Skip to main content

Net's fucked, need a router, have a poem.

Sandbar

At low tide, lying flat between two spurs of rock
it avoids it’s own extravagances, what am I I am a sandbar
a conglomerate what is this poem
other than an outpouring what is outpouring but lack of control.
Yes but it’s nonsense what is listening but waiting for a pause
what is structure but attempting to discern a meaning what
is appreciation but the hope of reciprocal flattery what is anger but a tool for getting attention what is a sandbar but the agglomeration of eroded particles
what is your point.

What is the lying quiet sat on sandbar with notebook.
What is the omission of indefinite articles what is.
What is the hegemony of adjectives what is what.

Obviously two flat planes sky sea must I keep repeating myself
there has only ever been one poem written and it is about two big blocks of colour
and the contrast between them, all the rest is editing.
What is editing but simple compression what is compression but distillation what is what is what is.

Out on the sandbar it’s all prayers, prayers for forgiveness, solemn psalms
begging for ideas, short conversations with allegorical whimbrels, beaks pushing into sand, inconclusive. A latter day saint, bartering sand in the arse for revelation,
writing romantic speculation in mica with a twig and watching water bubbling to the surface to fill them. A liquid canto. A seabird putting it’s head to one side and saying

We’re all going to beat the oligarchs to death with their own shoes later, fancy it?

The sky is a variety of descriptive words, the sea is less so, all is temperance
the slight convection of air, the indeterminate barometer in the hut on the shore
is a model of calm. Deposition is at a minimum, the cliffs retreat under abrasion is in abeyance. The sandbar shifts and settles.

What is a continuum but relevance,
what is relevance but a static field
what is static but movement
what is movement but a continuum what is

what is a signifier two limpets, conferring
cracking codes on the side of a rockpool, cries
in tonal increments over start salt flats,
a stuttering cipher a cry here, the downward
advancing of the grasses on the Cliffside, the
harmonies of sight the stopping. Stopping and spreading arms wide in a Demagogic Christ pose and holding the picture for some unseen camera feel sure must be watching

What is the sweep of drift what is.
What is the notebook, dripping with brine.
What is the emotion of static items.
Out on the sandbar all is utterance,
stood shaping plosives at a shiftless ocean, standing on
one leg and pursing lip and making faces at the sea,
stopping and exchanging insults with the salt
stopping and comforting the air
stopping and arguing with tides
stopping and singing at petrels, frankly baffled
wheeling up and off and crying their bafflement
stopping and preaching in a serious tone of voice
at anything crossing the field of vision

to sit on the sandbar, and feel the water slowly soaking you, to see the sand pile up on one side of you the feel the salt crusting on your skin cracking when you wrinkle your eyes against the spray and to scrape a shallow grave in the quickly infilling sand and to place your notebook into the grave and watch as the sand flows over it and buries it one bright red corner sticking up sharply to lay back and feel the water about you and hear it rushing in your ears disproportionately loud to it’s gentle motions to stare up and widen your eyes for as long as you dare, find the pen your pocket and break it and to think to yourself you know if nothing else I can always buy more notebooks

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi
Post a Comment
Read more

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&
Post a Comment
Read more

20

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage
Post a Comment
Read more