[Niggs]

About quality of experience and how every day, taken for granted activities can take on a ritualistic form that 'can' be to some rewarding. For example morning coffee, we can throw some freeze dried instant in a mug, add hot water and drink. Or we can grind the beans, get out the stove top Moka pot, boil the water, let it infuse and pour it into a favourite coffee cup (perhaps to the gentle sound of Chopin). The point is to derive as much pleasure as possible from a simple act. In this example one can smell the coffee more intensely, for longer, there is time to ponder ideas for a new poem, all is calmed and the more times such an act is performed the greater we derive pleasure from it.



I have lived well this day
ignoring the hand offering me more time
while it’s accomplice steals joy and
experience in return.
I seized the day !
But once in my grasp I cherished it,
savouring it’s flavours,
sensing every nuance,
finding hidden treasures,
gifts unwrapped,
and it was glorious.

Sonnet 19

That our today will so soon yester be
does enrage those who prefer breeze to gale
yet we who have weathered the savage sea
fear not the Goodnight of a fading frail.
We welcome the swift passage of the day
and grasping the hours with a fervent hold
live so fiercely that time enjoys no sway
and the heavens smile at such burning bold.
Choose not to wither slow upon the vine
but blossom bright and reaching for the sky
make demand that the sun will ever shine
for those standing proud and yearning to fly.
And when tired eyelids make that final meet
our weary self will that sleep calmly greet.


A long ago Boxing day midnight


Sleet falls,
revealed it’s glass tacks by the gleam
of shop window lights,
their passive hue, lying in wait,
luring and taunting with their wares,
their false promise of pleasure.
Garbed in red flash heraldry
stand plastic alabaster faces, lifeless,
wearing the vacant stares
of marketed beauty.
Above, swing huge stars,
ember dim, brazen under truth’s dark radiance,
while santas cling to lamp posts as
though nature itself is
laughing at this, man’s frail crayon
attempt to lift from the mire
the concrete bland.
Like a gutter metronome, a wine glass,
rolls to and fro, smudges, ghosts of
lips and fingers past, appear with each clink
in a constant toast. Intact, it must
have been carefully placed,
yet stolen to drink in the street,
now a monument to dichotomy.
Half a cracker, hops and tumbles past,
odd when not strewn among
postprandial detritus.
This empty crepe wrapped shell,
in that moment,
in that desolate street,
symbolised all that
Christmas had lost.

[Teresa56]

Thank you for posting this - I especially loved the last poem. And your introductory words made me think of a book from long ago, 'Chop Wood Carry Water'...holding the small acts and 'work' of life as sacred. Reading your words this morning changed my day.

[kicker]

Niggs,
You make me stop and think. Thank you.

[Atticus]

I saw a Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix over two nights this week, I couldn't stomach one sitting. The dialogue in the drive to the parent's house is electrifying, and this poem is read, bleakly, beautifully, in full by the actress Jessie Buckley. It is worth watching the film just for the opening section or maybe the first hour.

Bonedog

A poem by Eva H.D.

[transcribed from its appearance in the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things (w/d Charlie Kaufman, 2020)]

___

Coming home is terrible
whether the dogs lick your face or not;
whether you have a wife
or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.
Coming home is terribly lonely,
so that you think
of the oppressive barometric pressure
back where you have just come from
with fondness,
because everything’s worse
once you’re home.

You think of the vermin
clinging to the grass stalks,
long hours on the road,
roadside assistance and ice creams,
and the peculiar shapes of
certain clouds and silences
with longing because you did not want to return.
Coming home is
just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds
contribute to nothing
but the general malaise.
Clouds, such as they are,
are in fact suspect,
and made from a different material
than those you left behind.
You yourself were cut
from a different cloudy cloth,
returned,
remaindered,
ill-met by moonlight,
unhappy to be back,
slack in all the wrong spots,
seamy suit of clothes
dishrag-ratty, worn.

You return home
moon-landed, foreign;
the Earth’s gravitational pull
an effort now redoubled,
dragging your shoelaces loose
and your shoulders
etching deeper the stanza
of worry on your forehead.
You return home deepened,
a parched well linked to tomorrow
by a frail strand of…

Anyway…

You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.
One might as well, at a time…

Well…
Anyway…
You’re back.

The sun goes up and down
like a tired whore,
the weather immobile
like a broken limb
while you just keep getting older.
Nothing moves but
the shifting tides of salt in your body.
Your vision blears.
You carry your weather with you,
the big blue whale,
a skeletal darkness.

You come back
with X-ray vision.
Your eyes have become a hunger.
You come home with your mutant gifts
to a house of bone.
Everything you see now,
all of it:
bone.

[Atticus]

I found the clip on YouTube


bonedog peom from i'm thinking of ending things - YouTube