Saturday, November 14, 2009

bleak house music



Last night's attempt at poetry stank, quite frankly.
I woke up this morning and pulled the chain.
Not being one to flush the baby with the bath water,
I was loathe to disengage for the want of crying.

Spilt milk; gluey sex; oil pastels; empty bottles.

Bleeding containers of takeaway food. Sour spoils.

Ah well. I am inured enough to weekend ill tidings.
Salvation armies march on their stomachs. There is
a circle of concientious objectors stamping on mine:
pantomime sergeants; Presbyterian whingers.


Abandon your instruments of hope all ye who enter.
There's not a dry eye or house around here for miles.

5 comments:

Your driver said...

Hell, I thought it was alright. I got the impression you were trying something new. Thank God we are not professionals here.

ib said...

Damn. You are saying that just to goad me.

If we were professionals, I might just try and pass it off as "disposable poetry" or something snappy.

@eloh said...

A lot of times I don't sign on, I just read...so this is the third header you had for this post.

Go ahead and write... not like we'll take your sandwich away if we don't like it.

Chances are we'll like it.

Your driver said...

Or, as my friend Quinton likes to say, "Even if they can kill you. They can't eat you."

ib said...

Well, of course. Editing one's own shit is a dangerous pastime. And when you're dead their knives and forks can't do much worse than hack.

It's oddly flattering when people notice my attempts to discipline closed ranks of letters. Let alone make sense of it in the first instance.

I see our educational establishment is poised to to introduce computer software already used to apply SAT scores in the US. A disturbing development. Not only is used to grade multiple choice papers, but it is defended as a means of assessing creative writing.

Fuck me. Some Tzars apparently dropped Hemmingway, William Golding, and a couple of others into the system just to see how they might prevail. Like something straight out of a Philip K. Dick anthology.

"Boring. Repetitive. Below Average." the machines calculated and spat back out.

Well, alright. Now we know where we stand. George W. Bush is concise and provocative; Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new cyborg poet laureate; Kofi Annan is true to his word.

Fuck 'em. I am seriously tempted to drop my kids out of the system entirely and head for the hills. Well, not really. I am too much of a lazy sod and prone to procrastinate. But. I look at my son and wonder.