My life in service – the lost poem

My computer is dead! The last update of Windows Ten killed it. I don’t like Windows Ten. It updates my computer every Friday night whether I want it to or not. Then I come to it on a Saturday, thinking to jot down a fragment of a poem, or maybe tickle through an essay, and it says: “Oh, hang on, I’m doing something much more important, you’ll have to wait.”

So you make coffee and sometimes when you come back it says it’s ready for you, but then you find it’s not working right. Sometimes you have to wait all day to find out it’s not working right, or sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The computer grinds to a halt, as if the update poured treacle into the works; the mouse becomes sticky, or sometimes you can’t get past the login screen. Sometimes you have to wait a week for the next update to fix things, sometimes you have to wait two or three. It’s a good job I’m not up against any deadlines.

This time, I’m getting what they call a 100% disk usage error. From reading the self-help forums, I’ve learned it’s a common problem for which the solutions are legion, but I must have tried them all, and none of them work. Basically, the machine enters a state of infinite effort while actually doing nothing at all, the result being a condition of stubborn unresponsiveness verging on the catatonic. I even tried resetting my computer to a state as fresh as the day that it was born – thinking I was being very clever in working that one out – but it won’t let me do it. It’s beginning to sound like Arthur C Clarke’s HAL: “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that.”

I’ve forgotten what that poem fragment was now. I woke up with it running through my head, but its leaked away. I should have written it down. After all, Wordsworth never had this trouble did he? He wrote stuff on bits of paper with a quill pen, then sent it all off with a penny stamp, ink blobs and all, and hey-presto, he made poet laureate. Eventually. But no, I had to start fiddling, clicking this, pressing that, and all to no avail. Also, have you noticed, there’s nothing like a sick computer for spoiling your day, for making you realise how much you’ve come to rely on it, and perhaps despising yourself a little on account of that?

So how did I manage to post this then? Ah well, I have this other dead computer. The Internet killed that one too, long ago, but I managed to resurrect it with an obsolete operating system I bought of Ebay for a fiver. It’s now the fastest, most responsive and silky smooth machine in the house, but only because it can no longer connect to the Internet. I’m it’s master now, you see? So I wrote this on it, transferred it by memory card to my Android phone and posted it online that way. It’s hardly convenient, but where there’s a will there’s a way.

It’s also useful to be reminded that it doesn’t entirely serves us, this vast invisible thing we have wrapped the world in. It’s a marvellous invention of course. The simple fact of email was a step change in communications. But then most of the emails we get are junk, sent out by dumb robots, and we have to spend time sorting through them for the ones that aren’t junk and sent out by humans. And we all know our emails are scanned and parsed by the Internet anyway, looking for juicy clues about our likely buying habits. And we know too we’re being groomed and manipulated by its algorithms every day, that the non living, non self-aware intelligence of the machine is becoming far more important as an end in itself than anything we’re allowed to do when we’re connected to it.

So my poem has gone and, okay, it wasn’t going to change the world so there’s no sense getting too upset about that, but the point is the machine robbed me of a moment of human expression, which does not make it my friend. It has something far more important to do now than serve our often admittedly trivial needs, and we need to think very carefully about what kind of unthinking, unfeeling world the machine is leading us into while under the impression it’s serving us, when in fact we’re all in service to it.

Wait a minute,… I remember how that poem went now:

My computer once made me see red,
When it locked up and tried to play dead,
So I cursed it quite rough, cos I’d quite had enough,
Then I smashed it to bits with my head.

 

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Risking it.

Wintering in the same old cold and grey,
waiting for that chance-thing to arise
and say: here, this is how,
revealed in unambiguous guise,
you might now see and act
and leave behind at last
the lies you tell yourself
in order to maintain
this never ending waiting game!

But there is nothing new today.
No novelties arise, just the same
old cold and grey in which
you wear the usual disguise,
revealing this uncomfortable truth,
that for all your life you’ve hid,
dissolved in indecision.
And of all the things, of your own volition,
you might heartily have risked, and done,
you never risked, or did,
a single one.

 

 

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The mad March wind

There’s a mad March wind,
roaring around the eaves tonight,
testing the latch.
It shoulders the fence,
searching for gaps,
for an inch of spare
to get a grip and then to tear,
to splinter wood, or lift
a tile so brother rain
this gift can win and let the wet
come pouring in.

Meanwhile I sit in snug of night,
A book to hand in this warm, soft light.
But with each flicker of the mains
The wind another victory gains
Through skipped heartbeat and
anxious dread,
Drives home what oft escapes my
head, that for all our wit and
clever laws, the mad March wind
still gives us pause.

 

 

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A walk up Great Hill

Great Hill – Western Pennines – UK

I take the path by Dean Brook,
Follow in my father’s footsteps.
Fifty summers gone, he led the way,
But there’s no trace of him now,
Beyond imagination.

The moors lay quiet in a steamy heat,
Exhale soft scent of ferns and earth.
Narrow here, the path,
Above a deepening
Water rushed ravine,
There’s a leg twisting tangle of heather,
And all the tricky snares
Of grass.

Hesitant of foot.
I fear more to fall
Than I did back then,
Cock-sure-footed
And safe in the cradle,
Of my father’s imagined
Immortality.

Now I fear the void of empty air,
And the cold embrace of peaty scum,
Then to be denied deliverance,
From the drowning pools,
For lack of saviour.

Today, the journey speaks
Of emptiness
Among sheep ruined hills.
And rising now to pulled down farms,
Hungry ghosts whisper tales
Of grinding lives, eked out
And gone,
Names unknown,
Scattered by the wind as leaves,
All dried and scratching brittle,
In soured dust.

And on top of Great Hill,
There is litter.

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Resisting now this jagged mess of days

Resisting now this jagged mess of days,
Brings on the dark assassin’s migraine knives,
When even to tread the softer, slower ways,
Exhausts me long before the weekend has arrived.

Thwarted then, both inside myself and out,
Suspended, void of time and space and thought,
I ride an inky blackness of self doubt,
Until to cloying stillness am I brought.

The windows of my soul are growing old,
Long papered o’er by fools upon the make.
Their ragged posters many lies have told,
The perpetrators slippery as snakes.

Here then, shall I submit? Is it too late?
No wisdom in the wind, no maps extol
The seamless passage through that gateless gate,
Just a bloodied mess of thorns I’m fain to hold.

The season of the inner light grows dim.
And with it hope I’ll ever once more know,
That place of perfect harmony within,
The place I have for so long ached to go.

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Businessman

Businessman

What are you doing business man,
So far away from home,
With your trouser legs all wrinkled,
As you sit there on your own?

Customers in Newcastle?
Board meeting in Slough?
Then four hours traffic hotel bound.
What are you doing now?

Fish and chips at Corley,
On the M6 motorway,
And a quick read of your paper,
At the ending of the day?

And is your paper comforting?
Somewhere to hide your eyes?
To keep your thoughts from straying,
From that corporate disguise?

Or are you really unconcerned,
And merely passing through,
Oblivious to the rest of us,
Who barely notice you?

Your wife, your kids, forgotten,
In some lost suburban place,
Her parting kisses fading fast,
Upon your weary face.

A ‘phone call from the hotel,
On the ten pence slot machine.
“Hi Hun. I’ll see you Friday.”
“Keep it hot – know what I mean?”

Or is it not like that at all?
No solace from the roar?
Just passion grabbed like fast-food,
With a wolf outside the door?

Meanwhile you sit there don’t you?
Indigestion on the run,
A headache from the red tail lights,
And the week barely begun.

Still four hours traffic hotel bound.
A nightmare in the rain.
With just an Aspirin in your pocket,
To soak away the pain.

 

Although written in 1992, the businessman is still a recognisable species from this flashback. Nowadays his head would more likely be stuck in his phone than his newspaper and the days of ten pence slot public phones in hallways are long gone. Sadly though, the grey twilight world of the lone businessman in near perpetual transit is not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blind Cats Eyes

November and these cloud-thick nights,
Darken now my wending of the way,
Releasing sleepy thoughts,
From the oppression,
Of that harsher light of waking day.

Such a long road, so often travelled,
But now without the stars to guide,
Their names forgotten,
Friendly patterns lost
As with the memory
Of once much clearer skies.

There are just these vague pecked lines,
Ticking out the time,
And the blind old eyes of cats,
Sunk, each in their little pit of grime,
Depressed in layer upon layer
Of careless tar,
And just the odd one
Feebly blinking now
At the passing of my car,

Lost souls, all.
Adrift, alone,
And not candle in the dark,
To guide us home.

 

 

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