World Poetry Day - March 2016

Bit of a 'two cigarette' effort, done on my phone in January, lying on the sofa (I think) on the one snowy afternoon of the year in Nottingham and then briefly tidied up on Sunday evening.

Not sure about the bear and not the ideal time of year for the subject but let's see how it goes...


Snow

I wish the snow would fall and not stop.

Tuck the houses up and draw a hush tight around them.

All the movement and bustle fading.

All the paths hidden and footsteps erased.

 

I want the snow to smother the world.

Bury our mistakes deep and numb.

The birds could carry on,

the wind prowling restless,the cloud streaking the blue sky.

 

I'll sit alone with the unwritten page

and gazing out at a world unmade.

Peering into the whiteness for a shrouded figure.

Waiting for them to stamp their feet on the mat and knock three times.

 

I dream of a hibernation where we can lie good as dead.

Waiting to be reborn into a world wiped clean.

Waking with the clear purpose,

and the clean sharp mind of a sun irised bear.

 

David Millington

March 2016

Nottingham

Day 21 – The 30 Day Song Challenge – A Song that you listen to when you’re happy...

Song 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy...  – ‘I still remember’ – Bloc Party



Bloc Party

I only just noticed that I’ve followed a song called ‘Remember me’ with one called ‘I still remember’.  Amateur psychologists might want to read something into ‘remember me’ being the angry song and ‘I still remember’ being the happy song.  There’s maybe some significance there.  Hmmm!  Of course the ‘song I like to dance to’ was also called ‘remember me’ and that doesn’t fit the pattern so who knows.

Happy seems a much more straightforward and uncomplicated emotion than angry.  Perhaps there’s something in that Tolstoy quote ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.   Maybe we don’t dwell on happiness in the way we dwell and brood on anger or sadness.  If you’re happy you can just get on with your life.  Misery demands dissection.

Bloc Party - I still remember

Bloc Party are a band that have written a few songs that I absolutely love, but albums that I rarely seem to make it all the way through.  This song, from their ‘Weekend in the City’ album of 2007, isn’t supposed to be particularly happy, more to do with fond memories.  I love the melody, the way the bass carries the song forwards, the almost ‘call and response’ of the singer and backing singers, the chiming guitar.  The lyric doesn’t particularly speak to me but there are some great lines in there that really strike a chord.  It does sum up a feeling of giddy new love, when you’re not quite sure about how the other person feels, when you’re full of that scary nervous excitement. 

It’s a feeling that I’m sure I thought would leave with age, but it hasn’t yet and I don’t suppose that it ever will.  There’s a great line in ‘High Fidelity’ (the book) from the narrator when he talks about meeting a new woman he really fancies and how he’s hoping to bump into her, hoping she’ll call, contriving reasons to talk.  ‘I’m nearly 40, when will I just grow up.’  That’s a total misquote but, as I lent the book to someone, I can’t look it up.  I was reading through some Thomas Hardy poems a couple of months ago looking for a good wedding reading.  I read a number of the love poems he wrote when he was in late middle age and they’re devastating good.  Love is not the province of the young.  And I much prefer Hardy the poet to Hardy the novelist.

Here’s one of them...

I LOOK into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistrest	5
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;	10
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide. Thomas Hardy.

Just a quick word about the video.  The lyric to me seems pretty transparently the story of a crush between two teenage boys.  And yet the video doesn’t allude to this at all.  It would have been nice if it could have done, although I do accept this song is about relationships rather than gay or straight relationships.

David Millington

21^st April 2011

Nottingham

How to leave something alone.

I’ve stuck another poem here.  First though here’s a passage from the brilliant film/play ‘Six Degrees of Separation’.

How easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months,

and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher

"Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade – camouflage. But your grade, the second grade...Matisses, every one.  You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade.  What is your secret?”

“I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.”

Ouisa Kittredge - Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare

This stuck in my head from when I first saw it at the cinema in 1994.  The idea that knowing when to stop is as important to the artist as knowing what to paint or how to begin.  The reason I mention it now is as a preface to this poem which I wrote in about 30 minutes, from just a title, as an exercise.  I liked how it came out but having had constructive criticism at a poetry workshop and then spent several sessions try to edit and improve it, I’m still not happy.  It’s no Matisse but if I keep messing with it I’ll lose it completely.  But rather than keep fiddling with it indefinitely I thought I’d release it into the wild.  I need to write something else!  I suppose it could form a trilogy with the other two I posted up here. 

Summer Nights

Shivering defiantly in the dark, fleeces zipped snug to our chins,
under a peak sky that's ours alone,

silent-still and clear as the beginning of the world.
Then admiring the city girls, dressed tissue-thin with feet caged,
as the sodium stains into the dark

and the day's heat bleeds from  the bricks.

The bedroom’s full of soupy air and we’re snoozing sheet-tangled

in a web of each other, half listening to the taxi traffic that

breaks like waves outside the open window.  

The silences lengthen like shadows

until the dawn claims the day and sends them home

 to their beds and tired-eyed day jobs.

The feeling that the year's on the wane already and that the best has gone.
We're on the long slide now, hardly moving but slowly picking up speed,

back-to-school, harvest songs, halloween and fireworks.

Blinds shut and the curtains drawn in the damp-dark of tea time

with only the wind’s breath in the chimney

and eyes lit up with the TV’s light.

You faded in the spring and were lost from sight in the summer.
Come home with an autumn gale behind you in a cloud of falling leaves.

David Millington

27^th February 2011

Nottingham

When acting is useless and a poem

I’ve only recently started acting.  The people who’ve seen me on stage might dispute this, saying I’m yet to start (they’re wrong – look at the eyebrows in my Facebook pictures – magnificent!).  Others might claim I’ve been masquerading as all kinds of things over the years and am therefore very experienced if only marginally accomplished.  We’ll ignore those people.  Anyway, I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s been stimulating to start something new.  As you get older you do tend to have tried all sorts of activities.  You develop a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses and tend to play to them and avoid them.   Acting is something that I’ve genuinely never tried before and I’m right at the bottom of the learning curve.  This means that pretty much every experience contains a valuable lesson and something new and interesting.  This sense of exploration is very liberating, particularly when with so many others of my areas of interest I’m taking a new experience and filing it on a shelf next to other similar experiences.  With acting my shelf is bare.  And possibly my cupboard.

There are certainly a lot of better definitions of the essence of acting than this, but you might describe it as ‘showing feelings that you’re not feeling’.  I’d always thought that this would be a useful skill to have.  There plenty of times in your professional life when you need to pretend to be interested in a conversation that you don’t care about.  Or to be calm in the face of idiocy, knowing that if you lose your temper it’ll not help you get the outcome you want from a situation.  Sometimes it’s as a little white lie so as not to upset someone.  Sometimes it’s to deceive the other person to hide your own inadequacy.  A better person might be able to listen more carefully and sympathetically but I’m worried about a problem of my own and it’s distracting me when I should be all there for you. 

Sadly though, at the most important times, when I’d really want to be able to show myself as a different and stronger person I can’t.  To take a redundancy with a wry smile and a shrug when you’re put everything into the job and you want to hide your anguish at the unfairness of the decision.  To be scared almost to the point of being unable to move as you step up to a tough cliff face on an Alpine mountaineering route but wanting to raise a laugh, a quip and the illusion of courage.  To smile at the girl who’s breaking your heart and tell her it’s ok and to try to spare her feelings when you’re in that weightless moment before the new gravity pulls you down and spinning out of control.

So, when it really matters, acting is pretty useless.  But then when it really matters most things are.  I suppose having to be honest and face these situations as yourself is the best way.  Good luck and chin up. 

As this post is a little short and as the last poem was so well received, here’s another.  I wrote the bones of it in about 10 minutes in the summer but then spent a few sessions trying to re-write it.  I stuck it up on UKClimbing so I suppose I should put it up here too.

Just Because

My choices seem like burdens

Each one a chance to make a mistake I can’t correct

I plough furrows across my brow

a path to nowhere on the landing carpet

To do something 'just because' is what a child would do

or something you would do, at your giggling best.

Taking my hand and dragging me into something

I might think better of.

That rush of dread in my gut and then laughter

when I realise that this is what I wanted.

Not this just this giddy twirl across the floor

but this untethered way of being.

Of course 'just because' works both ways.

When I sit and think of why I love you

I can marshall a hundred marching reasons

and you, it seems, can think of none.

David Millington

21^st February 2011

Nottingham