Lost For Words

[hillwalker]

LOST FOR WORDS

I’ve taken to dropping my words on the floor
like stray crumbs of biscuit,
rich tea or digestive.
I squash a verb on the kitchen tiles,
it slithers under my slipper like fish scales,
and on the doormat two adjectives, captive
and circular in the litter of junk mail.
My lips are sealed, the next word poised,
now out of reach of a tongue-tip left delving in darkness.

Nouns dismantle into blizzards of syllables;
a white noise of word-sounds,
confetti in snowstorm.
Adverbs defy gravity as they fly into oblivion
where they multiply and mutate into quadratic equations;
a sandstorm of timeframes
with each second numbered but thrown out of sequence.

O, how I dread this protracted departure,
this centrifugal alphabet
where ever-forming thoughts are jettisoned to chaos,
where word associations come unstuck
even before the paste has time to dry
like that piece of wall paper behind the bedroom radiator.

My next of kin,
those poems I memorised from childhood,
lost to subversion, stammering parodies.
Shakespeare and Shaw more like Beckett and Brecht now;
cue cards all shuffled, ad-lib ad finitum,
no prompting, no recall, subtitles unravelling,
the audience restless, then heckling its outrage
from bookshelf and letter rack,
yesterday’s newspapers left on the draining board.

While here in my parlour
rectangles of summer gatecrash the room
casting fresh light on drab, dusty furniture;
cubes of Picasso daubing table and footstool in boorish bravura.
Dust motes of lost conversations continue their orbit like whispers in amber
but my eyes are unfocussed,
their rods and cones fade into crystalline lattices,
corneas transformed into wafers of silicate,
once amethyst, tourmaline, garnet, topaz,
now muscovite, olivine, plagioclase feldspar.

The cathedral silence of an over-stuffed room
settles upon two armchairs, a footstool, and three walls of literature.
I recline here in rapture in my Noel Coward smoking jacket
like some Cro-Magnon photo-fit,
fossilised in soft cushions of dralon and kapok,
an absent-mind tableau of stupefied idiocy, learned dyslexia,
suspended midway between Ballard and Bradbury,
Steinbeck and Salinger, Faulkner and Faulks.

Perhaps now I should mention I’m no longer animate;
no need to worry;
no more aging, no more ennui -
a stroke,
that most tender of verb/nouns,
mislaid
long before my slow freefall from verse one/line eight.
I’m still nursing my lover,
one of Updike’s or Nabokov’s –
I don’t have my glasses on,
slipped off my nose…..

Flies bombarding the Velux a constant reminder
the world has not slewed off its track, has not slurred to a halt.

[PrinceMyshkin]

An utterly astonishing poem, unlike any other I've encountered. Among so many telling, vivid lines & details, I was especially struck by these:


where word associations come unstuck
even before the paste has time to dry
like that piece of wall paper behind the bedroom radiator.

and


yesterday’s newspapers left on the draining board.

and

Dust motes of lost conversations continue their orbit like whispers in amber

and

The cathedral silence of an over-stuffed room
settles upon two armchairs, a footstool, and three walls of literature.

I could go on and on but you get the idea. I'll be watching for other posts by you.

[hillwalker]

Thank you so much for your positive feedback. I am pleased you enjoyed.

As you can probably tell I like words, and the thought of someone losing their ability to comprehend language or communicate drove me to write this particular piece.

It's rather disconcerting to have one's ego massaged in this way..... but I'm not complaining just yet.

Many thanks

[PrinceMyshkin]

It's rather disconcerting to have one's ego massaged in this way..... but I'm not complaining just yet.

Many thanks

Oh, I do understand you! But just as you must toughen yourself up to having your "ego" bruised or otherwise assaulted, you will have to learn to accept praise, remembering always that you are your own most severe critic and the only one who knows exactly what you were after. And remember Graham Greene's dour comment: "A writer is someone who always fails."

[hillwalker]

Message received and understood - thanks again!

[Hawkman]

Well having read the poem and the exchange with Prince, I can tell that you were revelling in the words. I can appreciate the desire to bask in them, roll them arround and feel them playing in your mind. It is powerful, though I don't think I picked up on the mental disintegration you hinted at in your subsequent post. I think the use of the word Blizzard is particularly appropriate to the bombardment of imagary you have conjured up, which is in itself a little disorienting. Not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.

this is certainly a poem you have to think about, but none the less enjoyable for that.

Thanks, H

[hillwalker]

You are right - the disintegration of intellect was further down the chain reaction which culminated in death - the main intention was to convey the increasing inability to form words quickly enough to speak, or to decypher the written word on paper, perhaps as disturbing as physical deterioration.....

Thanks for your response

[blank|verse]

There are some great lines in this hillwalker, but on the whole I found it rather, um, indulgent, which was probably more fun for you to write than it is to read.

There's a lot of stasis in the poem, you don't move the reader along enough for a poem of this length. I'm not sure what guided the free verse line lengths, but they could have done with being more regular, perhaps four- or five-beat lines throughout (close to blank verse) and maybe changing at the end (similar to how you have written it) to reflect the 'deterioration' you mentioned.

I've heard that poetry is the art of describing something once (it might have been Don Paterson, in fact) and the start is too repetitive, describing verbs, then nouns, then adverbs all in the same way. My mind was starting to wonder when you were going to move on to describing monotransitive prepositional verbs.

Then there's the show-off lists of minerals (I presume they are!) and later, this bit again contains some great imagery (not too sure about the light 'gatecrashing' the room, but that aside it's very strongly expressed)

While here in my parlour
rectangles of summer gatecrash the room
casting fresh light on drab, dusty furniture;
cubes of Picasso daubing table and footstool in boorish bravura.
but you're basically saying the same thing repeatedly; pick the best one and move on.

And I found the archaic exclamation at the start of this line, and therefore the whole stanza, a bit melodramatic

O, how I dread this protracted departure,

But, but, but... it is very good overall so I hope this doesn't sound overly critical, but with a bit of editing could be even better.

[hillwalker]

Thanks b/v for your comments.

A lot of what you say is true - it does come across as self-indulgent in places, partially because I was trying to place myself in the position of some 'old man of letters' who has suddenly lost the one thing that gave his cloistered life some purpose.

The poem started off as a much shorter piece - but I was advised by a fellow (but published) poet to expand it and make more of the way individual words lose their substance as the old man's mind slowly unravels.

As for the poem's metrical structure - this is something I still stuggle with. It's the third draft so far and there will undoubtedly be a fourth following on from your constructive suggestions.

Thanks for your time.