Tag: free verse

Commatose

The Board is mindful
of the guidelines produced
by the Association
of British Insurers
and the attention being given
to CSR issues
by investors and wider
stakeholder communities.
The Board acknowledges
the commercial and ethical importance
of the development and maintenance
of a culture of continuous improvement
in CSR matters
as far as they are relevant
to the Group’s activities
and accepts that
the implementation of a system
for measuring and reporting
on key CSR indicators
may, over time, be appropriate.

From Harvard International’s Corporate Responsibility statement, 28 June 2010.

Sea State

Humber Thames Dover Wight
Plymouth North Biscay
Portland. Smooth or slight.
Variable three or four. Fair.

Moderate or good,
Occasionally poor later.

From the UK Shipping Forecast, 22 June 2010. By Nathan Lechler.

Hepaticous

And then you’re in an operating room,
Staring deep
Into a stellate smash of livid liver.

It oozes discontinuous destruction.
Fragments of hepatic mush are strewn
And coddled among clots of blood,
Stained with bile and mixed with stool.
The beauty of the enzyme pathways is nowhere to be seen;

Dr. Krebs is not in the building.
Weak indeed is the capsule holding it all in,
split apart like broiled bratwurst.
How little it takes!

From Dr Schwab’s Brittle Beauty. By Jim.

Sawbones

I will reach in gently and caress the liver,
the stomach and spleen.
Slide over the top,
into the recesses,
curl the fingers enough to sense the texture,
the fullness.
The bowels move away and under,
and over the top as I direct my hand.
I can describe your kidneys now,
I’ve circled the top of your rectum,
held your uterus,
measured your ovaries between my fingers.
Part of you is gone at the moment,
but I’m here,
I know you now.
You trusted and let me in,
you opened your belly to me,
and I entered with force.
I’ll stay until it’s right.
It’s what I must do.
You think you’ll never touch me so
intimately as I’ve touched you.
But you have.
You have.

From Taking Trust on Surgeonsblog, 7 October 2006. By Marika Rose.

The Eye in Time

Keen lemon-yellow
Hurts the eye in time
As a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note
The ear.

Or white
Conveys a harmony of silence
Which works upon us negatively
Like many pauses in music
That break
Temporarily
The Mel-

-ody.

Kandinsky, quoted in ‘Music and Jugendstil’, Critical Enquiry, Autumn 1990. By Kate Guthrie.

First Night

If you and I meet up
and have a fabulous evening,
I will try and match you,
for the rest of our relationship,
with my image of
that fabulous evening.

But you are all sorts of other things.
And when I find that I then
can’t match up the magic
of that fabulous bubbly first night
to our second night I become
depressed and disgruntled

and I start hating you.

From an interview with Rupert Everett in The Metro. By Rishi Dastidar.

Be mine

Why’ve you got so many pictures of Maria –
she your girlfriend or summat?
Yes, she is.
So have you had sex with her?
No.
Have you felt her bazookas?
No.
Well obviously, it being your girlfriend
you’ve kissed her, yeah?
Not yet.
Well mate, in England
it’s sorta like a tradition
for, like, a girlfriend to kiss her boyfriend
so it sounds to me like you’re not actually with her
you just like her.

In Poland you mustn’t kiss to be together
and to think only about one thing.

But mate, we’re not in Poland:
this is England.

Dialogue from Somers Town (2008). Submitted by Marika Rose.

NOOMA is there for us

We can get anything we want,
from anywhere in the world,
whenever we want it.
That’s how it is
and that’s how we want it to be.
Still, our lives aren’t any different
than other generations before us.
Our time is.

We want spiritual direction,
but it has to be real for us
and available when we need it.
We want a new format
for getting Christian perspectives.

NOOMA is the new format.
It’s short films with communicators
that really speak to us.
Compact, portable, and concise.

Each NOOMA touches on issues
that we care about,
that we want to talk about,
and it comes in a way
that fits our world.
It’s a format that’s there for us
when we need it,
as we need it,
how we need it.

The blurb on the NOOMA series of films. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Seriously

Please, I need help.
I’ve had marital problems
Honey, I think it’s time that we start talking about a divorce.

Larry, we’re gonna be fine.

…professional, you name it
Larry, we’ve received a number of letters denigrating you
and, er, urging us not to grant you tenure
I need help

We’re gonna be fine.

I’ve tried to be a serious man
We’re gonna be fine.

I’ve tried to do right, be a member of the community
We’re gonna be fine.

Please, just tell him I need help, please?
We’re gonna be fine.

I need help.
We’re gonna be fine.

The rabbi is busy.
He didn’t look busy.
He’s thinking.

From the trailer for A Serious Man, 11 May 2010. Submitted by Marika Rose.