Express yourself!

Not me, but it could have been!

(via Dvorak and College Humour)

Grand-Mère

I have a strange mix of “skills”.  In fact, I’ve had quite a mixed and varied life and still to this day I don’t think you’d describe as “ordinary” a lot of things I like, do, or say – that’s just the way these things turn out.

Something I did do for a period of time about 16 years ago was to nurse a 96 year-old French grand-mother (unrelated to me) who was suffering from fairly advanced dementia brought on by a series of strokes.  She spoke only French and having moved here after she became ‘confused’ was not aware that she lived in England.  I used to sit with her and we would sing French nursery rhymes and poems from a book she had which her daughter had specially written in effort to help her stay in this reality and not another one – I still remember many of them such as “Le bon roi Dagobert” and one about La Tour Eiffel being “on fire” (which if you’ve ever seen it lit up at night you’d understand).  Her normal speech was a tormented turmoil of afflictions brought on by the dementia.

She was in many ways a very remarkable woman who, when younger, had swum in what was seen as an “indecent” bathing costume to the outrage of the local population – just because she could.  She died peacefully and with dignity, surrounded by her family with me holding her hand.  It was one of the most human and powerful things I have ever been involved with.

This is a poem about her.  I’ve also recorded it in a way that tries to convey the cruelty of a snapped-open mind – if you do download and listen to the audio please try to listen to it the first time in stereo and preferably on headphones because mono will not do it justice.

Until then: à tout à l’heure.

Download the audio by right-clicking on this link and selecting “save as”.  If you have speakers or headphones connected you can left-click and the link will download and play the track straight-away.

Grand-Mère
————————————
So I tap, tap, tap.
White you go
but I’m still waiting.
I’m still waiting.

Who are these boys,
the ugly man that runs the country?
A mere twinkle when I was first an
old woman.  A pretender who
hides his heritage for the love
of power.

Til I roll my eyes again and repeat
the nursery rhymes that I taught you
which spill out between the cracks of my
shattered mind.

White you go -
but I’m still waiting.

I was the suffragette who first
dared The Channel.
I was the crooked smile who
cocked a snook at the stiffened
shirts of the gendarmes.
I was the mother who rocked the baby
you in my arms.

And I was the granny who bit the
nurse on the commode.

I was the face in the photograph,
tiny torso in a wheeled chair.
I was the groaning carapace who,
hollow-cheeked,
pinched the shawl about my
knees and swore like a navvy
at the lady in St. Nicholas Park
and smiled like a treacle mouth so
she didn’t know.

Until I rattled my last.

Until I sighed out my submission
as you held my hand – and fingers
loosened their grip on this moment
and slipped from you without the
chance to sing again about the
tower on fire and the good prince
with the baggy trousers like we used
to in the glimpses of the past.

You brushed my hair again and
washed my face one last time and
crossed my suffragette arms
across my suffragette chest.  One
last time.

You kissed the face of what was
left, red-eyed with a crunchy
smile at the memories.

And the people sang in French. One
last time.

Let the morning time drop all its petals on me

“Bankers not paid”

This does not happen every day/week/month/year/century.

I think we’re definitely living through the Last Days of The Giddying.

Things to remember:

• Tony Blair took the country to war on what later turned out to be complete and utter false information.
• Gordon Brown has only been Prime Minister since June 2007, however he has been Chancellor since 1997.  He is pretty much out of excuses with regard to the current financial woe of the country.  I note that he is RARELY on TV or radio (and I watch and listen to a lot of both).  I feel sorry for him but at the same time: fuck him; he is the Prime Minister and with this comes a lot of responsibility.  The buck (or, more accurately, The Pound) stops with him.
• I am extremely well paid but, without going to some dodgy mortgage house I would not be able to use the “normal” salary multipliers to pay for the place that I currently comfortably rent.  This an indicator that something is horribly horribly wrong.

My prediction?  More heads on the block shortly.

Best quote ever from an M.P.

“like watching the crew having a punch up on the deck of the Titanic”

Genius.

Why?

No really, why is this not cool?

Don’t be stupid – it IS cool.  Evil bird of prey.  Remote control flying object.  Hawkins Bazaar.

You know you want it.

Reflection

Despite being garrulously sober – something I nowadays and have for some time made a great habit of – whilst walking back from the cinema (after watching Stepbrothers which I found hilarious as did most people in the cinema but I suspect is an acquired taste for some) a mood of sombre reflection washed over me.  My new job is going well, so far; my man-flu, which has persisted now for three weeks, is definitely losing the battle against my immune system; my flat is not flooded, something which many people around the country cannot say at the moment and, in general I have very little to moan about.

But it’s not enough.  I am like a plant-pot without a plant.  A cup without a saucer.  Salt without the pepper.

Yes, I do mind being on my own in the world.  I mind very much.

Sorry – just needed to write it down.

Roll on October.

Crunch

It’s been a busy week at the new job, still settling in.  Fluey cold thing still being VERY annoying but I think I might be on the mend.  I’ve been meaning to do some redesign on my poetry website for some time but I’ve felt so icky for the last three weeks (plus moving jobs) that I’ve found plenty of other more pressing things to do.  I think I’m actually get around to doing it today.

I have another poem I want to publish somewhere which is a 1500 word prosaic poem but I think it’s going to have to be in a protected post as the subject matter is a little bit obtuse but theoretically is insulting, and I don’t want to deliberately upset anyone.

In the meantime, here’s a poem I wrote a while ago.  No, it doesn’t rhyme: did you never read the stuff I wrote on the pavement? 

Have fun.

Crunch
================================
The night is falling.
The Cashman is walking with quickening and more urgent
footsteps as he pulls his coat about him in the
furtive hope he can keep out the chilling touch of an
unexpected financial death,
In the distance he hears the guttural dying fox-cry
of his current way of being.
So he strides once more purposefully that he
may drink, increasingly, from a glass filled
with a cheap wine for warming obliteration.
He shakes his head and curses his lack of pace
as the night creatures begin to gorge on the
insecurities of we haves,
who glance sideways towards the have-nots
and wish not to join them in their
obvious and threatening squalor.

Beneath and behind his winter scarf he mutters about today,
groans about tomorrow.  He allows himself
to look with disgust out from his lofty palace of TV morals
and unlasting over-consumption so that he
sneers at the rest; who are not like him.
His happiness is propped by the silky
taste of a delicate and ornate desert made from
other people’s money sweetened with a Blackberry™ topping.
Oh, but these sugary things tricked him and he
completely missed the coming of a live-for-today blindness
that crept into our eyes whilst we all dozed, safely but unsecured,
amongst our credit-checked slumber lies.

But all things come to The Reaper.  The System
is starved and is biting back hard with a sickening
crunch on the hand that feeds it.
The elaborate glass houses of his markets were
always fragile and they’re shaking in the growing
winter storm of a new world order.  The mistral wind
is blowing with hurricane strength from the mid-west
and chilling the bones of the greedy and immoral who had
grown too fat and short-sighted to run away.

The rumble as it blows up from the bottom of the food chain
is flapping the emperor’s clothes and
tearing away at the flimsy skirts so that we can
all see a bloated belly which has dined too
long on the guts of the have-nots and snacked
on the flesh of the not-so-lucky.

Not so lucky for us all now.  Cashman knows.

We’ll never be the same, it’ll even out no
matter how hard he squeezes the last drops
of blood from the carcasses of his victims.
His staple diet is poisoned by inattention,
self-deceit, idiotic, reckless distrusting collusion
and a placing of greedy wealth before
collective social health.
For an age he turned his face away if he
thought we might stumble on our own spendthrift stupidity,
just so long as he increased his liquidity.
He killed all his cash cattle at the first
sign of danger and left himself nothing but
the desperate charity of a government running
scared from the wrath of a million beasts of
overburden.

The shock of the new is coming, and it’s
coming for the cashman, the shock of the new
is coming and for once: it’s his turn too.