Day 22 — The Lord of the Fools + LOTR

Over the course of a month lots of ideas get tested & abandoned. Several lines in this poem were previously homeless yet coagulated into this one. As for the Poetic Factoid Poem — Warning. There’s a big *BIG* TRIGGER WARNING on this one for people who don’t feel/think they’re as old as they really are.

*****

Lord of the Fools

dirt beneath my nails
clawing the claybanks
for your return

dream of trees

a lifetime to learn
the dead do not
dance back to life
on the whim
of a lonely man

a mere heart beat
to make it proof

can’t craft the words
the way my brain feels them

impossible imposter

need to learn another language
to remember how to speak my own

lost days

try drowning myself
in every river

but even there i’m evicted

*****

Day 22 — TIL something deeply disturbing about the Lord of the Rings films

the Lord of the Wrinkles

i. meme
read a brutal meme
today which said
Viggo Mortensen
is the same age
Ian McKellen was
when he played
Gandalf.

NO, I AM NOT OKAY
I CANNOT POET
ANY MORE TODAY
SORRY! GOODBYE!!

ii. data
naturally, being a fool
i had to check
the veracity
of cursed meme
— turns out
it’s even worse
Aragorn’s older
than Gandalf
was at the end
of Return of the King!

time for a cuppa & a lie down

Principal photography 11 October 1999 — 22 December 2000
with pick-up shots done from 2001 to 27 June 2003.

Viggo born October 20, 1958 (current age 64)
45 when started filming, 49 when finished

Ian born 25 May 1939 (current age 83)
60 when started filming, 64 when finished

Day 24 – glory (& well, more glory)

Thoughts which have been broiling round in my brain while driving round the Barossa these past few weeks as Vintage wraps up, have finally coalesced into a reasonable poem. (After a bit of a biological brush up on the process of leaf colour changing.)

*****

senescence

i
with the arrival of mechanical harvesters
the Valley lost much of its vivid autumnal charm.
over violent shaking of the vines strips a quarter
or more of the leaf cover & startles the remainder
into a state of shock. though improved technology
has recently reduced the trauma & restored slightly
the brilliant explosions, breathtaking feast-your-eyes
yellow-golds, gorgeous scarlets, cheekblushing-crimsons,
redhued-rubies, winedark-purples, outrageous-oranges.
but still, slowly, the old ways die.

ii
a smilier malaise is affecting the less prevalent,
but still present, deciduous population. normally
as daylight declines & the nights grow long & cold,
chlorophyll production slows as plants recycle
& ship to storage those molecules ready for next season.
the domineering chlorophyll, no longer in the ascendancy
allows the always-present but lushly masked
complex chemistry compounds called carotenoids,
yellows & oranges, to have their moment in the sun
(as it were); before the red, pink, & purple pigments
responsible for sunscreen, light protection & pest prevention
kick in to complete the slow motion fireworks display.

iii
but this year’s long dry summer means unhealthy
water-stressed trees seem to be cutting their losses
carte blanche by snap-drying then rapidly dumping
instabrown dry paperwisps; terraforming the sky
to the same dusty brown as the droughtbaked dirt
it mirrors

BONUS POEM: April 24, 2018

A place Mum & I had to visit. & somewhere I think I’d love to live.

2019 EDIT: minor tweaks to improve flow, rejambed enjambment, & various images given extra bite. All in all, at least a 50% better poem than previous incarnation.

*****

sitting on the Doc’s step

after driftwalking
half in the world
the rest in my own head ;
limbo rambling in
artfully framed narrative ;
& the much messier
more inconveniently laid
out reality ; I sit on
his fake slate step —
wanting ; wishing ; hoping
to someday leave
such a through
looking-glass legacy
for other daytrip
dreamers

Day 05 – the moon (& too much travel)

Another one of those last minute ring-ins (it is one of the blessings of NaPoWriMo — firing up the creative cogs after something of a lull).

After pottering round with two others pomes for varying parts of the day, this one roared at me about 45 minutes to midnight. There are other myths/folklores I would have like to have worked in but I stopped tweaking at midnight.

NOTE: the formatting may be a bit out of whack: Wordpress doesn’t cope too well with unusually spaced lines. That said, it is meant to be staggered, messy, abstract.

*****

the many things we see in the moon

over millennia in the long night darkness
human eyes, seeking patterns, discover them:

a weaving woman;
clusters of laurel trees;
an elephant jumping off a cliff;
  a girl
with a basket on her back;
many rabbits:
one working a mortar & pestle;
two fiery,
one self-sacrificing,
& one thrown into a sun;
yet one more carried by a crane;
innumerable frogs & toads:
   an immortal
goddess hiding
   in the likeness of a toad,
another hiding
   from a wolf,
   a marriage
broker for a Sky Maiden …

but of course it’s none of these
— it’s the Man in the Moon
sometimes carrying a bundle of wood
sometimes just his face (though many
Pacific Islander peoples see a woman)

the real mystery is comprehending how
others could see such bizarre things
when our interpretation is clearly correct

BONUS POEM: April 5, 2018

Mine haven’t arrived yet, but I’m sure we won’t be like this. Probably needs a good edit which I don’t have time for (sorry for long pome, I didn’t have time to write a short one 😁 NOTE: this incarnation, edited)

*****

Pax Familia

visiting endless iterations
of the long dead past
taxes the best of us
today I touristed more
   tears, tantrums & hissy fits
   pleas to be carried
   how much longer whines
   and demands to go home
than
   statues
   artwork
   or archaeological knick-knacks

despite non fluency in your tongue
I get you are
tense annoyed fully aggro
or just plain over it

such is the beauty
of traveling solo
no one to blame
for arriving late
getting lost
taking too long to decide

no, I never do those things
have never done anything so foolish

Day 28 – April Twenty Eight: over the top obits

Some months ago, one of the finest actors of our/any generation died after an incident with drugs went wrong. At the time there was much speculation about what caused it. There was also an abundance of slightly sickly, sentimentalising of “the soul of the tortured artist”.

Back then, I PDFed a few of the finer examples I read. Today I tweaked & played with some of the more sick & sycophantic phrases, shaping them into a homage to suffering. (I have not acknowledged my sources, for fear of embarrassing them.)

I ran out of time to finish it, but there’s something there I like.

Beautiful Helplessness

addiction haunts every artist
barely disciplined helplessness
we’re all familiar with darknesses force
if we keep the poison away, the elixir is lost
if we had everything there would be love, no desire
art mends what life shatters, so escape into our creations
torment & talent are inseparable

all the d words appear
drugs, done in a dark places in despair?
artists who’ve done deals with their demons
or rather rock star hubris, deliberately courting death
an arrogant doubtlessness they’re above the rules, above odds

the Faustian pact where only utter self-annihilation suffices

hostage possession obsession carnage

the price of prodigious creative vitality is premature & public mortality
fleeing from pain, transfigurance enables endurance of suffering
solitude & uncertainty are part & parcel of artistic expression.

banal
romantic
hyperbolic
tosh

not all great artists suffer

*****

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gareth roi's playful poetry place

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Tag Archives: art

Day 22 — The Lord of the Fools + LOTR

Day 24 – glory (& well, more glory)

Day 05 – the moon (& too much travel)

Day 28 – April Twenty Eight: over the top obits

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