The poet contemplates the inescapable nature of the class system
A Richter moment of tectonic rock came
when I heard the voice of smug middle class
speaking through me. A mythic, conceited Volvo
blonde used me as her blank-eyed dummy,
stuck lovely manicure up me and made me say
‘The guinea pigs don’t like asparagus!’.
My ears could not believe my mouth’s betrayal,
the change marked by that simple recipe.
The seesaw tipped, sudden rodeo bucking,
swung away from student furniture of bricks,
stray cushions and ideas, towards clogging
superannuation of risotto and good red.
Class catches us like butterflies, or half-frozen slugs,
which we pick, so carefully, from our organic greens.
P.S. Cottier
No telling who that poet might be, but I used to have guinea pigs…And how’s that for a catchy title, by the way?
Muffet cc licence 2.0 (Wiki Commons)
On mistakes
March 31, 2016
So you’ve laboured over a poem, and it’s as near to finished as it will ever be. So you upload it and pay the fee for a comp, and sit back and have a cup of tea (or coffee, or wine, depending on the time).
So you realise that you sent a draft, and that draft was over the line limit. So you refill the form with the proper poem uploaded, and ask if it can be substituted. So you kick your computer and yourself. So you don’t know if the poem will be disqualified. So you may never know!
So you have a glass of wine, and stuff the time. Wine is the only cure for idiocy.
So you are not as celebratory as the woman in the picture.
UPDATE: So on the way down to your favoured wine place, you remember that you are picking up your daughter from school later on, and therefore, that you can’t drink. Let middle class sulking erupt like an erupty thing! (You maintain you are working class, but people tend to laugh when you say that.) So you vent on your blog like a whingey Vesuvius.
UPDATIER: The lovely administrators have accepted the second submitted version of my poem. Drinking in celebration is so much nicer! (Please read with slightly slurred eyes.)
Tuesday poem: Glassy eyed
March 21, 2016
Glassy eyed
She wraps herself in air, mere
scent and breeze and rumour,
and perches on the nearest branch
to hear the evening’s chat.
Invisible, except when the youngest child,
not quite doomed to prose,
holds a kaleidoscope to open window,
bored with the inexplicable gush
that parents call a conversation —
a strange animal dressed in beige
that sometimes flares to angry orange.
And amongst the leaves of glassy,
clipped punctuation, caught in a cylinder
of found poetry, the girl sees a pellucid
curve, bending towards the house,
and knows it to be outside the scope
of parental chat or cunning toy.
A shimmering crescent perched
between the eucalyptus leaves,
the eager figure bends towards the hum,
a stingless bee, muted hint of dragonfly.
Shaking her toy and her mousy hair,
the girl turns away, back to the easy
world of solids, and lumpy certainty.
Outside, a quiet sigh augments the wind,
and gossamer wings unfurl to flight.
P.S. Cottier
You can’t have too many fairy poems, in my opinion. Well you probably can, but I quite like this; and it’s nice not to always be writing angry poems about politics or climate change or mass extinctions.
Are fairies an endangered species? Discuss in two thousand words or fewer.
Tuesday Poem: Nothing continued to happen
February 29, 2016
Nothing continued to happen
until Nothing yawned
and wrapped himself
in a thick blank shawl
of mere nothingness.
An Emperor of Nothing,
the Prince of Nomark,
he went on simply not being
Nothing very much at all.
P.S. Cottier
As my energy levels are low (although not quite down to nothing) at the moment I thought I might post this wee poem about nothing very much at all. You know it makes nonsense.
Some more sensible poets are still posting substantial things. Why not have a look?
Tuesday Poem: Up
February 15, 2016
Up
To look up from cracks
to see two joined
fifty years by love,
cemented into couple,
completed by time;
To feel sudden sun’s lick
render you gerbera,
face stroked by light petal
eight minutes old
caressed by time;
To see dog raise hairy flag
of flesh and wag
a fan in smell-poem air,
simple and clear,
careless of time;
is joy.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this ages ago and can’t remember if it’s been published. Not on My List, so probably not! (My List is all the publications and awards I’ve had, and is a kind of memoir. But listier and with rather less angst.)
A simple poem with a bit of repetition for those who like that sort of thing. The dog in the photo likes the same line of poetry being thrown out again and again. We’d call it a stick.
Click this link to see which poets are posting on Tuesdays.
PS Cottier 