Sympathetic Resonance

I’ve been writing a lot more lately, and submitting pieces to different places. One of the places I’ve started submitting to is the Rattle “Poets Respond” – a weekly call to write something topical, inspired by the news. Since these are going to go out of date very quickly, I’ve decided that, when they’re rejected, they’ll get posted on my Patreon (and, a few days later, here).

I once took a short course in music therapy – if I hadn’t left Cardiff, I was planning on going into it as a career – and this news article really struck me, both as a musician, and someone who studied neuroscience as part of my first degree. (We can debate the merits of such a small subject pool another time.) The response piece is a Liwuli, a short, south-east Asian literary form that lends itself to cryptic/ mystical/ philosophical approaches, with its insistence on both giving directions and asking questions.

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Stare into each other’s eyes; blind yourself to the possibility of loss; connection is everything, and you are still here.

The beat goes on;
synapses hold hands;
and we are taken.

Now you know,
can it ever sound the same?

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If you fancy having a go at writing one of these liwulis yourself, why not try my handy-dandy tool here? Let me know how you get on!

Spectrogram of me singing in harmony

Palimpsest for the end of February

I’ve been writing a lot more lately, and submitting pieces to different places. One of the places I’ve started submitting to is the Rattle “Poets Respond” – a weekly call to write something topical, inspired by the news. Since these are going to go out of date very quickly, I’ve decided that, when they’re rejected, they’ll get posted on my Patreon (and, a few days later, here).

This is the first one! A sestina for the repetitive nature of the news cycle and social media right now:

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The sins of men these days seem… uncountable,
and we petition the mighty to conduct
us – they signed on to drive
this vessel, after all.
And they tell us being powerful is hard!
Don’t scupper the ship, we need them; don’t pull the trigger!

We’ve turned, we’ve pointed – we’ve seen the rigger
of the system; the evidence is countable
but so, so hard,
while we try to keep eyes on the conduct
of them all –
every single one, from birth, was taught to rive.

And yet, now we’re asking them to drive
forth the sinners, snip the strings of riggers,
their rigour’s suddenly forgotten in the calls
for clemency; we’re begging those accountable
to ditch excuses, conduct
proper searches, come down hard.

But even getting drip-fed poison is hard,
a larger world emerging under our feet, as we drive
home the messages, the revelations of misconduct
abducting our attention, while trigger after trigger
is pulled, and sins litter our screens, uncountable,
undoubtable – big and small.

No wonder, for some, reality begins to pall:
it’s all too hard,
and here’s a game, a way to keep from feeling accountable,
just trust the voice of the virtual, it’ll drive
the hurt away, let’s play ArtIst, while the downrigger
trawls the spoils of others’ talents to reconduct.

What’s the score? Who’s conducting?
The product is ready, laid out on the stall
don’t stop – you can’t let these spriggers
rob us of everything you’ve worked for, so hard.
Words are malleable – libido doesn’t just mean sex drive
it’s an appetite for living, would you deprive us, The Accountable?

It just takes a touch to trigger a witch hunt – gold is a great conductor,
locked in virtual stocks – unaccountable? Maybe not all…
If you can’t take it with you, burn everything – especially the hard drive…

*

If you’d like to write your own sestina, you can access the tool I created here. let me know how you got on if you do!

Image made clumsily with CorelDraw and MS PowerPoint (because fuck AI)