TMA03

Thought I'd put my TMA03 effort up. Went down well with the tutor and scored 77% though she was scratching her head at the final stanza so I had to rejig it. It might look strange, but that would be because I spent about three weeks on most of it, chopping, changing, titivating, burnishing, all the usual stuff - and then refashioned the whole of the last stanza in about 5 minutes. I think it shows. But it does, to be fair, make more sense I think, whereas the original ending left too much unsaid.

The next posting will be the commentary - so much better than trying to explain the narrative force behind this poem.

A Face in Time

'Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident.'

Thomas Hardy

The Market Square bus is late, today!

My head boils up at its cavernous void.

I cat-cradle my eyes, blunt out truthful light,

and draw in the threads of silent despair,

pull them together - force dreams to fill in, and

salve my wrecked nerves, settle that breath.

Surely now it's late, for that walking out date.

I'm already now a quiver of shivers,

a niggling of nerves, a salting of

sweat - starkly-stained on the shirt

that is witness to stress, with a cumulus cloud,

that's sufficiently there, for simple betrayal.

The fare finally falls with the flattest of rings,

as he dial-winds the clicked-out bisque flavoured ticket,

hung rude as a tongue and snapped

out from the jaws of the robot- like

gadget of stertorous breath and sparkled eye,

casually slung, like a silver box-brownie.

A whiplash-hiss-halt, a back flinching jolt,

landing amid the granular pavements,

still richly infested with 'on the town' nights;

striking of wide, metronomic, strides, and,

a single-panic-filled glance, at the big town clock,

that sits high up on Market House.

The old town clock whose hand-crossed face

has seen payment of corn weighed up with trade;

dealers dealing through the feculent stench,

whilst farmers furrowed the square with stocked carts,

churning the grainy ground into a

ghastly stirred breakfast of crubbinly slurry.

The old town clock that faced Jubilee Day,

the bells, pealing; the streamers, flying;

the confetti swarming, showing the time,

ticking the time, through history's changes.

But from centuries now we're in seconds,

through the continual slow-fly to collide;

the glance at the clock shows, I'm too late for my date;

for I am the ship, the clock is the ice,

and destiny has struck its most minor of keys,

and shown death, this time, to the smallest of dreams.