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.