For Mongo (NaPoWriMo day 9)

I was at Twycross zoo yesterday and saw a bald chimpanzee called Mongo. This poem was written with him and the other chimps in mind.

Bald, and stretched across the ledge like pink rope,
he tents his eyes in the crook of his arm.
Each movement is a little too familiar.

These chimps are us in our most honest moments:
the ones that always jump the last two steps;
the ones that give the cat a French accent;
the ones that pee with the door left open;
the ones that stick to the couch in their pants,
the TV loud, the window on the latch.

Text Book Poetry 1

I decided to have a go at found poetry, using text books as source material. This one has been adapted from page 254 of The Archaeology Course Book, by Grant, Gorin and Fleming (Routledge: Abingdon, 2005)

Serce Limani, Turkey. c. AD 1024
 
Pieces from the ends of the ship,
the broken and the raw glass
represent the process, the millions
of pieces. Rim sherds.

The keel was laid down, and planks bent.
Many hull planks cut from a single log
between the building of the wrecks

Scholars tell us there was conflict,
a cycle, ever-increasing.

Book Review: 'Clovenhoof' by Heide Goody and Iain Grant

In the early 21st Century, petty office politics, management bullshit, and bureaucracy. Despite the way many people might feel about these things, Satan does not thrive on them. He loses his position as Lord of Hell, and is retired to live in Sutton Coldfield, North Birmingham.

This is the Premise of Clovenhoof, the debut novel of Heide Goody and Iain Grant, co-founders of Birmingham's Pigeon Park Press. Although it takes the novel a few chapters to warm up to the thrust of the main plot, the characters are immediately likeable. Satan's new friends and neighbours, Nerys and Ben, lean very slightly towards stereotype but in comic writing this sort of exaggerated characterisation works well, especially when there is so much more going on with them beyond our first impressions. Satan himself is endearingly befuddled by his new life, and he leans more towards chaos and mischief than downright malevolence. Even before the plot reaches full swing, the characters start to develop in believable, interesting ways as they face the challenges of modern life in their own unique manners.

It is this character development which binds the novel together through its episodic opening chapters. The first part of the book reads like a sitcom, but it is a very good sitcom with characters that you genuinely care about and situations which lend themselves to the book's sense of humour, which is anarchic and irreverent, but still warm and even comforting.

The novel is punctuated by scenes from the celestial boardroom, where a committee of angels and saints discuss the administrative issues facing Heaven and Hell. The portrayals of Saints Peter, Paul, Francis of Assisi, and Joan of Arc are perfect for the tone of the book. God, however, is notably absent from these meetings, which are chaired by the Archangel Michael.

The characterisation of Michael embodies some of the contradictions facing Christianity in the modern age; on one hand, he is suavely dressed, smooth spoken and virtuous, but on the other, he is inflexible, old fashioned and priggish. His attitude to towards female preachers, for example, is less than supportive. These sorts of contrasts are explored in other parts of the book, and it is tempting to see them, combined with God's non-attendance of the board meetings, as an allegory of the way religion can be hijacked to suit various opinions and political agendas.  This is not to say the book is anti-Christian: Joan of Arc and a female vicar called Evelyn come out of the story very well. If this all sounds a bit heavy for a light comedy, it doesn't feel it in practice.

Neither does the novel draw exclusively from Christianity for its source material. The Qur'an and various apocryphal texts also play a part in filling out the Heavenly Host and the demonology of Hell. In all, Clovenhoof is a very well researched novel with likeable characters and a strong undercurrent of warm comedy (one of the more difficult genres to do well). I was lucky enough to download it for free, but even if that offer has expired, it would make a great addition to anybody's digital library.

On Ghost Stories

Over the past couple of weeks, I have enjoyed watching the BBC's adaptation of 'The Secret of Crickley Hall'. Among the vampires, werewolves, zombies and occasional fairies which prowl the airwaves and the the cinema screens at the moment, 'Crickley Hall' gave us a (cliché alert) haunting example of how powerful a traditional ghost story can be.

I have never really been a big fan of horror; my religious upbringing meant that I avoided it until my late teens, and my days as a popcorn shuffler at the Odeon didn't leave me with a great impression of the genre. Perhaps when I reached it I was too old to be impressed by jump-scares and fake blood. Perhaps when I lost my faith, evil spirits ceased to be scary. I jumped and the hair on my neck stood on end, but when the credits rolled and the lights came on, any lingering phantoms were vanished. I am, of course, dredging the bottom of a genre which has produced some great stories, but when I worked at the cinema, these seemed rare.

This made me wonder why 'Crickley Hall' had such an effect on me, why the atmosphere it created clung to me like broken spider webs, why now, almost a week after it ended, I am still thinking about it. I think I have an answer. This was not just another story of a family staying in a haunted house. The ghostly children and the spectral man with the cane were not just an excuse for spine-tingle moments and jump scares, they were a bridge between two more powerful stories: the story of a mother who lost a child and needed closure, and that of a failed attempt to save a group of vulnerable children from mistreatment. On their own, these stories would risk falling into sentimentalism, but tied together like this, they create a pervasive eeriness.

I realised then that a ghost story should be sad. For a ghost to be worth our suspended disbelief, two things are necessary: a death, and a reason for the deceased to linger. A successful ghost story should remind us of our own mortality, and of those forces which may be more powerful than death, whether it be fear, hatred or impossible love. Too many Hollywood ghost stories put the emphasis on the surface scares and leave the ghost's motivation as an afterthought. The spirit in the rickety house on the hill wants to kill the pretty young couple because... she was tortured... or something. If you have a character who was tortured to death but you're glossing over that to focus on the usual vindictive spirit chicanery, you're telling the wrong story.

All this thinking about ghost stories has whetted my appetite, and Christmas is (for some reason) the perfect time for them. Watch this space...

A White Poppy

This is the second time I've posted a poem on my blog. This time, I'm doing it because I wrote it with today in mind, and I'd like people to be able to read it. Below is my attempt a Remembrance Day poem. Thanks for reading.

A White Poppy 

In just under a century,

so much has already been written

that the blots still seep through poetry,

so what good can come from pouring my ink

into this pool of blue and black?

The year ten class were watching ‘My Boy Jack’.

A few of them wore poppies on their blazers:

creased tokens from a war so distant now

that habit substitutes for memory.

The class, for once, are silent;

the boys upon the whiteboard,

each one an actor and a ghost,

are dying in the shell-churned earth of France.

A schoolboy face we’ve all grown up with,

reassigned to Rudyard Kipling’s son;

just eighteen, commanding men a few years older.

The minute hand shifts into place

and he sounds the call to climb the ladder.

The shells, outstripped, have fallen short.

A rattle like a blood filled lung

still coughs from a machine gun.

Lieutenant Kipling, armed with just a pistol,

knows his men must reach is bunker.

There is no glorious flash of sabres,

only a defiant walk of soldiers

into gunfire, falling with mechanical

precision.

How easily hot lead can rip

through uniform and teenage flesh.

The gun splutters, and the young man stumbles.

His glasses fall into the mud.

He searches for them, grabbing soil in handfuls.

It spits again, again he falls.

Just one more burst – his story is concluded.

Except that two months later, back in England,

the Kipling family have a tragedy

without its final scene:

without a body, without witnesses,

no declaration can be made but ‘missing’.

Catharsis has to wait until the photos

of the soldiers in the German prison camps

have been checked and stacked and checked again.

‘Sir, is this story true?’ they ask.

Yes, and eight thousand other like it

from just one army in a single day.

This is grief incomprehensible

to anyone but statisticians,

the production line applied to war.

Now, the poppies seem a little crisper.

They still grow in Afghanistan,

in the sand outside Baghdad,

and in so many places unreported,

so I wear one for the young men fed

to the factories of war, I wear one

for the veterans who have seen the smoke first hand,

but this poem, this poem is a white poppy,

a prayer both for and to humanity,

a prayer that one day, this will stop.

Failing to See the Perseids

I haven't put any poetry online since the days of Myspace and cringeworthy teenage doggerel, but I had some advice on this one, so I thought my assistants deserved to see the finished product. Here it is:

Failing to See the Perseids

1

Mist drowns out the houses and the sky,
pink from the glow of a bronze medal moon
or streaked with orange where the street lamps
mark the road. Somewhere behind the curtain,

Dust, hung on the void since man first stood,
is pulled like loose thread by proximity
to an Earth which plummets round the sun
at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

On impact with the air, it lights momently
- for half a second it competes with stars -
then disapears, reduced at last to atoms,
falling, silent as a martyr's tears.

2

Do you recall the fellow traveller:
that long haired star which stalked the sky
when I was eight and you were six
and we had not yet met?

Outside my mother's church, I saw it
in the pagan dark of April,
a messenger, a stranger moon
from a time before reason;

A nomad cast adrift upon
this vast machine of fire and rock,
a prophet of the awefulness
of distance without end.

Three stories in 450 words.

Today is flash fiction day, so I thought I’d share my efforts with you. Here are three stories at 150 words each, let me know what you think.

 Meterman

Only come to check the meter, so of course I let him in. He was a bit too jowly, and his eyes were dark around the edges, but he was the first man I’d had in the house since my Terry passed. He hadn’t gotten his photo ID yet, but he looked the part, with his British Gas fleece and his little suitcase full of wires. I offered him a cup of tea; he declined, so I stood in the mirror checking my curlers, and somehow he got to the front door without me seeing him. 

“All done now, love,” he said, and stepped into the evening rain.

I dreamed about the meterman last night. He was stood bedside my bed. He fell softly on my neck, kissing, biting. There was ever so much blood. I woke early this morning and opened the curtains, but the sun was too bright.

Bridge

He stands with his hands on the Victorian iron and looks down at the water. Steady, wide. He has never been east of the river before, but he has a five pound note, and he wants to see the fair.

There are so many people. So much coloured light. He sees a sign. He doesn’t read well, but he knows the word ‘magic’, so he follows it to a red velvet tent. The man in the spotlight calls him to the stage, has him check a hat for hidden compartments, then conjures two doves, which fly out through the doorway. Someone says it is fine sleight of hand; he is sure they are wrong.

It is midnight. He stands on the bridge which will take him back to the flat above the butcher’s, where his mother and sister sleep. He looks at the sky. A dove flies towards the moon.

Flash – A horror story

There was lightning in the sky, and the rain fell on the leaves like a giant watering can.

“Let’s hide in that old house!” shouted Kevin.

He was sick of reading horror stories. Nobody wants to mark coursework at one AM. Every story seemed to feature fifteen year olds taking shelter in haunted houses. Still, they ticked the boxes for similes, adverbs and onomatopoeia, so he gave them good marks.

It was raining when he went to bed. It hit the windows like… like a giant watering can. Perhaps bad prose really was infectious. He sunk his head into his pillow and closed his eyes. Great Expectations sat on the bedside cabinet. Dust made thick fur on his guitar strings. A notebook lay open on the

coffee table. He’d left the pen lid off when he’d written ‘novel ideas’ in the centre of the page; the ink was going dry.