,
coming in
through this
perfect
open
window.

The crow
perfect
watching you
sharpening
its perfect beak
against a stone.

Even the storm
on the horizon,
dark, rolling
towards your house.
This, too, is perfect.

Defragmented Memory

  1. Obsolesence.
  2. The future.
  3. Explosions underwater.
  4. The law of root mean squared.
  5. The number means nothing now.
  6. Live and direct on Network 23.
  7. I don’t buy them these days, I have nothing to play them on.
  8. The smell of burning plastic.
  9. Her room lit by the red LEDs of the AV system.
  10. The television, a window on the winter sky.
  11. So much of him replaced, he’s not certain who he is any more.
  12. It happened so fast, journalists in hotel rooms watched it unfold on Twitter.
  13. Unable to maintain efficiency, the machine was replaced by a human.
  14. The nanomachine consumes itself at the end of its process.
  15. Designed in New York, made in Beijing, worn in Paris, burned in effigy.
  16. Never buying version x.0.
  17. The definition of necessity broadens and births another invention.
  18. Mankind was not built to survive at such speeds.
  19. It turns out that the jetpack is no longer necessary.
  20. Don’t worry, the car knows where you’re going.
  21. Cat videos of the late 20th century.
  22. Regardless of how it looks, remember that there’s no there there.
  23. The earthquake passes beneath the building, rumbling like an underground train.
  24. 5,000 years of someone inventing new questions for old answers.
  25. We have attempted intercourse with everything we have invented.
  26. Can you believe we used to die from that?
  27. Can you believe we killed animals if that happened?
  28. Can you believe we let that go to waste?
  29. The walls don’t have ears but when it rains, they breathe.
  30. Red soil between her toes, she looks up and sees the earth eclipse the sun.
  31. If we could rebuild him, why haven’t we rebuilt ourselves?.
  32. In every city, the concierge addressed him by his birthname.
  33. They knew him by the teethmarks he’d left in an apple they found near the spent shells.
  34. Electrolytic converter was little more than water and salt.
  35. The journals are full of papers saying you shouldn’t be able to do this.
  36. Bounced off a satellite, retweeted, shared, liked and reposted before the answer was known.
  37. Honeycomb structures 4 angstroms wide.
  38. It took four days to reach the the tribe. The first child he saw was wearing a Chelsea shirt.
  39. So small that the eye cannot see it.
  40. The house says “Hello, Dave”. His name is Tom but he likes retro sci-fi.
  41. It took so long to execute his will that he was declared dead three years after his body stopped.
  42. 640K RAM should be enough for an off-the-cuff comment.
  43. The new machine is capable of growing what it needs in situ.
  44. 569 people have read this question and 412 believe this is the correct answer.
  45. We still can’t quite explain how it works and yet we still don’t fall.
  46. Nothing is lost, merely archived.
  47. Like a dead pixel in the sky, the drone focusses its lenses and awaits orders.

Forest

“You can’t write poems about trees
when the woods are full of policemen.”
– Bertoldt Brecht.

You can feel their presence, even now.
They lean over us, inspecting, silent
asking questions but answering none.
 
Some loiter in the distance, indifferent
to their impact on you. They expect to
 
be ignored, so pretend they aren’t here.
Some exude the authority of age and a
lack of concern for your opinion.
 
When you leave, the clear daylight and
open space will make you exposed, anxious.
 
Lone stands can comfort, or warn.
Though you have left the forest
you can feel their presence, even now.

Just a rough draft for now.