Commonword Blogs

My dad’s leather shoes
Old, dormant, resting under the kitchen table
Curled up at the toe, beaten in at the back
Crispy insoles, like sandpaper, grit from the garden
And odour of turps, and beer slurped
Speckles of white paint dot the tongue
Inky blue, now a gauntly grey
Nuzzled by the dog
Sometimes, he forgets where he kicked them off!

I offered the idea that we could meet up on Wed eves during the Commonword recess. Martin also was up for it. Hopefully loads more.
We thought Weds 12th at the Corner House on Oxford St would be nice. How's about it guys and girls?

Corner House August 12th Weds. Great it'll be.

I'm going on here about it's good to keep in reasonable nick, then there's a high-profile case of one individual getting into body-difficulties though he's fitter than a fiddle.

'You don't know who/what to believe. So as well to do nothing, drift with the crowd'.

Or you'll be saying possibly: "Great One , what is the truth? Lay it on us; tell us". My own answer is that one can without the greatest difficulty see through the APPARENT contradictions. It takes, per my own experience, a lot of study. If I could think of a quicker way I'd say it.

Compound words, we use them all the time. They feel natural through usage and are being continuously coined. Seems to me though that we don’t get enough of them coined in fiction and poetry.

Anglo-Saxon poetry used compound words to avoid repetition of the same word. e.g. sea is referred to as ‘whale-road’, ‘swan-way’, ‘sail road’

Contemporary usage includes literally thousands of words, e.g. breakneck, paperclip, sandstorm, fingerprint, handbag

So, I've worked on a rewrite for this - taking into account comments about making it less of a list, more grammatical and incorporating the relationship of the writer to the 'shaver' etc. I think it may need a little cutting down at this point - not quite sure about stanza 4 and 5, I'm kind of using them as a break to switch gears but it feels a bit clunky. But it's all part of the process! I heard William Trevor describe writing as being like sculpture for him.

For much of my life I've been aware there was this culturally bang-on, near erudite piece of Theatre, Porgy and Bess. I'd better tune up my sensibilities, be on-the-button and sharp: see this, and drink from it as much as I'm able to understand.

Well I've long nurtured the idea that I'd get hold of all the big Hollywood and Broadway musicals and the like and have just a beano. Several weeks ago I bought a 20 CD set of such fare. Amongst them were the two shows headlined above.

Touch and Kiss a Stranger
Her eyes are still beautiful, even though they’ve seen everything.

***

Typical. Thursday afternoon, not a cloud in the sky. The coffee had two shots of nicotine. There hadn’t been a cloud this far south for over a year. Yavneh sitting opposite me, floating.
In and out of the dreamstate.
She moans from way off. I relax, let the dream happen: a halo falling from the sky. I don’t know exactly what a halo is, associate with the saints.

Touched by the states:

I went on vacation to the states with my mum in the six-week holidays before i started secondary school, to visit my sister who lived in Brooklyn New york.
We should have have been going for four weeks but ended up going for three weeks due to some misinformation with regards whether we needed a visa or not from the travel agent, which resulted in us having to leave Ringway Airport as it was known then at the time and return home.
I will always remember that long journey home and thinking will i ever get to America.

One of the main problems with running is possibly that it's too darned simple. And it's profound what it does. And we can't do it in that we, unwittingly I suppose, make it complex complex, really complicated. I was wondering at my qualification for doing this.

It's that I want to be plain simple about it. And I've failed at it lots of times. And I see those errors being made repeatedly...

I'm about to go on holiday, thought I'll put on two short poems relating to travel here.

(1) Night Flight (Boeing 747) I wrote this one in Chinese on my last flight to China & later translated it into English.

云端之中行,
伸手可摘星.
仙境在窗外,
我在仙境中.

Striding the summits of clouds,
I am in and of a magic world.
But for a pane of glass,
I could pluck the buckle
from Orion’s belt.

(2)Travel

Passport, carousel,
Foreign exchange.
He’s arrived.

So now the brilliant air,
The strange tongues
And the pungent food

Did the indoor bit - a little of it; 5 min worth. A Start/re-start. Present job needs fitness. And talking about the difficulty of keeping up this or that aspect helps. Helps me anyway. Rekindles personal interest/ activity level

The comment about attempting too much too soon was of course bang-on. With proper guidance one doesn't do it; or is less likely to do it anyway. Ken Cooper is brilliant on that aspect of things

Did run today. Skipped the previous one. Been cycling more than normally. Around last October time I thought I didn't have as much time for this (running) so took to on-the-spot running indoors.

The boredom factor works against it. For me, saving time on this is very much false economy