Poetry

The Cambridge Cricket Clock

It looks like someone fixed a huge gold plate
to the wall, and put a monster on top who eats time
and makes the plate rotate. Instead of hands,
blue lights spin away the seconds, minutes, hours.

I'm a green, keen, fresh Fresher,
Alone in a crowd of kind strangers,
“If you need help, please don't suffer
in silence.” Stress is the ever-present danger.

Someone in South Africa once said to me
“I wish I could go to university.”
It may seem like hypocrisy
But too much opportunity
Makes choice a sort of tyranny.
The responsibility of liberty
is weighing on me heavily
fragmenting my energy
(Monday's awful regularity
Lectures' frightening intensity)
The deciding is so tiring,
and I sense that gradually
my enthusiasm’s expiring.

The juggling society teaches me
How to keep all the balls up in the air.
(After all, planning is all about spinning plates.)
Like cycling, you have to balance
to move and move to balance.
Don't even think about falling off.

My yoga guru advises me
that life is full of conflict
between people's expectations and obligations.
Well, if conflict is drama,
then all the world's a stage.
I'll play my part
with my head and not my heart
for I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

My father once told me
that managing time is like waging a war.
But I'm so tired of conflict.
I take my eye off the ball
And the plates smash on the floor.
I'm going to bed,
I don't care any more.

---------------

I was inspired to write this late last night after spending the evening with some English students, Joe Harper and Charlotte Kennedy. Their bad influence has evidently corrupted me. Joe lent me a book of poems called 'Staying Alive' (edited by Neil Astley) - 'real poems for unreal times' - which I would highly recommend to anyone. I'll immediately admit that most of the metaphors in this poem are stolen right out of various other ones from this book. But these same Englishists assured me that in poetry it isn't stealing, it's 'intertextuality'. So that's all right then. For the un-literary among you, if you don’t recognise the references, these are some poems you should read:

1) 'Tyranny of Choice' by Elizabeth Garrett (see below).

2) 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-2/

3) 'Machines' by Michael Donaghy.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/114.html

4) Shakespeare - and if you didn't spot that one then you have a problem.

1) Elizabeth Garrett

Tyranny of Choice

Pick a card, any card
You’ll say. I love this trick –
The tease and tyranny of choice –
The dove’s tail tender
On your fine and hidden fingers,
And the thumb I’m under.

You know my Queen of Hearts
By the dog-ear on her top-left
Bottom-right corner;
By the voluptuous sad mouth
Which will not smile,
Whichever way you turn her.