Where did it go, that dream?

Lost. It has been months since I wrote. In the garden, I newly see unruly shrubs and craters wrecking them which have appeared overnight. Wanton. The marking of aliens. Albert and the others are hiding. Tree branches have been ripped down but by what force?

Then the dream. It was like Caliban’s dream who woke up and howled in rage that he could not live his dream’s thousand sounds and sweetnesses.

Only one thought which sounded like a poem’s start.

Where did it go that dream?
Grasped nearly in the sheds of night …

A poet would want to finish it. Say it. Write it.

I will not.
I am
no
poet

Progress

I’ve been busy in another world. You know how it is. Just when you should be vigilant you get distracted

What’s happening? I think I’ve made contact. I went down to the village shop today to buy a piece of cheese. The snows of yesterday had melted. All was quiet. The sun was shining. Maybe the bad weather has been keeping Albert out of the garden. I never saw anyone on the way, but as I went in, I was attracted to a poster in front of the shop. It said “Air Show to come back in 2012”. The Air Show was the pride of the village until it was cancelled many years ago. But why should it come back. Everything has changed. New owners had come to the shop and there had been someone I didn’t know behind the counter who had handed over the cheese and my change with out speaking. He looked as if he should have been in School. He was very large and his head almost reached the ceiling behind the little counter.

I came back out into the sunshine. There were two other young people in the car park, a boy and a girl. They looked as if they had taken the afternoon off from School, as well. The girl was holding an interviewing microphone. The boy was struggling with a large recording camera.

“Please can you help us?” the girl asked. “We are interviewing local residents about the Air show coming back”.

“Shouldn’t you be at School?”

“It’s for WSTV” she explained. “I’m Stella and this Callum”. I could see they were both wearing the Woodford School plum and gold Uniform.

“I’m Trevor” I said. It was a name which came into my head. “What’s all this about the Air Show?”.

“Do you think it should come back?”.

I hardly could speak. But they may have put it down to Camera fright. I was thinking furiously. The Airshow will bring people from all over the world back to the village. It will be just the place for something big to happen. Somewhere for strangers to appear without attracting any attention.

“Oh yes” I said. “I think it’s a very good idea”.

Then I hurried away before stopping again and turning back.

“When will this interview be shown.”

“When we’ve finished the project. It’s going to be a documentary”.

I turned away again. But I had regained my composure, and I did not walk back down the village street. Instead I went in the opposite direction towards the village hall, just in case someone else had been listening and watching.

All quiet on the tweeting front

All is still on the tweeting front. The Reluctant Twitterer undertakes a period of enforced silence.

This silence is not at all sinister. Or fishy. Or anything like that. I have not been captured by a band of assassins.

There is one personal matter which I want Albert, or Little Pink Ant, or the Marmalade Beetection Agency to put an item on their TBD (To Be Detected) lists. Albert is enaged in a covert operation with his own identity disguised. So if anyone can pass this on to Albert then I will be most grateful.

“Dear Albert. Dealing with events of global reach must continue to be your priority. However, you may help in a more personal matter.

I seem to have lost my poetic voice. I had it last week, but now it’s gone. I can’t think what happened to it. Can you help?

Worried

Woodford”

Albert acts strangely

This is ridiculous. Albert had been acting very strangely for weeks. I can’t make any sense of what he’s up to. Anyway, here’s what happened this morning.

He was waiting outside the window this morning when I opened the blinds. But to my amazement, he seemed to have crawled through a pot of blue paint. His brown shell was streaked with blue as bright as a cornflower. And I could just see shimmering streaks of silver on his two tentacles, as if he had applied some shiny make-up. Looking more closely, I could see that he had borrowed another snail’s shell, which had the owner’s name painted in blue on it. Albert had come in disguise, as a snail called John.

I wanted to ask about his progress on the case, but I could see he was all of a quiver. He seemed for the first time to be interested in something inside the room. Albert was behaving in a very curious fashion. He was doing a snail dance, and singing a snail song, in those familiar grumbly rumbly tones.

Snaily baby
Don say maybe
Say you’ll slip outside with me

I’m not quttin
I’m so smitten
Smitten baby over you

“Albert! What’s going on? Why are you wearing a shell with the name John on it?”

My words gave him quite a shock. It was as if he hadn’t expected to see me on the other side of the window. His head disappeared right back into his shell.

“Albert! Where have you been? And what’s all this Snaily baby stuff.

But there was no enticing Albert out of his shell.

“I’m going to make a cup of tea” I said. “Perhaps when I can come back, you’ll be ready to answer some questions”. And with that I got up from my chair and went away to make the tea.

And do you know what I found when I got back? Only a message on the window, in Albert’s snail-mail writing.

“In disguise. Back on track, soon”

Now what is all this about?” I wondered to myself, sipping the warm green tea I had made.

I Have Been Very Foolish

I have been very foolish. Obsessive even. For months I have skulked in my office, fearing that I had found vital evidence of a plan with the gravest implications for the future of the planet. But my fears were turned inward. Turned to what might happen to me because of my discovery. Not to what was happening out there.

It was when I became less timerous I saw my foolishness. It’s not easy to draw attention to yourself. The internet is not so much a giant transmitter as I had assumed. Since I began this quest, I have written sixty blog posts, two hundred tags, hint after hint of real and present danger. But fewer followers have come forward than if I had rented the village hall and put adverts up in front saying ‘Meeting to Discuss the Imminent Threat of Tomato Blight at Woodford Allotments’. That would have worked better on one dry night. Al least, the allotment workers would have dropped by. The real-life detectives I contacted by e-mail never even bothered to reply. Except for Albert, nothing.

Last week, I took what I thought was a risk. I sent out a coded message. Result? Silence. In my hopes and fears I thought that the four word blog post would fly around the world. But nothing.

So let me be even bolder. It is possible that Google has come under attack by the most dangerous of enemy forces. Even Google thinks that it is the victim of a conspiracy. This is the escalation I was expecting. It fits into the pattern of attacks on Twitter and other social network sites recently. My suspicions are all confirmed.

Here’s what Google had to say:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

That message shook me out of my foolishness. I decided to act. First it was with the four-word code, now with this open message.

There must be other people out there who have also woken up to what is happening. And if so, we must do something together. At whatever personal risk from Google’s “highly sophisticated and targeted attackers” . But what to do?

Don’t Stop Thinking about Haiti

The news of the week is undoubtedly from Haiti. I can’t watch the news. The images bring flash-back memories of other images of bombs and battles and bloody bits of flesh. So I try hard to be in denial. Write about something else.

Something that doesn’t matter at all.

But it’s the old conundrum. Try not to think about an elephant. Still managing to not think about that elephant? What’s that thought with its tail and its trunk and its tusks and its bigger or smaller ears, and its crinkly tough grey skin?

Still trying to not write about Haiti? What’s that elephant reminding you of now? Africa or India. Echoes of droughts and famine and…

Did I send something? Did I send something before I fired-up the computer and checked who had been in touch with me, and before I looked to see if Albert had snail mailed me? Did I send something before I blogged about Google and China.

Google and China is an important story in another way. Any other week I would have found myself writing, maybe. And I remember now. Google helped me find the Disaster Appeal fund link.

It’s such a relief. Filling in numbers. Not numbers of dead bodies. And closure with some candles-worth of penance purchased.

Can’t remember which news agency. I got the image from. Was it AP? Reuters? I must have stolen it. It belongs to the world, at this time. But the photographer and whoever owns copyright deserves more than this anonymity. Sorry.

Google, China: Don’t Stop

Message

Google

China

Don’t stop

Thinkin about tomorrow

A Yuletide Message: Find the Poet

Funny how you can try as hard as you can to be original, and find you have been throughly influenced by someone else’s thoughts. I wrote this and later noticed how close it is, in rhythm and even in the final sentiment, to a poem I studied as a Schoolboy.

Hint: The original influence was a poem written as the 19th century was ending …

Half and half

Five thousand solstices ago
Among the Celtic hills
The ancients took up mistletoe
Drank mead from early Stills

Far from those times, the lore persists
and Yuletide celebrations
Which started in a land of mists
Now reach to other Nations

The ancients greet the passing year
And celebrate the light.
For half the globe, the shortest day
For half, the shortest night.

Who ever cares beyond the cave
and seeks a wider home
share this, and in its sharing hold
more hope for times to come

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways

The Mythograpedes

Strolling in the cracks of the pavement
Honouring the city’s weeds
Or walking on unlit shores
The mythograpedes

moving unseen,
eyes like split fruit
every year at the height of summer
The Crab Man walks on blistered feet

GPS, a rightly-worshipped Orrery
a Guide, sort of, in the sightless search
of Neanderthals chanting
the Order’s boundary beat.

Derbyshire wallabies are nigh extinct
Victims of Tourism’s blobby ways
While Surrey overflows with Parakeets,
No pool safe from the crocodiles.

Not angels but angles
Not plans as such
but uplanned plans and planned unplans
Not Utopias but ‘Anywheres’ to cherish

The heart leaps to A. Salmon
And the halting arrest of myth’s progress
Absurdly faint? Faintly absurd
Hardly seen or heard

Central committees
Shun the traps of fame
But request me to state
in a near-real-world way
and in their words

“You are free to share …any part of this work provided that:
1/ you always attribute the work as follows [but avoiding suggesting any influence from the copyright owners]: from Mythogeography, Triarchy Press 2010

2/You make no derivative works – you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work [without following certain conditions].”

The first condition seems ethically and legally acceptable. The second has, rather like the book itself, a curiously other-worldly feel to it.

Noli me tangere. Now I must go
to catch the mythogeographic Gruffalo

Climate Denial. The Mermaid’s Cheeks are Damp with Tears

Albert has found out something important about the Copenhagen conference. Snails can communicate with statues. And he has learned something from The Little Mermaid. There have been very sinister and covert activities in advance of the climate change summit in Denmark.

The plot goes deep. I admit I am not a brave person. I am prepared to say only this. What causes news to become public? Because it has been found out by honest citizen journalists? Not so. When evil schemes are afoot, news is released at the moment when it has maximum propaganda value. The skilled eye can detect the covert activities.

Fact. The internet leaks. Fifth level columnists have infiltrated the ranks of government departments identifying technical experts they can ‘turn’ through blackmail and bribery. Fact. A Political Leader prepares to address his followers. But his speech is overshadowed by the cunning timing of an announcement of defection of a powerful ally. Fact. As governments accept evidence of man-made global warning and prepare to discuss it at Copenhagen., e-mails are leaked that were known about much earlier, and which put the scientists in a bad light, weakening the credibility of their work, and that of others whose results they support.

Fact. (And this is one I am most careful to avoid mention of my sources). A person with connections to the highest families in the land has entered the fray. This is a person is able to gain access to any paper in the world. He chooses to write a letter in a newspaper read by other influential figures. In it he argues that the deceit of the scientists means that the climate debate must be re-opened. I dare not name names, not even in tags, but I hope that there are people out there who are braver than I, and who have not been turned. You must check what I am saying. You will find that I am right. And when you do, you will find compelling evidence that the conspiracy was also directly involved in the collapse of one of the great financial institutions which helped produce the financial crisis. It is no wonder that the Little Mermaid’s cheeks are damp with her tears.

THIS IS NOT RIGHT

This is not right
Nothing computes
Skin stretched lampshade tight

Where waves once lapped
At Heaven’s gate
Waves lap no more

This is not right
No balm for dried lips
At a silenced spring

Sharing our fears
A mermaid’s cheeks
Are wet with tears

From the darkling night
No hope then?
That can’t be right

A wave begins
Far from the shore
And bringing Dolphins