Wondermentalist

The suggestion for the audience poem at yesterday’s Ways With Words Wondermentalist Cabaret came from Satish Kumar, whose suggestion of ‘windmills’ was preferred over ‘cream teas’ and ‘praying mantis’ and did seem to inspire the collective metaphor-making faculties…  Here’s the poem as it appears on a Ways With Words poster produced the following morning… 

The Wondermentalist Cabaret

Audience Participation Poem - 14 July 2008

 

Windmills… what are you like?

 

Do you mind how I wind the windmill will?

Gyratory, vibratory, mistral–seeking blades

Sentinel shifters of airy semaphore

Windmill nimbys, nimwill wind me, spin me

Whisking up clouds for a sunset soufflé

An un-winged plane, going nowhere fast, forever…

Turbine be forever mine

Swish, swoosh, swish, swooshhhhh!!!

Oh how revoltingly Dutch.

Wind mills – (on) tall hills – (are) modern ills – (with) fancy frills

Puffing, blowing, huffing, flowing

Ghostly forms, foolishly arrogant in your ridiculous white attire

Why do your wings wave like a waffle?

A pickled onion spinning with its stick

A Spiro-graph of air-borne flight, fights…

Wind grinding pepper-pot, slow sail stew

Scarecrow comedian making a point

A lighthouse on the land, warning of approaching corn

Making flour by wind power, takes about 59 minutes! Doh!

Big sails waiting for wind kiss, sky caress, open arms

Sail this steeple across swollen sodden swamps

Slender blades generating “power”, strong stems – 3 turning petals

She loves me, she loves me not, “she loves me”

Whooshing, whirling, wheeling

Web, windy, wild, westerly

Focused on flour or flux

Though the mills of god grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small

Revolving doors

A Mandala milling the wind 

Ranks of slim white sentinels saving our skins

No ill winds please, keep it sweet

The sails on the mill go round and round…

Who can mill the wind?

And, once ground, what kind of cake would it bake?

Something light and airy? Self-raising? Or f-air-y?

Windmills – do they always wind with time?

Do wind farms really make all the wind?

There once was a windmill in old Amsterdam

Where mice loved to dine on bran flakes and spam

The slow wave of the giant’s arms

Not waving, but drowning.

 

 

Written on 14 July 2008 by the audience of the Wondermentalist Cabaret as part of Ways With Words Festival of Words and Ideas: The Great Hall Dartington

Edited and created by Beryl The Feral

Brought to life by Matt Harvey

 

I’ve been remiss and not sent up the audience poem from the wonderful night at the Phoenix. They opted to investigate the aubergine, and were pretty pleased with what they came up with - quite rightly, I think. Aubergines what are you like?

 

Aubergines – an egg’s ugly cousin

Purple and sexy you make me smile

Saviour of my cheap night in

Aubergines,

Oversized liquorice jellybeans

Lick-able like me

The purple shiny skin of a sweaty bald patch

Plummy, roundy, purple bumbly

Green pokey stalk

Aubergines have feelings too

A personified bruise

An English pear with a suntan

Aubergines, broken dreams, silent screams

Aubergines are fancier than Under-gines

Rakish squishy pulpy thing

The big but small fruit of life

It’s like a giant tomato but purple and slimy

My love is like an Aubergine: big hearted, shiny and delicious barbequed

Aubergines you’re fat and thin, you’re purple like a lucid dream

In America they’re called Eggplants, either way they’re beautiful

Aubergines would make good weapons of mass destruction, if they weren’t soft

Black dummies for big babies

Dressed up marrows

Aubergines are a culinary challenge

A Greek holiday with Germans

The colour of our bathroom suite, the colour of my wedding suit

Goodbye Aubergines…

Aubergines are difficult to shove up your arse.

 

By the people of Exeter and put together by Beryl the Feral The audience liked it all, but especially the last line…

I know it’s not directly related to Wondermentalist - although it will be if I choose to read my shed poem tomorrow night at Ways With Words, which I might - but I was so chuffed that my Guardian Work Section Desktop Poetry offering on the subject of sheds, Where Earwigs Dare,  was picked up on by the wonderful blog Shedworking, produced by Alex Johnson, that I wanted to link to it from here and post a copy of the poem. In fact it’s very wondermentally related, as I was told of the shedworking blog and given a link to it by a thgouhtful woman called Annie who I’m sure has been to Wondermentalist as she also sent links to youtube performances that might inspire wondermental happenings…Anyway, here’s the poem:

Where Earwigs Dare

 

A silver trail across the monitor;

Fresh mouse-droppings beneath the swivel-chair;

The view obscured by rogue japonica.

Released into the wild, where earwigs dare -

 

You first went freelance - and then gently feral.

You worked from home - then wandered out again,

Roughed it with spider, ant, shrew, blackbird, squirrel

In your own realm, your micro-vatican.

 

No name conveys exactly what it is -

Chalet?  Gazebo? You were not misled

By studios, snugs, garden offices,

Workshops or outhouses. A shed’s a shed -

 

And proud of it. You wouldn’t want to hide it -

Wifi-enabled rain-proof wooden box.

A box to sit in while you think outside it -

Self-rattling cage, den, poop-deck, paradox,

 

Hutch with home-rule, cramped cubicle of freedom,

Laboratory, thought-palace, bodger’s bower,

Plot both to sow seeds and to go to seed in,

Cobwebbed, Cuprinol-scented, Seat of Power.

 

 

Vital Statistics

 

“Statistics are like a bikini - what they reveal is enticing, but what they conceal is vital”

 

I read. And slept. And dreamt I was there

at the Vital Statistic Beauty Show

ogling a bevy of stunning stats

the smooth curves of their perfect percentiles

rounded to the nearest whole number

 

90%-of-Accidents-Happen-in-the-Home

was voluptuous as a pie-chart with one slice missing

 

69%-of-Household-Dust-is-Human-Skin

the acme of elegance in a plain line graph - axes left daringly blank

 

interviews were conducted by the square root of Michael Aspel,

chanting protestors were dismissed by the media as an unrepresentative fraction

 

the sash and tiara went to

86%-of-Women’s-Industrial-Injuries-Are-Caused-By-Glass-Ceilings

garbed in stark Arabic numerals

 

and I only guessed I was dreaming when

90%-of-Drivers-Believe-They’re-of-Above-Average-Ability

gave me her phone number…