Mine is the Art

Mine is the art of disorderly rhyme
every word broken, begged or borrowed,
every syllable spoken, a token of tomorrow.

Mine is the art of crude notation,
no word written in strict rotation,
randomised, abandoned, eyes left, eyes right;
I’m blind to the last word, keep it out of sight.

Mine is the art of pumped-up letters,
scrambled alphabets, sonnets, tercets,
fissile missiles turned into verses, reversing, rehearsing,
line on line, listed, twisted, diagrammatic anagrams, wild acrostics
not a word of sense, far too dense, my made-up prognostics.

Mine is the art of forensic polemic;
my A-B-B-A-B in a beat-box rhyme scheme
I’m the SIO in a poetry crime scene; doing it all for kicks;
politics plus poetic licks, I cruise the news, shout from the side-lines,
I’m a dissident poet escaped from the salt mines;
I want a name to frame, a name from the old days,
I want the names we forgot when the blues went away.

Mine is the art of interpretive chance,
looking for angels that dance on pinheads, dance
like skinheads, aggressive, booted, not well suited to fluency,
full of truant lunacy, anthropogenic, schizophrenic,
ants with their mandibles, predatory creatures, nature’s teachers,
cute display, acute dismay scratched on their features,
no rhyme, no reason, injustice, treason, silly season,
made up stories, just ignore this.

Mine is the art of pure white noise,
high-pass filters, phased, repeated, hiss on the tape,
short of breath when the sine-waves peak, everything gone,
silence truncated, audio re-map, fade in, fade out, press play, then what?
every beating heart knows the highs and lows.

Mine is the art of looking for the truth
I’m an ageing youth, old man, tin can, kicked down alleyways,
rattled down the back streets; make news, fake news, all my own,
nobody’s business and who’s to say what’s so when it’s anything but
who needs lies when everybody knows what everybody knows.

© BH, 2020

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Something staccato from the rap-caves deep in this heart of mine. Mouth music, scat, word jazz, whatever you will. This has been the long-time jive-talk of every cat, every beat, every long-hair, every mohawk-headed brother, every bad-ass mother - whoops, there I go again.

Time to slip out of this vernacular, clean up the act - get received pronunciation, ascend into heaven, annunciated, brought on high to sit with the great and the good.

Nothing it seems, is as it seems. Take my words for it!

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Submitted in a video to the Scottish Writers Centre - Roulette Speakeasy and accepted for an online streamed event on 25th August 2020.

You can access the event by signing up (for free) at the SWC website - http://scottishwriterscentre.co.uk/event/swc-roulette-speakeasy-life-after-lockdown/

Line-up:
Aileen Ballantyne, Anjana Sen, Brian Hill, Charlie Gracie, Chris Tait, Colette Cohen, Elaine Whiteford, Gail Winters, Hadley-James Hoyle, Hugh McMillan, Jill Korn, Jon Miller, Karina Vidler, Liza Miles, Lesley Traynor, Mairi Murphy, Malcolm Timberley, Martin Stepek, Morg Smith, Nalini Paul, Peter A, Rose Anne Fraser Ritchie, Ruth Aylett, Sean Wei Keung, Thomas Legendre, Tom Kelly, Tom Murray, Ali Whitelock, Chrys Salt, Saima Afreen, Marcas Mac an Tuarneir