Nihilistic

There is nothing left you can rage against.

Rail against the night, the day,

Whatever blue the sky is

Above your heart that thunders:

A cloud gone beyond grey
To colour, filtered pigmentation,
Like blood beneath skin.

We choose not to see
How far light has come
To meet us here.

This is the fading moment,
When all the things that drift from heaven
Come to us as dust
Specks on the remaining wind
Grace, salvation, the blessings
Of some imagined God
Eroded by distance or time,
All but invisible in our eyes.

There is nothing left to bruise your anger on.

In the backlit halo
Of your disappointment,
In memory or misunderstanding,
The descending starshine
Shaved an atom’s width
Of paradise to lay it
Unrecognisable at your feet.

This is what years become,
What hope amounts to:
Falsehood projected on naked tomorrow,
Heaven, not as we divine it,
But heartless and indifferent.

There is nothing left when everything is put away,
When we remember the places built to conceal
The things we could not bear.

By our hands we understand,
With them, we sign and shape,
Frame distance in the grid of our fingers
And the labouring of our hearts.

Here and now, and not hereafter,
Time and space are structured.
Should we dare to act in them,
We reinvent tomorrow,
Reconstruct from so much dust
Paradise from its scattered pieces.

There is nothing else.

© BH 2013

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I heard Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, on Desert Island Disks today. There was a brief comment on writing poems starting with a title. She does this apparently but it may not be entirely poetically normal.

This one of mine came that way. I have an alphabet of them in my Initialising cycle, started in 1996, where each line is a word in an acrostic sequence. I'm half way through having begun in 1996. Time I got it finished, eh?

Check the cycle here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html This poem is here.

Interleaved

Where the shapes
Of land and sea
Lay down their arguments,
Moving boundaries
Throw stones in the deep,
Hollow caves into the earth.

Now In Retrospect

Ghosts

Navvy - Illustrated

This is an illustrated version of the poem Navvy, from August 2012.

Orthogenesis

The stars do not fall.

All the eyes in heaven spiral free

And come at last to earth. 

Continents, divided by the sea,

Slip, one by one, over the round horizon.

Shieling

West wind comes like a ghost,
Summer a mere presence.
Winding roads fade into the hillsides
Where, barefoot, we wander,
Turn skyward, skip the burns,
Scatter in the yellow of the glen,
Lie forgetful in grass-grown hollows.

Spacebar

Words are written now

Or, unwritten,

Left waiting in the recesses 

Of unordered thought.

The Stolen Poem

In a desk drawer, some words lay

In the dark and wooden dust.

Too many silent years stained

The brown-edged paper’s folds.

The smell of cheap pine lingered

Behind ill-fitting dovetails 

By whose feeble daylight

Meaning cast no shadow.

Terse Cogent Salient

Simeon Enfield made up his own coat of arms. Not given much to heraldry and certainly no toff, he just wanted to embody himself in something impressive, something symbolic. The world as it was dragged him down with the trappings of mediocrity and now he wanted, even as a secret only he would know, an exotic emblem.

Mr Whippy

I imagine the ice cream van passing me on the Inverness bypass is a cover operation: a front not as misleading as at first glance. Inside there are no chill vats of cheap vanilla ice, no vegetable-fat concoctions or fantasy ice lollies which promise more than they deliver. Instead of shelves of confections, humming freezers beneath racks of Askey’s cones and wafers, I picture the interior as a kind of BDSM parlour. Darkly lit with an arch dominatrix dressed in leather bodice with high-heel boots and a whip across her shoulder. At her feet, in his underpants, cowering and slightly salivating, a mild-mannered assistant bank manager.

Activist

Distant klaxons whined out a guttural polizei-tone. The intersections all the way into the city were rife with living ads. Immense holo-hoardings pulsated and enticed, light as day. It took concentration to negotiate the seven-lane roundabouts, especially for those not on automatics.

Plug in a Peetza in Turbat sauce! Cheezo!

New Whizzky – auto-bottled – no need to decant – sip via SensoTop™ Safe, clean, eco-pure!!

Constant motorcades flashed furiously past from A to B on the highways of gripper tarmac. Illuminated info signs animated as the traffic drove by, speaking directly, electronically, to the vehicles themselves. Meanwhile the occupants dozed on, hopped up on Morpholax, Valet-Yum, or some other of the coma-narc, relaxant pleasure drugs of the Fortuitous Forties. The vehicular conference of raw cybernetics continued and the Holo-ads brightened in passing. They instructed, ordered, wheedled and cajoled. In the whole history of commerce, this much had not changed. Still no-one questioned the dark night and the space-travel stars, the beckoning beacons, these distant classifieds in the heavens.

Dormociel, the penta-glaze sky-dome window system is best and thermally effective!

No-one stirred a stump against the deliverance of things to come. There was an ethic, which said: Procrastination is the thief of time – are you under-insured?

What else was there to say? Invest, divest, travest, harvest, request. What planet was this? Terra (oh, so Firma), in the year of our Lord, 2040. It was the year of Vasto the Gamma and of Guru-ji Zukariss, the Anti-static Meso-Martyr. Recession or precession: who cared? The poor had always been with us. Only now they woke on Red Risers or slept the sleep of Somno-Lens. As always, the cash-homes went on raking in the credit, production went on accruing.

Please be seated, unhook your cerebro-cortical faculties, undress the brain, the poop-show is entering a new phase. Pop the pill and finger the fumble-pads, we are going over the hill to nowhere. Be sure to buy a ringside seat!

It was a cool night in autumn. Beneath the futuristic heavens, in the myopic and monochromatic darkness, the few remaining trees bore brown and crinkled leaves. Among the Keatish mists, harvests were ripening, awaiting a mechanistic gathering. It was the 28th of August, the last of the month. Above there was a light cloud layer, an advancing weather system deflected by the clear-air corridors of Dice, masking the paler stars.

A veil was drawn over the firmament, the work of a directed universe, a benign omni-being. So thought Ackroyd MacReady, as he wheeled his autobike down the lead-dark hillside from the glowing porch of his organo-croft. God, the All-person, had dulled the scintillating heavens so that MacReady, the acolyte, might further the emergence of Divine Truth. 

What if these wispy nebules were only side-events of the interfering Weather Bureau? Could the God-force of Ack-ack MacReady and the Disciples compete with the secular ham-fist of humanity? MacReady believed so, but he had no sure answers as he pushed his autobike along the carriageway embankment. 

In his heart any cobwebs of doubt were dusted away out of sight. His only aim, his one thought, was to carry out this sacrifice, to unleash a gesture which should shake the world. Let the vid-tubes bleat and hypnotise, the quasi-divine operation would still their claptrap and open peoples’ eyes. With the flushed cheeks of a fanatic and a wild, fervent gaze on his face he kickstarted his machine and rode out into the traffic mainstream, disappearing from view into the glaring lights.

Be happy, now, with Gay-shah, the semi-cyber-hotsie doll!

© BH 1985

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I've always liked the opening paragraphs of stories. I've written plenty and I have a preference for the weird and speculative, as you can tell. This one I dug out of an archive. The assigned date of 1985 is only my best guess. I really have no recollection of when. All I had to go on was the style of the note it was written on and the level of degeneration evident in my handwriting.