I sit and try and be a lotus
after killing the third fly of the evening
with a pocket book of recipes and a
thirty centimetre ruler stolen
from bathroom **** measuring contests to our knees.

Young professionals tread these boards
and I watch, trying to paint them lotus.

I listen and learn like I was told to do
then clock watch, mop, cycle home to you;
I am still trying to be a lotus
even in wet shoes and no socks.

With less than five-hundred pounds to my various names,
an office-chair-***-clothes-horse, eight USB charging ports
and a future that stretches to Sunday’s last reluctant second,
I am sitting, trying to be lotus figuring out the professional path
David Attenborough heard in his gentleman’s class: that son of a-

- I walked into an army recruitment vault with dreams of being Gulliver,
though was asked to leave out the cat flap cathedral door back into war
as they’d got their laugh and didn’t applaud.

Perhaps I should’ve been better at maths
where apparently a career can be predicted on a scatter graph,
and the pigeons of today were the pigeons of next year and the months that’ll follow the century after that.

I am still trying to figure out the hoo-ha of *******
and ring fingers and collar sizes and the inner circles
of hyenas when the winter solstice splits the seasons.

There is no reason for this lotus procrastination
when what’s there to live for but a crooked world
and one bandage left.

The clock gets me.
It comes to me in the middle of the night
Pulls back the sheets and says, "Hey fucko."
Then it lifts open my sobby wet sand-encrusted lids,
It knows when I'm trying at sleep, pumping quarters
Like I was swallowing yawns, sometimes I try to squint
Harder and take a dream to the next level, whatever
The next level is. It's like Friday night when I wanted to go
Out to do something, whatever something is.
Because I know that if I don't I'll miss that thing that's so
Important that if I were to miss it the clock wouldn't come for me

Again.
And on Tuesday's when I'm knotting a dream around 2 o' clock
In the morning, my web-footed adventure, say, killing your

Boyfriend, say
Fighting the Nazis, say,
Rediscovering that you sent nudie pics to
That rando guy we met in that club that lives
in Prague-
I throw the clock at the ******* wall.

Because who knows, I make the bed wrong
Or maybe I don't cook right, or look right, or
Smile the right way at the right

Time. And you start thinking that I have to die.
The bane of my existence is an imagined feat in your
Walnut-sized brain, slowly numbing us while we're
Supposed to be, say

Listening to the rich, Oxford voice of
David Attenborough.

Instead you're thumbing through that index
of CVS cashiers, just trying to find a scruffy face
To flip your digits to, your homemade justification. It becomes
A feat, an unjust cause of mine to

Get it right, that imaginative and artificial bit you've
Been sewing up Monday twilight.

That's when I go out and jaw your sister, somewhere between
A smirk on your face and a bit of anger at the end of your sentences.

So aye
We wir watchin
that David Attenborough
or tryin tae -
fower weans tearin up the joint,
an she's like,
See if youse dinny shut it...!
an aw that, ken -
You no gonny tell thum?
So ah'm like,
"Aye.  
Wheesht, youse."

But it wis amazin, like.
These fish.
Years oot at sea.
Tiny wee at first,
dodgin sharks an jellyfish
an aw sorts,
awa oot, miles fae land.
(God!  Youse!  Take it up the stair!
Tell thum, you!
"Aye, boys.  Listen tae yir ma.")

Then wan day, like
they get the urge, ken?
Got tae go.
An in they come,
surgin fae the sea,
these sleek, silver bullets
fat wi feedin.
(I'll no tell yis again!)

Nothin, an ah mean nothing
is gonny stop them.
Waterfalls?  Nae bother.
Just pure hungry
fir the lassies, ken?
The boy Attenborough sais
they dinny even eat!
(That's it!  Ah tellt ye!
Here you!  Take some responsibility,
wull ye?
"Eh?  Oh, aye.
Away tae yir rooms, boys -
yir ma tellt ye.")

These pure ***** divils
will loup up sheer cliffs,
baws burstin, bi the look ay it.
Poetry in motion, ken?
Like, ah dinny ken, pure water
brought tae life, an that.
Jist pure savage.

An then, haw -
they find the lassies!
An it's jist, like,
'splurge'!
Done the deed.
Gemme ower,
job done,
deid.

An there's this shot.
Ripplin shallows,
just fill ay the twitchin bodies.
Craws an bears an that,
queuin up fir the bonanza.
Jist, like,
totally
spent.

An she's aw,
Here, is that no terrible?
Pair buggers!
Eifter aw that!
An ah'm like,
"Aye."

But see inside,
ah'm thinkin,
"Lucky,
lucky *******."

When he opens the door it is almost exactly how I have imagined it: the room and the person.

Without a word he takes me to the window directly, and there it is. He smiles and says ‘Am I not the most fortunate of Fellows?’ And, of course, he is. Who else could have taken rooms that look out on the great Oriental Plane of Emmanuel College:

A lado de las agues esta, como leyenda
En sui jardin murando e silencio
El arbo bello dos veches centenario
Las pondrosas ramas estendidas
Cerco de tanta hierba, extrellazando hojas
Dosel donde una sombre endenice subsiste.

(By the side of the waters stands like a legend
In its walled and silent garden, the beautiful tree
Surrounded by grass, interweaving its leaves,
A canopy where Eden still exists!)

He doesn’t provide the English translation of Luis Cenarda’s poem, but he probably knows it and can recite all eleven stanzas. If you had that view you’d learn it too.

‘I gather you’re a Cambridge man.’  he says. ’76 to 88 – I know Robin of course. He has new rooms since you were about, but says do look in.’

Yes, I’m a Cambridge man, but this was never my territory, never such gracious rooms, the floor to ceiling walls of books, the maps, the pictures, so many photographs, a traveller’s room. Indeed, on my journey here I found myself imagining this location and the man himself. I am not disappointed. He is my height, just under six foot, cropped hair, a slight beard, large eyes that rarely seem to blink; they take all of you in and hold your gaze. His clothes are unassuming – a blue sweater, proper trousers, Church’s brogues highly polished.

Thus, I am being examined like those landscapes he describes so well. He studies my personal topography. No pleasantries. ‘Lunch in the Common Room at 1.30. Let’s talk now.’ A glass of sherry appears. He perches on the edge of a desk, one of four in the room. A small table by the window is quite empty except for a small note book and framed photograph of his friend Roger. His muse perhaps? I know he swims too, and imagine him on a morning in early Spring heading for the Cam at dawn like Richard Hanney taking a plunge in his Oxfordshire lake.

‘Music isn’t really my thing,’ he says tentatively, ‘I love the chapel stuff, but I don’t do the background thing. I’m not like Attenborough who can’t take a step without being plugged into Bach. When I travel I like to hear the sounds around me. I think they are as important as the smell of a place.’

‘There’s this tradition of English composers painting landscapes in music. Egdon Heath, the Fen Country and so on. I looked at your recent essay on your Heartstone, how you’ve taken the fractal nature of the chalk landscape down towards Audley End as your canvas. It is beautiful there, seductive. I occasionally take the train to Saffron Walden and cycle the lanes.’

We talk about whether words in a musical performance need to be heard by the listener. ‘I can never hear them.  Do composers think people should hear them, or are they just a lattice on which to hang musical sounds? I wonder. Do you want those kind of words? Starting points for your imagination? No. Oh . . .’

I tell him I have to have clarity. I see music as a kind of additional commentary underpinning a text. As a composer I give it rhythmic space, a further and extra dimension. I place it in a field of time.  

He goes to a bookshelf and picks out The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. ‘You know this of course.’ I know this I nod. ‘A book which sets the imagination aloft, and keeps it there for months and years afterwards.’ I proudly quote (his introduction to the new edition). ‘Gosh,’ he says, ‘Nobody has ever quoted me before’. And smiles very broadly. ‘I think you’ve deserved your lunch’.

And so we go, past the Oriental Plane, across the Fellows’ Garden to the Fellows’ Common Room. In the December gloom we have rich Scots Broth, herrings with a course mustard dressing and salad, a glass of claret and cheese. We talk of China: his year in Beijing with expeditions to the northern Tai Mountains, the territory of my work in progress. ‘They are just like the Pyrenees only more so. Exquisite limestone forms, and in Autumn they are simply poems of mist and water. You are going to go there I hope before the tourists take over completely? The scenic mountain road is a travesty.’

It is time to leave: he to an afternoon of end of term tutorials – I to look in on Robin, who sees us at lunch and makes appropriate signs across the Common Room. ‘I enjoyed your letter’, He says ruefully, ‘You have very gracious handwriting, so unusual these days and a delight to leave lying on the desk. You know I insist that my students write their essays in their own hand. You should see the scrawls I get. But they learn. I gave one young woman one of those copy-books that Charlotte Bronte writes about giving her pupils. I got my act together when I first corresponded with Roger. His letters were astonishingly beautiful and one of these days they’ll be published in facsimile. Lui Xie says a well-written letter is the ‘presentation of the sound of the heart.’ What a pity you no longer write your scores by hand.’

I tell him I’ll write his score by hand if he’ll compose the words I seek.

‘We’ll see’, he says, and with a brisk handshake, he rises from the table, smiles and leaves.

All these vultures hovering around their prey:
Three golden prizes
Who will get there first?
Cue David Attenborough on commentary!
Coupled and single lions
Prowling about
Waiting for the chance of food and drink.

That coffee takes ages.
Coffee?
Yes, for this is my local
And my pack and I
Are thoroughly enjoying our ale
With our lovely lunches
Served to us by beautiful barmaids.

Those golden prizes are the three front tables
From where you can see the golden sand:
On a beach
Dotted with distant tiny people
As some frolic in the estuary waves
On paddle boards,
Basking in the glorious sun.
Time for another pint.

Paul Butters

© PB 2\9\23.

the jellied bioluminescense,
drifts and swhirls in an ****
of neon ecstasy...

out beyond the breakers

we sit on the beach
and watch,
with voyueristic fascination

as the sea makes whoopee!!

On our bikes, day after day
Wheeling along the West Country Way
From Georgian Bath, that Jane Austen knew
To Glastonbury Tor, our challenge still new

Where are we now, is it this way or that?
Another cool stretch on a railway track
No one fell off, no one got hurt
Except now and then by a few cross words

And so over Exmoor, our longest day yet
It was football, not cider in our Somerset
Sea views and fresh air in Westward **!
We could have stayed longer but on we go

The hills are getting longer, tall hedges either side
Our legs are getting stronger now we've found our stride

The Eden project was on our route
So we had to stop and see
The scene was complete in a bio-dome
With David Attenborough filming for tv

Past holes in the ground where they dug the clay
Along old canals our journey panned out
Then over a beer at the end of the day
Out came the map for the mileage count

On through the ancient landscape we go
Past the odd castle or stately home
Past sheltered coves and beaches of sand
And on to the end  -Lands End-
Where we ran out of land

she.
a personal pronoun.
The only concordant definition of a woman that exists in lightyears of our literature.
Today I glaciate our fluid chronology.
Freeze the sequential order in which past events have occurred and continue to occur
every
day.
Forgive me if I sound like David Attenborough but
Today there are 3 billion,
804 million,
160 thousand,
198 women that breathe the oxygen pulsating from our trees.
That wake with heartbeat because of a single seed.
Their atmosphere is polluted by a quiet kind of disease.
Where bodies develop like a delicate striptease.
We aim to please.
They probably say bless you to someone when they sneeze
But are still defined by obscurities or their sexuality.
prisoners of social construct that enforce her reality.
This is me.
This is you. And you too.

164 Thousand,
635 people died today.
Their burning passions extinguished like a pathetic cigarette in an ashtray
If they were still here
what do think they would say?
Jess you could only fit into a size 12 on a good day.
Jess I saw how much turkey you ate on boxing day.
At the buffet with all the gourmet ha!
you thought they looked away
Jess you have child bearing hips which means you will never dance ballet.
Jess the only way you'll lose weight is if you literally run away.
I mean You will never have a fiancé.
Or If you do
They will probably go by the name of 'Cheese Tray'
I'm sorry but
That is not what they would say
That one voice is very much alive.
it is very much mine.
Patriarchy is a force that I feel in my spine
Why is weight still the way that girls are defined

Why is weight a crippling consistency that is picking at my mind
Why does weight tangle reality like jewellery,
impossible to unwind

When meanwhile
16 year old climate strike leader Greta Thunberg has been nominated for a nobel peace prize
When meanwhile
Money donated to Notre Dame would be enough to clean the great pacific garbage patch by comparison of size
When meanwhile
250 people were murdered in Srilanka less than two weeks ago.
When meanwhile
We are in an age where the president cyberbullies his own people through the later Iphone
When meanwhile
Consumerism has been more newsworthy than crime
Why is our society so unbelievably blind
Why are we so concerned by the size of our THIGHS

496 million,
325 thousand,
200 women are illiterate today.
Until I was twelve, my teachers believed that I couldn't read.
I was a blip in an anomalous cluster of academic failure.
I can't speak Chinese though I learnt its script from three.
I am an Asian with Bright blue eyes and blonde hair
What does that say about me?

It's okay to not know who you are sometimes.
But do not unearth dirt that only you see.
Do not let that hole deepen to a grave in which you will fit.
Here lies the self-criticisms that stop personal growth
Here Lies my self-hatred more potent than god's oath.
Here lies a girl who hides from exposure like a glove.
Rest in Peace.
For I am a women now
And I embody self-love.

Got the Covid shot.
Got the word that I have no cancer.
Got the will to form a
door
into this day far in our future, from then,
just
a moment ago, it was now, and
some how you  
knew ex- out
action to {perience hap}
change the time
to your now, my future and my now, your past.

just that fast/

--- lickity split, {as if it never needed meaning}

Any whole time invested in an old oath
to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but… when you pause

what comes next is ever, and
the state of never is
unattainable from here.
---
I know a guy,
he deals in evil, the idea, scare-tactics, terror, horror
all that
Lovecraft literal realm, words may lead a mind to let
be
a bit, a while, not a whole time, but
a bit

a par-sec or a plancksec, or so, you know,
a little bit of time,

taken as granted for now.
Are you tested,
proven, reused and re
tested? Experience is something more than
a novice mortal can claim. Honest, sharpenedest point,
the life unexamined is worth more than
the life unlived.

Okeh. You live in these lines, this is the literal book
life is…
along these lines, it
just is. Really, the nextifity can never **** the was,
and the was can never reach past
now
-- the junction, re
conciliation all pairs re
sounding harmonious ohhhhhs and ahhh,
yess
yes, we do know knowing itself is good.
How did we imagine
knowing good and evil, the difference, was separation
from the way through life
in truth,
with no added sorrow?

See, truth is,
…Death has no sting.
But, you gotta do it twice,
sorta…
it's a kludge, what can I say.
Truth functions fully now,
lying can never hold you,
person-you, dear reader you, lying
can never subject you to ******* for fearing death.

You may cease being after your final idle word is working right,
but no mortal really knows.

Hell is a mortal imagination, as is purgatory and limbo, et al.
As a mortal of our sort thinks in its core, CPU,
so it is… Mac or PC. {Joke, kidding… it is a division,
elite sorting division, elite
mechanisms
in the collected subconscious ifery per
white lit apple where there was
a rainbow,
yes
yes
I remember.
inanely great

aha- I know - I was tricked
- who told me I was naked?
signaling the same bite,
knowing good and evil and the connection
at the chthonic level of life,
where roots and fungi merge and share
information,
no more
no less}

the more you know the less you don't, but don't
be
deceived, your reading genius is a gift, the eye that sees, the ear
that
hears, all the senses sensed as a nation might
sense
us-ness in all the inhabitants of the atmosphere -- whosoever…

-- you paid no price, yet truth you don't think you know
draws you to
sneer at a thought that we ought fear death,

after all the virtual nexts…
really
deep mythic revelation festers
pops
The totally Disneyfied home of the future… from an Amazon
or-if-art-if-ice,  Marvel Universe where unbelief
is released… almost like books

The Age of Ultron
is set to rumble with
Enuma Elish?

Who'da thunk it? The oldest of stories,
swirling to gether,
all but one,
the good one, truth the trait tendency in any
given word
made up in minds since
Enuma Elish,
the surviving story, for a seeded cultural embodiment,
a mind made of us,
we, the artists and the art observant, seeing as we wish,
thinking as we may, if there is a way.

You? you think life is funny,
but not fun.
No fun for no reason play?
Nay,
they say, they said in the final days of the iron empire,
while the ants steadily absorbed the scent
of trusted friend, and the marching ants selected on edge-
wise vectors,

to copy'n'paste, past to now, nope… no match, but
watch…

spread all you ever knew, one thing thick, like lipids
reflecting ever before
or something… sorry, think gaspumps on the lake, at sunset.

That beautiful film on the water, ain't good.
But the beauty is. Ants feel sensibly, the whole mass
of ants,
the message ants send that says we do not **** each other,
humans are learning that now.

One at a time. Bit by bit.

Called to be the sluggard, as an actual ant,
in a colony the size of California,

we imagine you think
with stars as reference points,
being photon tied to you, and all whoever, who
considered the ant,
after a great course on esteemation of ever lasting worth.
Effectual
communication
with comforters sent to comfort not terrorize…

consider the message: Consider the ant, thou sluggard,
consider her ways and be wise.

Right. Fabre said, or is recorded in the 1916
current opinion magi-
zine:
"... I should like to see a few small facts."

Years along this trail and we were unaware
of warez we might imagine in a marvel usiverse, an usity
of me and thee,
word and pen,
surface and ink,
what do you think? how many messages fit on the head
of a tack?

A pin? Ist that the proper imagination? Do children
among the elite
ever see a pin,.. perhaps some ultra-elite see tailors,
we all see them on TV, dressing James Bond,
or a bride in white, chalking stitch marks

for the future… in that reality,
the next scene,
all the sewing done, all the pins put away, save one.

Stick to the plan. Tack this one on your clue wall.
Every 2021 seeker has faith in the pattern
emerging.

As if the words rise from the page and you know
none mean anything you may never know.

These are beyond Ultron,

these wild old man insights on olden ………..

Back in the ant den, we imagine interpersonal feeler-
a touch and all we know is known to all,
ahhh
it feels good to know
all I know is now known to all I know, in ant level knowing.

We can do this.
We have done it all our lives,
step into the scene, as an extra.

An extra ant of the 40% who have no care,
need no practice in any ant-craft,
and - seem to serve as assurance
needful for the peace of mind we use as invasive species,

the super-colony survives on peace within,
this is new, this is us, as ants
having certain tasks to keep the climate in the soil,
perfectin the motives of beauty.l

salt from distant seas
subtile tastes to tie the tongues to good to know,

yes it has long been so, the mouth tastes what comes out.

And flesh is a feeling spirits must live to know,
one may never
pretend to have been, without dying once,

minimum,
try the spirits. See did they ever love a lie?

An imp once asked me, when I was 72,
a little younger than I am in your now,
if I escaped Christianity,
how did I rest so peacefully staring death down.
The imp asked, not me, so that is technically not a quest
ion sufficient to warrant a full days wage of sin,

disconnect…
total lost the thread, mazed in the face, hands up, drop
everything…

call it art.
Crazy,
who says crazy is evil if it lives in the bubble
where ants are making peace, and
poets are given truly magic-tech
to stitch stories
to times.

Attenborough called the world to consider
The Ant… as had Solomon, it's been said.
And I heard, but I understood not:
then said I, O my Lord,
what [shall be]
the end of these [things]?
And he said, Go thy way, Daniel:
for the words [are] closed up
and sealed till the time of the end.

pop

Escape? Nay, knave, nigh-ifer misser
of myriad points
of light,

I escaped the name of god for good.
True,
let good be true and every man a liar,
as mortal instant man
remains

a we, at least, very least, I'm sure,
of me and thee, you and I,
lefts and rights and tops and bottoms
fronts and backs

we be in time…
who rah, the hero, uh oh hubris mystery,
curios sort
who wishes to know
the way of the blade parting soul from spirit,
in a
bit of reality we all believe, some how,
does exist,
soul and spirit realms, we all imagine these, we do.

Sniff, if my myth had babies with yours, watchathank?

In the final analysis
We are but colonies of bacteria
Swimming about in our own primordial soup.
Who knows what pacts and treaties
Have been made within our very bodies?

Aeons and aeons of evolution
Have led to this:
The human being.

So much mindless life,
Following instinct,
Building and building
To produce intelligence.

Natural Selection,
Seen by Darwin,
Such a beautiful thing –
Presented by Attenborough on a silver screen –
God’s Formula:
The mark of Genius.

Paul Butters

© PB 22\1\2019.