This is me practicing for an open mic on Thursday. The poem is one that was published in The Centrifugal Eye last year, and although I read it in public at the time, it has been quite a while since then. Although I make audio recordings of my work fairly often, I am not particularly used to seeing myself perform. This is something I need to work on, but it is not too bad, all told. Sorry about the poor sound. A proper mic is my next investment.
The poem itself is really a take on an old theme, the pathetic fallacy of weather. In this rendition of the idea, it is not rain and shine which signifies happiness or sadness, but rather the sudden break in a build up of atmospheric pressure that symbolises a mental breakthrough for the protagonist. In the poem, it is not only she who is in sympathy with the breaking storm, various household items around her also chime with the same resonance. Her own shift of state is more or less implied by these, rather than any statement to that affect.
A Funk of Weather Turns
She chews a problem stub, thumbs her thunderhead, jotter open,when the patchouli stench of mould blows off the kitchen curtain.
Netting parts, to unmask cloud-banks, lit like mustard, at last light.
She shifts to the other elbow, palm crooked. A pressure cooker
on the hob hisses mist; the worktop is crisscrossed with onion skins
and strewn utensils. She twists aslant, to the knotted shelf
where she kept a clenched fir cone, hung bunches crackled bladderwrack –
savours graphite in her mouth as she sums her workings out:
The rainfall is a pitter-patter of mathematics. Cutlery spins
barometric readings; strewn skins become tables of logarithms; vapour
is raised to the power of thunder. Net curtain displays calculator numbers
as a knife-and-fork flash cuts mustard clouds to ribbons. Bladderwrack slackens.
She smells accelerating tyres as the pinecone pops. The valve
rockets off the cooker. Convinced, she slams down her pencil –
rough as chewed cob. The air prickles with ozone and throbs with a funk
of stewed lentils she spits out the last splinter of stub.
