What an odd and powerful thing the imagination is. I blog, therefore I virtually exist..or is that, I link, therefore I spam...? To whom, with whom, is one blogging? Is it to self, family, friends...is it a modernised splitting of oneself, along the ancient, evolution-thinkingly spawned plane of hic and ille? That is, you're talking to yourself guv..or at least you're imagining you are. I could imagine a vast and darkened amphitheatre set against space, with a few people sitting here and there, and a few coughs and scrapes as one or two hutch out and a couple more edge in to take their seats for a few minutes.
Anyway, here's a poem. Though I wrote it some years ago, I've only a vague idea of what it's "about". Mind you, I'm convinced a poem does not need to be about anything: "rhythmic grumbling" was what that Eliot chap said, and fittingly enough the only fact I remember about him with any glee is that his name is an anagram of "toilets."
It works best when read aloud, as most(if not all) poetry should.
Poetry, eh? Who on earth decided that poems have to be read with that remote, lofty, whiningly depressive cadence as in one's imaginings of what going to church is about? Heck, people read poems as if anticipating a reverb unit set on "Cavern" mode. Either that, or we have the modern "3 Ps" disease of simplistic and dumbed-down couplets: Pisspoor Performance Poetry, that is prophetic only inasmuch as when it spwaned itself a few years ago, it pre-empted the "Your Crap Talentlessness Is The Equal Of, Someone Who Is On Telly Getting Paid For Their Mediocrity"(...er..."ness") by several years.
And speaking of simplistic couplets, here it is...actually for the first time in front of a virtual audience...and how's that for oxymoronic...!
So...ahem...laydeez and gentlemen pleeze-ah:
Icarus Millenium
It's after hours. The player hangs out on nickel strings;
It makes him feel like flying, as if on steady wings
That draw him up and out along the sliding motorway
In a zooming metal guitar-machine that slices up the day
In shiny metal strands that slip in glistening wires
Past thoughts of fallen birdmen, bright streets and screaming spires.
Like Icarus ascending, he rises with a note
That slides like razor wire past an upturned throat;
Fingers cut him as he pulls eight-thousandth gauge delights
From the singing strings snaking out between stars' madding heights
And flashing trails of speeding cars that stab into the dark.
And he thinks the glinting from the frets is really from the spark
That lit him into madness' flash when he fell from Grace
And howling at the warm void was flung out into space.
Far from earth he arches, stretched on silver strings,
Forced out into glaring worlds where nightmarish things
Leap from doorways and the alleys that snake out from the stage
Where he cuts and frets away his life in whammy-barring rage
At the love he stole and burnt those twenty years ago
But whose effigy he carries in a raw hole just below
The broken strings and trailing leads that spill out from his heart:
The image of a woman he'd fashioned from the start
From mud and tears and blood all spilt from past creations
Of screwing towards chastity and mad infatuations;
An idol, a dream of family and a happy, shining girl,
A lover, mother, whore and daughter for whom he'd buy the world
With the silver-mercury tears of the one important gig
That would pay for all(if he played to all, suspended from a rig
Of nickel strings and fretwire strung out above the stage)...
So all would know and love him, and he would never age
But scream and cry and bend those strings: and never would he cease
To rip raw song and laughter but never find the peace
That whispered from the stage in half-heard curtain calls
To sink exhausted, sobbing, in played-out empty halls.
And Icarus is falling, sparking down to earth
Like a gnat caught in a campfire from which the merry mirth
Has long crawled into darkness. He looks with hate above
At his father's wings spread out wide in an attitude of love,
Along searing razor strings pulled taut along their length,
And is lacerated by the wire as he gives up his strength.
Feathers, wire and brightness falling from the air...
He plunges like a meteor, until engendered there
Is a freeze-frame, glaring still projected on the night
Of screaming, snapped and twisting strings on the pavement in full sight
And lurching, tortured spires against the orange glare
Of neon afterburn; and a scorched feather in despair
Drifts down past the doorway to the steps of the poisoned church:
The Castle Perilous and its denizens who lurch
Through dead cans, sherry bottles and forgotten Chinese food.
Here's our fallen birdman: draped by a cloak of rude,
Thin umbrella cloth that can't keep out the rain;
Sad and broken wingskin ripped from a tarnished frame...
His last and maiden flight had almost grabbed the sun
To forge his soul and sear the pain,to be the only one
Who flew at the face of Hyperion, then to play the strains
That frenzy the horses of the sun; and to take the reins
Himself(and die laughing at Prometheus' attempt),
To grasp control and fly the day, not heeding the descent
Of he who takes on the Man with overbearing pride
In trying to harness what's not his own, nor paying for the ride...
Now all that's left is the wreckage of a man across a kerb,
Feathers, blood and twisted wire, of he who would disturb
Whole stars, worlds and lifetimes strung out through the night
On those silver strings that ever sing across their madding heights.
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