you'd better be sure if you're making god a liar

You look happy to meet me

Constellation consolations

We were talking about stars, or lack thereof,
above the city of illuminated streets where we walk
among satellites in a synthetic solar system that swallows us,
with lights burning so ferociously, competing to shine,
we are lucky to see two or three stars, looking up,
so you stand beneath streetlamps instead.

We were also talking about what you encounter
in life that is valuable. I told of my belief
that will not be shaken, even from the holdiing
of hands as unsteady as mine-
that beauty one is born with bears an absolute value of none.

He told me then that this may be so, but then again,
if I were to be correct in believing
that it is only effort, time, tenacity, trying or devotion
that can be deemed valuable, then what is it,
exactly, that the stars are doing?

Flaming orbs of burning gas and cosmic dust
but not for trying, not of their own volition.
Stars don't do a thing and if they had a finger
they would not lift it, so why, he said,
when you get the chance to see stars
beyond the closed-up city compartments,
beyond to those effortless constellations,
do you see something that bears no value
yet is so beautiful, it makes you ache?

It changed my thoughts- at least about stars-
so when the day comes for catching them as they begin to fall
perhaps the flame that falls like rain will not be worthless after all.

Poetry forms: the tritina

I've tried doing the standard sestina form but I didn't dislike it because it was difficult and long- it was long but that wasn't why I didn't like it. It was so repetitive that the words seem to lose their power or whatever relevance they would have had and the point of having those 6 words included in the repetition of the line's pattern seemed to be destroyed because it was like I would become habituated to heartng them, expecting them, and ending up not reading or listening to the poem at all but just counting off the number of skips on a broken record. I imagined that if I were to hear another writer's ssetina poem I would just be trying to predict how the words were going to be used next, if they were going to take on new meanings, and after all, once you know the words that are going to be repeated six times each, in a particular structure you're aware of, you can pretty much start guessing with good accuracy what the poem is going to say, where it's going to say it, which only leaves it open to wonder what the writer hoped to do with this pattern. And I couldn't hope to do anything while I was writing like someone with severe anterograde amnesia. So the tritina, which I found my my book Adventures in Poetic Form, was a wonderful surprise because it is also preictable but when read or listened to it's short enough to not leave time for trying to keep a step ahead,. The words are also only repeated in a 3 time pattern (not including the envoi) so there's not much risk of habituation. So I picked what seem to be some favourite topics/common theme or image in what I write i.e city, sleep, and teeth. Here goes. I included the tritna line pattern below in case anyone feels like trying it. I also felt ambitious as I got into it and ended up including a little inner rhyme. My first tritina attempt: 

Look for lullabies elsewhere. Too too blunt for berceuse, here, where. nothing beats at the heart of the city.
You know better than to look for comfort in the clang of hands that cradle you to sleep.
They curve like apostrophes, quotes of strangers talking in their sleep, crowds of skull-heads grinding teeth.

We are all just clinging on, it seems, whether we know it or not, and only by our teeth,
trying to save face but keep up with the pace, lying to say that it's not a pretending place, the city.
I choke on the great smoke but it's not for signals, only screens. Either get lost or lose it. I've lost sleep.

While I collected my lost mind back in scraps, I happened to misplace almost every trace of sleep.
Estranged at night, I stay awake with what I recognise- daylight chews into shadows with gold teeth,
Dawn and its bite are so pretty that I rarely notice night untiI I see daybreak shatter across the city.

I'm not afraid of the city. I'm afraid of sleep, afraid of believing what I may be hearing lying through my teeth.

When you find a new door to open,
you hear one being closed behind.
Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise, after all,
as they say, if out of sight, it's out of mind.

a few typewritten bits

10 Things I've Learnt Along The Way

A cheat sheet I'd give a kid if I had one to pass on a few meagre pearls of not-so-much-wisdom to.

I’ve grown into even bigger grown-up shoes
and haven’t been keeping score
but yesterday I’d just outgrown seventeen.
Now I’m headed for size twenty-four.

In a few odd months when the summer has caught up with
and been hauled right over us, think of me when you look out the window
to see it disappearing. That is what I want to be for you.
The summer that existed only where no one else could see it.

balance

Sorry for your loss is the wrong way to say it.

It is customary, with last goodbyes, when someone has passed away
to use the words I'm sorry for your loss. That is the right thing to say
but I don't see how or understand
why that's the sentence we use
when people we love pass away are nothing we could ever lose.

We lose keys and glasses and their cases,
we lose bank cards and lose our places
in queues, lose wallets, phones, lose track of time
these are things we're sorry about losing but they can be replaced
and didn't matter all that much,
but people- Ella- is not a pair of shoes
or the sweater you intended to wear,
or whatever it is you swear you saw a minute ago, somewhere.

These things can go and well be fine
despite complaining about banks and the please hold the line
or going to lost property bins, or to find security-
it doesn't work when you say, "I'm sorry you lost a memory."
Because we don't really lose it. Ella has never really gone.
In fact, in more than just memory but in presence, she keeps us going on.

I don't know about any of you but the Ella I know and knew
is nothing lost. She's still with us, giving Nanny a kiss in the backseat,
spilling marbles all around her mother's feet. In the night,
I've heard her talk to me, not even in  my sleep, but her voice
at last telling me that, finally, I'm getting things right.

She'll never be lost to any of us at all, so irreplaceable
and I feel I am walking in her shoes
down every UCL hall, and so the sentiment of sorry for your loss  
doesn't apply. Ella is someone we miss, not something we will lose.
Flickering in memory,
visiting in dreams, in echoes,
and staying with us. How can anyone
or anything be lost
if it never really goes?

Here Be Dragons

He was reading a book called 'Here Be Dragons' but there wasn't anything in it about dragons. It was full of empties. He read between the lines and all the absences pressed between the pages that nobody else could see. It made him afraid. He tried to make a list of things that he was afraid of, so it would make some sense, but there were no words for that paper either. He was afraid of everything he didn't know. Everything he was yet to know. Somethings that could happen and felt like they somehow would happen- and should happen?- and they hadn't happened ever before, and that was perhaps what frightened him about this future he had. They say you hold your future in your hands. No wonder his were shaking so much all the time. He was afraid of the unknown places that he was headed for and what he would find there. He wasn't scared of dying or of planes or of spiders or heights or needles. He couldn't be afraid of dragons. He didn't believe in dragons.

Enough

I wrote this in the space of a few minutes without stopping. I guess that's the kind of spontaneous Kerouac went on about and I've never been any good at, but I've decided to stick to his rules and not go back to revise anything. Right, no rewrite, here it is:

Enough,
I think I seem I am I think
I am enough,
I think,
I am not pretty.
as beautiful as water
(from a tap) but enough
of a pile of human teeth,
not grown-up but grown
from troubled daughter,
(far enough from little brat)
so please, no need
for looking underneath
the words I say-
that's quite enough.
I think I seem I am I think
I am okay.

Summer daybreaks

I don't like this time of year-
summer's breath down my neck,
chased up sleepless from shorter nights, tired and dry,
hands that were shaken by day, the one before
still aching and sore- day breaks to brittle hours,
sunlight strips, sandpaper scratches,
at the corner of an eye
and all the clutter catches
at the throat's back, dust kicked up
from summer's track- day breaks the thirsty flowers.

Clock face

Still, flat hands
tick time away-
filling up boxes,
making empty space.

I don't know this form
and who it is for.
only stay and still
wait and count
the passing clouds
each passing hope-

hope for time, hope none is waste
hope whatever it is was worth the wait

but then there is more time
and there is more space.

It's a long time to look and see
only one flat, still clock face.

One of those days

It seems, somehow I've grown into the grown-up shoes

and I don't know when I grew

because only last week I was still seventeen

but today I'm twenty-two. 

Unheard of

Here's what I have learnt about the phonetics of loss.

They sound something like this:

(which is to say, silence)

it's a note I've never heard anyone sing

and it's note that someday I will find, 

come morning, sleep has left behind.

This sound, like those in an old lullaby

until found, I can know only as goodbye,

as milkteeth underneath a cotton pillow,

as the sounds that I hear now:
(the black bedtime echo).