Tag: free verse

The eye of the beholder

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

Grey skies,
Grey streets,
Grey grass.

Chimney stacks, factories.
Everywhere a factory.
Belching smoke. Black gates. Brick walls.

A wretched dog.
And the brilliantly
red nose of
the heavy drinker.

The industrial landscape of
1930s Salford wasn’t a pretty one.

But one ‘clumsy boy’ grey up, looked beyond
the bleakness and saw something beautiful.

Grey skies became
A silver canopy
undulating over a sea of red brick.

Factories became cathedrals of industry
with soaring chimney spires.

Crowds of workers became colourful, matchstick people
And black smoke became the
breath of a city alive with hard graft and banter.

A full page advert for an ITV documentary on L S Lowry, spotted in the Observer magazine on the 25th April 2011. By Marika Rose.

Marine Drive

O we do like to be beside the seaside
Voulez vous promenader avec moi?
Kiss me quick!
Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands
O we do like to walk along the prom!

Words written along the seafront in paving stones in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, spotted 11 April 2011. By Marika Rose.

Oak Beach

The black police dog winced
as its paws touched the thorns
on the bushes by the side
of a remote beachside highway.

A little reluctantly, the cadaver dog
followed its police handler into
the Long Island brush, looking
for yet more human remains.

We always say ‘another day in paradise’.
The wind whistled through the reeds
and the brush crackled
as the cadaver dog carried on sniffing

Selected text from a BBC news article about bodies found on Long Island, 7 April 2011.

Apologia Ignis

We incorrectly stated
that Julian Brooker, twenty three, of Brighton,
was blown fifteen feet into the air
after accidentally touching
a live railway line.

His parents have asked us to make clear
he was not turned into a fireball,
was not obsessed with the number twenty-three
and didn’t go drinking on that date every month.

Julian’s mother did not say,
during or after the inquest,
her son often got on all fours
creeping around their house
pretending to be Gollum.

From an apology in The Sun, 29 April 2005.

The summers of his youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’
but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour
and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy
where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,
‘I tell you it’s a seagull’.

These are healthy pleasures.
They certainly seem ideal to the young men.

A quote from Albert Camus found in this essay. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Vitriol and Opportunity

I would love to say we’ve got a great show for you tonight,
but I’m not sure that’s the case.
Old friends, no one wants to do this listening.
All too often we are here.
Stunned by a crazy that is rarer than we think,
how incredible, the packing of the deceased,
the pain of disturbing nature with a moment of graphic speak,
of toxic and absurdity.

Here we are again, violent.
Vitriol and opportunity on television,
in the way we talk to each other.
Exonerate from blame a reality that we cannot approach verbally.
Our capacity to be horrified by being truly sad.
The shattered lunacy of real dignity,
the sense of such situations.
Senselessness in being cut way too short.

Read up on being numb,
the dispiriting implications,
troubled enemies with families of pain.
Match the forever-paranoid with great rhetorics
of light and thank you.
Never worse than when the actions of madmen take forever.

Don’t you know the leading of thought
away from the tragedy of shame?
How much living and catharsis in predictable crazy.
Something incredibly stupid and silly
that we had previously lost.
Manifestos of anonymous goodness.
More often than not, people creating solace
for tomorrows they’ve never even met.
Wouldn’t it be nice to cause this hyperbole of feeling,
however fleeting?

Taken from the Jon Stewart show after the Tucson shootings, on the 20th January 2011. Submitted by Haley Patail.

Falseworks

Most falseworks
are designed to support
vertical
loads,
but in practice
they are also subjected
to forces in the horizontal plane.

These result
from dynamic effects
such
as the rapid pouring
or vibrating of concrete,
from the movement of ten-
sioning cables,
from the wind, from differential
expansion
under heat or load,
and from many
other causes.

Some of these forces
can be estimated
but others can not,
and the fact
that they
are usually contained
is no proof
that they are not important.

They may be
particularly significant
in skew spans
where displacements in two
perpendicular directions
produce unexpected strains
in the third,
or in cases where
the design loads are applied
consecutively
rather than simultaneously.

Taken from an article (that I have, without reason, kept for a very long time) on the Building Standard 449:1959 – The use of structural steel in building. Submitted by Kim Rooney.