a long, strange story of a poem

After the pangs, he woke and set out alone.

Sore heels and the city led him on.

The days unfolded like a diagram, little-coloured

and strange. All around the mountains shone,

confused compass to a bodied world. Once,

by the river, a girl walking masked

with long loose hair showed him how the moon rose

and the sun set on the wings of her collarbone.

Men walked alongside him, offered beer

thick and sweet as treacle, till he was tongued and bloodied

by the spinning world and the bitterness of hops.

They stretched lips round over words of space and place

and swallowed, leaving him more lost than before.

Everywhere a babel chattered in the trees,

aping sense and flirting long, soft fingers.

In the desert he knelt, and the tears

rolled fat as birds. Where they dropped a man sprang

strung with ribboned veins, dressed in himself like cloth.

He sat on a rock, and smiled, and spoke:

'My friend, you are here on the limb

of the limb of the limb. Don't you know

that man cannot live by bread alone? Allow me, please,

to congratulate you on your perversity in adversity.'

He laughed and laughed and large-eyed in the darkness watched

as a comet traced rippled fingers across the sky

and the paper desert folded into itselg, like the end of love.

Kathryn Hobbs : 14 Jan 2009 23:09 |  Tags: Poem |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

more of the learning curve

Another first draft. sorry. and i am half-joking, rather than a complete emo kid.

Street Theatre (II)

I suspect we are in trouble.

Roadside rubbish fidgets in the eye

as the camera lens refracts the street

and turns it upside down.

We are all recorders here, the days imprint

and harden us. Reports retort and echo

from the walls, the graffiti which

like the outlines of old masters peeps

from plaster, threading in the cracks.

At every corner the soul creeps out the skin

in damp, sour beads and metal dents the fingers,

kicks up dust.

Untitled (again)

The day started badly that morning in the shower,

when my skin fell off in sheets like water.

Making tea, my touch soured the milk,

and on the bus the fares had risen;

the conductor snorted at my

protests over arms and legs and pounds.

Instead, he took my eye-teeth, and

part of my lower jaw in payment.

At work my desk was snowed

under flowers from sympathetic coworkers,

who nonetheless avoided contact, as if i were catching.

I thought i was hiding it well, but they

sent me home early and told me to stop howling-

I was a 'disturbance to those around me'.

I am all unpeeled, salt-stung and unmade.

I never thought that love was like this.

Kathryn Hobbs : 14 Jan 2009 22:29 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

magazine cuttings

idea very slightly related to the plot herring. Picture of the girl and also the text taken at random from a women's magazine. Text reads a bit like a polemic without sense.

Kathryn Hobbs : 12 Jan 2009 00:48 |  Tags: Poem Sketch |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

boots

ever since hearing about the shoe-throwing with president Bush i've been reminded of a (picasso, i think) painting of a pair of old boots i saw in Paris once.

Kathryn Hobbs : 12 Jan 2009 00:43 |  Tags: Sketch |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

poems in pictures 1

Kathryn Hobbs : 09 Jan 2009 23:22 |  Tags: Poetry Sketch |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

first draft, untitled

This strange, demanding girl

wanting to be taught

what each of us is living.

Amelia asks herself:

do you want to stay on this losing streak?

Or do you want to live

in this unsettled

heightened state?

I thought so. Sealed-up lips

are picking it up fast. Tomorrow,

if all goes well and there is less of you,

we'll celebrate and share an apple.

Some lessons are not easily learnt.

Kathryn Hobbs : 09 Jan 2009 14:40 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

POF– The Plot Herring

today in our POF seminar this came up and i couldn't resist- a Barthelme inspired plot herring.

Kathryn Hobbs : 08 Jan 2009 19:02 |  Tags: Sketch |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

new years

new year, new resolutions.

more: writing, reading, gym, sleep, sensible decisions, drawing, painting, blogging. Learn to write poetry.

less: drinking, facebook, procrastination, caffine (and probably fun).

and so here are a couple of attempts at poetry. I am a fiction writer at heart so criticism appreciated.

(still needs a title)

Holds court in the car, holds forth

on the many ways the world is wrong.

Gaps in conversation have magnified the minutiae

so that his mind revolves around imagined needs-

the given advice, the half-life of love.

Deafened years have bleared the sting

of relative hands, similar bones structured and withdrawn.

This new life is invitation only; the barricades

and hackles have been raised before, counter-accusative

and unmeant bitternesses bore the marks

of old, old fights like the lost limbs of trees.

Tied, tired and repentant, we are polite;

no weathered remarks are rallied,

but the tender topics are skirted.

The journey lags ahead, and our automotive

forced confinement brings the rub:

my father, and other abstract loves.

Street Theatre

Edinburgh in August, dense days of rain

the cobbles slip-stone wet, sheened

slick as oil. A week away

from another turning year;

Twenty.

        And we are walking home

over eye-spun streets and stages

wet-legged, waisted with arms.

Traffic, arterial, thick-clogged

before a blank road:

rainstruck tarmac mascara black,

streaked, light-combed crooked limbs

with one arm flung, angled.

They have turned the sirens off.

We cast long shadows like dice, foot-lit.

Strobe ticks time, turns, spits,

walks on.

Kathryn Hobbs : 04 Jan 2009 14:29 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem