AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES: Whistling shade. A link to David McLean's blog.

AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES: Whistling shade

You really should visit David McLean's blog. Some amazing poetry.

regeneration sutra (video)

That Boy

That boy,
remember.
Not quite right - face
a little flatter, walk
a little odder, lips
a little wetter.

He walks around
the moving obstacles
on their way to work 
or class. That boy,
remember.
I can't
see him.

Being Ordinary

                                                                                     i.m. Harvey Sacks

Oh you've got someone to talk to all right,
parents, brother, sister, cousins and wife,
but you know what they'd say:
Oh John, you're so funny.
Oh. My God. Don't say things like that.
Oh grow a pair, will you?

And you're not going to talk to the guy in the pub
who's complaining about his kids and their cats
and the state of this nation. And the experts
are expensive and what would you say?
They'd think you were crazy and lock you away.

So you don't
talk.
So you fly.
Fly far away,
dying to be normal,
a direct journey to the last stop,
splattered and battered outside the chippie.

Got his feet on the ground now!
Oh he were a silent one.
It's always the quiet ones.
But he were a good lad
really.

Still Rocking

The pale kid on the stage,
Les Paul slung low,
playing power chords to the stars,
a solo for his angels.
He straddles the universes.
The sparkling motes of dust
rise vibrating,
dancing into the skies.
The night is on fire.

Disappearing poems.

I've taken down a lot of poems because I'm submitting them for publication in poetry journals or in poetry competitions. Apologies.

I'll put them back up if and when they get rejected. LOL!

D'n'B

thuh drum
n' thuh bass
thuh drum
n'
thuh bass
thuh b b bass thuh b b buh bass
thuh buh buh buh bass
thuh boombox heart
beat thumpin' thuh blood
through thuh head of a thousand
dubsteppin' bodies
movin' to thuh drum
n' bass
to thuh buh
buh buh bass
n' thuh drum
in ecstacy bouncin'
till thuh mornin'
break

where do you go

where do you go at night
when you turn out the lights
and shadow rules

which world          which you
do you choose

and who do you allow
to lie in your sun
on this particular desert isle
or to light the fire
in this abandoned cabin
who shares your warmth
till the day comes through

which secret paths
do you walk
behind your eyes
across the northern lights
where time flows slow

and whose hand do you take
when the storms break
and the rivers rise

whose comfort do you seek
till the morning speaks

and where do we go go tonight
to share our hearts and minds

Guardian article by Nina Power 8 March 2011

When young women feel they are no longer held back by their gender, one outcome is an increase in political confidence Nina Power The Guardian, Tuesday 8 March 2011

Britain may still have appalling representation of women in parliament (as of the general election there were 144 female MPs to more than 500 male MPs), but the streets tell a different story. In the four major education protests before Christmas, women were frequently at the forefront: organising, talking to the media, standing up against increasingly aggressive police tactics, and articulating how and why the cuts would affect students. In the European student protests of May 1968, the student leaders we remember were male (Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit); in 2011 many of the people responsible for heading meetings and co-ordinating occupations are women. The rise of women to senior positions in major trade unions – too long bastions of male dominance – must also be seen as a major victory for progressive politics. Of course, it would be a mistake to think that protest comes about because of the leadership of a few charismatic figures: which is why the participation of all taking part in occupations and protests should be celebrated – without imagining that these things simply emerge from nowhere or, as a recent argument has it, because social networking has suddenly allowed protest to be organised at lightning speed. In the buildup to what looks likely to be the biggest trade union demonstration in recent history, on 26 March, the role of women in organising and participating in protest will continue to be central. Nevertheless, for the usual suspects the participation of so many young women – in the education protests in particular – has given rise to a certain moral panic. See, for example, the hilarious Daily Mail cover: "Rage of the Girl Rioters". The attempted pillorying of these young women – accused of "lacking respect" – by the Mail is the latest in a long line of attacks on women who campaign directly against the state: the suffragettes; women involved in the 1926 general strike; the miners' protests in the mid-80s; those who fought for reproductive rights and against domestic violence. Just as with the attack on "ladettes" in the 1990s, what looks to be a moral criticism frequently masks a deeper political and economic fear – what shall we do when young women are academically successful, economically independent, socially confident and not afraid to enjoy themselves? Could there be anything more terrifying? It would be a mistake to imagine that the strong participation of women in recent political protests is something new; nevertheless, the flip side of this female visibility is the way in which women, particularly working-class women, are already far more likely to be negatively affected by the cuts. Combined with the disparity in pay between men and women, and the fact that it is women who still do most domestic work and childcare – even if they are doing two or three other jobs outside the home – it seems obvious why more women would be taking to the streets. The past few years have similarly seen an eruption of interest in feminism across the country, with meetings and book launches spilling over with women and men of all ages. Whatever the 1990s tried to tell us was over – from inequality to political commitment – has most definitely not gone away; and the idea that one would simply have a passive, ironic or otherwise disinterested stance towards the brutal and brutalising policies of a government hell-bent on removing any vestige of a social bond now looks historically outmoded. While there were many women tirelessly campaigning throughout the 1990s and 2000s on a variety of issues – both those that directly concerned women and as part of broader political campaigns – it was with the anti-war marches from 2003 onwards that the kind of street politics we see today came back on the agenda in a more visible way. Many of the schoolkids who played truant to attend anti-war protests have grown into articulate and politically passionate adults, rightly incensed that education is being transformed into something insanely expensive, increasingly exclusive and socially divisive. The explosive mix of single-issue campaigns (such as UK Uncut), broader anti-cuts struggles and a growing worldwide recognition that the corruption and complicity of governments are no longer tolerable means that everywhere men and women are realising that what unites them is far greater than what divides them. When young women feel they are no longer held back by their gender, that they can take on any job, that they are more likely to do well in education than their male peers, that they don't have to think of themselves as wives and mothers first, one outcome is an increase in political confidence. If you tell women they can be and can do anything they want, and then let them down – by taking away their education maintenance allowance, by making university prohibitively expensive, by forcing them to stay in poverty – they, along with their male peers, will make you pay for your lies and hypocrisies. While the Mail presumably thought that "girl rioters" would terrify its middle England readership, this should only serve to encourage us to recognise that female emancipation – and political emancipation more generally – will start with those most angry about its incompletion.

Locker-room Legacies - Julian Barnes (copyright probably The Observer, probably late 1970s)

A WIDELY cultivated, politically liberal and largely honest acquaintance of mine remarked the other day, during a conversation about sexual equality, ‘I’m all in favour of women’s liberation: it puts a lot more pussy on the market.’ If he’d said, ‘I’m all in favour of blacks breeding faster than whites: it means we won’t run short of bus drivers,’ those present might have been shocked, or at least thought him striving for a jauntily subversive effect. As it was, there was a burst of complicit male laughter, and that hiss of relief at the voicing of a generally unspoken group truth. The women’s movement in this country, which ought to have produced the most far-reaching post-war social revolution, has so far failed with many classes and types of women: with working-class women, upper-class women, and middle-class conservatives; with those daunted by their own freedom, those already awed and tamed by men, with gold-diggers and outflanked hausfraus. It has been disgracefully trivialised by the Press, paid token homage to by broadcasting, betrayed by agitators for the ‘return of the feminine woman,’ and unhelpfully falsified by its more extreme package-thinker members. But it’s failed nowhere more spectacularly than with men — and in particular with educated, liberal-progressive men whom one might have expected to acknowledge its self-evident truths. Can you, for a start, name a single significant male contributor to the debate on women’s rights. Parliament has removed most of the legal and economic hobbles from women. A bit more tidying up, and they will finally have achieved theoretical equality: that is to say, they will have obtained the sort of official protection from discrimination that Catholics achieved after the Catholic Emancipation Act, or that blacks have obtained from the past decade or so of legislation. But no one can seriously claim that blacks are significantly better treated by whites in our society; and there’s little evidence either that men now treat women with significantly more fairness, kindness or understanding. Locker-room chat isn’t confined to locker-rooms; and it’s a more depressingly reliable indicator of what men really think about women than is their pillow- or table-talk. Its current tenor is also a sign that it will take more than a 10- or 15-year burst of polemic to establish in the averagely sapient man a gut feeling of sexual equality. It can’t, indeed, take less than a whole generation: gut feelings can’t be transplanted any more easily than guts, and sexual prejudices are dismayingly tenacious. So the generation of men whom one might expect to be flexible and sympathetic to the women’s movement — those, say, under 50 — are still, for all their libertarian reading, encumbered by the sexual attitudes implanted in their youth. The underground — and often the official — lore of their sex stated that men were dominant, aggressive, predatory, and promiscuous; and they reflexly take as universal facts the circumscribed values of their own adolescence. The sad truth is that, while for most women bed means love and sex, for most men it means love, sex and power. Women tend to philander from lack of love; men philander from a near-military sense of responsibility to their sex’s concept of itself, and as a constant, nervy testing of their own sexual power. And when it comes to power, and the renunciation of power, there is one sure rule: those with it don’t give it up unless and until it is forcibly taken away from them. The parallel with political power is direct. Who — except a freakish intellectual - has ever been argued into giving up political power when he doesn’t have to; and give it up, moreover, for the sake of an abstraction, a principle? The idea is ludicrous. So with sexual power: who would give it up unless he had to? Power is nice, thrilling per se; it brings privileges and the heady pleasure of dispensing largesse in one’s turn; it makes one bigger, better, wiser, stronger — doesn’t it? And then, on a cynical level, there is this subversive argument: since I won’t get any credit from most other men for behaving well and yielding up my power, why shouldn’t I continue to behave as I do now? In “The Female Eunuch” Germaine Greer remarked that women failed to understand how much men hated them. If hate sounds too polemically strong to be true, then try these words for what men do to women in their daily encounters with them: patronise, trivialise, colonise. In the old, traditional lexicon of sexual commerce, language reflected the power structure: there were no feminine equivalents for words like cuckold. In the sexual vocabulary of the seventies, there are no feminine equivalents for words like: ballbreaker, slag, cockteaser, score, nymphomaniac. Getting it right isn’t a matter of waiting for women to produce an answering vocabulary of contempt; it means waiting for the scorn, condescension and sporadic hate which generate that male vocabulary to wither away. It isn’t going to happen quickly.

Education for mediocrity - preserving the status quo

Why are governments and the elite so determined that universal education should be an education for mediocrity? Why are creativity and curiosity frowned upon? Why is excellence stamped out in the search for what they call 'equality'. The answer is frighteningly simple (c.f. Chomsky - I'll check the reference later). THEY are only interested in maintaining the status quo of a small, rich and powerful elite and a huge uneducated mass they can manipulate into working for them the way THEY want, buying the products THEY want to sell us, fighting the wars THEY want to play at, suffering the poverty THEY want to inflict on us, powerless unthinking consumers of the pap THEY sell us. We are blinded by the mediocre education THEY provide but which we pay for. We are taught NOT to see, NOT to think, NOT to react.

In recognition of http://www.ukauthors.com/

A plug here for http://www.ukauthors.com/
They are really good people. They're even crazy enough to publish MY poetry :))
I'm following them on Twitter too.

Taking down the king is dead

Sorry if you haven't read it yet but I've deleted the king is dead. I'm sending it to a poetry competition and I have to follow their rules.

However, I am working on new poetry now and I will share that when it's ready.

Sheffield Reference Library

Sheffield Reference Library

The clock on the wall says

Saturday, 13^th March.

In case you should forget,

Saturday, 13^th March.

Just so it can’t be Friday the 12^th

or Sunday the 14^th:

Saturday, 13^th March

and don’t forget it!

I wonder if we could declare a nation

where it is always Saturday, 13^th March

and you could drop out for a couple of days

and, on returning, find it Saturday, 13^th March.

And those days you want to forget about

and say just didn’t happen –

didn’t.

The New Game

The New Game

We’ve passed GO so many times

that the bank has stopped paying out

and we live on IOUs.

We can’t even take a rest

in Jail any more:

it’s been wiped off the board.

They’ve built a new wall

which goes round the sides

so you can’t call Pax

and step out.

I tried once, I did. Honest Injun!

I threw a brick through a shop window

and stole some coloured crayons

but they just smiled kindly at me and said that they understood

and that I would grow out of it.

I felt like asking them

what they understood.

I don’t like being understood,

not all the time.

By the next day

they had installed

another window in the shop

and the manager had forgotten who I was.

They didn’t even make me give the crayons back.

I’m determined to be anti-social

but  it gets so boring after a while

cos nobody takes any notice.

The Prime Minister plays silly buggers

in Primrose Street; it doesn’t matter –

the country seems to run itself

like a giant clockwork toy.

I wonder who turns the key.

Perhaps we could take over,

wind it up too far

and break the spring.

Anyway,

who suggested this fucking game in the first place

and why can’t we stop it?

Nevertheless

Nevertheless,




the disguised ragtime virgin princess made her incognito appearance according to schedule. Accompanying her was her team of detectives and bodyguards, her maid-of-honour and her two pyrenean mountain dogs - all of whom had also been disguised, of course.

When a local man, fooled by her camouflage into thinking that she was a certain prostitute from Greek Street, leapt on her with a cry of "Molly Grey, you old fucker!", he found himself beaten up against W.H. Smith's plate glass window advertising plastic replicas of the crown jewels, with his neck broken in three places. "Must've been mistaken, " he mumbled, as he crawled off into the shadows to pull his zip up and die like a gentleman.

Soon it became obvious to one and all that this pock-marked lady was not just another little rich girl slumming it for the sake of her education. "Who the bloody hell are you?" they greeted her with all the respect due to strange personnages. "Who the bloody hell are you?", all of one accord.

At this, the maid-of-honour and the two pyrenean mountain dogs circulated among the crowd and whispered in many ears that this was no common or garden harlot but was, in fact, their princess, their one and only virgin princess. The crowd was exceedingly surprised by this because they didn't know that they had a virgin princess and anyway, wasn't it a pity that she was so ugly. Nevertheless, they all bowed and sang "God Save our Gracious Virgin Princess" to her, after which they all went about their normal business and didn't bother her anymore - which is how all good citizens of any good police state should conduct themselves.

Nevertheless, ....

Salle d'Attente, Gare du Nord, Paris

Salle d'Attente, Gare du Nord, Paris


There is a fly,
just a little fly,
on my jeans.
I could take out a machine-gun
and kill it.
But I shall simply call it James.

July Poem

July Poem  (in Arles, France 1970)


I know a bloated rabbit
which lies on the surface
of a green canal.
Every time I walk by
it looks at me and we talk
of canals and of death,
of mosquitoes and yew trees.
Soon the rabbit will burst
and I shall talk to it no more.

Wallflower

Whilst expounding
our theories on human relationships
we made great advances
in building concrete barriers
between ourselves

Putting up some poems I found while going through old folders. Most of what I found was rubbish but these still seemed to please me. I hope they will please you too.

Please leave comments. I don't mind if they're good or bad and I'm immune to burning. I'm inflammable!

Poetry

Sorry for not updating more frequently - I'll try to write more often.
I'm going to put up some of my poems. I would like to get some constructive feedback. The poems are copyright but feel free to share them as long as you give full credit to me, Reuben Woolley.