Another month with 30 days and I’ll be prompting for the 30/30 crew (a group of poets working to write 30 poems in 30 days) every Monday, posting some of the result here and also posting up the prompts I set for anyone that wants to join in.

As I write this it’s Halloween — or the Pagan ‘New Year’ festival Samhain (literally meaning ‘the end of summer’). Bonfires were lit all over the country, pumpkins and gourds were harvested, and it marked the passage from the season of ‘day’ (summer) to that of ‘night’ (winter).

Photo courtesy of Naomi Woddis

It was also seen as a time when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest. This festival is reiterated all over the world in different forms, from All Saints Day in Eastern Europe to the Day of the Dead in Latin America.

It is  a time of divination, when we honour our ancestors, meditate on the past, think forward into the future and contemplate the cycle of birth, death and renewal. I’ve been thinking about the idea of poetry being an attempt to influence the future…as a ‘spell’ that is cast, momentarily, over the reader.

Write a poem that tells us of an event that will happen in the future…it could be an event that HAS happened in the past, but is written in the future tense, or a poem that intuits the future, as a prophecy…

We decided to continue with 30/30 for the months with 30 days in them, so this is the first prompt for June.

• The human embryonic heart begins beating at around 21 days after conception. It is unknown how blood in the human embryo circulates for the first 21 days in the absence of a functioning heart.
• The average human heart beats 100,000 times a day and weighs the same as a small pigeon (around 10 oz)
• The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime–that’s enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

WRITE  A POEM WHERE EACH LINE FEATURES A DIFFERENT BODY PART.

The poem is finished -

A choreographed coincidence as 7 in the magic number. (3 is so last century). For the final draft, I did away with the harsh language, replaced : he “won’t tap, won’t twitch for shit” with “won’t tap for nuthin’, won’t twitch for zilch”. Reason? simply to pander to younger audience and possible publications that may frown at such language… Somewhat redundant through as the poem begins with the use of an illegal substance.

So the reason for the poem:

The imagined silence, the void that hip hop fills, the fear of it.

Hip Hop rules the world. This is as true a statement as the ‘the sun shines’. There has never been a genre of music so malleable, so simple, so marketable, so present, so complex, yet basic as this. Its selling point is to make something out of nothing, to swagger up to a group of hard men, with nothing to show for yourself save your voice. Its romance: to be backed against a wall, still spitting and representing yours, your family, your ends, your truth. Its instruments are simple: Something you can hit, and a voice. That’s it.

I think the world without Hip Hop would be a more repressed place, certainly my life, my voice, in-fact – as hip hop led me to poetry – my work would be of an entirely different nature, or might not exist at all. Fearing that – March Forth.

————————————————————–

March Forth -  for Jay Bernard
(‘jay’ is also slang  for marijuana)

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March 4th.

Her dread locks are loose tower blocks,
forehead for sky, her nose: a shrouded figure,

a dude speeding by, who is back packed with
sketch books and gas masks, jeans patched

more times than he’s matched sticks to spliffs.
He is a loose hoodied slouch with spray cans,

crouched in a train yard, headphoned and
nodding hard to lyrics so deep it digs back

to the African forest where it started, back
to talking drums. Now, they talk in drum

patterns, scattered in urban forests;
rappers pattered tones riff against bars

just like spray cans whiff against walls,
both birth brilliance, coupled in this dark

before radio crackles, and rail guards
mark his presence; it’s clearly time to go

he packs bag and coasts: a winged shadow
floats past yellow lines, glides over railings,

air vents. The clouds cry. A poverty stricken
kitten skips the sprinkled streets, litter

glitters pave-stones, pavement splits into
a doorway, he enters, out breaths a beat,

door shuts with such finality
it stops his existence:

he never pressed a nozzle to colour walls,
the rapper’s vocals never coloured bars;

it’s a blasphemous silence, it unravels
talking drums, jazz, blues, baselines,

black music – never strummed, trapped
in the fingernails of a slave, so stitched,

he won’t tap for nuthin’, won’t twitch
for zilch, and the unplayed guitar riff

like ghost graffiti, leaks
from his heart, and dies.

Jay, I once smoked your name
and glimpsed what might’ve been

had no one courage enough to march forth,
make canvas of walls, and music of bars.

Wisps of it phantom roads in pot holes
and hide in the hush of a rapper’s flow.

I nod to brave such breaks in hip hop
and pray that the beat don’t stop.

© Inua Ellams 12/09

Back and Forth.

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March Fourth.

Her dread locks are limp tower blocks, forehead
for sky, nose, a shrouded figure speeding by,

back packed with sketchbooks and gas masks,
jeans patched more times than he’s matched sticks

to spliffs. He is a loose hoodied slouch
with spray cans, crouched by a

————————————————————-

Still to decide how to link these together, but the question I am fighting with is how to end the poem

———————————————————–

a poverty stricken kitten

skips across the sprinkled streets, glitter litter
crisps the pavement, stone splits into doorway,

out whiffs a break beat as he enters it. Door shuts
with such finality it’s as if he never existed.

Never pressed a nozzle to colour walls,
or the rapper’s vocals never coloured bars…

The silence is blasphemous as the blues
played backwards, un-invented, trapped

in the fingernail of a field hand so straight-
jacketed, so stitched, he won’t twitch for shit,

and the unplayed guitar riff, like ghost graffiti,
reefs over his heart and dies.
———————————————————————

I am not a massive consumer of the green stuff, but have dabbled in it once or twice. I get kicks from discovering its various literary incarnations, at least 50 including ‘grass, weed, green, Mary J, Jamba, Spliff, Ganja, Bud, Blunt, Yay, Joint, Jay,’ or as Black Thought, front man for the Roots calls it, ‘The Tenth Letter’. It is insinuated in this poem… the graffer’s jeans are patched ‘more times than he has matched sticks to spliff’ and I choose to play on with ‘Jay’ as a term for weed, which fits with the slightly surreal nature of the poem as Jay’s face morphs into the city..

————————————

Jay, I once smoked your name and a glimpse
of what I might have been, had I courage

enough to March Fourth, make canvas
of walls, and music of bars frightened me.

Flecks of if it speckle roads like blues riffs,
whiffs off aerosol or faint hip hop beats

But I trapped them in verse and it’s good  for me.

—————————————–

This ending will definitely change.

Pushing the idea forward… Now that I have introduced Jay at the start of poem, she must be the departure. I freestly in my moleskin to see what comes…

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March 4th.

Her dread locks are limp tower blocks, forehead
for sky, nose, a shrouded figure speeding by,

back packed with sketchbooks and gas masks,
jeans patched more times than he’s matched sticks

to spliffs. He is a loose hoodied slouch
with spray cans, crouched…

It seems to be about hip hop. I am a city boy and I tend to write from this perspective, mix it with the lil philosophy I have dabbled with, and my small time some time wisdom. It makes for interesting parallels, with the jungle, with literature, with the body… this parallel is with graffiti… which I think is a physical manifestation of the art of rhyme: of hip hop..

stay tuned..