Tag Archives: NAPOWRIMO

Day 20 — winter sports + *bling*

Another poem inspired by my housemate’s weekend activities, writing sitting, baking, as my iPhone screen overheated. I love today’s Factoid.

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Round 2: winter sports

admittedly it’s been over 30 years
since i last donned the sprigs 
& dashed out into the mud
as bewildered teenage boy
in the middle of his gap year 
on his way to university 
still terribly uncertain 
of his own personality, his destiny 

however 

one thing for certain
neverever sunburned
watching or playing 
winter sports before 
like i did today 
sitting on the sidelines
tentatively keeping score
through the heat haze

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Day 20 – TIL I’ve gone back to a fact I found a couple of days that I just couldn’t let go.

*bling*

one page told me
pirates believed
gold earrings 
improved 
their eyesight

& i didn’t seek 
corroboration
because i so want
this to be true
i’d be crushed if it wasn’t

Day 19 — Reef + 10,000

Love a good pun. & irony. So ironical puns. Brilliant. Even if the topic is depressing as hell & makes me want to drink bleach.

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Great Barrier Grief

Australians are experts in irony
(& coaly, but that’s a different topic) 
hence why we’ve built a mega-massive 
coal transport terminal on the coast
bordering the Great Barrier Reef 
the only living structure visible from space

hey! we gotta get these coal-filled 
show boats to China & Indonesia somehow

— it’s not our fault there’s a few bits of coral in the way 

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Day 19 – TIL about reefs

10,000 years 

by midcentury, pretty much every reef 
in the world will be crumbling ruins

— gone after enduring 250 million years

in a blink of geological time, they’ll return
but it’ll be 10,000 years before we see a reef again

— assuming “we” even survive ourselves 

Day 18 — vision + OH&S for our eyes

The book of poetry I read yesterday was a welcome relief. Winning Words: Inspiring Poems for Everyday Life this book really does live up to its blurb. Reading/researching climate change can be extremely depressing/debilitating. There’s a lot of hard work to be done … & it really does feel like a near impossible task. But reading so many of these poems made me feel excited & alive & tingled with hope & optimism & what not. So I wanted to try capturing that in my poem. 

I tied it in with a wonderful Joel Pett cartoon which became a meme in its own right. A disgruntled man right up the back of the auditorium of a Climate summit asks fellow conference goer a frustrated question. Only the first verse is shared.

The Poetic Factoid is a perfect example of the form. Me being silly.

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vision
What if it’s a big hoax & we create a better world for nothing?

What if we : take better care : of our home : of the natural world
. : value it : appreciate it for what it is : rather than what it can give us
What if we : redress : past inequalities : lift people out of poverty :
. : end the immorality : of billionaires
What if we : make the world : fairer : for every human 
. : regardless : of which country : they call home
. : remove the reasons : people flee their homelands

…

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Day 18 – TIL about OH&S for your vision 

20-20-20 vision 

when working at our screens
apparently we should 
be employing
the 20-20-20 rule

look at something twenty 
feet away every twenty 
minutes for twenty 
seconds

turns out i’ve been doing this for years
but bosses got made at me
called it — daydreaming!

Day 17 — fallow + souls

The Climate Change book I finished today concludes with several chapters on fertility — both the earth’s & the author’s. In so doing she mentions a beautiful word I have long loved & long wanted to use in a poem. That word is fallow. The poem isn’t quite there, though the verse I’m gonna share, is close. It also prompted a parallel poem instead of a Poetic Factoid.

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fallow

by growing single crops super-intensively
the brutal industrial-agricultural industry
has abandoned an ancient methodology
for keeping the earth fertile — they forget fallow

so desperate are they for continuous every increasing
crop yields they dump on (usually chemical) fertiliser, irrigate heavily 
& dump more chemicals on to kill the weeds, insects & other pests 
that thrive on monoculture

more traditional agricultural societies 
use natural methods to maintain soil fertility 
including allowing fields to lie fallow 
rest, regenerate and re-submit energy into the soil
often by planting nitrogen-fixing legumes 
like beans into a variety of crops grown side by side. 

but even if the moderns can’t do this
they can allow fields to rest fallow
let the dirt grow dormant, 
go quiet, move more slow
rest recuperate recharge

fallow also works in humans

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Day 17 A special +1 poem

A love poem with a difference. 100 years.

fallowsoul

Souls, like farm fields,
need to lie fallow for a time
before returning richer than before
so rest now in that far off fallow gold sea
— & may we meet again in the years that follow

Day 16 — missing fish + a trilogy of fish fun facts

There’s lots of research concerning the devastation caused by BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon 3 month long oil leak around the Gulf of Mexico. This poem, explores one of the least reported/appreciated consequences. One which didn’t make the news cycle because the effects weren’t felt for three, four, five years — but the experts, the fishermen of the gulf knew what was happening. [3 longish verses aren’t being published.]

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missing fish

missing fish don’t make 
the news ; there’s no dramatic footage

no bodies wash onto beaches
just thousands of bubbles of nothing

following BP’s deepwater disaster
fish embryos didn’t grow

…

missing fish don’t make 
the news … but they should

*****

Day 16 – TIL a lot of fish related fun facts. (Ironically, at this point last year I wrote my flamingo triptych which was one of the highlight poems of last season. Today I find myself with lots & lots of fish facts, so I decided to replicate the idea.)

fish triptych

i. 
something odd (& gross) is happening 
in the waters of Britain
— a third of all male fish are changing 
sex due to human sewage pollution

ii. 
Atlantic hagfish produce enough slime 
in a minute to fill a bucket — no, no
i don’t care about the size of the bucket
that’s all the information i need, cheers

iii.
fish “speak” using a variety 
of low-pitched sounds 

they grunt : moan : & boom ; hiss : 
& whistle ; croak : creak : shriek : & wail

they rattle bones : gnash teeth
noisemake by jiggling muscles : 

against : their swim bladder
— ahhh : kindred spirits : who knew?

Day 15 —  FOGhead + radar 

The Festival of Grief feels somewhat lessened this time around. Perhaps partly because I. of the publication of my poetry books last year. And II. Because only one date falls into Na/GloPoWriMo timeframe. And just for today I’m ignoring the Poetic Factoid component to write a second free form poetical sketch.

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FOGhead

My foggy head has ached all morning
& I cannot understand why
Grateful outside is a slow still day
The only anniversary this year
As Easter Sunday was the last 
Mad day of a manic March

I sit underneath the sunshine
& hear the multiplicity of birds 
Who share my trees carry on
Countless continuous conversations
Always moving through air urgent
To be some where they are not

Whereas it is my everlasting wish
To be wherever you are when you went

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Day 15 – TI Ignored the Poetic Factoid assignment 

interdimensional radar

as much as i want 
to take pain relief
to less the graine

i also don’t in case
it’s caused by you 
trying to get through

Day 14 — world peace + snow

Today’s poetry book was a collection of (second rate) haiku-poems. The author himself described them as haiku-poems to differentiate between them & traditional/proper haiku. So I likewise decided to attempt a few haiku-esque poetry today 1) because they’re short & I’m tired & 2) because I have a tendency to overwrite so forcing brevity is good. They’re based on a prompt: what’s standing in the way of world peace? They mostly adhere to the supposed traditional rules of haiku. Except for the Poetic Factoid. All were written based on notes taken over the past couple of weeks. 

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… in world peace’s way

i.
inequality
tax the rich right now
kill billionaires

ii.
dogma of all kinds
cold organised religion
believe & let believe

iii.
imaginary 
when superstition outweighs 
observable truth

iv.
lack of empathy
certainty in one’s rightness
apathy (too much)

v.
i’m 100% certain 99% of us just 
want quiet peaceful lives yet we let 
1% of sociopaths run everything

*****

Day 14 – TIL  how easy it is to cook the system when you’re tired

A “traditional” haiku
this line has five  beats
seven  syllables go here
back to five  now  snow

Day 13 — omnibus: bills + books

Foray into politics & legislation-passing. 

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Big Uglies

While I understand the need 
for bundling pieces of like-legislation
into the same bill so Parliament 
doesn’t get bogged down passing 
thousands of unique, highly specific laws;

too often omnibus bills: bury 
controversial provisions; complex &/or 
controversial material (not all of which 
might have been adequately 
debated in either of the houses);
or hide pork barrel clauses
amid the thousands of pages.

Furthermore, their sheer massiveness 
& often quick adoption timetable
prevents parliamentarians from informing 
themselves concerning all relevant issues.

To me — these Big Ugly bills ring Big Loud 
alarm bells every time they’re proposed …

*****

Day 13 – TI  disagree with Professor Tolkien

*Not 
One book to bring them all
   and in the omnibus bind them

conversely & perhaps unsurprisingly 
i’m also not a huge fan of omnibus 
editions when it comes to books

books previously published separately
should under no circumstances 
be brought together as one volume

& not just because the paper’s cheaper
to lower costs — or that they weigh as much
as two household bricks off their diet

but because they lose both elegance 
& individuality when crammed together
between the same two mass-market covers

& this even applies to The Lord of The Rings
(Tolkien only grudgingly allowed it published
as three volumes considering it one big book)

— to me three is the absolute perfect number
even if Book IV The Ring Goes East drags till Faramir
& The Return of the King does kinda give it all away

Day 12 — denial + heart is a muscle

*****

These guys have been in my poetic sights ever since I first read This Changes Everything. I regularly cite the key tenet of this poem in discussion with CC deniers.

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Heartlessland

i.
one of the most strident 
climate change deniers
is american conservative 

think tank — & i use
those words advisedly — 
the heartland institute 

by rabidly rejecting 
the scientific consensus 
on climate change it has done

perhaps more damage than
even the trillion dollar 
fossil fuel corporations

that put us here

ii.
to the surprise of no one
this organisation took the coin 
of tobacco giant philip morris

spent the 90s discrediting 
smoking’s health impacts, the risk 
of secondhand smoke & fighting smoking bans

i guess that says it all

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Day 12 – TI Wrote some heart poems as easy as shooting fish in a barrel 

miles & litres

supposedly my heart pumps 
almost 7 litres of blood around 

the over 60, 000 miles 
of blood vessels in my body

every. single. minute.

& i’ve driven each. & every 
one of them
                      twice. 
          looking for the slightest
   signpost
that you still love me

BONUS #1 — above average 

the average heart
beat of a woman 
is (on average) 
8 beats a minute faster 
than a man’s
— assuming it beats
at all

(i always said 
you weren’t average)

BONUS #2 — all I want for Xmas

each year more heart attacks occur
on Christmas Day than any other

Monday, likewise, has more cardiac assaults
than any other day of the week

Lookout 2028 emergency rooms
when Christmas falls on a Monday!

Day 11 — imposter + composter syndrome

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Reading It’s Not that Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World & Mikaela Loach talks about how not everyone in the movement needs to be a front line activist. Everyone has their role to plan … & grass roots movements only succeed if there’s a broad spectrum of supporters doing a range of roles. Which got me think. The Poetic Factoid started as a joke google, & I’m still not 100% sure if it’s a real thing, but I went with it anyway. 

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imposter 

for a long time : i’ve wanted : to do more : to be more : active : to fight harder : for the world : i want : the world : i believe : we all deserve : but at the same time : i’ve suffered : impostor syndrome : because : after all : what have i : really : got to offer : what do i know : of struggle : i’m a reasonably : well off white man : in a reasonably affluent society : who has more : than the majority of : most people on the planet : i want to speak up : but i fear my voice : or voices like it : have been heard : too much : for too long : already : & in many ways : is/are largely responsible : for the very mess : we’re in ; i want to whisper : but i’m different : but am i : after all : with all my : bundled up griefs : & rookie mistakes : blundering bumbling bumping through life : not deliberating setting : out to harm : but doing so : anyone : what good : after all : will my contribution : be : to the cause : to any cause : to all causes

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Day 11 – TIL about a potential self diagnosis

Composter syndrome

a psychological phenomenon affecting
compulsive individuals incredibly unlike me
who may exhibit the following characteristics:

i. obsessive attention: 
preoccupied with composting
that perfect balance of organic matter
temperature control, & moisture 

ii. perfectionism: 
always researching alternate techniques 
experimenting with multiple systems
striving for the ideal mix
composition, texture, & odour
& heartbroken when it fails 
to meet self-imposed standard

iii. waste management anxiety: 
deep responsibility concerning
environmental sustainability
heightened guilt when organic waste 
is discarded rather than transformed
into nutrient-rich compost

so very not me till i realised, last night
i accidentally peed on the compost heap

it was no moon dark & i’d taken the dog out 
& now i’m freaking out in case i’ve totally wrecked the nitrogen balance