Perspective

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Suburban Blogging

In his post, Dear Internets: It's Not You, It's Me, long term blogger Ernie Hsiung of little. yellow. different talks of the dissolution of the golden age of blogging. Arriving at such a post, haphazardly, after half a bottle of red wine on a suburban Saturday night, and even later in the blogging game, is both disheartening and illuminating.

Ernie, from what I can gather, has been blogging since about 2000. Back in 2000 I was trying to hammer out a film industry career and all I knew of the internet was the email provider I used to send off my CVs and receive daily instructions from my film director boss. Back then a colleague also described me as 'mainstream', a moniker that horrified the girl in me who had once flounced around university in tie-dye, hoping she was radical.

Lately I've been very in touch with that 19 year old (listening to Happy Rhodes, remembering Coming Out and a gap year in India) and increasingly I wonder if I did her justice. Wouldn't she have embraced the genesis of blogging?

But then I realise that, actually, painfully, she didn't.

Which begs the question: what am I doing here now? Is this just yet another thirty-something, middle-class, semi erudite, moderately poetic (embarrassingly existential) no-man's land in cyberspace? Because it's what friends talk about at dinner parties? And does it matter, anyway? I'm not doing it for the kudos. Am I?

There's nothing wrong with mainstream, of course, but in truth I think we all hope it's a term that applies to other people, not ourselves.

Autumn

There's always a moment when Autumn announces herself. Her voice isn't as full as Summer, and certainly not as bold as Winter, but she's the most confident of seasons. The temperature in London is due to reach a balmy 20 degrees Celsius today, but don't be mistaken, those 20 degrees belong to acorns, golden leaves, sweaters and the clearing of the light.

These days poetry has been falling out of me even faster than my hair (stress related), even faster than the pounds I'm losing (a joyous, lean sparsity). So last week I took my little vessel to the South Bank Centre where I finally got round to joining The Poetry Library. Really, it couldn't be in a better location; that concrete, modernist perch on the Thames opens me up just like a conker shell. On the syllabus this term: Marianne Boruch and Brittle Star and the confidence to begin submitting some of my work. The academia of Autumn.

And there's nostalgia, too. Doesn't Autumn, with her bonfires and Harvest Festivals, make us look backwards, just for a moment? So go on, slip your hands into mittens, draw your loved ones close and remember. I certainly am.