Becoming Mortal
SYNOPSIS
A reflective collection of poems. The book includes an extended poem called The Fall which deals with sin and guilt.
BACKGROUND
A somewhat subdued book.
Many of the included poems explore issues surrounding the human state and mortality. My initial theme was around the loss of innocence. However, the poems didn’t reflect this. The initial working title for the book, The Fall, no longer seemed to fit. I eventually settled on Becoming Mortal which more accurately seemed to capture the mood of the book.
For interest, I was reading Shakespeare at the time of writing. Although not stated in the text, Verse Envy is my own very modest nod in his direction.
SAMPLE VIDEOS
SAMPLE POEMS
Dream
There is no hope. The best of us
dressed and undressed in that simple
state. Captured between unconscious
sleep and awakening we have filled with symbol
and an ocean of imagining.
In this fugue, are refused
our will. Instead, rely on what mind might bring
looted from our actions. Reduced
to the ridiculous or elevated. Themes
which entangle us, too senseless
to reconcile themselves. No means
of escape, we are rendered defenceless.
The price to pay
for passage. An actor
stumbling through our own play
speaking lines, we can’t remember.
Useless
The list grows fat and ugly. Towers
over me. Larkin’s toad with all-too broad arse
squat upon unused yet disappearing hours.
Progress feckless: arrives in fits and starts.
Want a job finished? Go ask a busy man.
Not one entangled in poetry, philosophy,
price of abstract fish. Man to make a plan
and stick to it. Skills learned on a father’s knee –
practical stuff and other such crap. Poverty a cure.
No slippage when hunger comes to call.
Keeps you focussed. Try making obscure
points when those gnarled hands cup your balls.
Lay poets end to end, light a fuse, and run.
Explodes like a fart. Noisy. But no damage done.
Dying Flowers
The vase has been left too long. Petals dipped
falling away from sun. Bloom transformed
into a paler, more dour display. Vigour stripped
so the rod-like shoots which formed
that skyward bountiful first thrust of growing
now bend silently as if in prayer, heads bowed.
Leaves no longer firm. Last vestige of life ebbing
they cloak the body in a drained, green shroud.
Yet there is beauty here. A shabby elegance
in that inevitable decline. Battle lines drawn
on careworn frame, each furrow presents
its own history. And much as we might mourn,
purpose discharged. Stems clumped together
to be discarded, tipped from glass captivity.
Although faded, blossom perished forever,
we strive to remember their younger glory.
Pretend to Be Someone Else Entirely
In drifting between sleep and full awakening
embrace a dream. Think of unlikely things
marked only by scant chance of ever happening.
Weigh what your wish might bring
both good and bad. And in that bodiless state
let thought and structure wash away
to reach a place in which you can relate
to all aspects of change, assume any shape, play
any part in that story of your own creation.
Next, move too-and-fro. Flex your adopted cage.
In doing so, understand its joys and limitations.
Measure your real life against that marriage
of longing and avarice; a fresh script.
An exercise for oneself: to look through the eyes
of our desires – wear a coveted life to find it
a false fit – revealed as one of our many lies.