Pre-Emptive Initial Strike

This poem reflects my own anti-conflict and particularly anti-nuclear weapons, and was written with dismay after Theresa May, then Britain's prime minister, replied without hesisitation that she would be willing to launch nuclear weapons, vaporising hundreds of thousands of civilians. This kind of nationalist and conservative thinking seen in the blasé threats of the likes of May, Trump, Kim Jong Il and others can be said with confidence as they will suffer little blowback from their self-made catastrophe; it is the ordinary person, you and I, whose future is condemned to uncertain anxious doom by these words that ruddy-faced men, desperate to relive a world war, lap up.

Pre-Emptive Initial Strike

She has been crawling up since Spring.

They dropped little boy

They dropped singing songs

Chocolate bars and bully beef

(not for her, not for her)

Tree seeds stratifying in the fridge

One day I’ll make the desert green again

I’ll make the desert eat again

I’ll make you dessert; get you a fat man.

Glad for the winter, for the ash

For the still birth in the pan, for the rash;

All is well, clouds never part, but. Clouds never part, but.

"Are you prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?”

Lips unfurl

Brittle iron

Gotcha gotcha gotcha

“Yes.”

Abandoned Cities 2: Flaw in the Design

I've previously written about what I call 'Abandoned City Ecology' here

            The other day, I went for a walk in Leigh Woods. I’d done this walk a few times before, but this time I got a little lost because I was being lazy and stupid with following directions, and so I got to walk past the Stokeleigh camp twice, and on the second amble past, I really thought about it, and imagined what it was once upon a time.

            The Stokeleigh camp is an ancient site in Leigh Woods, facing out towards the Avon gorge by Bristol. Two crescent shaped mounds are all that’s left of an iron age fort that once kept guard over the banks of the River Avon for reasons so far unknown. All that’s left are the two mounds, surrounded by trees, shrubs, grassland, and themselves completely covered in a variety of wildflowers and weeds.

  Between the two mounds at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods.

The Mound Rising up ahead at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods, Bristol.

            I’d been thinking a lot lately about the impermanence of all things, especially artifices, and how cities have a lifespan. The abandoned cities archaeologists find weren’t always deserted during some cataclysmic event, rather citizens trickled out as life in the city became less and less viable. The cities we have opted to create in ridiculous climes such as Las Vegas, a city that functions as any other American city albeit in the middle of the desert with strained water sources; similarly, Cape Town in South Africa experienced a water crisis just last year. Whether we like it or not, artifices have a lifespan of usefulness that might be shorter than we expect; everything from a skyscraper to a coke bottle to a city has a timer counting down in its usefulness.

The problem with artifice’s useful lifespans is that, unlike organic features, artifices do not break down or transform on the demise of their usefulness. Where an eggshell, once empty, will dry up, the membrane and residues rotted away, the shell becoming brittle, eventually shattering, and then one day becoming powder, returning the mineral constitution of the shell to the ground. A plastic drinks bottle, once empty, just sits. It might tear or warp, and shed a few shavings of plastic into its surrounds, but generally it will not disappear.

The Stokeleigh camp, re-absorbed into nature being just mounds of dirt, seemed to me the most brilliant, unintentional design, because its demise was factored in, and this isn’t a spoon we’re talking about, but a fort. If we accept that an era’s worth of cities could well be left due to war, climate change, and  resources stress, then we should be designing and building with decay factored in. Nothing is permanent, including unfortunately us as a species; whether we evolve, planetary migrate, or go extinct, I’d hate to wander the globe a spirit, and see city stacks still stood where a rich base of habitats could have instead been fed and allowed to succeed us.

Followed up by Abandoned City Ecology 3: Cut in the Landscape 

Bolsonaro is Deaf; They are all Deaf.

Brazil is an example of sustainability

- Jair Bolsanaro, televised address to Amazon fires 2019.

Green wood doesn’t burn straight away.

It is rendered dead first; that which makes it has to be ignored.

It has to scream first.

The green woods were never just trees.

The cacophony cries are in every communing.

Listen, because it will be silent soon.

A Quiet Place: the good apocalypse.

may contain spoilers.

picture from here

Despite the brutality and constraints of their ever present endangerment, Jon Krasinki's A Quiet Place (2018) shows a family that has adapted and learned towards a full and naturally grounded life beyond what's available in modern society, especially urbana.
The Abbott family farm their own food, preserve their produce, have studied up on medicine and various technology, and venture into the lush wilderness to forage and fish. Additionally granted them through the horrific constraints presumably put on all of humanity by their sonically hypersensitive invaders are things so dramatically lost from 21st century life; the Abbotts walk barefoot to avoid unnecessarily loud footfalls, gaining a physical connection to the Earth through the soles of their feet; through their silence, the family are forced to listen, to be patient and sharp to each others feelings and opinions, and also they are forced to hear the natural world.
Amid the slew of apocalyptia before and the films that followed, leeching influence from Krasinki such as John R Leonetti's The Silence (2018) or Susanne Bier's Bird Box (2018), A Quiet Place stands out for the life that beats in it. The main events aren't epic journey's or battles, but family lives in the face of hardship; the core event is a birth. The territory visited throughout is always familiar to at least one member of the family, as they imprint on the landscape and it on them.
We are shown an end to noisy modern life, and a return to a world that booms with bird song, rustling leaves, rushing rivers and slavering waterfalls. Whereas Hollywood's apocalypse is a noisy show that ends all reality, Krasinski shows a gentler vision (despite the horror.) This for me has always prove na vision of apocalypse more intelligent; even the most horrifying apocalyptic film I have seen, Threads (1984), a film about nuclear devastation, goes far beyond the destruction of Sheffield by nuclear weapons to show a society soldier on, stunted and dumbfounded beyond recovery. by the threat being external, and in many animalistic predator/prey ways natural to some extent, A Quiet Place is allowed to show a pristine and hopeful vision of humanity and nature surviving.

Photo Prompts

This is from an abandoned project my friend set me on, sending me scans of black and white photos they'd found as prompts for writing. I wrote a short story and poem, see below for the photograph followed by the writing.

Unwillingly and Impossibly Received 

Occasionally one of us will snicker or sigh to ourselves. Me and Bheki have long since abandoned vocal conversation as we wander along the river, without a map, with few supplies and little clean water. We have drifted away from the real, instead reeling through the inventive passages of our minds, imagining conversations with those who live, those who died, and those who never existed.

            …Can’t feel from the ankle down anymore. There was a point when we enjoyed a strengthening as we walked, our bodies whipped lean and sharp, cleaving miles and miles of earth; but with dwindling supplies came the soreness, then the numbness.

            I can see particles constantly dance in the air. Rain? Spores? I know its ash, but can’t help imagine otherwise. For a moment my minds blurry eye conjures a huge luminous sun, sinking into the river, forcing away the clouds, turning the river a deep and pleasant green; the fluid imagining dissipates, and I can see the ash settle on the waters surace as we walk along the misshapen craggy bank of the river… Then it shatters me.

            Brighter, more painful, more vivid than anything in human experience, comes the overwhelming visage of the photograph. There on the shore of the river, just as misshapen and craggy, the water clear of ash and swarming with natural shades, just as I remember the rivers and lakes of my youth, stands a man, with a misshapen and craggy face, combed head of hair, white shirt tucked in, cast in black and white film, relenting into posing for a holiday picture, decades ago, before the sky-fires, long before that; I had been inescapably visited by a singular moment of a time before.

            I am sure I had been screaming, but when I look at Bheki, he has the same simple flashes of emotion as before. So I conjure my Bheki, who still has energy and health, the twin who lives in my mind, and spin out this feeling, never before felt in human memory, but he simply smiles, showing his bright teeth, before he is lost, smiling, filling the sky and settling down gently into the river, just like the sun might if it weren’t eternally obscured with cloud. I am left gaping with this singular moment, the photograph, offering no guidance as to where we should go or if mankind will survive, merely suggesting that at some point in a forgotten string of history, a man was forced to stand in front of the river for a picture, a souvenir, that I have unwillingly and impossibly received.

A Moment Seen by Kodak Plus X Film

That first foray of exploration… What do people hold in their unsure grip?

Clumps of dirt? Swathes of hair and fur?

But there is my daughter, feeling the canyons and tidal waves

Of her father’s scars, slithered across his face,

A not-abnormal face,

But close to that child’s eyes it was a plank split from an ancient tree…

Brick-brown face, skin rashed working under the sun and wind,

Before the evenings spent

Dancing on canvas, an aggressor, a defender, a winner, a loser, a loser…

Two primed grown men splot out each other’s blood for an audience of tuxedos

Snarling; his brain is ingrained with the ballet of the game,

But all fights need hate to happen. Love finds no fists with which to fight with.

Ding Ding!

Hair uncombed stained vest hand holding cracked ribs other squeezing beer bottle neck constantly growling at me gazelles and hyenas yelling squeezing that bottle squeezing and squeezing and finally it shatters across my forehead

None of the gazelles make it across the lake

Apparently the blood ballet is not enough to release tension.

Pack a bag and go! Pack a bag and go!

Stood on the street corner, a rush, a gusting wind of addictive new paths

Alas, my hand produces only a grimy penny from my pocket, a stubbed path.

Taxi driver with no time no time miss sorry miss in or out in or out.

Not long after, the morning sickness came.

Shirt and tie, furnishings in shot- all suddenly appear with each fight won, violence paying for ‘proper’ domesticity. While the dulled history of this moment cloaks me the camera bites three times eating the moments

As she feels the burred jaw, the undefended face mashed by a child’s stubby hands

As he gazes at that face. Does it eat at that necessary hatred within him? She enjoys playing with the lips, the nose- does she enjoy him, or the mish-mash of features found on a boxers head?

As she looks beyond Daddy, the man with the shield, with the cudgel, at the indistinct Mummy, dazed behind a lens, watching those sprouting fingers touch those cracked lips. She asks why why why why with her gaze how how how how

Why/how do we fight why/how do we hate why/how do we love

Whilst dancing in the dark ballet

Screaming with love with hate

Loving to fight and fighting to love

Descending unto the child

Terrified of her gaze

That knows absolutely nothing and yet consumes all.