THREE poems
David BRIGGS
QIUDDITY
words were stones
they skimmed through the surf—
talking it out
diminishing circles
and then
a figure on a beach
watching a sunset
[correction]
not so much a sunset
optics—
an illusion sustained
by the world’s
ceaseless
spinning
HAECCEITY
not those rising in a cold glass of Champagne
nor those in the yellowing scurf by the sewerage outlet
but these now
blown from a plastic dipstick
in a child’s hand
on a spring breeze
into blue sky –
their fragile occupation of time
their fixed but futile desire
to hold their form
to maintain themselves awhile against
the unbearable pressure of space
MYTHOLOGY
The doctor in The Madness of King George cures the king’s porphyria-induced senility with a strong dose of irreverence—he looks at the king; the king is told he’s ‘merely the patient’; the king is restrained for misdemeanours and obscenities. And it’s made clear that this Quakerish insolence is essential to the king’s recovery.
In this way it is essentially the same film as The King’s Speech, in which another oikish quack with a strong regional accent cures the king’s inability to sound kingly by means of wilful disrespect.
And the appeal of these films must surely lie in the attractive idea that the renegade outsider with little respect for social distinctions is, in himself, the essential cure for the sickness at the heart of the establishment.
That, I guess, or the one other, lesser-spotted commonality – the under-sung prowess in the editing suite of BAFTA-award winning Tariq Anwar.
In this way it is essentially the same film as The King’s Speech, in which another oikish quack with a strong regional accent cures the king’s inability to sound kingly by means of wilful disrespect.
And the appeal of these films must surely lie in the attractive idea that the renegade outsider with little respect for social distinctions is, in himself, the essential cure for the sickness at the heart of the establishment.
That, I guess, or the one other, lesser-spotted commonality – the under-sung prowess in the editing suite of BAFTA-award winning Tariq Anwar.
David BRIGGS has published two full collections with Salt Publishing, The Method Men (2010) and Rain Rider (2013). Recent work also appears in this year’s festschrift for W.S. Graham, The Caught Habits of Language (Donut Press, 2018), and a pamphlet, Vision Helmet (2016), is currently available from Maquette Press.