LITTLE LIVES ROUNDED

I step off the narrow path onto the long grass to let a new dad pass with his tiny treasure harnessed to his chest.

Probably the first, seeing the slight bewilderment in his eyes and how he cradles the back of the child's head with his soft, white collar palm.

It will take a while for his world to settle again from its current state of swirling newness.

All these sleepness nights until the waking life returns to the state of familiarity and routine.

Another form of sleep.

#clockcard #poem #fatherhood #poetry

IF GODEL MET WHITMAN

“I’ve always been jealous of mathematicians that are able to see the poetry and music of numbers. Whether by genes, embryology, diet or culture, I’ve not been able to tune into that frequency. I sometimes think that art happens when useless things become useful but the opposite is also true. Things become symbols and symbols become things. The well formed equation that speaks its own negation. Its logic is sound. It contains multitudes.”

#poem #ProsePoem #ClockCard

HIGHER LEARNING

“Pondering the possibility of giving a lecture to an empty classroom. for the purpose of making a recording, obviously. But still, a moment to ponder the value of knowledge when nobody listens? There is always one who listens, even when we identify as the one who speaks. Where do the words come from and where do they go? Does speaking aloud make the intrinsic extrinsic? Any questons?”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #education

NOTES ON BRIGHTNESS

“Low sun and old snow. Dirty red fox pads across the icy path, rock salt stinging its tender paws. Perfect zero. Equilibrium of mercury. I inwardly dismiss a philosopher's schtick as Coldplay poetics and hit shuffle. The world hasn't been this bright for a while. Beautiful mornings intrude on bad times. Heating stays off while the kids are in school. I forget who's on strike today. Solidarity, always.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #nature #strikes #solidarity #winter

SHRINKING PAINS

“Ageing is a type of adolescence where the end outcome is not a flowering into adulthood but a consignment to the compost heap. Not the promise (or threat) of sprouting hair and swelling appendages but a slow reveal of the scalp and wherever our pecs end up traveling to. No school disco pangs but some awkward, civic indignites. And yet the outward gaze still crackles as is beams from bleary, vein-spackled eyes.”

#poem #ClockCard #ageing #ProsePoem

SHRINKING PAINS

“Ageing is a type of adolescence where the end outcome is not a flowering into adulthood but a consignment to the compost heap. Not the promise (or threat) of sprouting har and swelling appendages but a slow reveal of the scalp and wherever our pecs end up traveling to. No school disco pangs but some awkward, civic indignites. And yet the outward gaze still crackles as is beams from bleary, vein-spackled eyes.”

#poem #ClockCard #ageing #ProsePoem

TAKE ONE

‘Just spent over an hour recording a podcast which went pretty well apart from the
"hit record” part. So it turned out to be a cosy chat and poetry reading for myself. I could consider this a form of therapy, a different kind of shouting into the abyss than the worldwide web. A crow croaks beyond my window and the traffic swishes. The glory of one's own incessant noise.’

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #poetry

UNCOMPLETED WORKS

“I'd love it if everybody was forced to list every unrealised goal and abandoned project. We spend our days surrounded by finished things while our minds rattle with frayed ends and broken chains. But every finished product is haunted by a platoon of fallen prototypes. All the budding branches that never became boughs blossomed and flowered regardless.”

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #failure

MIDLIFE AUBADE

After waking, I sometimes sit upright at the edge of the bed in the dark. My age makes me prone to "this is how things turned out" thoughts. Things didn't turn out bad at all but there's something about a few moments of pre-coffee/light wakefulness that changes "this is how things turned out" to "this is how things are”. It's enough to keep the "'turned out" thoughts from turning in their little prayer-wheel barrels. Coffee's for closers.

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #midlife

BOT DYLAN

A few days after writing that a person cannot be digitally replicated I read that Bob Dylan used a machine to sign 900 limited copies of his book. His mea culpa referenced covid and vertigo. No details were given about the machine. I imagine a series of rods, pulleys and cylinders leading from Dylan's wrist to 900 books on 900 tables. A few wrist flicks and he's done. Nobody shouts "Judas!'

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #BobDylan

UNAPOLOGETIC CAT POEM

The lady in the other flat told me she bought the cat to keep from getting lonely. Her son turns up occasionally, afflicted with that out-of-place-ness all young men seem to have. Sometimes I hear the cat, who never leaves, tearing about like a nutter - its frantic paws sounding like spilled marbles on our ceiling. I like to think it is battling the vaporous waifs of her loneliness, sending them fleeing to be dispersed in the sudden evening chill.

#ClockCard #poem #cat

UNAPOLOGETIC CAT POEM

The lady in the other flat told me she bought the cat to keep from getting lonely. Her son turns up occasionally, afflicted with that out-of-place-ness all young men seem to have. Sometimes I hear the cat, who never leaves, tearing about like a nutter - its frantic paws sounding like spilled marbles on our ceiling. I like to think it is battling the vaporous waifs of her loneliness, sending them fleeing to be dispersed in the sudden evening chill.

#ClockCard #poem #cat

UNAPOLOGETIC CAT POEM

The lady in the other flat told me she bought the cat to keep from getting lonely. Her son turns up occasionally, afflicted with that out-of-place-ness all young man seem to have. Sometimes I hear the cat, who never leaves, tearing about like a nutter - its frantic paws sounding like spilled marbles on our ceiling. I like to think it is battling the vaporous waifs of her loneliness, sending them fleeing to be dispersed in the sudden evening chill.

#ClockCard #poem #cat

“It takes a while for the stories to assert themselves. Sometimes they spin into motion a few seconds after waking and other times it takes a strong coffee or a pre-commute shock to kick it off. Some of us head for jobs that help us to forget the stories for a moment like a few hours sat at an industrial lathe or looking for invisible poems in cascades of numbers. Some even forget all of their stones or truly see them as such. They are truly happy. But fucked.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem

SUNDAY MORNING

“Rather than place an object of desire into a box, the thrill of ownership dissipating into familiarity, I would make you unbox yourself. For everything that surrounds you to be suddenly apparent. The suburb transfigured by fog or the low winter sun. The wide fraternity of the living and the grudgeless dead. A pinprick spotlight specks the vast rule of time. Sunday morning.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry #unboxing #sunday

HUSK DADDY

“Being a Dad is great. It means that I have permission from the cosmos to be a bitter begrudging husk of a human. To stew in the acrid soup of my dashed aspirations and murmur dry-throated lamentations for my freeze-dried virility before my kids shuffle into the room and love just erupts, blasts my skull and ribs to smithereens before I drop them to school, cool off, become a husk again.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry #fatherhood

HUSK DADDY

“Being a Dad is great. It means that I have permission from the cosmos to be a bitter begrudging husk of a human. To stew in the acrid soup of my dashed aspirations and murmur dry-throated lamentations for my freeze-dried virility before my kids shuffle
into the room and love just erupts, blasts my skull and ribs to smithereens before I drop them to school, cool off, become a husk again.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry #fatherhood

APOCALYPSE ZEN

“After the wasteland summer and balmy autumn, the rains came. Succour in portents of coming apocalypse. Tomorrow's true inheritors throw mass produced slop at the glass that covers a masterpiece. The glass is thin and almost invisible like the imagined border between the self and the world. When I walk in heavy rain it's hard for that border to hold. The brittle glass shatters every time.”

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry

IN RAINBOWS

“My brother sometimes spots Thom Yorke at his local supermarket.
He says he seems like he doesn't want to be recognised but sometimes he wears rainbow coloured trousers. Autumn is Radiohead season for me but now I am picturing Thom Yorke in rainbow trousers and it hits different. My melancholy smoulders and forments but then rainbow trousers zap it like a Care Bear Stare. Not even Johnny Greenwood's black jeans can stop it.”

#ClockCard #poem #radiohead #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry

IN RAINBOWS

“My brother sometimes spots Thom Yorke at his local supermarket.
He says he seems like he doesn't want to be recognised but sometimes he wears rainbow coloured trousers. Autumn is Radiohead season for me but now I am picturing Thom Yorke in rainbow trousers and it hits different. My melancholy smoulders and forments but then rainbow trousers zap it like a Care Bear Stare. Not even Johnny Greenwood's back jeans can stop it.”

#ClockCard #poem #radiohead #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry