via Interview with Soodabeh Saeidnia

This ekphrastic collaboration was part of National Poetry Month. I challenged myself to respond in poetry to 30 paintings by Marcel Herms. I’m glad that my imagination took unexpected turns.

“A World Where” my thirtieth and final ekphrastic poem for National Poetry Month inspired by the inspired art of Marcel Herms.

A World Where

I can’t recognise this pattern of words,
the timetables at work. I can’t make

a pattern is a world without form,
without substance, an out of focus

picture in which there maybe more
than one of me. I don’t orientate

without signposts or landmarks or signatures.
All is blur. Meaning elusive.

If I make it could be false. There is grief
at a loss of shape, of pattern.

A gallery of random words and pictures
I can reshuffle so every time a picture

has different words, words you can apply
to any other picture. The application of shape

more meaningful perhaps. As we can’t say
when someone close will leave this earth.

Port of Souls is found landlocked sometimes.
Like marrow locked inside a bone, at other

Times it is a small island surrounded
by a repetition of water. Occasionally after

so many have passed into memory,
a port of souls occupies our inside.

 

Our Port Endorphin,

anticipation Dopamine, empathic Oxytocin,
gut full or gut empty Serotonin

combats or feeds grief cortisol.
Sob lakes in hospital night she dies there,
as you wave her off on the dockside of her bed.

Alone, head and guts a vacuum
get off the bus outside the cinema
where your late quiet Golden Virginia tobacco smoked Grandad and yourself
would go to see the latest Bond,
buy a ticket to ride the latest memory
of American superhumans you collected
in comics when you were ten.

What is left

to others is what they find
in themselves when you are lost
to them.

 

Our Futility

must be striven towards
with all efforts of mind, bone and breath.

It mustn’t be resisted.
Futility builds, constructs, imagines.
This port of souls has many names,
or is nameless under the road sign:
Futility, pop. Varies but mostly zero.

I guess because futile feels like defeat.
Embrace defeat. What is left die with it.

 

Strangers And Pilgrims On The

earth. My first avowed intent
to be a pilgrim. I’ll not relent,

each breath a step, an oar in watery graves
pushes against the unremembered waves

“How can you go abroad fighting for strangers?”
I am a thankful passenger.
I see the bright and hollow sky
I ride the how, what, where and why

to reach the final breath, final shore,
Nothing new here, stolen words restore

ancient thought and image, rearrange
the mundane to confront raw rage

at the lights lit on the headland brighter
with each exhalation my body lighter

as the last place we embarked
gets darker and darker and darker.

“A Queued” kindly featured on Duane’s Poetree. Thankyou Duane.

http://duanespoetree.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/paul-brookes-writes.html?m=1#comment-form

Imperfect Is

perfect, our modern mantra.
Gone the need to be

perfect mate, lover, parent,
sibling. More differently abled

you are the better. Dysfunction
is a virtue. More odds you battle

braver you become. Bring them on.
Count your blessings.

Todays demons are child tamperers,
Enslavers without safe words,

warmongers who laugh as they
make atrocities. Visit their theme parks

 

of slaughtered children. Be thrilled
By the open wounds we give one another,

Stare deeply into the opening eyes
Of deep and bitter scars as they deepen.

Obscene

 

he is, so he’ll not cross this threshold.
disembark here.

how he never told me
till much later

that he had mumps
so we could not have anymore.

how he made his late daughter’s children
into pounds and pence.

how I found him alone upstairs
in our marriage house with a young lass.

how he kept on about a lass
in the post office,

so I says “If you leave this house
to see her you’ll not enter it again.”

how he got Alzheimer’s and didn’t know
me, grabbed my wrists till they hurt.

how our lives all went bad when he married
our only daughter.

His ship’ll not dock here. His feet’ll
not touch this hallowed ground.

Good things come to those who bait. We left before any glimpse of a daffodil sunrise, meandering off to the bay on the wisp of a dare The vessel reeked of years at sea, but we boarded, kept company with philistines and fishing rods, sights set on a sun-sparked lime-green ocean where the contents of […]

via Fishing Trip, a poem …. and your Wednesday Writing Prompt — THE POET BY DAY