Ends and Explanations

This collection had a slightly strange gestation. It was supposed to be done very, very quick. But as it turns out it took a good few months - nevertheless that probably does still make it nearly my quickest collection to date. It sprung from a comment someone wrote about the last lot that they didn't understand a word. So I thought, right, I shall prove I can right simple stuff. And I shall do it quickly, and it will be wonderful. So, this, then, is an attempt to write simple poems. They are all, broadly speaking, about fear, to a certain degree, and I hope that they are fairly understandable. To add even more to their comprehensibility, I thought I'd include some brief notes. And voila.

But first, a further note on how they were written. Everything was an experiment really. I started off by coming up with just titles that sounded good - with no ideas of the poems behind them - I got about 20 and then started to write the ones that came out. This is exactly the opposite of how things normally work - the title comes last. They were all written over the course of two weeks, at the rate of approximately one a day, on the Metro to and from work. This is my idea of discipline. Once that was done I entered an editing process which is what has proved to take up the bulk of the time, and has been hindered by other circumstances.

Anyway, here we are, I am fairly happy with them. I hope that someone, at least, may read them this time, and understand what I am leaning towards, whether they like them or not, that would be nice.

And then, here we go, in the spirit of transparency, some brief notes on what I think are already pretty easy poems:

Pilgrim's Progress

This is a simple little poem about the obvious subject of security screenings in airports, which I think all sane people realise are completely ineffectual and highly inconvenientto passengers. I say most sane people, but actually I've met a fair number who buy into the propaganda. Plus there's a little bit about security cameras at the end. This is a subject I could blather on about for decades, but I thought I'd keep it simple instead.
The poem was very specifically inspired by a short segment on a Spanish TV news program, about the arrival of a full-body scanner at Madrid's airport - the kind of scanner that basically takes photos of you naked. They interviewed a nun, presumably for the comedy value, who said she had no problem with being seen naked, if that was what was required. What particularly intrigued me was that she said this - if it was required, and not if it would make her safer.
Which proves even nuns can be idiots.
The title is stolen from John Bunyan's allegorical Christian tale, you can download it here if you should so wish.

The Millennium Bug

Nine years too late, but then the Zunes proved for me it can happen any year. A joyous tale about when the machines take over. The final verse makes reference to the film of Day of the Trifids, but I imagine a lighthouse like this one.
I actually quite like that everything has a brain built in these days.

Mene Mene Tekel Parsin

Sometimes people get married and you wonder why, this is one example of why one might. To all my friends who are married, this isn't about you.
I got a bit self-indulgent with the ship metaphor at the end, but what-ho.
Revêtements are, in case you didn't know, a type of fortification.
The Mary Celeste is a famous ghost ship.

The title comes from the Bible and a story found in Daniel. The words are written on the king's wall during a banquet and eventually Daniel translates them as meaning:

It is from this story that we get the phrase 'The writing's on the wall'.

For the Homeschooled

This was the very first poem I wrote for this collection. It established the American theme that is found in some of the poems and is about the phenomenon of parents who homeschool their children in the states, largely they are from the religious right.
The poem was inspired by a documentary which I've completely failed to track down again in order to reference here. It was about a Christian university with a high proportion of Homeschooled students that wields incredible political influence in Washington. It was a scary documentary.
Really though the poem reflects my view that people worry far too much about children, it references lots of unsavoury activity you could get up to:
J, of course, is Joint - Cannabis, Charlie is cocaine, bukkake is a sexual act involving multiple ejaculations onto a woman, Sodom is a place in the Bible that was destroyed by God because of the sinfulness of its inhabitants, entropy is complicated, but broadly means disorder, one possible end of the universe is Heat Death by entropy, homeroom is the American word for something similar to a registration period in secondary school, hooch is illegally distilled alcohol, talk about exiling Christ and boffins refers to American policy on religion in schools and teaching evolution, crystal meth is a not very nice drug, blah blah blah, you knew all that already, didn't you.

You're the first in My Heart

This was probably the hardest of the poems to write, probably because I wanted it to be a simple expression of love lost, but it didn't quite work out like that. In the end I'm not sure I'm particularly happy with how it came out.
The test card used to be the last thing you saw on TV at the end of the day, and you can magically get the one I grew up with from the BBC: ftp://ftp.bbc.co.uk/pub/video/stills/.
The EAS is a now superseded system in the US that would have allowed the President to let everybody know that the world was about to come to an end.

Nowhere Else But Here

This was probably the second most difficult poem to write because it's about an alcoholic who's kidding himself that he'd quite like to die. I spent most of the time writing it trying to avoid morbidity, before realising that the whole thing was essentially morbid, this is a guy who thinks about how wonderful death would be all the time because he's so afraid of it.

NCO

This is just a little musing on what might go through the mind of a Territorial Army soldier who's waiting to get called out to war. Like most of my generation I don't really have any idea what war is all about, and neither does the soldier in the poem. The closest he gets is his memories of someone who claimed to be a soldier. This Davy character is an amalgam of three real people, and there really was someone who told this story of machine-gunning people in Bosnia. In fact, he appears in another poem, that I wrote long ago, called Davey.
The SA80 is the standard assault rifle used by the British Army.
Wimpy is a chain of fast food restaurants in the UK.
An IED is an Improvised Explosive device, or roadside bomb, they've been getting a lot of press recently. A VBIED is an IED in a car, the VB is for Vehicle Born.
Davy's death is, incidentally, entirely fabricated, I have zero contact with him.

John Blamed the Stars, the Stars Blamed John

The weirdest thing about this poem is that I put my name in the title. Because I can't drive, and I don't even really think about fate or any of that stuff. So anyway, this is about a character who shares my name who goes driving hopping to be kidnapped by aliens, and is really just looking for someone or something to blame the problems of the world on. I, however, know exactly who to blame.

Yes on 8

I wrote this poem the day after the result on the Proposition 8 vote in California. I wasn't very sure about it until I saw Bill O'Reilly on the Daily Show - Then I realised that if anything I wasn't being ridiculous enough, and I polished up the dictionary part of the poem.

So, just in case you weren't aware - proposition 8 was a ballot in California to outlaw gay marriage, which had previously (for a brief period) been legal. It passed. What struck me about the whole thing was how completely nonsensical the arguments of the Yes crowd were.

You can watch that Bill O'Reilly Interview here, and Read about Proposition 8 on wikipedia.

The references to racism in the poem stem from the idea that was banded around afterwards (with little to no evidence) that because more African Americans had voted (because Obama was a candidate) they were to blame for the vote passing.

Curfew

This is about young people, teenagers, the generation below us, who are obviously fearful and horrendous creatures.
ADHD is Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders.
ASBOs are Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.
Saturn eating his children references this picture by Goya, or alternatively, the myth it depicts that the god Cronus (Saturn) ate his children on their birth because he feared they would surpass him.

The Pictures

So, what's with the pictures? Well, they are QR codes, which are similar to barcodes - a method for storing information which can be read using an optical reader. If you happen to have access to a reader (unlikely I know) you can decode the pictures. (Some mobile phones can be used as qr code readers, alternatively there is certainly software that can do it for you, if you should so wish).
My images were generated using the Google Chart API, via this handy little tool, thank you Jason Delport.

So I hope you enjoyed the poems, see you again next time.