Her mum

She bent, once more in a dim light of the evening
Half watching a movie that she’d seen before
A thousand times, along her strings, knotted now
Into an impossible concoction of eye hurting colours

The warmth spread across the treads she touched with care,
She’s not going to be sick this winter
She casts it as a spell onto an ashen, spidery plot
We are blind, but she can see it all within the pattern

The movie is over, credits race through the dark screen,
The clock on the wall calls twelve, the hour of endings
But she doesn’t stop, giving herself five more minutes of love
Weaved into the shawl that not even Moirae can touch

7. Blank verse

The major problem I had with both blank verse and ballad is that according to the rules that were laid out for those forms of poetry ages ago - when the world was younger and more frivolous - they both ought to be written in an iambic pentameter. It is possible that one day I wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll shout ‘Eureka! The gods finally decided that it is the time to let me understand iambic pentameter. At last!’ And then I sit in my chair – as I am in fact doing right now – and instead of explaining that am a complete moron and making up excuses, I will actually become a proper descendent of Shakespeare and produce tons of stuff that will make future generations of kids smash their virtual, laser pens and break up in tears. Unless that happens, I don’t think I will ever be able to produce anything close to iambic pentameter.
At the end of the day I decided to go with blank verse and represent contemporary epic speech; which could be also viewed as a conversation on the phone. I am sure that the epic speech today can be as epic on the phone or on skype; the medium is always secondary to the content. I am not going to argue that the ‘I’ in the poem delivers an actual dramatic speech in a sense it was understood hundreds of years ago. Although under the surface of humour there is quite sad and subversive undertone. Wherever you go, whatever you do, being truly faithful to yourself is yet another obstacle in a way of communication. Especially on the first date.
I think the whole idea of speech in poetry is quite fascinating. The poem is always a voice. Creating speeches within the poems is therefore a little bit like putting two cotes on. If it’s really cold then it’s perfectly justified but when the weather gets warmer you’ll feel terribly sweaty; not even mentioning the fact that two coats will make you walk like a disabled penguin. I guess the key to the successful speech within the frame of the poem is to accentuate the deliberation in which it is represented, just enough to highlight the specific elements of the spoken language, but not as much as to make it an actual spoken language (does it make sense? It does for me). I am a little bit afraid that I overdid on that last thing and that my poem is a bit too realistic.

I tell you

I tell you –
I called him about ten thousand times,
he doesn’t answer.
What do you mean he doesn’t want to talk to me?
What have I done? Again? No…
I don’t think I talk too much.
Definitely. Not.
I was just trying to explain that, no matter
how much you learn, you can never know the truth.
The omniscience does not exist,
we never know all the facts.
Because. What do you mean? Just because.
That stuff with calculating the entropy of black holes,
oh, that was just an example. I was just simply,
yes simply, pointing out that everything is relative.
Relative to what?
Well, for example time can be relative to speed,
Although we can never know that for su…
So what? Can’t a humanist talk about physics?
Is it my problem that not everyone finds it interesting?
And then? Oh, yeah and then I explained to him
how Wankel’s Engine works, and why in art
women are often portrayed as lack.
What do you mean?
I do not intimidate. Damn it.

6. Open forms

Straight away comes the apology for the fact that I didn't upload my thoughts on sonnet. As all of you know I went to Scotland and although it was a productive trip it was also quite disturbing in some way. I will still come back to sonnet but first I want to share with you my recent poem which is an expression of precisely the kind of thing I want to write. All the references in the text are used self consciously and with determination. Because most of the times you find real poems lying inside of other people and the only thing you as a writer has to do, is to channel that voice. I could supply here the list of references but I think it is quite pointless, since everyone probably would like to discover them for themselves. Let me just say thanks to Roisin for 'rooms spread across the city' because that idea had never left me since. I also have a photo which shows the real World's End Close in Edinburgh. The poem is called 'sometimes'

It was The Day
Rooms spread across the city
Contagious, white, dangerous, pure
We leaped the time
Today, its twentieth first century
Today we don’t talk
No more
We guess each other
According to the transmission,
Appropriation and development
It’s not contextual
We game
Do not unplug
Unfeel, pause, connected, reach
Grab, open, share, I am you
We don’t sleep
This time is fake and upsetting
Let us progress, from frame into frame
The war of mind and window
We watch
But no one sees the video
Meet me at the World’s End Close
I will unravel you
In a way, I am all the people
I morph into you
A being with no self
Understanding follows recognition
Form follows function
In your case, you deserve
An invitation, at least
Your life is upsetting
Do it for the sake of humanity
Fuck you man

journal

Going after Paul’s advice I did my daily log of one specific thing. Since I was travelling last week – and as we all know during travels strange things happen easier – I decided to do the log of wounds I suffered every day for six days. I have to actually say that it works, because I already wrote poem about it too. And that is the stuff (some of them are kind of disturbing):
Day 1. A knife cut on my right thumb; I got it while cutting the cheese.
Day 2. A paper cut on the same thumb, that one I’ve got while opening the notebook.
Day 3. Hit my left thumb with my luggage and scrape it to blood with a handle; that one was done on the airport.
Day 4. Someone squeezed my upper arm between the door and the door frame. I can’t even remember who exactly did that so there is no one to really blame for spoiling my arm with two gigantic bruises.
Day 5. I have bruised my derriere. And that one I have no idea how I’ve got. I think the defence mechanism is preventing me from remembering. However it is fairly possible that it happened when I was trying to get into the house through window wearing heels…
Day 6. I have bite marks on my right palm and left hand.

5. Sonnet

Sonnet 1
You are a guilty mark upon my soul
That came to me tonight. Once upon a dream
I want to seal a kiss, and not to foul,
But I am forced to surrendering scream.
I put my mind away, to follow you
Into the sweaty nightmare of sly lust.
How would you like to swim into the blue?
Watching the skies with mask of right and just...
I lick your hand and watch you smile and bloom
Like flower, that sings only once and dies.
We meet again, before the morning gloom
To spread rainbow thread upon the morning skies.

The world is a shallow and dirty place,
I run towards when my dreams win that race.


________

We
are
perfect –
strong,
beautiful,
alive,
too
stupid
to
know
the
value
of
it.

________

Ability

It is clearly the matter of abilities –

One can argue that wishing for someone's face is incongruous, and it points
towards malfunction of personality, in certain aspects I agree, nevertheless
this runs deeper than any explanation I am able to provide, at this point.

Michaelangelo could base his sculptures on you, and if daVinci saw your
enigmatic smile he surely would not paint Mona Lisa.
As for me
(I could hang you on the wall as painting, I could chop of your head dip it in
formaldehyde stick into a jar and put it on my desk)
it is clearly the matter of abilities; therefore I compose, I word paint with caution,
a portrait that is like a charming spell.
(To make all your clothes fall off)

From miles away my hands slide through the same darkness that falls upon
the flower of your lips. My eyes reach towards stars that you can name.
Your lungs are filled with heavy, sticky breath of life that understands the
love of loneliness as do I,
and although we have nothing in common I know we feel pain in the same way.
(unless you are a psychopath)


+ coming soon (hopefully) 'all the stuff you don't want to know about when you are writing a sonnet'

4. Villanelle

All the poems we concern ourselves about in this semester are quite heavily structured. Villanelle seems to be one of these particularly difficult and yet it is not really. You buckle up, count the lines, divide into stanzas and make up two lines that you think are particularly cool so they can bear the repetitions and do not make the whole sound like a children song about the bunny rabbits. Then there is the rhyming scheme. I am usually not particularly friendly with rhymes, let’s just say that most of the times we give ourselves a friendly understanding nod, when we see each other, but we wouldn't really engage in prolonged evening conversations over a glass of red. In this case however, I decided to follow the rhyming structure precisely for that reason. It is interesting to do something outside a comfort zone once in a while. As for the actual poem and the theme, it wasn’t very difficult once I established my key lines:

I will always be in pain with you
But when I give up; promise to see me through

As to that first line it might seem quite weird to use the word ‘pain’ instead of ‘love’. You may burn me on the stake but I cannot determine if in this context love is used as noun or a verb. At the same time it doesn’t really matter, because the phrase is so well established in the common language, that one substitution does not create the sense of misunderstanding, but a slight ambiguity that is necessary in this case. Saying ‘I will always be in love with you’ in a poem? I don’t know if someone could really pull it off but if they do, I kneel. I can’t, and I don’t really know if I want to. In this context the message is clear (or at least I hope it is). The second line is a plead and I thought if anything can bear repetition in the quasi-love poem it is going to be a helpless appeal to other person, that cannot be explained or justified. Why do I say quasi-love poem? I wanted to write a poem about love in friendship not about a romantic love as I find that subject far more compelling and worth of exploration. I am a strong fan of the turn in poems and in this one it comes in the second line of the last stanza:

On the road from here to forever; you and my knight

It introduces the third person and shifts the meaning. I am not quite sure about the word ‘knight’, it is somewhat clunky, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would do the job and sustain the rhyming scheme. At the end of the day, this whole line is surely the one for revision. But what to do to keep ‘road from here to forever’ and the rhyming scheme in place? This is not a job for a writer but for a mathematician. I surrender. (only until my grand come back with some kick-ass idea)

(oh and) PS. I am sorry Paul that it took so long. I am a victim of managers who think that ‘part time’ is a synonym of ‘full time, plus, can do all the shit hours’.

4. Villanelle

Let Me Say

I will always be in pain with you
The day was empty, we ceased the night
But when I give up; promise to see me through

Lie along with me to cover what’s true;
For me to talk like this is the matter of fright –
I will always be in pain with you

He said, with no regard to my point of view,
Cover your eyes to conceal your sight.
But when I give up; promise to see me through

Ignore me, what’s your problem? Haven’t got a clue!
This pitiful yearning towards the limelight…
I will always be in pain with you

You are nothing; this is all spite and I spew
There are no more tears, no more skin to bite
But when I give up; promise to see me through

The day had left us; the sky painted with blazing hue
On the road from here to forever; you and my knight
I will always be in pain with you
But when I give up; promise to see me through

how to write pastoral my way

The pastoral is a type of poem that in some way relates to the idea of nature and utopian lost paradise (arcadia). At the same time more contemporary poets do a great job of using convoluted references and metaphors to only slightly reference the subject matter.
In my opinion the pastoral works extremely well with reference to childhood. Memories of old days have often this unique imaginative quality that with time becomes somehow removed from reality. There is something in saying that time heals all the scars and that at the end we only remember good memories. This blissful imagery, of the days and experiences that will never return and will never be possible to examine more closely (which could actually cause the disillusion), can easily be incorporated in the pastoral form of poetry.
In addition, for me, childhood has very close reference to nature as I spent most of my time outside in the parks, by the river, surrounded by fields and forest. In my memories childhood and adolescence always combine into one single, perfect image.
Imagine: a warm Sunday afternoon; yellow room, windows opened, in light the specs of dust float in the air, poplar seeds spin in the breeze outside, wind carries the smell of lilies and distant car roar. Somewhere outside people are busy, someone shouts, child laughs but in the room everything is removed. Three girls don’t need anyone’s attention but their own. One lies on the floor; paints. Another one sits beside; tells the story. Third one took the couch; she looks outside the window at the sky gradually turning purple-coral. Tomorrow is going to be another fine day.
I wrote quite a few poems that try to some way capture one of these unique moments. One that in my opinion is directly related to my pastoral is called ‘Turner’s afternoon':

May I bring to you the
Promise of summer, when
Air simmers in the bright
Glaze of the sun –
We’ll walk across
The fence of reality
Holding hands.
I’ll paint your smile
On my cornea, with
Lights and shadows,
Of young summer day.
We’ll seat on the
Bridge, and run our
Fingers through the sticky
Water, of the blue stream
Under our feet.
We’ll watch the world –
In Polaroid and sepia –
Spinning quietly
Before our eyes;
As we’ll grow old.

I hope it says more about what my childhood memories mean to me as a writer than any of my clumsy explanations.

3. Pastoral

What was lost


When the sun was young,
I run its golden hair through my fingers

We breathed slowly with our new born lungs;
air sizzled in my mouth like a popsicle

These days wind sung for us,
she tasted of corn and cherries and her eyes were blue

The life was a chain of consecutive existences;
dislocated, day by day

We fought for being like there was no tomorrow –
which was often a case in those days

Memories were fresh, like if time happened all at once
Trees spoke to us; he was the Leaf and he was always

we believed

Laughter came naturally on lazy Sunday afternoons
when nothing to do was sacred

For most it was the outside;
For us it was together

We thought freedom was to move on,
We know it is to stay the same

These days sun went down and we couldn't part
we knew that what is precious is often lost

I had ice on my lips and the world in my heart
We were reborn to its melody into humans

It was when the sky opened into universe;
That we invented religion of our own

briefly about the ode

I think that writing an ode is particularly difficult. Main reason being the simple fact, that praising something in the context of contemporary art, became somewhat unfashionable. Results are multiple examples of odes to tomatoes, socks or other elements of daily existence. As I had absolutely no intention of doing anything across that line I tried to think hard of something different. I did not want to fall upon any sort of cliché, be it an XVIII century one or contemporary. My first two ideas were like matches, they burned brightly, yet shortly. First, I considered writing an ode to all those who come second. That developed from the idea that the classicist ode was a form of appraisal dedicated to the winners. My second idea was writing an ode to the common sense. Both of these however bear certain humorous connotations that I wanted to avoid. While I do appreciate humorous poetry, I do not think I am very suited to the task myself. Finally trying to tweak expectations a little I decided to write an Ode to the Abandoned Places. While I believe it might draw from the romantic tradition, and their devotion to solitude, at the same time it is also very personal to me. Often I find myself captured by old buildings, overgrown gardens, ruins and other places abandoned in the course of industrial evolution. They might well be graveyards of memories but at the same time they are also breeders of inspirations and a food for imagination.

2. Ode

Ode to the Abandoned Places

When the darkness asphyxiates you with its dusty coat
I suppose one could make mistake of unseeing;
sensing the footsteps on the time impaired floor
The light could be ours within that wall
Your naked body is frozen yet; it still feels warmer than cold,
And less familiar than the apocalypse –

Was it ever a place?
or is it for now and always just an emptiness defined;
Defined by lack, in contrast to familiarity
its tears concealed in the ponds of misery,
staircases that taste of rust and midnight
While the wind steals my hair

Once even you were young - said God to the world –
immortality dwells in memories, but youth;
It is a matter of paranoid perspective and distortion,
like your impossible angles in the spiral dimensions of chance
Breathe the night when longing is undeniably music;
be a lonely note in the construction of solitude

Emotionally uncharged and yet blown out of proportion –
It makes you lean erratically against its suffocating spaces,
Plays suicidal hide and seek in the moist fogs of the dawn
Demands to adore its sick genius in ferocious longing for breath
And when you are ripped apart into unity;
there are no more words to convey –

1. Sestina

Sublimation

Act I
She sleeps, wakes, puts TV on; she is home,
Her coffee is hot, she cannot find her pills.
The sun stares at her from its red lair of fire;
Smile races through her face and her dress is blue.
He is nice – she thinks – sensitive, and a little stupid –
As she leaves the room four walls fall black.

Act II (flash-forward)
On the inside of her eyes she dreams black,
Of the place that is a flat but no longer home.
You can only be very smart to be, oh so stupid.
Now she would kill to come back for her pills
In the morning when her dress was still blue.
Fixating disgust sets her on fire.

Act III
She puts the kettle on and turns on the fire,
She makes the coffee that is hot, sweet and black.
As she drops the box of which the colour is blue
She remembers – forgets, to make her way home
There is a word behind her will to remember; pills,
If there was only a way to determine the right from stupid.

Act IV
Circulating adrenaline turns her stupid
And stiletto heels burn her legs like fire.
She still does not remember about her pills,
Until the world spins upside down and her vision goes black.
Remember me not; there is no place like home
When your arms, legs and eyes suddenly turn blue.

Act V
On the other side of the mirror the grass is blue.
When the world suddenly contracts her thoughts are stupid.
The fortress of her body becomes a deserted home;
Under her eyelids live tears of fire. [prayer]
‘Let me be made of glass deep and black.
Let me come back home and take my pills.

Act VI
Let me come back home and take my pills!
Before I worn the dress that was blue,
And the four walls of the room went black,
Before I realized that I am the one who is stupid;
And the hell opened to set me on fire,
And before the world decided to steal away my home.’

Epilogue
The sky is on fire and she is contorted in a pure vibrant blue,
She is lost on her way home and there is no pills.
Today stupid is a new black.

sestina - modus operandi

Everyone says that sestinas are hard to write.* For some reason it did not take me much time to compose mine, maybe because I was always looking forward doing so.
I read as little sestinas as possible before I attempted mine, only just enough not to get confused and be aware of the possibilities. I find it far more interesting to be able to transcend the limitations of the convention without knowing what have been attempted in the past so I do not feel compelled to try it myself. In the very beginning I wanted to use six colours as my last six words (black, red, blue, white, yellow and green) and ascribe emotion to every colour, this however proved to be very difficult to do. After I failed on my noble quest to create colourful sestina I came up with my second idea – to capture my story in six acts an epilogue therefore referring to the fact that sestina is a form of storytelling.
I wrote my last three lines in the beginning to establish closure that will bear all six key words. I say key because in this case they are meant to point towards the true meaning of the poem. Together with the title they are clues that can be used to decipher the story as it were. These six words are: home, pills, fire, blue, stupid and black. Nevertheless I will not speak much about that as I personally prefer if poem is a convoluted combination of masks upon disguises for each reader to explore in their own unique way. I will however explain further the meaning of the title. I do believe that without supplementary clarification it will always come as ambiguous and somehow disconnected from the storyline of the poem. The word sublimation is therefore a reference to the psychological process that channels morally ambiguous impulses into the socially accepted behaviour. For me it also comes from the word sublime that happens also to be a name of a particular band who once upon a time recorded a song called ‘Date Rape’; and we leave it at that.

* I say that odes are far more difficult.

this is the day when poetry met design