Out of the Maze

 

—Poetry by Neil Fulwood, Nottingham, UK

—Public Domain Illustrations

 

“TO DO” LIST

Day off. Lie in. Wake to the morning
half gone, the percolator, the coffee
you should have woken up and smelled
hours ago. Wake to a lazy outlook
twitching its death throes under the weight
of everything you intended to do,
everything you’ve been procrastinating
for weeks, everything you’d meant
to clear the decks of by lunchtime,
leaving the afternoon free for what-you-will
and how’s-your-father. Your day off:
a collapsed building. Your fingers raw
scraping through the rubble, 
unable to scratch a single bloody X.

 

 

 

 

 

COSTUME DRAMA

Filmmaking as comfort food. Cinema
as checklist. Take a Penguin Classic
adapted a dozen times before
and done better for TV; hack at it

till the screenplay’s contingent
with a two-hour running time.
Who cares if a little irony or nuance
is jettisoned, if the most finely

drawn romantic heroine of her age
is reworked to accommodate
a smoky-eyed American ingenue?
Here’s what you get to compensate:

Oscar-bait visuals, a soundtrack
sparkling with imitation Haydn,
set design porn, a supporting cast
assembled from the RSC’s finest.

Something handsomely mounted,
but inert. Less a motion picture
than an object, motionless, pinned
beneath glass or preserved in amber.

 

 

 

 

 

WAR MOVIE

The outcome of a last-gasp mission,
the strategic value of a location
or an asset—that’s what’s important
in this kind of big-budget bombast,

not the loss of life on a global scale:
a dam to breach, a bridge to destroy,
a mountaintop stronghold to penetrate,
some damned armoured train to derail.

 

 

 

 

 

QUITTING THE MAZE

You simply turn round, retrace your steps,
swap left for right, right for left,

re-emerge from the narrow straits
into the slightly waning light of day

and tell yourself you’ll not do that again. To
think the Minotaur crouched at the centre

wasn’t even a deathless slavering beast
but the oily likeness of your boss’s face.

___________________

Today’s LittleNip:

THE DOUBLE
—Neil Fulwood

I know who the other one
is. His name, his strange
designs, the nightmares
he wakes from with new ideas.

It’s me I’m not sure about.

____________________

Welcome back to the Kitchen, SnakePal Neil Fulwood! About his situation in the UK, Neil writes, “Here in the UK we finally have a programme of vaccination being rolled out. Because it’s being done by age groupings, I won’t get my turn till April; however, I’m still out in the thick of it, driving buses!” Neil will have a new collection out in June called Service Cancelled, which brings together the best of his pieces written in the first lockdown last year. More about that later.

If you missed the excitement yesterday, Blogspot and I got our feet tangled up, so the post was subsequently late. If you missed it, be sure to check out John Patrick Robbins' poetry and photos in yesterday's Kitchen.

___________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

Not to mention no masks...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.

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