I notice by reading around this morning that I am not the first in claiming this, but Jeremy Paxman’s TV questioning of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May on last night’s Channel 4 general election programme had him performing a pathetic parody of himself. It wasn’t so much bulldog as bullshit in haranguing on the most irrelevant of points, most notably with Jeremy Corbyn about the fact his distaste for the monarchy wasn’t mentioned in the Labour Party manifesto, the fact it wasn’t mentioned in the Labour Party manifesto the most glaring evidence that it was a miserable moot point.

I genuinely thought his tiny-dog syndrome of snapping at both their heels was a complete waste of time: far better to let them make their own mistakes rather than relentlessly interrupt and make gormless incredulous faces at their inability to respond to a barrage of relentless interruptions.

Calling the Prime Minister a ‘blowhard’ did make me smile, but really only because I think she is a totally disingenuous but dangerous potential ‘new’ Prime Minister, and for the blunt irreverence of the tag. Otherwise, I feel cheated of what should have been an intelligent interrogating of both candidates from the supreme quizmaster, though of course on this performance he has become the supreme grizzledmaster, someone who has morphed into his own bloated blowharding.

Everywhere is the same: there is
no music in the evenings, no art
on the walls. The radio is silent
and we do not know what to do
with our time. We have forgotten
how to celebrate the way the sky
glows with fire or the moonshine
on the sea, its shimmering haze
and hypnotic song. Forgotten how
words slot together between each
and every moment of our days,
and how the colours abstract
as light fades and disappears.

Students of the future take note:
it will be dark and arid. Climb
out of the car, turn the engine off
and listen to the voices of the birds,
the singing fish, your footprints
on the ground, all the noises of
the evening, til the night is done.
Find a vision of yourself and try
to put it into language. Hum
a little and pay attention to
the echo. Find a way to worship
and write a liturgy to share.

We are listening in the silence.

© Rupert Loydell

Read it here.

[22nd May, 2017]

It is occupying the time of early evening
in a warm May back garden
as if a lone child at its own party,
making a racket singing and springing from the
Himalayan birch to the other tree –
the cheap one –
a wren I rarely see in the day but now making
branches jerk surprisingly for such a tiny thing
by pushing off in its manic lively flights.

Above and beyond in the screen of conifers
pigeons are fighting,
the flap of wings
like a monster’s applause,
then a single white feather drifts out and
down from the wall of green and
rests on the roof of the shed beneath
in its horrific fall.

Schools Week has reported here that DfE figures [not that I could find them on the Gov UK site] predict creative subjects at GCSE are and will continue to decline as Ebaac subjects continue to grow, these latter becoming mandatory and therefore part of a school’s central measurement for success.

So, for example, teacher training courses for Geographers have increased whilst those for creative subjects have fallen. Students of the future will know where the Cairngorms are but not understand Coleridge’s artistic maxim on ‘suspension of disbelief’, or how to write a story. A horror story.

And if only we could apply Coleridge’s adage to this reality, though of course it is better to see it for what it is.

No Ansel Adams
but the snapshots we captured
through the open car window
on our eight megapixel cell phones

on the side of the road off an exit ramp
as truck taillights streaked eastbound
opposite the earth’s rotation
in startling calm that evening
a mere dot-glow above dun fields

Look, life is like this, filled
with moments of meaning
paid attention to or not
but we tried we lingered

and sure enough it is here
looming in memory-mind
the fat orange ball above horizon
inching up into blank navy air
the full moon in early spring

we drove toward in silence

~ from Rock. Tree. Bird. © The Backwaters Press, 2017.

Luke Kennard’s Cain is, as so many others have already observed, an innovative, playful and resource-rich poetic experiment in defining the here and now of alternatives – the alternative narrative of the troubled mind of Cain-as-Everyperson who seeks redress and redemption in drawing our attention to a world elusively encapsulated in the form of a bucket and a Chupa Chupa lolly.

As ‘Cain’s Prologue’ lets us know in ‘Book I Gravel Pit’, all interpretations are up for grabs – that is if you can hold on to the coming roller-coaster ride of confessions to a Community Psychiatric Nurse: a helping, caring hand for us all. That is before the further imminent cuts come to get rid of all the support staff.

I was captured from the start, mesmerised by the brightly named colours of 10 of your nail varnishes, and await, having attended these therapy sessions, with a newly acquired optimism to see Cain stocked in Argos. My total immersion came with reading the school-based poems ‘Self-Portrait at Primary School’ and ‘On Being Very Annoying’ where the teacher in me heard the extra click as we all will hear from the multiplicity of vantage points [and anchors] provided throughout this eclectic text.

As the poems continually demonstrate, the enforced distraction from our collective grasp of the world within which we live is endemic and attributed to many things – from a zombified obsession with zombies to watching TV’s reality whilst zombified by, at the same time, watching our mobile phones. It is a virus, and we have all been hacked.

The centrepiece ‘Book II The Anagrams’ is both presentation and poetry/poetry and presentation and is a glorious wishbone of readings waiting to be pulled. Arsehole Theory, here we come tugging. I discovered my blood type is Ahhhhhhhhh!

 ‘Book III Death Shroud’ further explores the random joy of poetic discourse on this ever-elusive reality, a world as shredded as grated cheese and other food analogies,

You don’t need to explain
a game called Juxtapotatoes.
Just put a potato next to something.
We’ll figure out the rest.

Further details and purchase here.

Pleased again to have a poem here, and appreciate poetry sites like this who support work, especially when it provides a writer the opportunity to share a range of material. Your One Phone Call is tagged as Poetry with a knife edge and I am delighted to slice and dice it up with others, and encourage a wider reading of its cutting contents.

As I continue to plot old episodes of The West Wing against current political events, UK and International [well, Trumpworld], I thought on the day the Labour Party here introduces its general election manifesto with a commitment to spending, if elected, in order to ultimately improve the economy, and is immediately pilloried by the national press for its ‘predictable’ profligacy, I watch tonight’s episode from series 3, Enemies Foreign and Domestic, with this gem of an apt observation:

TOBY [OS]
I just wanted to give you a heads up – the journal’s going to run an editorial
with regard to broken promises in fiscal spending.

[Charlie picks up some papers and returns to the Oval Office]

BARTLET
Oh man, the greatest campaign speech ever about money – FDR promises to
tighten our belts. What’s he do when he gets here – spends more than we knew could be spent. And it’s ’cause he discovered it’s better for long-term growth. [sits down to read]

Pleased to have my poem here.