strawberry duck

This second renga from the end of last year fell slightly more easily into the 20 verse nijuin renga structure (4/12/4), with just a couple of verses discarded and a few reordered to help the flow.

Some parts are more obviously composed as tanka than others, and as in general in these renga, the traditional apparatus of season words, moon, love, and flower references aren’t really present.

But, although most of these adhere to the 5/7/5;7/7 syllables count of the translated version of the verse form, I’m not really attempting an imitation of that structure.

I just want to look at things using the constraint of verse as a lens, and think about what that daily looking builds into.

*

To the rain’s delight,

the garden’s overgrown by

a pride of parsley.

In a quiet hospital

hope and hopelessness are still.

In the rain, a car

darts past with a Jack Russell,

it seems, at the wheel.

Oil bruises the rain-dark road:

a galactic jellyfish.

*

The sea delivers

its unassembled flat-pack

furniture: driftwood.

It’s up to us what we make

of or from what washes up.

Both ends of the beach

driftwood has been stacked into

skeletal tepees.

Between, a hopeful dog picks

a stick four times its own length.

Everybody does

the walking with coffee thing

they never used to.

Grails bearing the twin virtues

of conformity and warmth.

Days set out of time

As we reckon it, save us

from how we wreck time.

Grey skies, brisk waves, yellow-toothed

surf gnaws at Tyne’s Christmas shores.

Shapka Day at last!

Sky’s a purple-grey bruise;

ground wears arctic pelt.

Flakes the size of eyelids fall;

your tread remembers snow’s creak.

Waves’ shell-burst over

Sea wall catches light like snow:

Avalanche’s sibs.

Spray from the Black Middens' surf

is blown back towards the sea.

*

Shield’s white-walled towers

and the clouds at sea are made

brighter by snow’s light.

Pavement’s palimpsest mistakes

slush for ink and soles for print.

As snow clears, lost gloves

emerge from hibernation

and wave from fence posts.

Rich pickings amid the slush:

It’s proven difficult to keep up with a daily practice of writing this ‘lifelong’ project, not because of production - I do more or less write something every day - but because dailiness itself applies a slightly different pressure to the usual gap between producing creative work and processing it. ‘Normally’ I write as and when and edit to the same extended schedule - often considerably extended. Not so with this.

Novelists of course have a quite different and more dynamic relationship between daily production and editing, so it’s indicative of quite how disorganised I am that I experience difficulty when only working with a tanka’s worth per diem - 5 lines of text being added to a unit of, customarily, 100 lines in total. This renga is a case in point, being at one point 30 verses long (150 lines) because the ‘season’ didn’t quite divide as neatly as I supposed it would.

I’ve appended the excess verses to indicate how they imbalanced the renga’s 4/12/4 structure, being 8 at the start and 2 at the end. This is partly to be ‘completist’ and partly because the point of this project, for me at least, is to explore what impact ephemerality (a daily writing practice), whether as poet or as editor, has on my sensibility. Which is in the category of Big Vague Words, but let’s see if, through this project, I can come up with a better one.

(I mean ‘daily writing practice’ here in a slightly different sense from journal writing or Daily Pages as writing for oneself, in that - as in this post - I’m intending this work to be outward-facing, however limited the readership.)

*

The Moon is rising

over a bus and below

a V-rod of geese -

a cloud over Carnoustie

eats its northern hemisphere.

The wee conductor

on the back of old tickets:

‘It’s better by bus!’

Once legion, now nigh extinct,

he falls from my old papers.

*

Road trip to Melrose

to meet an old pal translates

their north to our south.

The road undulates up, till

wind turbines rise from the mist.

The A68

delivers us from fogbank

into gold forest.

Sitting on the autumn trees,

cloud the colour of their leaves.

The Cheviots from

Carter Bar plunge into mist

like the North Sea

viewed from the Yellow Mountains.

Beyond them sits the North Sea.

Each Eildon Hill keeps

its wisp of cloud at one glance,

loses it the next.

Abbey, toun, and auld hotel,

let you keek into your past.

In the G & A,

Victorian prints of clansmen

model their tartans:

the Mac Niel on his pony

slouches like the teenage me.

I remember break-

fast in Timex: black pudding

in a morning roll -

that summer job, decades back,

now served in the Proust Canteen.

*

Luminous at gloaming:

clouds behind trees behind

Halloween streetlights.

Pale leaves on a dark lawn:

calligraphy in negative.

High, fenced-in, mid-slope,

thorned about, an apple tree,

heavy with lost freight.

Who gathers fruit that’s neither

fabulous nor forbidden?

*

Excess verses

High clouds over Tay

drag a cold sun behind them

like dogs on leads.

On the river path: a comb

and a brick that says ‘Lochside’.

This lanky lad walks

his golf cart home from the range

as though it’s a pram

and he’s a young dad, trying

to get his bairnie to sleep.

That man in shorts has

on each of his calves one verse

of ‘Flower of Scotland’.

Robin on the train track flies

up and down but not away.

Sea view: surf on black

seaweed rocks then grey to half-

erased horizon.

The train glances then it’s back

to our screens’ vanishing points.

*

In every swirl

of fallen leaves plastic and

paper kick up too.

Birch leaves, yellow as cornflakes,

Listening, listening (Naked Eye Publishing), 11pp, £9.99. You can buy a copy here. I was saddened to learn about the death of Bob Cooper, an old friend whose work and company I enjoyed in equal measure. A couple of years ago he asked me for a few lines for his latest collection – I’m very sorry to think it will probably be his last. As ever, I ended up doing a sort of mini-review I now post by…

This is not, as Bowie states, America -

but that is, and that, and so is that!

Attack us, Caracas, if only with words:

we have dabs on your oil and that’s a diktat.

Amend the amendments that nobody meant;

interpret predation as money well spent;

be it here as in Moscow, not as in Kyiv;

give Beijing Taiwan with our best ‘By our leave’.

Here is not, as there must be, America:

tell it to the penguins or is it bears?

We preen and, Greenland, you so must be ours -

should NATO deflate-oh? says Trumpo, ‘Who cares?’

By jingo by Jenga the jungle has laws -

let the prey pray that we’ve sanitary claws.

If you hollow out home it flows everywhere other:

if you murder all morals, each corpse is your mother.

This was never as Adams dreamt, America:

there’s a patty of beef in the snowman’s heart.

Leave Cuba to Rubio, France to La Vance,

just pile up the spoils in the hangman’s cart.

Caratacus spoke and it saved him his neck

but Trumpo can’t listen so gosh the darn heck:

there’s only one rhetoric left in the West -

a baseball bat to the brain works best.

The South’s a piñata that bubbles with crude:

Are you ready, Pete? (Uh-huh)

Marco? (Yeah)

Pam? (Okay)

Alright, fellas, well, let's go

Well, it's been getting so sad

Living with the things I do to you, ah-ha

Your dreams are getting so strange

Cause I like to tell you things that just ain’t true

But I see a man at the back

He used to have a Pact, his eyes are still as red as a star

And Melania in the corner is beggin please ignore her

Cause she thinks we might’ve gone too far

Oh, yeah, I’m white lightning

Every asshole is tightening

And the East Wing was cloying

Till we started destroying

Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh

And the man at the back said, ‘MAGA fucks, attack!

Cause you’ve clearly neither balls nor witz!’

And Melania in the corner said, "Don, I wanna warn ya

You’re just a bunch of ballroom shitz"

Ballroom shitz

Ballroom shitz

Ballroom shitz

Ballroom shitz

I'm reaching for a Peace Prize

but grabbin pussy’s all I ever do

So my lofty calls to Ukraine

Lead from the rear till nothing’s left to screw, ah-ha

Now the man in the back is laughin at the flak

As his drones rain death from the sky

And Melania in the corner is architecture's mourner

She would kill me but she thinks I won’t die

So pour out Pete Hegseth

To fall on Fallon and fleg Seth

Cancel Kimmel and Colbert

Let them go and read Flaubert

Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh

And the man at the back said, ‘MAGA fucks, attack!

Don’t you know that we are puttin on the Ritz?

And Melania in the corner said, ‘Don, I’m gonna spurn ya -

You lead a bunch of ballroom shitz

Ballroom shitz

Oh, yeah, I’m white lightning

Every asshole is tightening

And the East Wing was olden

So we’ll make it faux-golden

Faux, faux, faux, faux, faux

And the man at the back said, ‘MAGA fucks, attack!

Contra Eurotrash and pious Brits!’

And Melania in the corner said, ‘Don, they’re gonna scorn ya

Cause the Constitution’s blown to bits…’

Blown to bitz

By ballroom shitz

Blown to bitz

By ballroom shitz

Witz: it's the ballroom shitz

Ritz: it's the ballroom shitz

Britz: it's the ballroom shitz

A triptych of clouds over the White Mountains this morning - I believe these are altocumulus lenticular, but happy to be corrected.

Don’t read me no entrails, don’t cast me no runes:

just send in the gangsters - so Trumpo croons.

This fuck-up re Epstein: who’ll pop that balloon?

That thing with Zelensky - will that be done soon?

These riotous cities: send in the goons.

Those turbulent bankers - get me new brooms.

These South Parker puppets: scratch out their ‘toons.

Those undeadish Dems - put em back in their tombs.

These righteous Eurovians - just read the room:

my Vlad is so bad he will doctor your doom.

My Witkoff, his wit’s soft, my Vance, he’s all ‘Vroom!’

The engine of state? Well, it’s boom, baby, boom!

My Marco, my Hegseth, my Tulsi, my sneer -

(with all due acknowledgement to Don Hunstein)

‘Reassemble the troops - my birthday nears:

may the tramp of their boots assuage my fears -

each year that old Baloney Slicer

draws closer and yikes he’s no Sean Spicer!’

But Trumpo’s grand parade was pants

and somewhat short of celebrants:

symbolically he’s firing blanks -

plus, someone forgot to oil the tank.

The military, it seems, does irony

more Byron-y than Alanis - why else play

the infantry’s favourite, ‘Fortunate Son’,

for their two bone-spurred Napoleon?

‘Quick, pivot - don’t we got a war

hopefully far from New Jersey’s Shore?

No matter it’s never worked out before:

dissemble/assemble the troops some more!’

No matter the martyred, the maimed, the marred:

(This is of course a mirror image of my favourite Gary Larson cartoon, reversed and crudely politicised to symbolise the stale crumb-filled pocket universe in which we find ourselves - at least I drew it myself. Badly.)

*

Trumpo hoots, ‘Assemble the troops!’

His own toy sodgers in their own toy boots!

Well, not quite: just the National Guard -

part-part-time troops, part-playing cards.

His problem? It’s the populace -

not his policy of divide by race.

Expel the wrong uns! (just not him):

he knows it plays well with the dim…

Call no-one, though, ‘Deplorable’,

though some might find intolerable

the rights of others - humans, beasts,

the planet - life’s a glorious feast,

till one day when we all must share

a remorseful morsel - all shall care

when guns turn on both them and us,

then we’ll all board the special bus -

the bars-on-windows, camp-bound sort

with wheels that sing, ‘Deport! Deport!’

So, red-faced Guards guard the ICE

from folk like you and them and me -

And should these guardians lack the means,

During the cool eleven hundred year

reign of La Serenissima

each Doge flung a wedding ring into the mere

Grand Canal to marry that lissom ma-

mma, il Mare - see here yr wannabe Despot of Mars,

Musky the Rat, having spurt into orbit

one of his emission-remittin, ET-hittin e-cars,

then chainsawin due process via those exorbit-

ant cheques to our cheaper greedsters: gimme your vote

for digital ducats, oh, and yr soul -

win shit, and still lose yr berth-right on the space-boat

that’s blastin us alphas out of this a-hole

we got you in: lo! one hundred and thirty days in,

the marriage of Wreck Bro and Trumpo’s annulled.

Still, all decency’s desiccated down to a raisin -

Here’s Point-n-Iffy False Don in Mar-a-L’Avignon.

How can you tell? Well, it’s not his middle finger

such as True Trumpo raises, so he’s having you on.

Not stinky pinkie nor the one he calls ‘Stinger’ -

that’s the digit he keeps for jabbing the button

disconnected when he came crawling back in.

There he sits, the Chump of God or at least of mutton,

as holy as Cthulhu or at best as the Kraken.

Either carpe Imodium, O Conclave, or cleave to opium,

so while Trumpo attempts to josh like Jost,

habemus papam and not hot pabulum…

and he’s pipped at the Pope-post by Bob Prevost.

Tell him, Chicago’s lion, of the ordo amoris

or if not him then one of his remoras

attached to this rusty catshark’s vasty beam

Trumpo doesn’t think it has been proven

that lobsters and/or humans suffer -

it’s just some woo woo dreamt up by a coven

of the nasty, and no legal duffer

can prove it otherwise. ‘Who plonked these lotuses

in the SCOTUS’s pot of basil?

One of these previous people-lickin POTUSes?

The state of them - withered to a frazzle.

Who cares about their mewlin pulin rulin

that some ‘innocent’ ’s in jail?

That’s holiday camp for poor folks. Quit yr foolin:

their butts are mine, and mine exceed the pale.

There is no justice now, just ICE.