Uncanny that in my transitory blog-turbining I have come across this current release Lease of Youth by coldwave/electronic artist Erskine Lynas – with this album cover:

I’m on this
most of every day –

emails, blogging,
social media,

fake and
real news,

where that next missile
will land,

the absurd words on
how to stop it all –

and I miss thirty odd
years ago:

queuing outside
for meat,

the butcher riding me
about teachers’ holidays,

queuing outside
for bread,

fresh smells sliding
along the long line,

bottled milk each day
at the front gate

and so seeing Bill – old
Luxton – at his shop

in town, tallying in a
note-book with a pencil,

adding up what’s owed
in real numbers.

A search
for her name

cannot find
the inflection,

even an otherwise
gift from god is not

acute enough for
the internet.

She is,
therefore,

a loanword
by appellation – so

special – but
I already knew that.

And what is in a designation?
Precisely.

This is the stuff
of looking for

something important to say,
when feeling

just doesn’t
seem enough.

I have been asked how
to spell her name

so many times.
Does it matter?

As often as it has
been requested,

and the accent will always
mean much to me,

I promise,
with a personal é.

Koi

Throw any
and everything

at it, the voice
in his head

says something
like this – but it

is more the
instinct of a

jerk by some
dumb animal,

not fish who
do consider and

learn [even the
bony-eared

assfish knows
this is wrong]

and a gunman
in Texas has

perhaps done
what he has

done on impulse –
no koi,

love and
affection,

in his knowing –
just a carping

on about hatred
to overfeed

it all in a
scattered falling.

Photo by Phyllis

In an era and culture of fake news, I have some reservations about the veracity of the following, but it’s been reported [*] that an hitherto unseen poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been discovered in his birthplace of Ottery St Mary – the actual location so far undisclosed – and it is said to be a sonnet in which Coleridge celebrates the town’s traditional Tar Barrel event.

The history of this event is considered to date back to the time of the gunpowder plot of 1605 and thus the alleged Coleridge sonnet is plausibly based on one or more personally observed November 5^th Tar Barrel events held in his hometown, Samuel living there from the date of his birth in 1772 to 1781.

The stylistic tone and Romantic reverie of the event’s impact on the writer reflects a mature appreciation and will have been written some time after Samuel left Ottery at eight years old – if indeed it is his work. You be the judge:

A thick orange flame flares from the barrel rim
And quivers hot, fluttering in the night,
This roaring unquiet thing on the backs
Of men in motion, a rush of nature
That gives me bright sympathies where I live.
O! this life in Ottery and afar
Which is all motion and becomes its soul,
All fire and sound, sound-bright powered light,
Rhythm in running and fun everywhere –
Methinks, it should be quite impossible
Not to love the Rollers in Ottery,
Where the bonfire rages and smoked air
Is Music merged with a barrel’s scorched tar,
As wild and various as random stars.

[*] Ersatz News International