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CAUGHT IN THE NET 90 - POETRY BY MICHAEL PEDERSEN
Series Editor - Jim Bennett
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Introduction by Jim Bennett
Hello. Welcome to the next in the series of CITN featured poets. We will be looking at the work of a different poet in each edition and I hope it will help our readers to discover some new and exciting writing. This series is open to all to submit and I am now keen to read new work for this series.
You can join the CITN mailing list at
-
http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm
and following the links for Caught in the Net.
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She breathes so lightly, purrs, as if her lungs were making music; restful notes throttled by my brute orchestra of noise.
The room pulses, damp, bulbous; geckos on walls balloon to the same primordial beats - we’ve acknowledged this, the reptiles and I.
from; Flowers by Michael Pedersen |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
No.58, Slorkram
Arching Eyebrows and a Chalked Door
Newscast
Flowers
Hello Bréon, it’s nice meet you
Greenhouse Ganglands
Tom Buchan (1931-1995)
With Divine Ovation
3 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY:
MICHAEL PEDERSEN
Michael Pedersen is a 26 year old writer of Scottish stock. His inaugural chapbook Part-Truths was listed by The Poetry Book Society and was a Callum MacDonald Memorial Award finalist; his sequel chapbook -The Basic Algebra of Buttering Bread - is available from Windfall Book; and his first full length (part illustrated) collection is forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press. He is widely published in magazines, journals, e-zines and anthologies and has galvanised an electric reputation on the live circuit - collaborating with musicians, filmmakers and artists. Allied to this he script edits for a forthcoming motion picture; has written a short play that will appear under National Theatre of Scotland's banner and co-captains Neu! Reekie! collaborative arts night. www.michaelpedersen.co.uk
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2 - POETRY
No.58, Slorkram
This stilted house (of heavy heart) speaks
out in castigation of the card-counting
swindlers gambling by the river.
Ferny feet hide secrets buried deep
in the soil, down beneath the timber,
where, all earthy, only spiders stray.
Together we watch the sky like television
screens: lapis days turn back to black
booted nights but we natter on,
letting colours creep and silence settle
behind the shadows of shrubs -
think milk mixing into tea. Tonight
the ether’s eyeballing us, winds gallop
from tufts to yarns, settle in yawns –
a telltale sign to shamble off to bed.
Remember Michael (with a voice
brass as bells), inside all bones are white
and souls are soft as ripened Mango.
Of course. I won’t forget it.
And tomorrow, can we talk about
the Big City who lost his feathered hat?
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Arching Eyebrows and a Chalked Door
X marks the spot of visceral malevolence:
cracked lips, thin as slit wrists, collide
like tyre tracks. Sweat pours past blemish
past blister, words rock back-and-forth,
like kids on swings. This is a man condemned:
a gravy blooded, Xed, hexed, body filled with AIDS.
As with all commanders of devilry, he purveys
vicious charms, many men, fond of fame,
have followed him to battle; each battue
comes cloaked as coup d'état. Jean:
an Algerian abdicator, a French defamer,
an aficionado of wartime suffering -
how at home he felt, hiding out in Nam,
flogging filth to US soldiers. Under stolen stars
they sparked Lucky Strikes and staked-out claims
for infinity. Now on sojourn, in Cambodia,
he’s bragging to strangers, about harm,
necessity, seeing things through.
Assumes each too wasted to collect quotes,
tap scales or severities, too scared to repeat
the rendezvous. Regrets? Only misfortune:
I’ll never see my son grow old. I’m withered,
dying because of heroin. Cut-loose by two countries,
pariah to both cultures. Had I been on spirits
I’d have piped-up and said it: If I ever
meet your son, I’ll tell him his dad was a monster -
who called Bob Dylan an asshole.
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Newscast
Siem Reap is stitched together
with huts and hovels, electrical wires
and bent barbed fencing.
Each day begins to the oily trigger
of a moto-bike ignition, post porridge,
pre the first garish sales pitch.
This ‘want to walk’ flummoxes Tuk-Tuk
operators flanked by a bride - confused
as cowboys confronted by spacemen.
The red roads come without a welcome,
quickly turn to sloppy clay when damp,
clump, bubble and cook in heat,
forceful as a butcher tenderising meat.
Bees are bigger, beer is cheaper
the coins have absconded for China;
the poor paper scuffed and over-worked,
like beloved old sneakers. Evening
conducts its own incongruous symphony,
fickle as the habits of fish; and though
I end up bug-bitten and perspiring wildly,
taken for a mug and sometimes lonely
I am happy, in this wooden house, reading
a backlog of texts from a brimful list,
so many miles from all your news.
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Flowers
I’m indigo petals, you’re a blooming sunflower:
spiral clusters, beaming head, stems frozen
on single stalk (plants can’t stand akimbo).
It’s like an oven in here: air cake-icing
sticky and steeped in sweat – best
place for it is above the covers; breasts
flat on the chest. Who’d have thought
skin rises like yeasty bread and the body
like a sun like helium like mist.
She breathes so lightly, purrs, as if her lungs
were making music; restful notes throttled
by my brute orchestra of noise.
The room pulses, damp, bulbous; geckos
on walls balloon to the same primordial beats -
we’ve acknowledged this, the reptiles and I.
Their berry gaze understands hands touch hair
joints creek, skin slips, all in reminder
we are capricious mammals, keepers
of uneasy conscience, like a spinning top
near stop. If we stay together, me tit to your tat,
vice-versa, I will never yell Areeeba -
really mean it. You will never drop those sighs
into the sea. Unlike the sunflower
who arrives in annual bloom, these moments
come then go, just the once.
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Hello Bréon, it’s nice meet you
- please ignore the scratches,
I’ve been browning in gutters,
amongst wet cigarettes and the last
flecks of Camden’s lanceolated leaves.
As things stand: faith is grubby,
sweet premise pale, the railings, too,
have lost their stockings - nowt
but dankness underneath.
I’ve noticed your stories don’t involve
sticky risings, Senegalese dealers
or Lambeth car-parks and I’m very
intrigued; alas for fear
you’d think me mad
(or a poor secret-keeper), I snub
the amber squalls which haemorrhage
through the firmament. For you,
too, blaze, thatching synergies,
talking of six continents
operating like organs. It was years
further when I spoke of the stars:
blinking blinking, as night
flinched beneath them.
To which you replied Ahhh
the Stars! I thought you’d never ask.
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Greenhouse Ganglands
Buttercups solicit ladybugs, bees woo pansies,
sparrows raid the strawberries. Mum just sits there,
in peaceful observation, potting then re-potting,
as scores of trespassers procreate and plunder.
Arthur’s Seat and Other Peaks tower overhead
like behemoth bull seals, whiskers from a brawl.
The Ulster and the Paisley streets are their grassy
underskirt, hiked-up, in floral theatre. Teeny tyrants
flee through thicket or downwards burrow,
when our half-daft cat comes tumbling
through the rhubarb patch. Bagged gooseberries
swirl, like wind spinners, on the back fence, a gift
from Mrs Fisher; her clothes pong of people
who spend too much time with boxes,
but she’s a sorceress with fruit and sugar.
I parent my own pebbled plot, years four through seven:
an ensemble of radish, raspberries and Venus Flytraps,
which all die and I later discover were from Dobbies
(off the A7, Lasswade), not a far-off planet
of fiery infernos. Then came football stickers
and wrestling figures, to pioneer expeditions Mum
would often ambush: a scarf of spider plants gangling
round her neck; muddy paws like monster claws,
she chased the winds right out of me. This picture
was my elixir through the teenage years,
with adulthood came predators far fiercer than
slugs or greenfly, true ghouls, like self-harm
and malignancies, who too had monster claws,
but unlike mum, these didn’t flinch as beetles,
underfoot, crunched like celery.
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Tom Buchan (1931-1995)
Tom wrote poems like fantastic pointing fingers
‘straight, strong and complex’
as Glasgow;
wrote pulsing prose with pursed lips,
served verities caked in salt, bent rules
masterfully;
captain of a body well lived in
chipped teeth, fractured bone, but enough
about his vessel.
Buchan brewed an eastern-western blend,
so like comets flew he spoke, in the heydays
and the greydays; moved
as a great touring caravan, compass pointing
alpine north. 7 foot they say, a strident mammoth,
a turtle-necked warrior.
It’s possible we were, at some point, synched
in time and place, tectonically on the promenade
Pittville Street, Portobello,
perhaps too shared insights on a story, spotted
the same flying kite, rogue seagull or submarine
emerge from the Firth.
It bends wits, brooding over
what forces lobbied night sky to swallow
up a brightest star.
As to how such verve came to plunge
like a rusty anchor into fierce waters,
the mind boggles.
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With Divine Ovation
As a resident of Brinsworth,
she enjoyed the acreage and courtesies
of the artistes’ benevolent fund;
a sixty-four-fold companionship; reciting
nightly, verbatim, alongside coupons
from occupants and the jaunted
pastiche of their loyal visitants.
Colin, a fan first and nurse after,
makes an impromptu stop
ensuing a missed appointment
with Earl Grey and buttered
crumpets - there lies Eloise,
decubitus and stone cold dead.
A more courtly passing
you couldn’t have ask for, not
tethered by wires nor sprawled
across iron, like pets on vets’ tables,
but serene, elegant, at ease.
Colin shuts the door,
lifts the rejected analgesia
- morphine, a syringe-pump –
and self-administers the full 10mls;
on closing her eyes, mouths
Bravo Eloise - now taking his seat
for the encore.
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Colmar
is a matrix of criss-cross canals, capitale des vins d'Alsace
and where, at 13, on the school French exchange,
I met Elodie Mullan.
All summer, would insist on croissants, slurp expresso
and defame Scotland with a fraudulent harshness;
for I knew nothing of our propinquity to the Rhine
or Vosges mountains, only that Elodie lived a stone’s throw
away and with craned neck out the attic window
I could see her boudoir; where there must have been
frequent nakedness.
Our moments were few: sat side-by-side on a boat tour,
locked hands walking through a rusting vineyard
and were dancing partners for three songs;
linked together like salted pretzels.
A photograph of us, in partial embrace, reveals Elodie,
alluring as Julie Delpy, me, wholly disparate, in a Scotland
strip with peroxide-blonde hair. The sky, like the shirt,
ultramarine, whilst I blushed rouge from little-boy syndrome.
I used to dream of returning a celebrity, with histrionic
displays of extravagance. It would have been horrendous:
white-limo, champagne, skunk, one-liners –
like something from a hip-hop video.
Nowadays, I’d explain how a poem is like a bomb,
a bomb like a poem, when assembled correctly
both explode rather than arrive, become
instantly important; as she did and could again.
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4 - Afterword
Email Poetry Kit -
info@poetrykit.org - if you would like
to tell us what you think. We are looking for other poets to feature in
this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short
bio to - info@poetrykit.org
Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net. Our other magazine s
are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at -
http://www.poetrykit.org/