You don’t know the intended curve of a line before it comes into being. You look at the blank page for writing or drawing on, and you may feel a certain increase in anxiety. Then you start. The line is following a curve. And one line is leading to another. The ends of your curves rarely meet, the ends with the beginnings.

Time moves on, and the curve is becoming a fold. A fold is that which is being dragged though time to curve over itself, and somewhere/somehow one curve always imPLIcates another (La Plie = the fold: with more than a nod to Gilles Deleuze, but you are not a philosopher in the continental or any other tradition). Folded, your curve is a contribution to a collective action, you might say. But you do not know how or when your curve will meet up with another. Many of your curves will often not be seen to be doing so. Or perhaps some are in the process of being rejected.

Another curve may at this very moment be creeping up on you unsuspectedly. You may not even notice. You wonder as it imPLIcates you.

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The post Bristlepoet No 3 first appeared on Wordstall.

and I see the words, pietro colorato

I might drown in italiano.

This is swimming by numbers

and numeracy leaks away suggesting there is

a problem higher up, above the water line

pietro colorato

the colours are smudged by rising damp

meaning serious discolouration.

Why don’t I do something before the problems

threaten to overwhelm rather than this floundering around

with clumsy and wild strokes in approximation

of the swimming I learned when I was eleven

(is that right?)

Richard always needed me to go along with him

his parents paying for the lessons because they were better off

than my family. Not only did I learn to swim but I had already learned

to swim without money –

what was it I felt or what sense did I make of the absence

of family holidays, the lack of money?

i simply shut out the  possibility of the question:

desires strictly limited.

And then in the middle of my working life, after a few short years

of feeling better off, I was back to my default position.

The default position of the world:

most of us have little money!

i don’t imagine there will be any desert island discs

merely the wash of the waves and knowing that

I can be washed away by the first storm, the rising waters.

If the shoe fits … wear it

it wasn’t so long since life was incredibly hard (for most of us)

demanding, unsafe. For us in Europe, North America etc there was

a brief interregnum. Weakened by the costs of World Wars

the elite gave in and allowed certain elements of social democracy

but it wasn’t long before some tough minded warriors took to the warpath

and made out the case (there is no alternative) for the return to normality.

Truth lay exposed to the casual gaze of passers-by

but the passers-by had little time for such things.

It looked complicated, the surface scarred

by self interest, by the impact of lies and corruption

“I haven’t got time for that stuff”

Beneath, hidden from view were nuggets of possibilities

beauty patiently waiting, never ending joy …

I scratch around like a chicken

(what does a chicken feel as it scratches around in the dirt

with its beak, its sharp little eyes?)

I scratch around prodding at the words

willing them to divulge their possible and multiple meanings

to lift the lid, to uncover …

The post Swimming by numbers first appeared on Wordstall.

generating power

the turbines tumble into action

images flicker

and watch each other comparing notes

Two

words reduced to to background rumble

but not one word in plain sight

nothing distinguished

solo you sail hoping for nothing

Three

poetry: a constitution for human life

animals and carnivores

we show our teeth

Four

gravitational oppositions

will you bounce into me

like an accident of some sort?

Five

yesterday is gone

and in the middle of today

there is the usual evaporation of time

Six

and then a way forward (or backward)

will emerge but I cannot

confirm the direction of travel until 2155

Seven

let’s say we did our best

in the face of stiff opposition

The post Seven Thoughts first appeared on Wordstall.

How they tremble when I strut around; their heads might fall at any moment; this day might be their last; my dreams will come to them as nightmares.

Old man who were you in my dream last night? A rough sleeper, there seemed to be smoke coming from your mouth, from your body, seeping out from you clothing. Were you on fire? And you sang a song, a dirge, a love song. Must I envy you your ancient freedom. The freedom of minstrel and bard, the freedom of the old roads, feeding the earth with your song.

The post The fear of imagining first appeared on Wordstall.

The shimmering mirages of our minds?

Where the world is both fragmentary and dazzling?

This is such is it not?

I mean it’s like this; this is how it is

Can you see what I’m pointing at?

Indicating the target

But in my myopic dazzle

Can I trust that the target is the target

A bull’s eye of power?

Possibly not.

My hands shake with the tension of the bow 

Paradox is all of a shimmer

There is no target

Only my tears in the cold wind.

So I will sit for a while and gather my vulnerabilities.

Over there is here now;

I love to be surrounded by all these foreigners

It makes me feel at home

Perhaps at home I am not at home.

I need to turn round and catch a glimpse of the self behind me

Hiding perhaps 

Those opposite but maybe apposite impulses

Cheeky devils but devils non the less 

Twisting me about their talons . . .

Holding me to the flames.

I don’t think optimism is overly concerned with the contradictions of paradox,

Do you?

We could even make the next leap together . . . 

We shall discuss it at tomorrow’s conference and discover that the door is open 

Or if it’s not a door, then the path will be apparent

Though its degree of difficulty remains uncertain

Surprises are guaranteed.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

The post And how do we manage paradox? first appeared on Wordstall.

“…the hard things when you’re not thinking or writing and as far as you know
you are dead
or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a heart pump or straw in a milk shake…”
[CK Williams, Writers Writing Dying, Pp59]

It’s for keeping an eye on you, that’s what being a think-and-write person is for, for watching you, the you yourself
not a dream sequence at all “floating in the sidereal void”,
the you with a yellow hard-hat on, swamped wet,  and looking about to burst into song, or a snatch of song
shifting a word or two here or there like in a Prayer for the Dying (Lisa Hannigan, 2016),

to feel all                                      the ripples

and some mis –                        understood

gleefully taking liberties:

“-singing songs or not even songs, just lolly-molly syllable sounds
and you’d escaped from language, from having to gab, from having to write down the idiot gab.”
[CK Williams, Writers Writing Dying, Pp60]

The post think-and-write person first appeared on Wordstall.

No, don’t look at me like that,

That exasperated expression on your face;

I mean it seriously:

Forward is now back.

Is this Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence?

1970 is as far as got before the braying donkey of the right

Rediscovered those populist slogans 

To feed the resentments toxically exaggerated 

once equality was downgraded

To a shrug of indifference 

By the freeing of markets 

That poured billions into the open pockets

Of the rich.

After all we can always blame the stranger.

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The post Is backward the new forward? first appeared on Wordstall.

I like his poems that are often slowly unfolding stories, long sentences, with spaces to pause and breath, both personal and political, moral and cosmopolitan.

Is this grief, he asks at one point. I have been feeling lost for words too, swamped.
We should walk the fens outside town today,
I say to him, the native wetlands, and we can go shopping on the way back.
The spring waters are clear and cold,
as I reach down for a smooth gravel stone lying on the bottom, and wonder
about slipping in deeper. Later I look up
that the statistical chance of this happening is less than 1:200.

The post On the Road Again first appeared on Wordstall.

Should I pack my belongings on the poor donkey’s back and head for the hills?

Or will life carry on much as before apart from relatively isolated acts of mindless violence?

The sun is breaking through the clouds here in Florence. Perhaps I will go out to play.

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The post All diagnoses will be given full consideration first appeared on Wordstall.