Poem #21/52

Here is the 21st poem in my 52-poem sequence (one a week) for 2013, followed by some illumination and reflection:

“PRAHA” –THE THRESHOLD

The noble carved faces
on all the Jugendstil facades
seem clouded with doubts
in this morning’s fog.

On Charles Bridge
the stalls sell the usual junk
it could be Crete or Majorca
tasteless watercolours
unauthentic antiques
Capitalism’s Midas touch
everybody wants Dollars
hard currency
the hope of the nation
vested in Coca-Cola
and Levi 501s
empirical new clothes
gaudy garments of the west.

And we who come running here
from our soured utopias
we want spirituality, culture,
history and its clean morals
the cafes of Kafka and Rilke
to shed here the same clothes of materialism
to which the street vendors aspire.

Somewhere the two streams
of moving people must meet
in the midst of Charles Bridge
East and West
those going to and fro
systole and diastole
the life and breath of Europe.

~

The name Prague is said to be derived from the Czech word for threshold, and a threshold is certainly what it felt like when I visited it back in 1995, as this poem reflects. The Charles Bridge is where most of the tourists and hawkers end up, and although it is over photographed (the image I include here is by “Chosovi” from Wikipedia), the statuary and architecture are stunning, and at twilight particularly the place is haunting and theatrical.

While in Prague I discovered the work of an artist called Jakub Schikaneder (1855-1924), which I had never seen before (see above). I include a few of his paintings here, and will post a few more over coming weeks. They are melancholic and atmospheric in what seems to me a very Czech way, but of course he was of German descent (as you can tell by his name) and seems to show the influence of German Romantic painters such as C.D Friedrich and of Arnold Böcklin.

This poem throws up the phrase “Soured Utopias” which will probably be the title of my first book of poetry should I choose to try to publish it next year. It seems to sum up the first part of my life, and maybe everybody’s.

Poem #20/52

Here is the 20th poem in my 52-poem sequence (one a week) for 2013, followed by some illumination and reflection:

EUROPEAN ILLNESS

Renaissance gardens
on the hills above Prague
focus our words
polish them like marble statues
and throw them out
lost and scattered
into the unfathomable eternity
blue sky I cannot bear
to lift my eyes towards
where weary birds
peel off from the high steeples
like rose petals
to float on Autumn ponds
in the cool evenings
when the frost and fog
creep across all the bridges
like the intruding fingers
of destiny and progress.

~

We’ve now entered the second phase of my life in this sequence I suppose, after I’d met Rona. I wrote this in my diary whilst sitting beside her on a park bench in the ornamental gardens on the south-facing slope of Hradčany (the castle hill district) below Prague castle. I think I was coming down with a cold at the time, which accounts partially for the strangely pained tone of it all, which was thus physical rather than metaphysical pain for a change!

A lot of these poems from now on are turned outwards like this, towards the world around me and foreign cities I was exploring, rather than the turgid self-obsession I’ve been posting since January. Hopefully, when we reach the year’s end however, you’ll look back and see how both kinds of poem are part of a larger process of examining the world and my place in it, something we all do in different but ultimately similar ways.

Prague was an amazing city when we visited it, but it was already losing its unique soviet-era character to the influx of well-meaning German tourists who, like tourists everywhere, unwittingly destroy the very thing they seek out. For gnarled and gaunt central-European atmosphere (and fantastic strong beers), wreathed in fog from the Vltava, it’s hard to beat, but boy was the local food bad. The tourist influx has changed all that, and there’s the irony. Ordinary people’s lives have on average doubtlessly improved also, but at the cost of becoming westernised, which subject next week’s poem shall expand on further.

Wordland Issue No.3

Issue Number 3 of the online magazine Wordland is out now, featuring my flash fiction piece “Racing The Comet“. Edited by the multi-talented and all round diamond geezer Terry Grimwood, the excellent theme of the issue was “What They Saw In The Sky”.

Go on, have a read at it, it won’t take more than a couple of minutes to read. I can’t really describe the plot without spoiling it. Suffice to say, that the dinosaurs were around for an awful lot longer than we have been so far, which raises some really serious questions for those who care to think about it, like whether intelligent and civilised life is inevitable, and if not, then what stimuli or calamities might be necessary to give rise to it? And more to the point, what’s an archaeologist but a blind man groping around in a coal mine with dark glasses on anyway?

Poem # 19/52

Here is the nineteenth poem in my 52-poem sequence (one a week) for 2013, followed by some illumination and reflection:

TRIP

Grey winter city skies and faces
glittering glass of tearful stations
waving handkerchief flags and mournful horns
sound the last post goodbye summer
now love freezes in the veins
so take the needle and mainline loneliness
to fade into the Saturday crowds
and melt into forgetfulness.

Outside the braying pigs and clattering heels
announce their macho bigotry
and feminine displays of unattainability
obsessed with appearance, the air-headed girls
get the thick and nasty bastards
destined to beat their children.

~

Another piece of Autumnal pessimism, very black and vindictive. Bear with me, this is the last of my bleak poems before I met Rona, not that meeting her is commemorated in any poem that came up to the standard of what I should retrieve from the big box of paper amnesia in the attic. The problem is, like the grit of sand in an oyster’s shell, it’s often unhappiness, rather than its opposite that provides the most fertile ground for poetry or any kind of creativity. And yet we try to be happy. And yet we try to be creative. Never considering that the two might be, if not opposites, then have the potential to imbalance each other, or cancel each other out. We don’t all have to be tortured artists, but it does seem philosophically true that any person who finds complete contentment would cease to have any impetus to speak out. Fortunately in a way, in a world such as ours, the chances of any intelligent and sensitive person being entirely contented with the way things are, are fairly slim. So, as Rainer Maria Rilke said, let’s not “squander our sorrows, gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration, to see if maybe they have a limit”, but use them. They are fuel. They are everything.

Next week I’ll be in Prague (figuratively speaking) , as we begin the journey through the first of many travel poems.

Theaker’s Quarterly #43 + Sein Und Werden Spring ’13

I do seem to get an inordinate amount out of pleasure out of each time my work appears in a copy of Theaker’s Quarterly magazine. I’ve been seen in more illustrious places, as I’m sure Mr Theaker himself would agree, but somehow I like being there, far from the madding crowd and the constant awarding of accolades to literary mediocrities in the mainstream. You can order a copy of this magazine through Amazon for only £3.17 here! And even get it free as a PDF here. How on earth can such a bargain be possible?

My rather long short story in this issue is called “Quasar Rise” and is about a planet almost entirely populated by women. It was a fascinating experiment to write, because I wasn’t sure what a world without men would really feel like, so just had to write it to find out. The results are strangely claustrophobic I think, and possibly insightful as to what we really are, us humans in our little brackets of gender.

*{stop press: the esteemed writer and reviewer D.F Lewis has posted a glowing real-time review of “Quasar Rise” over at his ‘Weirdmonger’ blog, describing it as “another Douglas Thompson gem”…read the review here}*

Meanwhile, my favourite high priestess of the weird, Rachel Kendall has published three “Exquisite Corpses” in the latest copy of the online magazine Sein Und Werden. An “Exquisite Corpse” was a nickname given to a writing game devised by the Surrealist artists led by writer Andre Breton, not dissimilar to the British picture game ‘consequences’, except that each writer must write the next paragraph of story having read only the paragraph before, written anonymously by someone else, and so on. You can read the Exquisite Corpse I took part in here. And the other two featuring other writers, here and here. All in all, a brilliantly liberating and unpredictable experiment, and a lot of fun.

Poem #18/52

Here is the eighteenth poem in my 52-poem sequence (one a week) for 2013, followed by some illumination and reflection:

METROPOLIS REX

Autumn city perched on the verge of night
black spires and brittle skeletons of trees
building bonfires as the sky rusts and effervesces
iron red and copper burnished into gold
sizzling cars and raised voices of football matches
energy dissipating in a million white lice
who crawl home over these blackened bones
of some forgotten dinosaur
too vast to reconstruct.

~

We’re a bit out of season with this one, I guess. An Autumn poem for Spring. The sense of Glasgow as a dinosaur’s bones reflects its status as the erstwhile Victorian “second city of the British Empire”. Only in Lisbon, or perhaps Prague, have I ever found an equivalent sense of somewhere in the shadow of its own golden days. I suppose it may account to some extent, for the melancholy in my own character, artists being the sort of people who soak up the culture around them like blotting paper. I was still living in my top floor flat in Bridgeton at this point, with panoramic views across Glasgow, what my brother Ally Thompson called an “industrial hinterland’ in his painting (inset) inspired by the area. There was a football pitch a few hundred yards away where matches were played regularly, until the school closed and the grounds were run down into yet more visual dereliction. I didn’t realise until they were gone, how much I liked the distant voices from the matches, the sense of background excitement which it loaned to a Saturday morning hangover. There were four trees opposite my house that always struggled for light, growing up against the gable of the school. Then when the school was demolished, all but three of those trees fell over in the first winter storms. If that’s an allegory, folks, make of it what you will…

Poem #17/52

Here is the seventeenth poem in my 52-poem sequence (one a week) for 2013, followed by some illumination and reflection:

RESORT #2

tonight
the hot breeze blowing from the sea
as we walked the streets
and you asked about my unhappiness
suddenly
there were tears rolling from both our faces
my voice shaking
then you running away
to catch up with my best friend
who could never love you
and I went to a bar alone
to drown myself in alcohol
planning a beautiful suicide
looking forward to it
so close to the edge
no dread or sadness
only the promise of peace
at the end of all suffering

later
the tapping at the window
then the mattress taken to the other room
the drunken giggles
then the usual noises

walking the town until morning
I came at last to the shore
and watched an old man fishing
his face worn hard as leather by the sea
waiting for a catch which never comes
the blood sun rose up and his friends ridiculed him
a dwarf watched a couple making love in the sand
as a lone boat sailed into the burning light
and the white town around the bay shone clearly
a distant mist hovering beneath the Minoan peaks
an image of persistence in adversity, absurdity;
-I knew that old man was me.

~
So there it is. Our second and final evocation of the joys and terrors of the resort holiday. Those once-beautiful places that tourists progressively transform into pure muck like a too-well-tramped pathway to the beach. No doubt we’ll do the same to alien worlds once day, given half a chance. Just as well it hasn’t dawned on our scientists yet that the fabric of spacetime is flat in interstellar space (without the gravity of large bodies to distort it) and therefore nothing is as far away as we currently believe it to be. A cosmic crèche principle. Stuff like that could make you believe in God. Just kidding.

This week’s images are two radically different artist’s depictions of the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, reminding me of me and my friend H on holiday in Crete. H and I couldn’t have been more different, despite having grown up together in the same town. One day, out on the mopeds, we found a mural on the gable of a building near Chania, of the two Greek aeronauts and we both recognised the resonance. H was in his element in the resort world, trying to chat up a different woman every night, usually a breeze for him. But things didn’t go quite as either of us planned. I found myself, a cathartic and convulsive moment in my life, and thereby the strength to go on. He found an intelligent and creative woman who wanted to keep her virginity. Then she found me. Two years and a lot of letters later I suppose it all petered out. Nice place to meet people from all over the world, if you can forget for a moment about trying to shag them all… actually more rewarding that way.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of the fall of Icarus is a famous puzzle…. his message seems to be that nobody notices or cares the small detail of Icarus’s legs vanishing into the sea (bottom right in the composition)and ordinary life goes on regardless. The Lord Frederick Leighton version is odd in its own way too. Why is old Daedalus so tanned as to be almost black, while the boy Icarus is pale like an angel? Says a lot about the predilections and prejudices of the British Victorian society of the time, probably. There have been suggestions that Leighton was gay, and certainly Icarus is portrayed as an epitome of youth and beauty. I’d say Daedalus is being cast as Death here, leading doomed youth astray. At any rate, I’ve always found the old myth fascinating. It seems to me that wars are usually planned by old men so that young men can die in them, and that there’s some spiteful and jealous impulse hidden underneath all that. It’s still happening. Think of Bin Laden and all those deluded Jihadi suicide bombers or Indeed Margaret Thatcher and the young men who drowned in a cold Atlantic so that she could retrieve her political fortunes and get re-elected. The old subconsciously resent the young for their potential to outlive them. Far-right nutters in America (some of whom ran the country until recently) long for the Armageddon of the old testament because they’d hate to miss the end of a good movie. Could it be that simple? No, but they are.

To come back to the myth of Icarus in a final stab at self-analysis, I’d say that it has always had resonance with me because I always sensed that my father was jealous of me. It’s commoner than you think, and not talked-about often. If I was ever a father, I would like to think I would be better than that. But we can all only do our best. Forgive each other, Earthlings, for none of you are perfect.