30 April 

Day 30

prompt - something that happens once a year

Salmon run

Not April, but May, perhaps,

or full June we find

they come back, strangers

to the vein of river

that rushes through the body town.

We stand , weir-walkers,

shallow ankled,

laughing, but dead serious

as the monsters swim slipstreaming,

current- led towards us.

All year waiting for it,

bunking school and smoking

Year on year of this,

14, 15, older 

when we're old men and women,

when our life flashes before us,

finds us standing over kingfisher

and faint jade in sunshine.

See, Joe has made a spear,

and I've a sort of net,

of narrow gauge, 

but you can't tell with silver

squirming by our bare feet,

muscular as children used

to scrapping

The effort is to get upriver,

and we hope that we can catch it

our hands together, ready,

gone cold white in the water,

moving as we trap her,

first salann of the new year

In the uncertain spring,

don't breathe now,

don't you breathe now 

We're never elsewhere,

never out of water,

kissed the gills on your white neck

or the place where they'd grow smooth,

the scales and skin unblemished,

you perfect in your jean shorts

And he's no kind of hero,

there's no wisdom to be had

in blood or in the pricking of a finger

After this year, 

the shoal heavy with eggs,

I don't think that we'll meet again

or won't remember,

like the stones on the bed,

with blank faces, with all faces

The 3 of us

will wake up nights in sunlight

slowly remembering we were sort of hunters

Look down, look down,  

like God or a lost gang

into the pools where 

we will

curl and jump and fail, 

these hopeful, hopeless generations

29 April 

Day 29 

Napowrimo prompt -pets

All praise you Valentine,

you run around with your posh shirt tail

folded in the up,

meaning business

 I am great

You say,

I am the greatest

You're double fur

like in Cats the unholy musical

You're double fitted,

unzip one coat

You wear another

You are sure of the praise you deserve

You are a boy

And act like one

Quick as the switch your eyes

are mischief

You graffiti our walls 

with your scent, your  tag

Here I am

My place, my pad 

my manor

Arc your leap

in the April morning

like joy

like you

are here

as much as I - 

All praise you Valentine

29 April 

Day 29 

Off prompt - an ode to Boris and Bo Jo Jr

All babies when they're born look like Churchill-
portly, imperious and bland
So it was, for our glorious leader
at the launch of his new baby brand


They said, "it's a boy", (call him Junior),
paparazzi were jostling  for snaps
Could the people be distracted from troubles,
just enough to stop griping and clap?


Though it wasn't first go as a father,
(he'd done it before- once, twice, six?)
he knew that this time was the charmed one,
that goodwill's a way out of a fix.

So while we wait for protection,
for testing and targets and masks, 
Let's praise this convenient miracle
for our great nation's deadbeatest dad

28 April 

Day 28 (2)

in the chamber - a kind of sestina

Because he was only a marriage uncle

and once removed, I write and score the reminiscence

The narrow double bed, its corners tightly folded,

the air refrigerated, an official marriage- long ago her other bedroom

The health and efficiency magazines in the bedside cabinet,

blueprints, and the wondrous Plimsoll line, Masonic secrets

Years served in the boiler room, welded to secrets,

risen to the rank and file of uncle

The ointment and ligament in the medicine cabinet

Her rising, singing in her neat, pink room

This is the minutiae of reminiscence 

The single husband man, strict drawings neatly folded 

Keeping the days edge-neat and folded

Learning the cramped routine of secrets

The skin and bone grown cold with reminiscence, 

when uncle worked for years at being uncle

The room was also repository, not just sleep room

There it is , the memory box , the cabinet

The tens green bottles, medication cabinet,

prescription with receipts, all sleeping, folded 

He keeps the tools of trade, quiet neat, in lullabyes in this room

And blankets for the baby unmade, secret

for he was never father, only uncle

And poor her, couldn't nurse a reminiscence

All the wives showed off bruised reminiscence

and stored their inside faces in a cabinet

It's my money to keep he said,  the distant uncle

keeping his regiments all tightly folded,

The mysterious order of misplaced secrets,

the grand book whispered inside its dusty throne room

This is twice removed, like an escape room

The past hurts, it locks in reminiscence 

Where, if you looked, were secrets-

the odd white teeth , smoke breath locked in a cabinet

Fold the expectations till they're folded

all gums no bite, the inconvenient uncle

He is this wife, this room- locks himself away , a secret cabinet

He is foreman of old knocks and reminiscence

He folds himself in two, this not mine Uncle

28 April

Day 28

Prompt from Poetry Society - Vision (actually a triolet)

The patient sitting (an Agent) in the dark is blinded by devices for the measurement

of eyes, and through them soul. Here is the chart of obfuscation, here is the lexicon of dark

with all the whitespace glowing. It is hard to read and understand, there is no sense

in letters without reading, and the dark is in your very eyes, a weak, short sighted love,

that fades towards glaucoma-blue, a strange enlightenment

27 April

Day 27

Prompt - from napowrimo.net  -  write an unlikely review

Reviews - Money

“I didn’t find it as useful as everyone said; that Assyrian for example, who passed through my village last month and gave me a disc of gold in exchange for two of my most impressive sheep.

I have been unable to make use of this since and it is simply an attractive adornment on the ledge above my fire.”

Shepherd, 47, Turkey, 4000 BC

2/10 – need to work the concept out

________________________________________________________________________

“I, for one have never understood the actual use of the stuff- I like the having, not the spending. I have hoarded a large quantity given to me by grateful peasants and simply enshrined it in a room I call the gold room to watch the way the sunlight catches each coin and marvel in my possessing all of this. My lady wife seems to think I have a problem, but I could part with any one of them, though I have found removing one does disturb the order and the placing of the others and this worries me. I never dust. I want to have my money buried with me, coddling me, keeping my coffin warm, weighing me down.”

Miser 1278

8/10 – for collecting

________________________________________________________________________

“If it’s imaginary, yeah, and it is, kind of, cos it’s just paper and we’re all just getting more paper and working for paper and giving other paper for stuff, then it’s kind of like the world's biggest con and the world’s biggest book with all the pages torn out and if you took everything you had in terms of paper and put it into a pile and set it on fire with lighter fuel and match, then it would keep you warm. So it's useful for that as well, but not for long.”

Anon

5/10 -for the idea

________________________________________________________________________

“It’s a Godsend. Not so long ago, I was trying to decide the value of things as they related to each other. I was trying to estimate the trade of ten red apples – a pig’s flank, a pot, a shoe from an average shoemaker, the equivalencies are endless.  And that’s just basic things. Stuff gets very complicated when you zoom forward millennia or so. What's a song worth, or the viewing of a film, in a theatre in the dark? What’s your hard work worth, what’s insurance to be swapped for, what if I decide to put my dream on the market, what could you give me for it? How many children equal a diamond? And, what’s a poem worth in terms of bread?

Money is great, it’s a go between, it’s a scale, it’s a lingua franca, pax romanis. It’s that good, even the Pope has a bank. It controls the imagination, no more difficult translations, we have prices, stickers now. I exchange goods for services and vice versa all the time. Gold, paper, online, I love it.

Would recommend. “

BTW, what is a poem worth?”

Anon, would be philosopher, 2020

9/10

________________________________________________________________________

“I like copper –

as it aged, it faded green

and gold shone

and silver

Paper was fat in the hand

like a good love letter

But I can’t get on

with all these airborne signals

And it’s hard to feel rich

in zeros and ones”

Anon  -bring back real money

1/10

26 April

Day 26 (2)

From Napowrimo.net - almanac entries

Almanac Questionnaire

Day sunflirts with dandelions

closing closing shop

in jaundiced suburbs,

creeping up outside old Georgian Sunday 

This is a haunted house  - 

a plague of alligators, 

ghosts  preaching xenophobia ,

poor graffiti - look the end is her..

Been 27 years, 

we're lost inside a plot -

some mad disney princess will freeze

the sky above the ordinary

5g corona templar gold 

is the rhyme of the day, sings

the leader of the free world 

Tinfoil and bleach and faith

3 drunk economists will shout

and slur the names of 20000 dead

Don't drink the koolaid, brother,

duck and cover  

You make a turn  - another alley  

 -  nothing here

but curlews, absolutely free,

who cares anymore what people think?

       

You do, you try to be a prophet - 

there is a fire of knockoff Christmas lanterns

along the skinned snake of this  blood red river

You think of night, those char-dark hawkmoth wings

26 April

Day 26 

Marathon
 a poem in 26 words

All first miles are easy-

times twenty, more, feel endless-

run until you can't

All first miles are easy-

stillness is a state of mind


At Marathon

we wait-the heat tires.
We shelter in the shade:
this town is dusty now, dusty then

We're waiting for the messenger, 
dying with his message

25 April

Day 25 (2)

Prompt from Napowrimo.net

Minutiae

This poem is about little life and everything we notice but don't notice:

For example, ants, the teeniest beneath my feet,

the extremity of workers. They make a line from

the ant-hole to my kitchen counter,

trying to death vortex round the sugar canteen,

except that it is square and it's hard to curve

round a square, but yes they try

I'm in a Facebook group where

we pretend to be ants

and it’s all BITE and LIFT

and yes, it's nice to have a sense of community

in these times,

but there's a mystery in being so small.

And we are small too. Our lives are very short

and this can lead people to do very silly, inexplicable things.

Like the wasp that flew off with its severed head

and thought it had escaped and only realised too late

(is there ever a good time?)

that it was blind and that it could never feed. 

Or the bird with wounded feet

we saw ascend from the weather in the deserted square,

not thinking that it might never land.

Or the cloud happy it was raining but not realising

that after,  it would no longer be a cloud.

Or the blue planet that creates

little baby things that may someday destroy it,

or try to, but is still proud of its creations. 

And do you know that the planets

and the galaxy and universe can only be

rolled up into a ball and pushed along

the edge of space and time by a girl,

a worker ant, taking it her queen for inspection?

She probes it with her antennae, she moves her feelers over it,

she moves her mandibles, she digests and recycles it

into ant-nectar for her wormhole wriggling young.

In her is the ant-nest in my garden

and the line of white stars beginning there

and stretching like time,

or what we understand of it, to my kitchen counter

and the sugar they can't reach,

can never reach, and still they try…

25 April

Day 25

Prompt from Poetry Society - what do you collect and why

Collection (1)

I wish I’d found among my lost possessions,

that old, round box with the sharp lipped catch,

an antique, made of Bakelite,

an ordinary heirloom, a memorium

and opened it, shaking it first ,

to hear them rattle against

each other, in their hundreds,

all the regrets

my mother collected and kept together in one

special container. I have none for mine,

just leave them scattered so anyone can find them

All hers, I have inherited but lost –

the mother of pearl, the plain brown round, the gilt,

the thin white plastic, little beads of glass,

twin eye on each to see the in and out

of thread not taken, or the wrong fed in

When I come to think of it,

I wish I could find it now- there are things

that need repairing,

coats don’t simply fasten on their own

But you've come to the wrong person -

I can’t sew this on,

I can hardly use a needle,

prick my finger, witch and maiden

Yet, I could simply do this, as I used to -

dive my fingers in the button box

and stir up all these little empty faces,

letting them slip between

You could hear them, all the regrets, from here -

clacking and purring between my fingers,

nothing but totems and charms, each powerful

and dangerous - such potential to be useful

24 April

Day 24

Actually from Day 23, but late...a letter to Shakespeare on his birthday

Dear Will

Your birthday is the same as your death day

in legend. A playwright’s neat contrivance

but I'd credit you with more than that

if you were your own creation,

as I am. There is no coincidence

There is no Deus ex, no fateful storm

We write the geology strata by strata

We are territory now, beyond plot -

forget the sad old men,

yourself included, all those jealous

kings, those senile gods

those envious middle managers

promoted above their station

I'm all verse and nothing -

I walk in structured pentameter,

in loose, worn clothing.

I write in blue blood like my eyes

I'm Sycorax, killed off before first act,

leaving the island motherless

There’s Prospero, father of all your books,

writing just to burn them, making

smoke to choke the plague

It spreads from London to Stratford

and you haven't many children left to spare

and nothing but words to save them

I am your co author, 

I'd allow the characters to breathe and eat, be agents

though I know the power of symbols on a page-

Sycorax washes her long blue hair,

Miranda, to survive, traps gulls, snaps their white necks,

Prospero eats air, scratches letters in the dirt

You lock yourself away in text

like a voice in Trees

singing terrifying songs.

I whisper in Miranda's ear - 

She'll take a knife into her wedding bed

to trim the form of her own sonnet

24 April

Day 24 

Prompt from Napowrimo.net - describe fruit
This is mostly 'found' from apple sites (for apple keepers) with some additions

Eden

I worked for a time up in the orchard

on the edge of somewhere you have never been.

The farmer told us our job, picking but not tasting

We  disobeyed him -stealing them to bite with our new teeth

They said two of the apple trees were brothers,

Good and Notgood-

sweetness only after the first frost of the year,

tasting like perfume  wildness, very early desire

The apples were not quite the grasp-span of my hand

as I plucked them too soon from the stiff, old fingers

Man ate one first, then blamed me,

but I invented taste and words to describe theft on my tongue-

greenlarge tartgood tartlarge, tartlarge greeningnever

thinchopped tartwithered juicyrosy,

witheredjelly redcharming mellowhideous 

sourgreen tartrotten russetfavorite

perfectsmallest and worstsour,

witheredmedium-sized tarttiny sourearly russethot

and tartmellow sweetsmall and sourlonesome

greenlarge red-cheeked enny green

Many fell on their own,

that was forgiven. In lean times, they were windfall -

We stored them till they stank of dazy sugar

drank them as they rotted, sang praise songs

It wasn't an easy job, but it was important,

my fingers bleeding onto the waxy skin.

I remember now,   in the dust and in the after,

Our Days were choked with apple blossom petals