Monday January 1st
My Resolution Will Not Be Televised
You will not be able to discover it from your sofa, brother.
You will not be able to sit there under the cat, sister,
remote control in one hand, phone in the other,
and put the kettle on during the ad breaks,
because my resolution will not be televised.
My resolution will not be tweeted.
My resolution will not be announced on Twitter.com
in 280 characters of self-promoting concision
to be retweeted by Ricky Gervais in between posts
deploring acts of animal cruelty and the release date of his latest film.
My resolution will not be tweeted.
My resolution will not be televised.
My resolution will not be Facebooked.
My resolution will not feature next to an inspirational quote
set against the backdrop of a soaring mountain or a looking-glass lake.
My resolution will not be posted beside a shining infographic
illustrating how many kilos I have lost, how many pennies
I have saved, how many drinks I have not drunk.
My resolution will not be Facebooked.
My resolution will not be tweeted.
My resolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures on Instagram
of kale soup and black bean–quinoa salad.
There will be no pictures on Instagram
of NutriBullet breakfast smoothies.
My resolution will not be vlogged.
My progress will not be revealed to you in a twenty-minute daily video diary.
My resolution will not be right back after a message
about my new range of eyebrow pencils.
My resolution will not be vlogged.
There will be no pictures on Instagram.
My resolution will not be Facebooked.
My resolution will not be tweeted.
My resolution will not be televised.
My resolution will not survive more than two days.
My resolution will not be televised.
My resolution will be diarised. I shall write a poem a day. It will be a daily testament to the power of poetry and how it can help us make sense of the world. A kind of inky monument to Truth and Beauty.
I shall set my poems down here: in this surprisingly affordable medium-ruled notebook with acid-free pages, rounded corners and expandable inner pocket, with its cover illustration of an anthropomorphised white Japanese bobtail cat sporting a red bow.
I do not underestimate the task ahead. Writing a poem every day will not be easy. It will require discipline. Mental resilience. Self-sacrifice. Vast reservoirs of imagination. And a ready supply of custard creams.
Tuesday January 2nd
I lay in bed until mid-day, bathing in the cotton sea of tranquillity that is my duvet. Inspired by my surroundings, I attempted a poem. I got as far as:
Duvet,
you are so groovet,
I’d like to stay under you
all of Tuesdet.
I didn’t care for it much. The rhymes seemed a little forced. I worked on it for a while longer but produced nothing more of note, except for a doodle of a cat on a skateboard. I was quite pleased with that. The cat was wearing headphones and I’d drawn a speech bubble coming out of its mouth with the words “I AM A CAT ON A SKATEBOARD!” written inside it.
I am forty-five years old.
I wondered whether it was my working conditions that were the problem. It is unnaturally quiet. This is partially explained by the temporary absence of students next door, whose general rowdiness frequently serves to keep me awake most of the night and disturb me for much of the day. By contrast, Mrs McNulty, on the other side, is typically as quiet as a pea, except for the occasional sounds of sawing and her Wednesday night séances.
In the hope that a change of scenery might help, I got up to press on with the rearrangement of my bookshelves. This year, I’ve decided to re-order by International Standard Book Number. I went at it tenaciously and must have lost track of the hours. It was time for bed and I’d still only got as far as Little Dorrit (or 0192545124 as I have now come to think of it).
It was only then that I remembered my New Year’s resolution. I took another look at my duvet poem. Would that do? Probably not, I decided. My cat doodle also seemed less impressive now. It looked more like a dog. A dog on a trolley.
Two days! That’s all it has taken for my resolution to be smashed on the craggy, unforgiving rocks of my literary negligence. All in all, this constitutes one of my better efforts of recent years.
Wednesday January 3rd
I would like to apologise for the delay
I would like to apologise for the delay
in coming to work today.
This is due to a signalling failure
between my primary motor cortex and pyramidal motor pathway.
I shall remain here instead,
sidelined in this bed,
until further notice.
I would like to apologise for the delay
in going for a run today.
This is due to leaves on the tracksuit
I wore last week,
during my unsuccessful attempt to bury myself
in a coppiced wood.
I would be there still, if I could.
I would like to apologise for the delay
in joining your skiing holiday.
This is due to the wrong kind of snow,
which, as far as I’m concerned, is any kind of snow
that enables people
to hurtle down slopes, at speed,
on skis.
I would like to apologise for the delay
in taking part in life today.
This is due to delays.
I would like to apologise for the delay in getting to work today. This is due to writing a poem. Thankfully, Janice is not back until next week so she wasn’t there to see me slip into my officle ninety minutes late.
Even at the best of times, my officle presents a distressingly joyless sight; not quite office, not quite cubicle, it exists in a permanent state of beige and bewildered irresolution. But there are few sights as depressing as my officle on the first day back after the Christmas break: tinsel droops around my PC monitor; an uninspired Secret Santa gift (yet another pine-scented candle!) sits on top of my in-tray, jilted at the altar of my ingratitude; abandoned corporate Christmas cards silently reproach me from the flimsy wall panels.
With the aid of a mid-morning Twix, I attempted to coax my brain into thinking about the report I’m supposed to be putting together for Janice. It has the working title of “Re-solutioning the Brand: from Customer Dissension to Retention”. I have yet to start it, mainly for the reason that I don’t really know what it means. Staring out through my officle window into the midwinter bleakness, I pictured Janice skiing down the slopes at Kitzbühel, the snow gleaming like powdered champagne.
Thursday January 4th
I wasn’t in the mood for poetry today. I think it’s all this work business. Larkin may have had his library stamp and Bukowski his mailbags but it strikes me that proper work is unconducive to the creation of poetry. It’s not easy to elevate yourself to a higher plane when your mind is being laid siege to by flipcharts and pivot tables.
The cat doesn’t help either. She is my furry straitjacket. Every time I sit down with the intention of writing, she sees this as her cue to lie on top of me and pin my arms down. My writing speed reduces to five words per minute; by the time I’ve physically managed to write a line, all previously imagined words and ideas have oozed from my brain like custard through a cattle-grid.
I cracked on with some more ISBNs instead. The project was proceeding apace and my bookshelves were beginning to look pleasingly resystematised.
Until, that is, I came to 1903436419.
I had all but forgotten it. Tentatively, I peeked inside. And, yes, there was the familiar spidery scrawl of Sophie’s writing, in the margins, next to my own. The love-notes we passed to each other in the back of a lecture hall, lifetimes ago, years before it all went wrong.
Friday January 5th
Everyday is like bin day
Everyday recycled and grey
It’s the first bin day of the new year: general landfill. I made sure my lilac sacks were securely tied and primed the night before and my alarm clock set so I might rise in good time to minimise potential mishap. The Man at Number 29 had clearly taken no such precautions given his frantic bag-handed dash down the street in futile pursuit of the lorry.
Trudging slowly through the wet streets
back to the house where your bins weren’t emptied.
And all the bags you found
that you forgot to put out, Armageddon,
come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come.
Any feelings of residential primacy were short-lived. Dave, Martin and Marvin were unloading items for the new term from their VW Beetle when I returned from work. These included a seven-piece drum-kit (Dave is an acoustic engineering student), a Moog modular synthesizer (Martin is a music technology student) and a life-size anatomical skeleton (Marvin is a sociology student but one with a rather peculiar fetish for medical supplies and equipment). They high-fived me as they headed in next door.
I went into my own house, which was still in something of a state from last night. There were books all over the sitting-room floor and my Morrissey singles lay scattered as if someone had summoned a nuclear bomb.
Saturday January 6th
Anthem for Doomed Christmas Trees
What passing bells for trees who lie in gutters?
Only the monstrous rumble of the vans
will drown out their silent cries. No muttered
prayers, no roadside eulogies or thanks.
Doorstep-dumped, no longer spruce,
who now will pine for you and cry?
Unbaubled, untinseled, stripped of use,
off to the Great Wood Chipper in the Sky;
How long has it been – two or three weeks? –
since we laid out our gifts at your feet?
How quickly the present becomes the past
and time sweeps all needles from its path.
I dumped my tree on the pile at the edge of the park and returned to find Sophie waiting outside my house with Dylan. She rarely says a word directly to me these days, preferring instead to communicate through a combination of hand gestures and glowers. She handed him over to me with a look that clearly meant: return him to me in one piece or you’ll be the next to have your baubles removed.
We headed off to football, where important father–son bonding takes place over unfailingly inclement weather, volleys of verbal abuse from opposition parents, and humiliating, life-scarring defeats. Today’s trouncing is a respectable 0–8. Dylan, isolated on the wing, just stood on the touchline for most of the game, shivering. Rob Trafford, the Under 16s’ beleaguered and chronically inept manager, declared it to be ‘a season-defining performance’. It was hard to disagree with him.
We arrived back home to the ominous signs of party preparations being made next door.
Sunday January 7th
I Did Not Tell Death Where I Lived
I did not tell Death where I lived,
But he has found me all the same.
I hear him knocking on my door
And calling out my name.
My Snapchat settings kept Him out.
On Twitter I did block Him.
His Facebook friend requests were spurned.
Yet still he keeps on knocking.
Court injunctions were sought and filed
But still I sit in fear.
Oh, my mistake. It is not Death.
I think my pizza’s here.
I drew back my bedroom curtains to find Death staring back at me. He was wearing a fixed and maniacal grin of sickly menace. His ghastly eye sockets bore into mine. Fingers, bony and extended, clawed at the glass.
Staggering back, I gathered the courage to look again; it was Marvin’s skeleton. Whether it had been placed there by design to terrify me or whether it had simply been launched up into the air and failed to come back down, I don’t know. I marched next door and pressed the buzzer continuously until I saw a shuffling hooded figure emerge. For the second time in the space of a few minutes, I found myself in the presence of a gruesome Death-like creature. This one was wearing a dark blue towelling dressing gown. I began to harangue it but gave up when it was clear that it was impervious to my ranting, or indeed any aspect of the world of which it was supposedly a part.
Monday January 8th
The Tyrolean air must contain magical, soothing properties. Janice, in an uncustomary gesture of benevolence, has granted me a week’s extension on my report. This is all very well but I am still no nearer understanding what it is that I’m expected to write about; the problem of working in a business that sells ‘solutions’ is that none of us really know what that means and there exists a kind of collective corporate complicity that makes us all too scared to ask.
Tuesday January 9th
Poetry Club
The first rule of Poetry Club
is that we meet each month in the pub.
The second rule of Poetry Club
is that not all poems have to rhyme.
Contrary to popular stereotype, poets are hardy creatures; neither Arctic blizzards nor desert sandstorms, mighty earthquakes nor rampaging tornados are likely to get much in the way of a poet with the opportunity to read their work to an audience with no obvious means of escape. Consequently, there was full attendance at Poetry Club in spite of the evening’s bitter cold.
Mary got proceedings off to a poignant start with a requiem to her husband, Leonard, who tragically died in the Falklands. This was not during hostilities, as it turns out, but falling off a cliff while attempting to photograph a colony of rockhopper penguins. Leonard, as we’ve learnt over the years, was her third husband of six. The sequence runs as follows: Divorced, Bewildered, Died, Divorced, Befuddled, Surprised.
Next, it was the turn of Douglas, who launched into a ballad concerning rival sea captains at the Battle of Lepanto of 1571. This he attempted to bring to life with a sequence of nautical actions and sound effects. Twenty minutes in, and with no end in sight, we were able to coax him to sit down with a double rum and Coke, during a particularly heavy spell of cannonade.
Chandrima captivated us with a poem about a doomed love affair between a wealthy Delhi merchant prince and a serving-girl, followed by a brief meditation on the movements of the moon. And then, in a sudden change of pace and tone, Kaylee treated us to a very impassioned spoken-word piece about urban decay, rape and abortion, which made us all rather quiet and reflective for a while.
I did my best to lighten the mood with a few poems about Piers Morgan, bus journeys and the seasonal migration of ice-cream vans. As ever, I could sense Toby Salt sneering at me from his seat in the corner and trying to distract the others in the middle of my usual hesitant, stumbling performance.
Toby Salt is very dismissive of my work. He claims it lacks gravitas and soul.
‘As Carl Sandberg once said,’ he declared pompously at our last meeting, ‘“poetry should be an echo, asking a shadow to dance”.’ Three years of studying Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and he thinks he knows it all.
Toby Salt is particularly dismissive of my rhyming schemes and poorly constructed metre. His modus operandi is free verse. However, I like to think that I treat ALL poets with equal respect, whatever their literary shortcomings, and so I sat quietly through all four of his frankly impenetrable poems, flicking empty pistachio shells into a pot.
After we’d all sat down, Mary took the opportunity to remind us about our commitment to finding new members for the year ahead. There used to be ten of us but numbers have dwindled in recent times. Not even poetry is immune from the age of austerity.
‘So then, how’s the recruitment drive coming on?’ she asked. ‘Any leads, anyone?’
I stared intently at my pint glass. I could sense others doing the same. Toby Salt broke the silence.
‘Believe me, I really wish I could help. It’s not as if I don’t know a lot of poets.’
The eyes of my fellow club members began to roll.
‘But, to be honest,’ he went on, ‘they are of rather a different calibre. I’d be hard-pressed to get them to come along to a gathering like this!’
‘Actually, I know someone who may be interested so how about you stop doing us down for a change and casting all these nasturtiums,’ said Kaylee, glaring at Toby Salt.
Good old Kaylee! You could always tell when she was worked up about something as the contents of her lexical filing cabinet would become all muddled up.
‘Met her on a “Save Our NHS” march just before Christmas,’ she continued. ‘She couldn’t make tonight but thinks she might come along next month. I said that’s fine, we can just play it by year. Turn up when you want. No stings attached.’
‘What’s her name?’ Mary asked.
‘She’s called Liz.’
‘Well, let’s just hope that Liz passes mustard,’ said Toby Salt with a smirk.
For one moment, I thought Kaylee was going to thump him. I opened my mouth with the intention of advising her to take him with a grain assault but, thinking better of it, popped another pistachio inside it instead.
Wednesday January 10th
I have decided to fight fire with fire to fight my fear of being fired.
I shall ‘imagineer’ suitably impressive corporate sound bites – or, as I like to think of them, ‘jargon bombs’ – to drop into my report. To prove I can walk the talk, I first need to talk the walk. Just like performing poetry on stage, it is simply a matter of bluff and self-confidence. Seven hours of intensive ‘boiling the ocean’, ‘squeezing the sponge’, and ‘finding ourselves behind the eight ball’ and my report has at last begun to take shape.
All this industry went on amidst a backdrop of angry thoughts about Toby Salt. He has no appreciation of how difficult it is to make poems rhyme. It is far easier to find words that don’t rhyme than ones that do and I have statistics to back me up on that.
Thursday January 11th
Tweets
I think that I shall never meet
A poem lovely as a tweet.
A tweet with words and thoughts compressed
For me to press against my breast.
A tweet that stays with me all day,
Or ’til I put my phone away;
A tweet that I may marvel at,
With a photo of a dancing cat;
Or one that has mistakes within
That I may point out with a grin.
So shove your Larkin and your Keats,
Send to me your blessed tweets!
Before settling down in front of an old episode of Morse, I plucked up the courage to look at my social media accounts. These days, it is not enough for the Modern Poet merely to write poems: audiences must be engaged with and poetic content must be optimised for the purpose of platform and search engine discoverability.
I noted that on Twitter, I have now optimised myself for twenty-three people. Toby Salt has somehow mustered 174 followers. I clearly need to deepen my digital footprint and I have made a vow, with the cat as my witness, to share more of my poems with my foolhardy followers as a next tentative digital baby step.
Meanwhile on Facebook, Sophie has updated her status to ‘In a Relationship’. This news is accompanied by a smiley-faced emoji. She has also been tagged in a photograph with somebody calling himself ‘Stuart Mould’. In the picture, they appear to be undertaking some kind of candlelit dinner together. Sophie looks very happy about something; I can only assume it’s the gammon.
Friday January 12th
The Man at Number 29 has put his general landfill out on the day for recycling: it’s a basic bin-day error. Even Dave, Martin and Marvin seem to be able to get that right.
He’s not my only neighbour with troubles: Mrs McNulty came around in a state of agitation, prattling on about a rather spurious incident involving her dog in the night-time. She claims that her golden Labrador, Aleister, has spontaneously combusted. She pointed at a pile of ashes in her back garden which was where she said she’d last seen him, sitting there quietly and gazing sadly up at the moon.
I have my doubts: partly because it looked more like cigarette ash to me (Mrs McNulty is a committed smoker of Gauloises); and partly because she claimed the same thing had happened to Mr McNulty following his disappearance, although it’s common knowledge he lives three streets away in a pebble-dashed fifties semi with a woman named Sandra, whom he met at sales conference in Derby. Also, Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog.
Saturday January 13th
4-4-2
| This | line | up, |
| Lord | help | us! |
| Four | down. | In |
| dire | need | of |
| some | help. | We |
| lose | some, | we |
| lose | some. | No |
| plan, | only | an |
| ache | that | we |
| call | hope. | My |
| idea? | Team | of |
| goalkeepers. |
Trudging back from football (0–11), I found myself man-marked by Dylan, who regaled me with tales of his mother’s new boyfriend – or ‘Stuart’, as he seems so desperate to be called:
‘Mum says she’s not used to having a proper man around. He’s put those shelves up in the sitting room – the ones you were always promising to do – and last Sunday he cooked us all a roast. He even drives me to football practice.’
And then, going in with his studs showing:
‘Why did you never learn to drive, Dad? Do poets drive – or are they always passengers?’
I told Dylan that perhaps it would be for the best if he could stop talking in order to conserve his energy for the final three miles’ walk home.
Sunday January 14th
In October, Poetry Club will be heading off on our much-anticipated Poets on the Western Front trip. We will be visiting northern France and Belgium to see, amongst other things, the trench where Henri Barbusse was a stretcher-bearer, the hill where Ivor Gurney was wounded, the battlefield which inspired Wilfred Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’ and the cellar in which he wrote his last letter. Having recently taken over from Mary as club treasurer, I spent the morning reviewing the finances. All subs were up to date; even Toby Salt’s, unfortunately, giving me no excuse to harass him.
As the cat took up occupancy on me for the rest of the day, I took another look at Twitter. Last night, in the spirit of my renewed commitment to social media, I’d shared a poem called ‘The Day My Dog Spontaneously Combusted’:
there he was,
chasing sticks,
doing tricks,
and all that stuff
next minute, woof
Since I posted this poem, my follower count has gone down to seventeen (Toby Salt now has 196). What’s more – to add insult to invisibility – I’ve received a series of angry, foul-mouthed tweets. Initially, I thought that I’d experienced my very first real-life troll, but then I noticed that they’d been sent by the RSPCA.
Monday January 15th
Inbox
Janice is on the war path for my report and I fear for my core deliverables. I spent most of the day holed up in the stationery cupboard following a last-minute, eleventh-hour crisis of confidence. Although initially pleased with my jargonautical exploits (only this morning I had added in the sentence, ‘We need to stop chasing butterflies if we’re to develop game-changing marketecture that will enable us to grab wallet share’), I was seized with a sudden fear that it was utterly devoid of all meaning and content. That all it added up to was a great big warm bowl of nothing.
I managed to slip out undetected at about 6.30pm thanks to some diversionary tactics outside Janice’s office from Tomas, who cleans the second-floor officles, involving a squeegee on a telescopic handle and a 500ml bottle of Windolene trigger spray.
Tuesday January 16th
I phoned in sick in order to regroup myself mentally. As it always does, the act of pretending to be ill made me actually feel ill, and I spent much of the day asleep in bed, stirring occasionally in response to neighbourly sounds of UK grime and Mrs McNulty’s sawing.
But even feigned illnesses begin to wear off eventually, and by the evening I was able to finish off the reordering of my bookcases. I placed the last book – 97819123666158 – on the shelf and stood back, the better to admire my achievement. It was magnificent! To celebrate, I thought I’d treat myself to a couple of stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes but, having spent fifteen minutes attempting to locate it, I gave up and went back to bed.
Wednesday January 17th
How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors
It’s not rocket surgery.
First, get all your ducks on the same page.
After all, you can’t make an omelette
without breaking stride.
Be sure to watch what you write
with a fine-tuned comb.
Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.
It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.
Don’t worry about opening up
a whole hill of beans:
you can always burn that bridge when you come to it,
if you follow where I’m coming from.
Concentrate! Keep your door closed
and your enemies closer.
Finally, don’t take the moral high horse:
if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.
Still at home. Hiding from your responsibilities may perhaps not be the most mature response, but at least it is a response – one that says, having carefully considered all the options available to me, I have taken the positive and proactive decision to run away and hide. In this way, I remain firmly in control of the whole situation.
And frankly, I think this mini-break may actually have done me some good. My batteries are recharged and I now feel ready to step up to the plate and face the music.
Thursday January 18th
I feared the worst as I journeyed to work this morning. Birds flapped menacingly. Belisha beacons flashed in warning. Pavements stuck out their kerbs to trip me.
Almost immediately I received the summons to Janice’s office. She was sitting behind her desk, straight-backed, tight-lipped and twinkle-eyed. She reminded me of a politburo chief with a busy morning of denouncements to get through.
She’d instructed IT to hack into my computer and retrieve my report. She paused for dramatic effect and smiled icily. My thoughts turned to Siberian labour camps. I imagined the tilling of frozen soil. Then:
‘It’s just what this organisation needs. We need to shake some columns.’
I left her office through an undefenestrated route, with her invitation to ‘stir-fry some more ideas in her think-wok soon’ echoing disturbingly in my ears.
Friday January 19th
The whole street was woken at 7a.m. by the howls of the Man at Number 29 who, in an admirable bid to get his refuse collection back on track, had left his bin bags outside overnight, only for them to be savagely torn to shreds by foxes in the small hours. Utter carnage! Flour bags in flower beds! Houmous tubs in hedges! Dolmio daubed on doorsteps! The bin men declined to take what was left of his bags’ tattered remains, of course, and the Man at Number 29 retreated back inside in despair.
Moved by his plight, I had it in mind to write a poem of solidarity and post it through his letter box but I became distracted by the sight of The Guardian Bumper Christmas Cryptic Crossword. It had been waiting patiently in the corner of the sitting room for some attention since New Year’s Eve. Three hours later and I filled in the answer to 15 down, having first looked up its meaning in the dictionary:
VELLEITY (noun): volition in its lowest form; a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action.
Saturday January 20th
Penguin Awareness
I’ve been aware of penguins since I was three:
I think one may have moved in with me.
The signs are everywhere.
The smell of saltwater in the air.
There are moulted feathers on my chair
Yesterday I found a fish upon the stair.
But when I turn around there’s no one there,
for he moves in the shadows, like Tony Soprano;
I am forever stepping in guano.
I don’t know why he’s come to live with me.
There are better places for him to be.
But when I’ve gone to bed, I can hear the tread
of his soft heels across the kitchen floor,
and the opening of the freezer door.
And I picture him there,
his head resting on a frozen shelf,
dreaming sadly of somewhere else,
thinking about the hand that life has dealt him,
and I wonder if his heart is melting.
Sophie reminded me not to be late in dropping Dylan back tonight as Stuart was taking them both to some film premiere or other, and she’d really appreciate it if I could be on time for once. I replied that of course I would, before reminding her that she still had my vinyl copy of Pet Sounds and I’d really appreciate it if she could have it ready for me to collect from her later.
She handed it over to me wordlessly when I dropped Dylan back. Slouching home, I’d been all set to spend the evening with an old episode of Miss Marple but made the error of taking a quick look at Twitter. Penguin Awareness Day was being celebrated. I had previously been unaware of this. I posted up a poem to commemorate the occasion, drawing down deep into my well of imaginative powers to conjure up feelings of what it must be like to feel lonely and displaced.
Sunday January 21st
The RPSCA have contacted me again on Twitter to tell me they’re deeply concerned that a penguin – or indeed any aquatic, flightless bird – is being kept in a household environment. They believe its needs would become too difficult to meet in a human’s domestic dwelling and that it may become depressed. They are threatening to send an inspector out.
Monday January 22nd
National Poet Helpline
Do YOU ever talk
of nightingales?
Or whisper
immortal intimations?
Chat about melancholy?
Or Grecian urns?
If so, you may be
ode conversation.
A clatter of the letter box and a thud on the doormat told me that the January issue of Well Versed – The Quarterly Magazine for the Discriminating Poet had arrived. An occasion always greeted with much anticipation and no little excitement on my part for not only does it give me the opportunity to keep up with the latest developments in the poetry world (sample articles in this issue include ‘How to get the most out of your Pindaric Ode’, ‘Troubleshooting Double Dactyls’ and ‘How to Have Fun with Clerihews’) but I always experience a brief frisson of hope that one of my poems might at last be featured within its pages.
The theme for January’s competition was ‘Wind’ and I had high hopes for my two entries – ‘Breezy Listening’ and ‘Forgive Me Father For I Have Wind’ – but instead, there on page 3 was a photograph of a leering Toby Salt, alongside his winning poem, ‘Theogony and the Ecstasy’:
A rock for a jail
and nothing but the wind for company.
O Aeolian confidante! Dry my salty locks
and whisper the world into my ear.
The latest stockmarket news.
A child strangled. The shaming of a politician.
And all the snarling of the gutter press.
The jingle of my jailor’s keys as they bounce upon his thigh.
But no. These chains. This rock.
What do you bring exactly? Only betrayal.
The dread beat of accipitrine wings,
the daily agonies
and my ripped-out liver,
shining at my feet,
surrounded by rock pools, ruby-red.
I have now read this poem seven times and I understand it a little less each time.
Tuesday January 23rd
William Wordsearch
I have concluded that the whole notion of making competitions out of poetry merely serves to debase the artform. I’m seriously thinking about cancelling my subscription to Well Versed.
Wednesday January 24th
I had forgotten that it’s book group tomorrow!
After work, I pedalled furiously to the bookshop, swerving suddenly to avoid a collision with a Transit van, in the hope that they had J. G. Ballard’s Crash in stock. They did! While I was there, I bought a few other books: three more Ballard novels; a brief introduction on how to read poetry; A Dream Dictionary to ‘unlock the secrets of your subconscious’; 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die; and a self-help guide entitled How To Organise Your Mind So You Can Organise Your Life. Annoyingly, I couldn’t find this last book in my bag when I got home. I think I may have left it behind on the counter.
Crash is 208 pages. I have some speed-reading to do; I just need to be careful I don’t take a page too fast and career into the margins.
Thursday January 25th
There was a lively discussion at book group tonight concerning ‘symphorophilia’. This, I learnt, is the sensation of being sexually aroused by disasters or accidents. No one in the group admitted to harbouring such feelings although I did wonder about the man in front of me at the bar, having seen the way he’d looked at the barmaid after she’d dropped his bag of scampi fries on the floor and bent over to pick them up.
My own contribution to proceedings was slim on account of being exhausted from staying up late to try to finish it (I’d crashed out at 10.30pm having got as far as page 12). I bought an extra bowl of wasabi peas for the table to re-ingratiate myself with the group.
Friday January 26th
This is Not the Poem that I Had Hoped to Write
This is not the poem that I had hoped to write
when I sat at my desk and the page was white.
You see, there were other words that I’d had in mind,
yet this is what I leave behind.
I thought it was a poem to eradicate war;
one of such power, it would heal all the sores
of a world torn apart by conflict and schism.
But it isn’t.
Lovers, I’d imagined, would quote from it daily,
Mothers would sing it to soothe crying babies.
And whole generations would be given new hope.
Nope.
I had grand aspirations. Believe me, I tried.
Humanity examined with lessons applied.
But the right words escaped me; so often they do.
Have these in lieu.
The bin men have pinned a note to the Man at Number 29’s rubbish bags, informing him that as he’d put out more than the regulatory number of sacks to be collected (five), they will not be removing any of them today. I wanted to write a poem about ‘refuse collection’ – refuse being both a synonym for ‘rubbish’ and also a verb which means ‘to turn down’ and thus working brilliantly on two separate levels – but some days the words I would like to write are not the ones I end up writing.
I came home an hour early from work, having invented a doctor’s appointment, for no good reason other than it being Friday. As I arrived back, the cat emerged through the cat-flap. She was surprised to see me. Her whiskers twitched with guilt. I inspected the house for dead rodents or birds but none were forthcoming.
Saturday January 27th
After I’d dropped Dylan back at Sophie’s, I beetled off to meet Darren for 27th Club. Our monthly get-together is something we both continue to keep secret from Sophie because if there’s one person in the world who, in her eyes, comes close to being as big a disappointment as me, then it’s her younger brother, Darren.
We founded 27th Club three years ago as a way to take ourselves out of our musical comfort zones, while drinking over-priced, underwhelming beer. It’s a simple concept: on the 27th of every month, we venture out to see some live music. There are only two or three venues nearby so options are limited. But this does mean that we get exposed to music we might not otherwise have contemplated.
We’d imagined that 27th Club would expand our musical horizons into new and unexpected places and, in the process, we’d find ourselves imbued with a kind of hipster cosmopolitanism. In reality, all it seems to have done is to confirm our own well-worn, needle-scratched prejudices.
I was late arriving at tonight’s gig but I couldn’t miss him. This was, in part, due to the room being sparsely populated but also because Darren was holding a giant placard, on which was written the words “GOLF SALE”. The sign’s arrow was currently pointing in the direction of the ladies’ toilets.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘had to come straight from work. Didn’t get a chance to change.’
We watched a procession of singer-songwriters file onto the stage in order to sing songs that they’d written.
‘I met Sophie’s new man last week,’ Darren whispered while a woman was warbling about the comfort of trees.
‘Oh, really?’ I replied nonchalantly, my attention suddenly grabbed by some accomplished on-stage finger-work.
‘Really nice guy,’ he said.
‘Mmm . . .’ I responded, admiring the interesting chord progression.
‘I reckon he’s loaded. He drives a Maserati.’
Some kind of car, presumably. What might have been a Dsus4 rang out. I tried to focus on that.
‘Sophie’s really quite taken with him.’
Turning to Darren, I told him in no uncertain terms how disrespectful it is to talk when a singer-songwriter is in full flow. As he headed off to the loo in a huff, I held his sign and listened to how branches can bend in the wind.
Sunday January 28th
It was one of those beautiful, cold, crisp January days that are perfect for a long, bracing walk through a pine forest, while admiring the wintry elegance of trees snugly wrapped in their soft coats of frost and listening to the silvery half-silence of frozen streams.
And that’s why I stayed inside all day, staring at a screen. By the time I went to bed, I was filled with self-loathing. It makes me wonder how poets of yore would have coped in these distracting times; it’s hard to imagine Yeats sitting down to write ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ if he’d had Angry Birds downloaded on his phone.
Still, at least after the PR disaster that was PenguinGate, my social media presence seems to be on the rise again: I now have nineteen followers. It was less cheering news on Facebook, where Sophie continues to inflict more photos of Stuart and her together upon an unsuspecting populace. I have made a note to ask Sophie whether she has had him DBS-checked.
Monday January 29th
Monetization
The ad said
MONETIZE YOUR FOLLOWERS
so he thought
he would respond;
he painted them
in the changing light,
like waterlilies
in a pond.
I’ve been invited to an idea shower with the big enchiladas next month as they look to move the needle. According to Janice, my role is to serve as a grassroots-level pulse-check. Her PA told me later that this meant I’ll be attending a two-day meeting next month in a hotel near Leamington Spa. He showed me the website. It boasts of the hotel’s proximity to the tree-lined fairways and fast greens of a 190-acre golf course.
The awayday is provisionally entitled ‘Feeding the Funnel: How to Bring Home the Bacon for our Stakeholders’. I’ve been charged with putting together a PowerPoint presentation on how we might monetise our social media presence. Yes, me! If I were to monetise my own social media presence, I’d make about ten pence.
In other news, the cat is still acting suspiciously and has avoided all eye contact with me since Friday.
Tuesday January 30th
In the interests of research for Leamington Spa, I spent most of today on Twitter, assessing online opportunities for monetisation and short videos of pets falling off items of high furniture. To my disbelief, Toby Salt now has more than two hundred and fifty followers on Twitter, including a Radio 4 presenter and a well-known stand-up comedian. I can only conclude that there must be another, more successful Toby Salt out there and they have inadvertently followed the wrong person.
Wednesday January 31st
New Year Haiku Horoscopes
Aries In this diary you read your new horoscope. It tells you little. |
Virgo You stare at your phone, look up briefly in July, then stare at your phone. |
Taurus You hate your star sign. Disgruntled, you convert to Capricornism. |
Libra You take a year out but forget to return it. The fine will be huge. |
Gemini Mars enters the sphere of concupiscent Venus, whatever that means. |
Scorpio An out-of-body experience makes you angry. You’re beside yourself. |
Cancer You spend the whole year just wondering to yourself, ‘where do the years go?’ |
Sagittarius Year of good fortune. Not once do you encounter Jeremy Clarkson. |
Leo Your resolution to avoid all haikus is already broken. | Capricorn Trousers start to sag as your pockets bulge with coins. A year of much change. |
Aquarius You join the circus. Retrain as tightrope walker. Good work–life balance. | Pisces You leave the city to become a sheep shearer. New year, a new ewe. |
Mrs McNulty popped around again this evening. For some reason, she has begun to make the sign of the cross whenever she sees me.
She thrust into my hand a set of horoscopes for the coming year, while apologising for their lateness (she usually has these prepared by the end of December). This was due to unforeseen circumstances, she explained.
‘Remind me again, what star sign are you?’ she asked.
‘Not sure. Cancer, I think.’
She gave a sharp intake of breath, crossed herself once more then mumbled about how she needed to get back to her sawing. After she left, I read her entry for Cancer:
This year sees your transiting Saturn conjunct with your natal Saturn in the 8th house, and Uranus conjunct the Moon. The Vertex is conjunct Pluto and your 4th House has become shadowed with Neptune’s dark umbra. These factors, combined with irregular disturbances in your quincunx, point tragically yet irrevocably to one thing: Death will cast its shadow before the year is out.
Her usual mumbo-jumbo. I added it to the recycling.