Author Archives: gareth roi jones

Day 24 – April Twenty Four: spit-spot off to bed

I’m reading the biography of P.L.Travers (the woman who created Mary Poppins) – it’s a wonderful rich inspiring book (unlike Disney’s saccharine superficial movie).  It sparks, tingles, fires & inspires so many ideas which I dash off as I read. This is the best of them from today.

night terrors

The children are frightened
of ceiling cracks
creaking radiators
& hot water services
which sizzle in the night

We calm them
with ancient tales
of transformation
flights against the sun
forest witches, & other grims

*****

 mary poppins

Day 23 – April Twenty Three: venting

April 23. St George’s Day. Famous day. Not the Shakespeare 450th birthday anniversary poem I was working on, but something more pressing & urgent.

In the Dark

Dear Power Company,

As I sit here
Surrounded
By candles
But mostly
In the dark
I just have
One question
How can you
Disconnect
My power
Without access
To the inside
Of the house
But you cannot
Reconnect it
The same way
The meter
Hasn’t moved
Since yesterday
When you shut
It off
You bunch
Of cocks.

Yours etc

PS Don’t think
I’m paying
The after hours
Call out fee
For this!

PS 2 sorry Bill
Your poem
Was looking
good too 

 

 

April 21 – Day Twenty-One: odes to the olds

Day 21. Still at farm.  2 poems inspired by my parents. Sorry the second one is a bit long, I didn’t have time to write a short one. I think they’re humorous, even if my folks don’t haha.

1.
Woman on Hill

my mother crabs across the horizon
slow pegging sheets & beach towels
a gangly crustacean 
in a shabby dressing gown
her apparent aim
to block my view of the dawn

as retaliation
i roll over
turning away from
the surreal seascape
outside the window
& return to sleep

2.
Man in Well

today’s task: to reboard a well
the encasing earth is trying to reclaim
it’s a bigger job than he remembers
(he lured me here with the proviso,
it would only take a couple of hours
however, years of such requests
have taught me scepticism)

we measure the depth: 13 feet to the water
13 more beyond to the bottom
(the ladder only reaches 16)
after the mandatory jokes about
him “accidentally” falling in
& me destroying the latest will
he claims I’ve been written out of
we begin our bodgy job
tying ladders off against the wall
so they hang precariously
swinging tools down on bits of string
& clambering around, climbing up & down
we prop, we strut, we hammer, we nail
we brace, we saw, we dig, we board off

eventually getting the job done in reasonable fashion
did better than I thought we might, another admission
his couple of hours raging into five
the black jokes about hammers accidentally
dropping on his head or the safety rope snapping
endure for the duration of the operation
& made marginally more poignant
by the discovery half way through
a five foot long brown snake
has either chosen, or fallen, to make
the water his home (most likely the later)
& would swiftly finish him off
if the fall did not

*****

well

Image moi: Looking into the hole, pre-bodgy-fixup (if you look closely the snake is on the float on the bottom left  corner)

April 22 – Day Twenty Two: night visitors

Disturbing visitors last night inspired this. NB this still isn’t on word press despite being back in town is because I got back to discover my electricity has been disconnected. The glamorous life of the poet.

The Outsiders

I’m the proverbial snug bug in a rug
Bedcurled, thriller-reading when the attack begins
Intimate thunder that sounds far off
Yet feels close, frantic rain beating, never falling

As the numbers build, so too the sound
The fury, dive bombers splatting glass
On the neighbouring mesh screen, maniacal harpists
Frenetic playing to appease the wild god of light

Again & again they bash themselves
Over & over they wingertip strum
Till they fall to the ground, broken

There turn violent circles, overwound
tops hypercharged on red bull
Tyre smoking donuts by kamikaze hot rods

Already dying, despite only abandoning
Brownpaper sleeping bags hours ago

If the desire to embrace fire is so intense
Why not fly, Icarus like, at the sun

By the time dawn arrives, silver light filtered

By low clouds, dozens of wing-wrapped coffins

Sleep on

Concrete

*****

moth

Image moi. 

April 20 – Day Twenty: scottish inspiration

The following text is what I posted on fb that day.  Just realised I haven’t posted Day 20 – NaPoWriMo here. Came onto fb over an hour ago & got sucked into a quagmire of Easter posts, funny cat vids, ghost cars & a Guardian article “Top 10 Easter scenes in literature” which lead to several other Guardian articles I read until POEM OF THE WEEK Monday 7 October 2013.

The picture accompanying this online poem led me to write my own poem on a similar theme to Butlin (but less eloquently) & abandon the poem I had been thinking about/working on for much of the day.

Princes Street
(Holding its cup out to “Nicolson Square” by Ron Butlin)

Frozen on the silvermirrored ground
& in diamond focused digital clarity
Behind us the steeples stepladdering souls
to heaven are fuzzy & drizzlefaded
Hands buried in jacket pockets
Or, better, gloved
Under the brolley, from beneath the hood, or beret
We all look without looking, from the corner of our hearts

We know she’s there, but if we pretend she’s not
We can continue our golden walk to work, unencumbered

She, huddling in her shrugged shrunken hug
has one red glove on her lap
Perhaps to better emphasise bare finger tips
holding the paper cup
Her eyeshadow sockets stare off
somewhere at knee height but at no-one’s knees
However, the detail I’m most drawn to is,
that, the edge of her dirtybrown blanket is wet

*****

The city and the city … a woman begs on Princes Street in Edinburgh.

Image: Princes St.  Source Page: The Guardian, Poem of the Week: Ron Butlin.

April 19 – Day Nineteen: the theme continues

Still at country retreat. Same Word Press issue.

This came in a white hot rush & has barely been touched.  It’s almost Day 18: part 2. Or draft two. Or whatever. It’s a better poem than yesterday’s, that’s for sure. Was posted on fb 11 hours before midnight!!! I was impressed.

On at least one level the inspiration for today’s poem should be obvious.

Tomb

Buried. In darkness. Alone.
Wake surrounded. By the scent of aloes.
& bitter perfumes. All is dark, cold. Every
atom aches. Every muscle. Wine soaked.
Sinew & bone. I am sore. To my core.

The air smells. Mushrooms. Liquorice,
Damp smouldering wood. Eat the aloe.
Make myself sick. Eject the poison.
Wounded. In dark places I dwell. Alone
In a cave. Just me. & my angels.

*****

2014-04-24 09.53.56-8

April 18 – Day Eighteen: Easter ghosts

I saved a bunch of articles I was planning to use/explore in poetic form during NaPoWriMo. Yet almost every day, something more “personal” gets in the way.  Good Friday (the day this was written, was one of them.)  This poem was written in the car on the drive between Adelaide & my parents’ farm.

When I re-read the poem for the first time since posting it on fb almost a week ago, the irony is, the poem itself has a huge hole. The one thing I always think about at Easter is not including, other than through indirect allusions.  Maybe it works, maybe it needs to be addressed in May, when NaPoWriMo is over & the editing process can begin on all these half begun, half completed poetical sketches.  I want to tweak it even now, but will save that for later & repost as first put onto fb.


What I think of when I think of Easter

Looking over the litany of Easters past
I recall very few moments of chocolates & egg hunts 
Haunted by decades of bright eyed moons

Floating down houseboat rivers, discovering cunnilingus
Climbing cliffs, faking falls, tomato sauce for blood
Church surfing with fish laughing at services
Glorious joyous days before he finally died
Driving overnight interstate thinking I was driving to true love
Some lost at the bottom of a bottle
Crashing cars in suburban streets
Several lazy long weekends at the farm
Amusing my nieces, annoying the rest
Walking with a black dog, before meeting my souldog

Tonight the moon’s a ruddy oblong egg
Low, ghosting the hills, as I drive north
What is life but a succession of wounds
Public crucifixions, little deaths, lying in darkness
Trapped beyond stone, & eventually rising to do it all again

What pains me are the holes
Years I can’t remember – when I’m the only constant
No other person or thing to act as yardstick
& the holes

Lovers lost, friends forgotten, children never held

*****

blood_moon_by_darkriderdlmc-d4rzhrg

Image: Dark Moon by darkriderdlmc @ deviantart.com

~interlude~

Apologies to those following this blog for the absence of new poems over the past 6 days. This was unexpected owing to three factors:

1, being away from my wonderful study over Easter
2, while being away, being unable to remember my WordPress password to be able to log in via iPad (the method by which I intended to fulfil my posting duties)
3, returning from Easter Long weekend away to discover my power had been disconnected, followed the next day by my phone (apparently large multinational companies don’t take too kindly to financially struggling poets not paying their bills!) Both are now reinstated & the catch up will begin.

The good news is, I kept writing over those days, posting each day directly as a Facebook status instead of linking this page to fb.  So it shouldn’t take too long to update everything.

Let the deluge begin! 

April 17 – Day Seventeen: dreams of you

Well yesterday’s experiment didn’t quite get the response I was hoping for.  Hahaha, oh well.  (There’s still time to go back & play if you want to.  Read Day 16 & comment at the end for a chance to win a special prize – it has to be on my blog, fb & twitter comments don’t count.)

Maybe that’s why writing today was tough. I was a bit down. Tried a few things. Messaged a friend in the states just as he’d woken from a bad dream (it was 3am in Maryland).  We talk a bit about bad dreams. I never have them (though I have woken myself up from laughing in my dreams & in my body at the same – glorious sensation – although I think it’s how the dali lama must feel). Tried to write about that, meh! Tried to write about my friend’s scary dream of being left alone, meh.

Then this came out. Of nowhere. Not sure I understand it. Pretty sure I like it.

Shades

Half-woken scraps of you swirl round
the half sunrisen gloom of my room
through tannin-thick wetpaper-thin skull

Like souls of men recently killed
on a battlefield, afraid to leave

We have not spoken in two weeks
keep eyes closed as long as I can
these torments all I have of you

A herd of cats claw my legs
tripping me, demanding to be fed

For while I only half-remember
the dreams, I’m reluctant
to relinquish what little I have

So I leave the black shroud cloth
covering my eyes & drift

It is a prism refracting weak light
each intersection of weft & weave
it’s own rainbow link to another world

Opaque, shiny as an insect’s eye
Then. I. Don’t. Care.

*****

 hidden_eyes_beauty_2_by_bayhor-d5k5p14 copy

April 16 – Day Sixteen: one of the games i want to play (finally had time)

For those playing at home, here is the first of the games I was hoping to get to for NaPoWriMo — both for me & for you. It’s been exhausting … but a blast!

First.  I’m not telling you what inspired these set of poems. That’s the first part of the game. I’d like folks to comment below when they think they have worked out what I’ve done. Heehee. The first person to correctly comment will receive a special prize — AS PART OF NaPoWriMo.  I’m excited anyways.  NB there are technically three parts to what I’ve done, but I’ll not be too picky. Bonus points, however, if all three are correctly answered.

Second. The poem which has the most comments in support of it, will be used to generate the final image for today’s post.  (& sure this could backfire & no one comments, but meh, you gotta try these things out! But I hope people do vote, cos I have such a cool idea for the image …)

Happy guessing … 🙂

 

ur:title
part i

a.
summer of secrets
april witch, silver wattle
the blood of flowers
i’m a believer
i, my beautiful friend
i the divine, the virgin
shall we dance?

 

b.
the last summer (of you & me)
you or someone like you
a blind man can see how much
i love you the city of falling
angels, the bay of angels
the indigo sky, the moon
in the water, swim the moon, a web
of dreams slow love, a distant land
the landscape of love
the scared art
of stealing how
to become an angel

exodus, exodus
not the end of the world

 

c.
tin toys
silences long gone
wise children
burning bright
suspension

the gift of speed

leading the cheers
strange days
tender
a chance acquaintance
the facts speak for themselves

 

d.
black mulberries  jacaranda blue
the stolen child  where i was from
fires in the dark  the sealed letter
lambs of god  the perfect sinner
small acts of kindness  the madness
of love  burning bright  animal instincts
from here to paternity

 

e.
tales of burning love
the secrets of a fire king
the smoke jumper
the little book
the broken world
the lake of dreams
the girl who would speak for the dead
the rules of attraction
a good & happy child

 

f.
cold mountain  dragon
dancing  the clouds
beneath the sun
air kisses  standing
in the rainbow
a million little pieces
flying the coop

 

g.
a sweet obscurity  behind the silence
the pure weight of the heart
tasting salt  where you find it
the flaw of love  the summer i dared
i wish someone were waiting for me somewhere

 

h3.
barefoot the transit
of venus snow
mountain passage
and the mountains
echoed the falling

woman
stargazer stargazing
a thousand
splendid suns

the absence
of night dreams
of sleep dancing
on thorns

 

i.
lily,
white

 

j.
the broken book
the colony of unrequited
dreams requiem

 

k.
sweet miseries: the history of love
small crimes in an age of abundance
up in the air: in the company of angels

the moon under her feet: the storyteller
the vintner’s luck: this charming man
the other side of the story: measuring the world

trespassing

 

l.
the new dark age  the debt of pleasure
i know this much is true  the hour i first believed
a dream come true  if the moon smiled

imaginary friends
the seduction of silence
the given day  feast of all souls

girls night out  fresh girls  gifted  lost
under the volcano
the hope

 

m.
oh pure and radiant heart
the speech of angels
cage of stars  oxygen
evening  end of the night girl
this side of brightness
the last town on earth
the deep end of the ocean
twelve times blessed
lost nation
chronicler of the winds
the colour of water
afloat  south of the river
a dry spell  simply heaven
farewell princess
so long see you tomorrow
child against gravity
no ordinary love story
a god for the killing

promise not to tell
promise not to tell

 

*****

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