Poundland

Came we then to the place abovementioned,
crossed its bristled threshold through robotic glass doors,
entered its furry heat, its flesh-toned fluorescent light.
Thus with wire-wrought baskets we voyaged,
and some with trolleys, back wheels flipping like trout tails,
cruised the narrow canyons twixt cascading shelves,
the prow of our journeying cleaving stale air.
Legion were the items that came tamely to hand:
five stainless steel teaspoons, ten corn-relief plasters,
the Busy Bear pedal bin liners fragranced with country lavender,
the Disney design calendar and diary set, three cans of Vimto,
cornucopia of potato-based snacks and balm for a sweet tooth,
toys and games, goods of Orient made, and of Cathay,
all under the clouded eye of CCTV,
beyond the hazard cone where serious chutney spillage had occurred.
Then emerged souls: the duty manager with a face like Doncaster,
mumbling, “For so much, what shall we give in return?”
The blood-stained employee of the month,
sobbing on a woolsack of fun-fur rugs,
many uniformed servers, spectral, drifting between aisles.
Then came Elpenor, our old friend Elpenor,
slumped and shrunken by the Seasonal Products display.
In strangled words I managed,
“How art thou come to these shady channels, into hell’s ravine?”
And he: “To loan sharks I owe/the bone and marrow of my all.”
Then Walt Whitman, enquiring politely of the delivery boy.
And from Special Occasions came forth Tiresias,
dead in life, alive in death, cider-scented and sock-less,
Oxfam-clad, shaving cuts to both cheeks, quoting the stock exchange.
And my own mother reaching out, slipping a tin of stewing steak
to the skirt pocket of her wedding dress,
blessed with a magician’s touch, practised in need.

But never until the valley widened at the gated brink
did we open our lips to fish out those corn-coloured coins,
those minted obols, hard-won tokens graced with our monarch’s head,
kept hidden beneath the tongue’s eel, blood-tasting,
both ornament and safeguard, of armour made.
And paid forthwith, then broke surface
and breathed extraordinary daylight into starved lungs,
steered for home through precincts and parks scalded by polar winds,
laden with whatnot, lightened of golden quids.

A new poem by Simon Armitage.

The poet, dramatist and broadcaster Simon Armitage is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. This new poem appears in "Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014", published on 18 September by Faber & Faber (£14.99)

The Spoken Word

The evening advances, then withdraws again
Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.
We are drifting, you and I,
As far from another as the young heroes
Of these two novels we have just laid down.
For that is happiness: to wander alone
Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves,
Our distances, and what we leave behind.
The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light.
These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them. 

(Hugo Williams, Tides)



I love those conversational, straightforward and almost throwaway poems.
Poems that you end up nodding to and agreeing and sympathising with. Poems that are impossible to imitate, though.

They are as real as real life is.


Sometimes I wonder why on Earth am I doing learning how to divide again. Next year is going to be a tedious and quite challenging one. All in all, up to this moment I am not giving up in my dreams and convictions.

May is a Lonely Rush

Facebook. 

Four phones online, they probably aren't.

24m since last connection. Kk. 

Some of them still. Am I even idle?

Of course I am. Or nobody cares.

Some people do, persons don't. 

You know how this chat business works. Sure.

Spammers. Are people looking for something...?

Amusing to do. Or whatever.

Empty moments. Data fly.

Under the myriad of statuses. Updates.

Second by second, everything changes. 

Anything new. Or alike.

Meanwhile. My Critical Reader. 

Rests on the linen. Dull.

'Pay me attention, I'll be long

but I won't be endless.' Nor would us.

P. V.

***

First draft from a personal brain storm. I have to improve it, though.

Zzzzzzzz

"No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."

(Ted Hughes, Theology)


**

Since I started an internship as well as doing my final year, my life has turned... busy. Psychologically speaking its very fulfilling, physically speaking its kind of shattering. Although, I guess there are certain rules you must abide to enjoy yourself at a party.

My nervous system lives in rush hour and the lack of sleep turns me kind of itchy. I guess the odd weekend I would fall into temptation again, you know... the original sin Milton is obsessed with. How wonderful my poetry lectures are.

Certainly I found myself behaving as if I was younger, just because of them. Sometimes I really think I'm already beginning to turn into a parody of myself, although I am surely gaining a true insight into how I should conduct myself. Who would have thought?

 'Greedily she engorged without restraint, 
 And knew not eating death. Satiate at length
 And heightened as with wine'
(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX)

How far is it? How far is it now?

‘But almost every word or combination of words carries unwanted luggage.’

(The Guardian: Teenage Kicks, Simon Armitage)

From Valencia to the UK, via Cardiff

The other day, reading Greg's blog -one of my inspirations at the moment- I just realised of a little nuance.





Link: http://vimeo.com/49854492


**
 



 The world could sometimes be awesome although we are drinking this multi-coloured nonsense that is life.



 "Now I'm ready." (But not really)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

A thought on what’s yet to come

"Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage."
(As You Like It)





And so it is my brain.
Writing my final degree dissertation is a tough work. I would like to say the rest is easier, but it just isn't. Anyway I find it rewarding in some way, although I don't have many time to write here... oh, well. I will come back, as always.


In the meantime you can visit my twitter, as it is updated more frequently.

@theescrivener

"Thine face is not worth sunburning."
(Henry V)

Alien smile ::) .

Motion

Movement.

Overconfident people

Rrrrr...

'None of the hypotheses, in my view, is particularly convincing.'

-So... what happened with that issue...?
- Heh, not a lot. But I'll tell you when we meet next time in the pub...
-That sounds like you are pulling me.
- Well, you could think that... or, you could think that I am far too busy for speaking right now, so I just think in the potential moment we casually see each other. Don't confuse yourself.
- Oh, right.





Do not confuse yourself.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle

'The Pauli exclusion principle with a single-valued many-particle wavefunction is equivalent to requiring the wavefunction to be antisymmetric.'

I don't belong here...

Smooth.

How to write good.
1. Avoid Alliterations. Always
2. Prepositions are not words to finish sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. They are old hat.
4. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
5. Be more or less specific.
6. Writers should never generalize.
Seven: Be consistent!
8. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
9. Who needs rhetorical questions?
10. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

I'm nearly there. Again.
Lasts steps are always difficult.

The Christmas Flavour Concept.

Staring each other from the top of nowhere.
Could even be in nowhere?

How many souveninrs do I keep? How many still to go?
Last night I travelled as a picture. Wearing flesh.
And I did lost all the mega pixels and the measurements of your bedding pack.

How much did it cost to see each other? In time measures, please.
And at the next morning I need to cheer up you cause I couldn't be bothered last night.
Well, in fact I was, but too late.


Silent cinema. Genius hidden in people with grandeur delusions.
(Yeah, Byron and Wilde, I won't forget that).

Concealed are the greatest anyway.
Reading again and again the same caption of the journal pages.

They are being researched again.
Researched again.

****

But even if the Crystal Palace hangs over Bleak House, it is, of course, not in it.

The Christmas spirits are not the same everywhere. So does it change the Christmas flavor.

Do I taste like Christmas, Sir?

Twin Shadow Forget

I miss your songs, I miss your hair, your laugh and even your indifference.

Oh wait, no, I don't miss this one.

As John Maddison's character used to say: I don't know why I shouldn't but I don't.




Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

(William Earnest Henley)







...

I'm emptying.



P.D: La batalla entre el nadaqueperder y la mentirijilla de la autosuperación. 

Touch and go

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

 Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting her — as here he is — with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be — as here they are — mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be — as are they not? — ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!” […]’

 (Charles Dickens, Bleak House, March 1852- September 1853)

Charles Dickens creates an image of a filthy and dirty London. Concern and pressure.
He gives strength to fog. Just as you do.

And yet it does float.

The Song of the Earth

Late night woops.

http://mountainmoonvolcano.com/

The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pair of boots--but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name. 

He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,
Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!"
"What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"
But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!" 

(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)

El horrible plan de planear.
Suave.

Dreams and dreamers

I

'He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.


He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

[...]'

(Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of the Reading Gaol)

W.A.S.P.

Just because I like to wonder about silly things, playing with words and some other stuff. I have been rambling in the WASP acronym. I find it curious and appealingly paradoxical. Recently to broad my mind to another people and maybe cultures seems to be more rewarding than the mere fact of interacting with other people just for the sake of doing it.
Well, there it goes:

WASP(s)

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
White Anglo-Saxon People
Wireless Application Service Provider
Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome Protein
(and more technical acronyms)

There's the music band WASP, as well...

And then there’s the old, presumably Jewish joke: WASPs leave and don’t say goodbye, Jews say goodbye and don’t leave. Speaking of what I found this very interesting article about ghosting.




And... I dunno...

We Are Sex Perverts?


Just Ghost.

An Apple's Core

 '-What are you thinking so earnestly?' said he, as they walked back to the ball-room; -'not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head your meditations are not satisfactory.'
Catherine coloured, and said 'I was not thinking of anything'
'That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I had rather be told at once that you will not tell me'
'Well then, I will not.'
'Thank you; for now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to cease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world advances intimacy so much.'

(Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey)