Waterloo and City

[5th column]

January:


1. Modern Miracles: Internet Dating
2. Waterloo and City
3. Father's Garden
4. Not a Love Poem
5. The Sky
6. Rain Down
7. In Tandem

February:

1. Dust Motes


October:

You Are Here: Terminal One
Nur um es zu
You as Rodeo
Right of Passage

December:

Interference in Conditions
Thirteens
Poem
Movement

February

Hive
Could We
Like a Wolf

March

Seventy Eight, Seventy Eight Jetlag
Type Cast
This
Incarnate
The Letter


August

What If
When You Can't Find
longley For Lunch

[5th column]

Modern Miracles: Internet Dating



So far it’s done nothing but rain drinking water
quality engineers and call centre managers from Slough

who hit the ground, not running, but with the dull thud of a goose
feather pillow tossed from the 2nd floor of the Sally Army

on the corner of Wood and Shernhall where there used to be
a bookie with a three-legged neon greyhound

whose flying paw bled into the dark. Before that
it was an Italian grocer. The display reminded me

of a library of veg. My favourite was beef tomatoes
the size of a Wimpy ketchup dispenser and as red.

But the analogy fails because you can't lend a beef tomato
or a cherry for that matter, and if you did it wouldn't be for long

or it would be as wrinkled as your fingers
after a hot bath. I read that the skin pinks

to improve your grip in water like the tread
of a tyre shedding rain. Maybe I should look

for you in the bath once my toes have pruned
and water is something to be walked on.

[Dunc]

Neil

Oh the bleak song to the absent hope! "library of veg" is a great image. I take it "beef tomato" and "cherry" are references to the private parts? If not, I've missed something. And surely not a hint of bitterness at the end?

A clever ramble of a poem. I wish you good hunting in 2017!

Regards / Dunc

[5th column]

Hey there Dunc, thanks for popping in. Beef tomatoes are the really large and deep red variety you find a lot of in France or as part of 'Chop salad' in the states and cherry tomatoes are the tiny and very tasty type we buy from Italy, although now they grow them all over. I was hoping for irony at the close but if it tastes a little bitter? Well, what to expect if you insist on drinking bath water ��

[5th column]

Not new but something I've been revising. (Is it only me seeing the type in different sizes on my iPhone?)

Waterloo and City

There's something of the hive

in the clicking

sound. Rails

shed the husk of night.

Repetition in the queue

and queue behind the black and yellow line

along the platform

where we spill out pour

down The Drain, the throat

is marginalia

in straight

lines, never looking

up. And having lost

the words for journey: pilgrimage, sojourn

we

sleep

walk to our cubicles

for one - day's brief flame flickering

in the bone cup

of December

while we wait for April's dance

to waltz its way to nectar

shoes, snare rasping

down the glide path.

Everything else

[Donner]

Hi, Neil, good to see you here in a fresh new year.

"Modern Miracles" - Personally, some of my friends who make use of on-line dating sites would call them by a different name than "miracle". Oh, the horrors (and misrepresentations) they've run into. Heh. I do love a poem that makes proper use of long, rambling sentences that still make sense. and water is something to be walked on nicely sums up the expectations that some run into when looking for that perfect match.

"Waterloo and City" - If you're going for a visual sense of trains passing by commuters standing on the platform, you've got it down. There's something of the hive / in the clicking / sound is as good an opening line(s) as the last one in the previous one. I'm seeing only one-sized type, probably because of the board's default font.

Donner

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hi Neil,

Modern Miracles: Internet Dating took me a couple of reads to get into, and now I like it. I read the opening lines as something like, "I'd get addicted to you if you gave me the chance". The ending seems to say that such a chance is as likely as walking on water. And in between are some lovely surreal moments. I love the entrance of "drinking water / quality engineers and call centre managers from Slough" raining down like a Magritte painting; and it's a clever line break. Also love that they sound like geese, and again the clever line-break, although here I'd prefer that ""feather pillow" was lost, just because it diminishes the goose sound. The three-legged greyhound was a pleasing image. I wondered if in "as wrinkled as your fingers" was meant to be her fingers, of you as in "one"; I suspect the latter, and if so, it through me off a bit. There are other things I liked, but too little time, so I'll leave it there. Fun poem.

Waterloo and City, is all one font size on my PC. Lots to like here. I'm reading it as about commuting, working; the drudgery and the alienation of the rat race. I like Christmas as bone cup, and that we have lost the words for "journey: pilgrimage, sojourn" . A lot of the layout is working very well for me. Love the visual joke of "marginalia" and that "we/sleep" is looks like a small nugget of rest (can't explain it better) and that it's small fits the poem -- and then it becomes "sleep walk" is also nice; also like the gliding "glide path" section of the last three lines, and the fact that "straight lines" is broken. Good stuff.

Matt

[5th column]

Many thanks to Donne and Matt for your thoughts.






Father's Garden





The drone of several mowers

across my father's garden.

Hocks march over the beds

in disapproval, leaning to

in the burnt umber of the yard.

Disappointment

is the smell of new mown grass in

imperfect lines.

While he sleeps, flat out

after planting

I'm more than half way to horizontal

in a deckchair

thinking

this




quiet tapping of keys

unlocks

doors

but

watched unseen from a bedroom window

the lad

is still drunk

in the half-moon shadow
of a porch, all fingers thumbs, fumbling

at the lock

whispering

Quiet, quiet!

Loud

but

not

enough to wake the dead.

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hi Neil,

"Disappointment / is the smell of new mown grass in / imperfect lines" by itslelf is worth price of entry here. Lots of nice moments here. The last line / sentence turns it nicely as I realise that it's reminiscence of a dead father, and then I can go back re-read another meaning into "he sleeps, flat out", and also realise that the drunk boy is not maybe not literally a boy, and that he's not a rich man with an enormous garden but in a graveyard. (The comma after "like" should be lost though, I believe, if you want to mean "as if after planting"). I wonder if the keys sentence is may be trying too hard to be meaningfully figurative, but hey, this is speed crit, and I might think differently given time. You're having a good week.

Matt

[Dunc]

Neil

Waterloo and City worked well and used the layout effect well until the volta at while we wait for April's dance which I though diverted from the single impression of a sketch and deflated things a bit. (This being the fluff zone, I only mention it because I liked the rest.)

Father's Garden (I thought) didn't benefit as much from the layout as Waterloo had done, because the scene is contained, not so outwards-facing as the previous one. Still like the poem. What if you ended it at Quiet, quiet! ?

Enjoyed the read.

Regards / Dunc

[HowardM2]

(Trying again, having just unintentionally deleted my own post.)

"Internet Dating" is great fun; I love the way it captures the experience of one item leading to another and another and another until you end up far removed from from where you started or were intending to go, so typical of the internet experience (mine, anyway). I'm guessing "beef tomatoes" are what on this side of the Great Water are called "beefsteak tomatoes" (we colonials being so insistent upon attaching our own nomenclature to everything). And I love the concluding lines with wrinkled toes and water "to be walked on."

Lost my other comments in the brainfuzzle; I'll be back to try and recover them tomorrow.

[5th column]

Thanks to Dunc, Howard and Matt for the visits. Fluff is always appreciated....




Not a Love Poem


This is not a love poem or the vacuum
of a heart expelling tides. If I had to
say, then pyromancy; reading the runes
of the next second, breath, life, promise
in the smoking bones awoken
by a lick of flame because the dead
must surely know? I'd say, this is a rain
of silver mirrors falling on the corpse
of the earth, neck twisted, searching
for reflections of the pulse. No, this is
no love poem. If you asked me now
I'd say January Belladonna who heard
the voice of an impatient sun
and took a frost bow. I'd tell you this
is a handful of dirt. Sink deep
roots. Keep it whole.

[new leaf]

Neil, your ability to ramble on while keeping your reader in rapt attention is amazing to me. Perhaps because as a bonus you give us tasty treats to keep us at your heels along the way; it's always worth the run to catch images like 'library of veg', 'bone cup of December', 'flat out after planting', 'a rain of silver mirrors' all woven into the surprises of your line breaks and the earthy humanity of your themes. Well done.

[Dunc]

Neil

Well. maybe it's a love poem, since (though it might mean lots of things) I read it as a declaration that N cares deeply about the earth. Subtly directional and a cascade of great images. Thanks for the vivid and angry tour.

Regards / Dunc

[Donner]

Hi, Neil,

I remember belladonna's common name - "deadly nightshade" - and was always terrified of it as a kid when I'd find it growing in our yard. I thought I would die if I touched it, let alone try one of the berries. Now I know that it's also used as herbal medicine. And as a hallucinogenic. So, I'm reading that into the poem, even though I'm not sure if that's what you had in mind or not, or whether Belladonna was meant to be emphasized as much as I did. For all the negatives at the beginning of the poem, it ends on a hopeful instruction - "Sink deep roots. Keep it whole." Lovely sounds throughout, too - something I feel I lack the knack for at times, being more narrative driven with my writing. So, I'm glad you're around this month to goad me in that direction.

Donner