for the Poetry Challenge and At The Troubadour

I read this at The Troubadour last night. It got a strong reaction from a few people.

When I read the opening a few weeks back to Katy she went Yuk! So I knew I was on the right track. The poem was written as part of the poetry challenge and is part of a series of poems on Intruders.

The theme of The Troubadour evening was Home. It can be a subject that cloaks the past and often pain in soft focus. It can inspire sentimental nostalgia.

I think I wanted something raw and uncomfortable.

Kitchen Intruders

Behind the sink
A crack in the splash back
Opened up black wet, cavernous.
A dark damp nursery
Of slime coagulating
In dank glutinous blindness
Blistered with slugs
Suckling in musty darkness.

Each morning
A faint trace
Of their slow scavenge
Across the floor.
Paths crisscrossing
Like the lines of aeroplane vapour trails.

Each night
We gave the house over to them
To feast on our remains.

© David Loffman

R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts

This is a bit of a test. Hope it works. And hope you enjoy the poem and the video. One thing that strikes me about the video is how it borrows quite consciously from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.

Anyway - the poem


Stationary

Lonely motorway
Asphalt and aggregate
A long congested tail of vehicles
Convulses to a stop.

A clock on the dashboard
Measures lost miles
As the minutes pass.

Stasis shrivels meaning,
Swallows belief.
Speed is the highway’s only currency.
Blurred lines its only vision
Visible only in movement.

Thoughts are stretched thin
Try to focus
Will dissolves
Eyes glaze
Vague distractions fail
The radio and cross words.

The anchor drags
At a motorway interchange
Layered bridges
Unscalable parapets

Debris in the gutter.
Buckled and rusted hubcaps and beer cans.

We are the discarded,
The forgotten,
On this obscene stationary carriageway
We wait, heavy on processed air.

But in that restless hypnotic emptiness
Drowsing with boredom and shame
A driver seems to rise like an Angel
Unfold himself
Crosses lanes
To the central reservation.

Arms outstretched
Like a messiah of the motorway
A sentinel on the parapets
Offers a benediction to the stranded.
Calls to us out to follow
Like a Pied Piper.

© David Loffman


30 June 2007