Untitled poem ii

I promised myself that i wouldn't post this until i understood it all but it was pointed out to me that some of the beauty was in the fact that not even the author understood it all. It seems i wrote it in an existential crisis. As always i would love to hear comments on how you might change it so i can improve my writing.

What if this all is a cover-up, what if none of this is real?

There are rules and regulations

Unnecessary to feel

The body doesn’t exist all people are actors, no-one dies or is hurt.

The laws are to limit our thinking

Words have been banned

How difficult would it be to lie about history

If it had been planned

Any sense of truth is easily obliterated

Everything is mitigated by the inexplicity, my nonexperience

Cogito ergo I know nothing except that sum

People could lie, all too easily

Real pleasure is out there

Untapped to my brain unfeasibly

But I’ve never heard of it

I have no grasp of its nectar

Of the things outside this bubble in which my life is cast

Some things get through

Smuggled in from the real world

They have to let it be

Or the mystery is unfurled.

The rules can be broken, without punishment

Those who you hear about are just tempting you

They are corporation sent.

Is life an audition for some greater purpose

If I succumb to their ways do I win or I lose

If I think for myself do I shine or do I bruise.

The things that I know are things that I’ve learnt

But who chose those things,

We learn of non-democracies

Are told how we have it good

Is that just their way of decreasing our livinghood?

Grass

Well there's been quite an absence of writing of late and for that i must apologise. My excuse: Wimbledon. It's amazing what you can do with some well manicured grass. People will come from all over the world not only to play but to watch. Until today this was the only reason i could think for keeping your garden in a nice condition: you planned on painting some lines on it, putting up a net and maybe even some fences and ultimately playing tennis. This all changed today when i discovered the joys of gardening. It wasn't like this was my first time gardening, but it now feels like all the other times i thought i was "gardening" i have only been working in the garden to make money. I wouldn't say that i felt "at one with nature" in a way i do at other times but even though i was killing and maiming plants (weeds and grass respectively, don't worry i'll still get paid) it didn't feel like a domination of nature or even destructive. Maybe i was taming it. A strange concept but it felt more like guiding a child to stop being rude or endangering itself through it's actions than constricting or limiting. Maybe moulding is the verb i'm looking for. I could smell the garden, feel it, see it. For a long time now i have been considering spending a day, as an experiment, trying to make every sense operate at all times and be conscious of each sense individually. Today suggested that a garden would be a nice place to do this and this, i think, is why so many people are attracted to gardening. It's not about dominion over nature it's about working with nature and very much a journey rather than a destination, a journey in which you are always accompanied by your senses.
     Now before today i've always thought that when i had my own garden i would buy gargantuan packets of mixed seeds, throw them around the garden and just let them grow. Even if all my seeds were promptly eaten by birds i would still be pleased with just having long, overgrown grass. This is because i like long grass. It is soft underfoot and cool even on hot days, also i prefer it aesthetically to shorter grass. The other advantage is that animals, and when i say animals i particularly mean cats, will be able to play in it. The amount of times i have seen a hint of sadness in the eyes of my cats when they see the lawnmower - to accompany the fear of the terrifyingly noisy beast that it is - is...well, admittedly...none but i like to think they enjoy stalking pretend prey in the grass (or prey that is an ant and thus does not constitute prey), i mean their stalking looks so much less enjoyable in short grass. Now, many lines down a paragraph that started "before today..." you may enjoy my but, oh that sounds terrible, you may enjoy my use of but, still a bit weird...you may...well...but today i started to understand why people would go to all the trouble of mowing the lawn (except where it is a duty of yours by law - apparently my readers state-side have lawn-mowing quotas, this is incredible, i mean literally unbelievable, can anyone deny or confirm this?). By juxtaposing the tidy lawn with the flowers or the patio or the (if you're really into your garden) water feature, the latter looks even more beautiful. Don't get me wrong, a lawn can be nice to look at but only in the way that you look nice in that photo taken in front of the Ngorongoro Crater (fell free to fill in anywhere truly magnificent that you have been) or the cloth in Cezanne's 'Still Life with Apples' can be when compared to the jug or the eponymous apples. The spectacular looks even more so because of the banal.
     Earlier i said that gardening was a journey. I am all for journeys; i love the journey but what puts me off actually gardening is that it's a project you never finish. You have to maintain it year round, year on year. This, however, is also the beauty of gardening. It is a relationship like any other (well my friends don't die when i'm on holiday because i didn't give them water or suddenly get eaten by slugs overnight, and i hope yours don't either, but you see what i mean), you have to nourish it day on day and keep up your side in order for it to blossom. These gardening terms doing anything for you? I'll just go then.

untitled poem

I feel it might be a little Kubla Kahn to write up a dream but i feel it's strangely haunting like the opening passages of Notes from the Underground (and yes, i flatter myself by that comparison with Dostoevsky) and it expresses a feeling i am attached to quite well. Of course i would love to hear some comments on how people would alter it.

He traipses along the platform,

the day receives the sun,

with a briefcase in his hand

he trudges on.

Few notice that the case is cuffed to his left wrist,

fewer that it carries only water.

The water changes state

depending where he is.

Sometimes it's steam and barely hinders

but as ice it's cold and heavy

and it encumbers every moment.

But this case, it has a faulty clasp

so people can sometimes open it,

sometimes it just knocks something he walks by

then everything

                          pours

                                  out.

In the shallows of the day

and the shadows of a train

he does not want people to see the contents of his case

so he scrambles picking up shards of ice that have shattered in this place.

But his left hand is hindered by the empty box

so he scrambles and he dwindles with his right.

It is his burden to bear

but even if he were unshackled

he would again bind himself.

Although he hates the contents

he knows his die is cast

so he picks it up again as the controller ambles past.

Though it is hard and hinders him

as he must take it everywhere,

the alternative is living without it

and that he could not bear.

For the guilt would eat him just as surely as Lady Macbeth saw a spot,

and the pain itself is comfort that he can pay his lot.

For forgetting is worse than hindrance;

freedom worse than pain,

for if you forget

or lay the memory down

the moment that it comes back

is worse than the combined hell of the perpetual case sodden by the rain.

on reading the dictionary

Sometimes i have good ideas at night. It's logical right? I spend roughly a third of my life in bed so it's only natural. I definitely once heard that a composer kept a pen and paper on their bedside table for just this reason. What with the arrival of technology i just leave my phone / alarm clock / notepad on the fridge next to my bed. The slight disadvantage of this is the fact that whereas i would see a notepad with my inspired fourth symphony on my bedside table in the morning the phone is always there and is always singing at me to wake me up so my stock reaction is not to check my Drafts. So it is now that i find that, a while back now, in a period when i apparently wasn't feeling too positive, i thought it would be a good idea to read the dictionary in order to have different reasons and ways of disliking things; the more words you have the more things there are to dislike and the better you can complain. Also if you are looking for a silver lining for this thought how about the ability to locate exactly what it was that you didn't like, making it easier to alleviate any unpleasantness.
Now you can have your real silver lining in the present day: we had just come back from town, the sun was warm on our backs and sweat embalmed our foreheads so we went to sit in the park. Two of the boys were discussing the unnecessarily overly-engineered swing and, what with my limited knowledge in this area, and with my perpetual need to provoke debate between arts and sciences students, i remarked that it was nice that engineers had done something useful in my life because it was pleasing to look at. They, of course, pointed out all the things in the park that engineers had done which i had probably enjoyed and retorted that literature had done nothing for them here. Now, i would usually quote Bennett's Hector and say that:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours." 
then couple that with the fact that apart from seeing the way the children played on the swings and the ways the houses framed the soft lush grass through my own eyes and feeling a bond with "a person [i] have never met" and the ensuing beauty of the human mind and the beauty of their words, apart from all of that i could also have my thought framed by their words so i would see Wordsworth's grass next to Eliot's buildings and thus see the world completely differently as each image transports me back to original moment of beauty of those poems. Aside from all that, for the first time, i realised that verbosity lent itself to appreciating the beauty of the world all the more.
These thoughts suggest that reading the dictionary might not be such a strange idea as thought is shaped through language and language is as close to articulating feeling as i will ever get. Van Gogh's Starry Night may move me to rapture, but i cannot paint; music may inspire a catharsis that makes me understand how skin can crawl, but i cannot play; stories in film or novel form may inspire me to reach further and for things i did not know existed, but my own will never do so; but being able to appreciate a moment's beauty all the more for having the words to articulate it and the words to feel things i did not know existed, that, well that is something we can all aspire to and is within easy reach in any dictionary.