HYP: Merlin Betts
Together, Alone
“The wall is such a loud canvas, sometimes it hurts my ears.”
I was invited to do this. Possibly I’d complained about it early on and then later there were spaces. But let’s say I was invited. I’ve been an editor at HIP for maybe five years, and had a one year sabbatical to undertake all kinds of strange experiments: fats floating in a salty sea, mycelial networks, horrific joinings – hydrogen to hydrogen, can it really be done?
And the one thing my fellow HIPsters would probably always say is that Merlin doesn’t like pictures, he likes long columns of words with no subheadings, no spaces, ideally no punctuation at all, it’s almost as if he vomits onto the page in some sort of deranged protest. But what is he protesting against? Perhaps we shall never know.
So I was wisely invited to participate in this photography project. I had a plan. It involved photos. Something about wounded romance, the way love limps on against all odds, dying. But like all plans, it was an utter failure. Nonetheless!: here is what we have. I was going to send a challenge round to the local poets, get their cream in, splatter it on the walls and take candid photos. It could still happen: it could still happen.
Have you ever been betrayed?
Did you ever let yourself sit and dwell on that moment, the knife of a thought carving a new belief into your mind: that connected, you are worse, more abandoned, more alone?
We don’t always spend enough concerted effort documenting this loathsome, occasionally deadly, state of mind. And untreated betrayal leads to more, like an infected wound. I wonder whether being more open about it could help people to dismiss the loneliness, the sense of betrayal, the depression and resultant madness that can sometimes occur.
So, like some kind of deranged librarian, I’d like to gather poems on this theme and display them publicly – but just out of sight. Like how you feel when you’ve been cut away. Not absent, but still gone.
The poems will be graffiti, in one way or another, unwelcome etchings on the consciousness. Pen, paint, stencil or poster. The method and style is at the writer’s discretion. Each piece will be photographed and may be printed as part of a special edition of the Hastings Independent, and then shown at an exhibition event which participants are welcome to attend and potentially perform at.
All submissions can be anonymous, if desired. Please send to [email protected].
Here are three sample poems around the theme, not so much as guidance, but just to get you in the mood:
1 Law
“Look“ he told me,
“all those little children dying in the trees”
I said, “What?”
and he said, “Look”
and I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying
and I said, “What does it mean?”
and he said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”
The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,
dead, and hanging and dying,
I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”
and he said,
“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things, they took a vote, it was decided”
and the next day it was cats –
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did;
and the next day it was horses,
and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.
And after bacon and eggs the next day,
my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee and said,
“Let’s go,”
and we went outside
and here were all these men and women in the trees,
most of them dead or dying,
and he got the rope ready and I said,
“What does it mean?”
and he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it passed the majority”
and he tied my hands behind my back and then opened the noose.
“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said, “when I get done with you –
I suppose when it finally works down there’ll finally be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself”
“Suppose he doesn’t” I asked.
“He has to” he said,
“It’s authorized”
“Oh,” I said, “Well,
let’s get on with it.”
– watch/listen to Charles Bukowski read this on Youtube, Bukowski Reads Bukowski | Artbound…
2 The Kiss
I hoped that he would love me,
And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
That cannot reach the south.
For though I know he loves me,
To-night my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
As all the dreams I had.
– Sara Teasdale
3 The Couple Across the Way
Babe, it feels like it’s all happened
Twenty-three years of the same
And I’m sorry ’bout this morning
For the damage I will pay
All the mirrors face the walls and
I wake just to long for bed
Love what’s got you so down low?
The saddest tongue is in your head
I forget the thrill of lies
The truth escaping through the eyes, now
You use voices on the phone
That once were spent on me
The world has changed beyond our doorstep
Peoplе talk and dress so strange
I don’t know a neighbour’s namе
And all of life is rearranged
Nice to know that you’re still caring
Well enough to raise your voice
But if we must bring up the past then
Please don’t speak to me of choice
Across the way moved in a pair
With passion in its prime
Maybe they look through to us
And hope that’s them in time
– Grian Chattan. You can find it performed as a song on Youtube.
4 Between the lines an artery gets fat
Pale those fingertips on the cut glass
Swirling textures that rub the snake
Crack dividing truth like flesh
I thought you trusted now cold lips
Sticking as they part over white sheets
We lie straight in the blue half light
I drop an unwelcome plank a leg
On your blue I pull it back the way
Whatsapp messages are deleted
You talk you smile you kissed are
Accusations from between my cheeks
Where the tongue moved your fingers
Should have touched like the glass
Canyon that cuts them as I type
Away the last drops before the stop
– me (eek)
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