Fishing for Birds

Well, it’s been quite a discipline to record, edit, write about and publish 35 poems for this collection in the last few weeks, but I’m glad I did it. The original intention was to provide a little something each day for people feeling lonely over the festive period, so twelth night seems a fitting day to end.

This last contribution is short but sweet. If you’ve been along for the ride and picked out some of the themes then I hope it makes a fitting close though. And don’t forget that the Equality and Diversity Podcast, “Just Plain Sense” continues to run over at podcast.plain-sense.co.uk

Best Wishes Christine Burns

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“It’s the mind’s new dimension .. a world without edges..”

This poem was written at the height of the mid nineties hype about the World Wide Web, at a time when the papers were full of talk about the “Internet Highway”. Looking back, some of the hype was justifiable. The WWW has altered our lives in undreamed of ways. Yet my aim was to challenge the idea that it could do everything. Although we knew nothing then about things to come, such as social networking and Second Life, I still think it’s important to challenge to remember that we live for real in the physical world, and that there are some things that can’t be substituted in the virtual one.

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If you write then you’ll know about Writer’s Block. This case is possibly a world record contender though.

The poem was begun in 1974 but I couldn’t find the words to finish it and put it away. Then, around 1994 - when I was ready to write again - I got it out and finished it off.

You can definitely see the join - the second half has a different tempo and the style is changed. Still, the moral is to never give up!

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Calling all Jobsworths! This one means you!

We’ve all met them of course; the people who’ll say “Yes, but it’s more than my job’s worth to help you”. This poem is connected with the previous one. They were both written the same angry, tearful weekend, when I crashed into that barrier at full speed. I was younger then, of course. Now I’d know what to do rather than writing a poem about it.

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A short and cryptic one today .. which dates back to an argument which I had many years ago with an organisation I used to volunteer for.

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I have a soft spot for this poem, which was written many years ago at a turning point in dealing with some personal demons. The title is a mock newspaper headline and contains a word play about Councillors (the elected kind who would be concerned about dangerous streets) and Counsellors (the active listening kind). It was a positive action statement about doing something to deal with the dark places that frightened me and was written on the day I had found the just the right Counsellor to work with.

As this is New Year’s day - a time when everyone reviews their lives and makes resolutions - I thought this was a fitting time to read such a poem about making positive steps towards change. Personally, with all those years of hindsight, I can say that the day I wrote this poem was a really positive one, from which I’ve never looked back.

I hope everyone this year gets to clear up the dark alleyways and banish the shaddows this year.

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This is a bit of a bitter poem about trying to get someone to understand what you say when their arrogance is getting in the way.

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Today’s selected poem encapsulated sheer anger for me the day it was written.

Like so many emotionally driven poems, Greed draws from personal experience, on the receiving end of another woman’s insane hunger for gratification at all costs. You don’t need much imagination to work out the scenario which it describes, so I’ll not labour the tale .. although I will say that, like any good therapy, the poem worked wonders for me.

The effect of the greed had been crushing. To spit the anger and hurt out onto paper in one venomous Sunday-morning outburst enabled me to get the last vestiges of the previously wordless anger out of my system in one go so that, by the third verse, I actually felt sorry for my abuser. And that’s the way it has stayed ever since.

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Although this poem is ostensibly about an imaginary Samaritan volunteer who is too busy caring to realise the neglect under her nose, the idea could be readily applied to just about any caring profession.

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This poem harkens back to a time, around 1993, when I was agonising over whether to give up, once and for all, on the man I’d been half living with for almost two years.

It wasn’t a straightforward decision (is it ever ?). What made it hard was that, paradoxically, I was very fond of him … or rather I was still very fond of his best side. Unfortunately the more established we became, the less I saw of that good side … and the more he chose to regard me as a full-time audience for what I now realise to have been his intense self hatred.

Of course, being me, I just wanted to mend him … to make him feel better … to help him to be what he always managed to be for others when we weren’t alone.

Good natured … fun … a source of support for me as well.

Feeling I was getting nowhere with the awful decision about whether to part from someone who was unfortunately liable to drag me down with him, I sought the advice of a close friend. …A very out lesbian friend, as it happens, who’d suffered what seemed like just as much anguish from her women friends, as I was experiencing now.

We spent a lot of time comparing our experiences. Was it different ? Or did lesbian partners endure just as much anguish from each other as heterosexual people did ?

I knew what I wanted. I understood that people were often attracted to me because of the emotional strength which they perceived. Maybe I was attracted to them by the complementary sense of being needed. There’s something very desirable about a “little boy lost”. The snag was that there were also lots of times when I wasn’t in a state to be their mummy substitute; times when I needed a daddy substitute of my own. Someone whom I could lean on. Somebody who could take over sometimes and provide a space for me to let go for the time I needed.

How did that sort of role exchange take place between two women? Was it a gender related thing ? If so then maybe I was on a hopeless search for my ideal man. Was it the case that people were fixed in either one behaviour or the other … nurturer or dependent ? That seemed unlikely, because my very problem stemmed from exhibiting both behaviours myself.

I can’t say that my friend was altogether objective in her answer either. We knew, and I acknowledged, that she wanted me to be more than just a friend. So I’m really not sure if her answer to my question wasn’t tinged with a little bit of wishfulness.

In her view though, she felt that women were better starred as lovers, because of that greater ability to fulfil both roles in one : to be the big sister one moment, and the little sister, the next. She described instances of both and said how, she believed, true one-ness occurred when the roles became so fluid that she and her lover could be both at the same time, changing poles from moment to moment.

It certainly was an intoxicating thought and it stuck with me when I went to sleep that night, imagining the type of relationship my friend had painted. The next morning I had the words to express it in this poem.

What’s interesting is that lesbian friends who hear the poem all seem to understand the meaning without the need for an explanation. Heterosexual friends almost all assume I’m writing about something else.

So draw your own conclusions …

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For Christmas Day I’ve selected a poem written only recently about the kind of strife that goes on between different factions of queer folk, whilst the world generally carries on discriminating against them all.

I have always been struck by the way in which the famous Christmas Day Truce between opposing trenches in the First World War really highlighted the futility of human battles. For a short period, deadly enemies came together because of their similarities, before retiring to their lines to resume killing one-another. So it occurred to me to borrow that backdrop but replace English and German opponents with Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Trans people.

May the peace in your own lives extend beyond one day.

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This poem is all about the downside of getting involved with a cause. It’s about the evenings and weekends spent giving up a social life; how that irrevocably changes your life; and about the vision you create of an end goal in order to keep yourself going.

The setting to imagine is an empty meeting hall. You know the sort — basic wooden trestles; folding chairs; chipped paintwork. The final celebratory meeting has ended. The caretaker is folding the chairs and trestles. The table on the stage is still festooned with posters and leaflets. The revellers have gone on to a pub and to enjoy the spoils of success and the lonely campaigner, now decades older, tired, takes one last look around at the scene and wonders what it all did for them, and why they actually gave up so much.

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Who makes all the running in your friendships? Who is the first to ring or come round?

Is it you, your friends, or are you both as likely to keep the fun and shared interests going?

This poem harkens back to a time (long passed now) when I seemed to be doing all the work. The title is a reference to a TV ad campaign at the time for British Telecom.

If you’ve been relying on a friend to call you every time, why not pick up the phone today and return the interest.

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I need to watch myself. If I keep on with religiously themed poems then you’ll have the wrong impression about my beliefs. In reality, I don’t really consider myself religious. Nevertheless, I was thinking one day about what would happen in our modern world if there really was a second coming and, as before, the Messiah hailed from humble origins. Would the political power structure of the world’s major organised religions accept someone from the backstreets? What would the media make of them? And then, if you’ve not already noticed, I do like to add a little twist at the end of many of my poems.

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This one is a bit wistful, reflecting the contented way I was feeling at the time of writing it, back in the mid 90’s.

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Would a doughnut still be a doughnut if it didn’t have the hole in the middle? And what about the jam? Would you even notice the hole without it? And how does this all apply to the place you have in other people’s lives?

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I’m sure it happens to us all. That tendency to look critically at bits of ourselves at indecently close range in the mirror. Or maybe it’s a case of looking at and hating a particular photo.

Mirrors and cameras have a lot to answer for. We can’t all afford the Photoshop treatment! And, having once upon a time been ‘tweaked’ to look more oriental by the Japan Times, I can vouch that it’s not always quite what you expect anyway.

This poem is about recognising that there are better (and more positive) ways of understanding your image in the eyes of others. You just have to listen and look and their behaviours.

Maybe the fact that I’m happier being 55 than 25 says more about my friends than about all the wonders of fruit acids, moisturisers and an alcohol-free diet put together.

It’s not easy to learn to see yourself through other people’s eyes rather than your own .. and you do have to be picky of course ! The effort’s well worthwhile nevertheless.

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It happens sometimes that you can dream and wish for something so hard that you end up failing to notice when you’ve achieved it. You may also find that the obstacle to you getting there wasn’t the all the things that you imagined, but your own inability to go with the flow you’ve started. This poem is about waking up to those realisations in glorious hindsight, and realising that the worst culprit for making change difficult might have been something in yourself.

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There is no connection between this and “Ticket the to Edge…”, other than the fact that they both deal with relationships and emotions. In this short poem, written in my early twenties, I was thinking about the contradiction that sometimes happens in relationships — that idea of being able to have really passionate and intense anger over the other partner’s behaviours whilst still (deep down) loving them all the same. I realise in older, educated, hindsight that you could also read this poem as a comment about the dynamics of domestic violence settings, although that certainly wasn’t intended at the time.

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For all the things that may happen to us in life, divorce is perhaps the worst .. certainly at the time. The death of somebody close involves a terrible loss and inevitable grief .. and in that sense the loss of a once-held dream and a one time friend means that death and divorce have much in common. Yet the end of a relationship has other emotions too. There is blame and sometimes hatred .. a sense of failure too. And then there is the unexpected secondary loss, as networks of friends take sides, or depart from your life altogether .. unsure suddenly of how to cope with a single person with painfully obvious needs, where once there was a couple supposedly reliant on each other.

Perhaps it’s little wonder then that the end of a relationship takes so long to get over.

This poem was written the night when .. several years after the event .. I realised that I had finally recovered. It started as I was getting ready for bed .. and took form so fast that to write it down was almost like taking dictation. In a sense I sometimes wonder, in fact, whether it was I who wrote it .. or whether the words came from somewhere else.

Whatever the case, it’s a piece which I now always pass on to people going through a loss .. and I’m told it helps. Those who’ve come through often go quiet and nod, too. So maybe it’s captured something essential about the experience.

If you think it’s depressing though, then consider the title .. and the form. It’s about a personal and very lonely descent into despair, yes… But there’s a turning point and a celebration of our ability to return from that brink too. And, in that sense, it’s ultimately a poem of hope.

If you should ever need to take the journey, then make sure that yours is a return ticket too.

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Contrary to what people sometime assume, this was one of the first poems I ever wrote, as a second year undergraduate student nearing the end of another year in hall, in the Summer of 1974. It does seem to have borne the test of time very well though. Nobody, of course, understood what was really between the lines at the time .. and that’s part of the magic of poetry. Indeed I’m not sure that I was able to acknowledge what I was saying at the time. It worked at several levels, and with different interpretations .. which is how we all choose our words when the truth gets uncomfortable.

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I haven’t a lot to say about this poem, written back in 1975, except to say that it deals with that common experience of reflecting back on a relationship that wasn’t, and trying to figure it out.

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There has to be a first time for everything, and this is the first poem I ever wrote. Rather appropriately, I suppose, it concerned my very first meaningful relationship too.

Looking back, the encounter itself was nothing out of the ordinary… I suppose that it was no different to the rather awkward and self-conscious experience that epitomises the experience for most young adults encountering sexual desire and feelings for another person the first time around. Sadly of course, as often happens, the relationship (which seemed so important at the time) also simply fizzled to nothing almost as soon as I’d unpacked my bags for my first term at University.

Mind you, if I’d appreciated at the time that such an inauspicious end was quite commonplace then I suppose I’d not have found myself brooding about the event, feeling guilty, eighteen months later.

I was later to realise that this is the environment into which poetry is born. You can’t write a good poem (or a second rate one, for that matter) without good fresh emotional material. Being happy and content is the kiss of death to my own brand of creativity. Even my humorous poems are born at moments of black despair, in a sort of gallows humour. You can’t fake an experience to order, either. Ersatz feelings give birth to ersatz poetry.

This was my first time though. As a young, virgin, poet I didn’t know that the need to get up at 2am and write the words down, was the portent of things to come. It was a long time before I understood the rule that there would be no sleep till the job was done .. till the words had been written down and massaged into syllabic symmetry on the paper .. topped by a title.

What I did learn from that first night under the desk lamp was the sheer pleasure of releasing the feelings onto paper, between the lines of double-edged words. I’d discovered that the real poetry lies in the ideas conveyed in such a short, neat, package. The trick of getting words to say more together than their individual meanings alone.

In short, I suppose I was hooked.

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This poem was written in the early 1990’s on the day when I first properly realised the power of the Internet as a campaigning tool. I had received an email from someone in Sydney, Australia looking for some advice; I knew someone in Aberdeen, Scotland who had the answer; five minutes later, with my help, the two were in contact with one-another. I remember that the power of that event hit me so hard that I burst into tears. In that moment I saw the potential and, as they say, I never looked back.

So, this poem is dedicated to anyone and everyone out there who, through their disembodied presence on the Internet, beavers away with making connections that file away the chains.

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This poem was a true story about a man I met when walking across Boston common one time back in 1995, whilst touring in New England. I have never before or since heard of anybody else who flys a kite with the aid of a fishing rod, nor do I think I’ll ever forget the encounter. The poem is dedicated to the man who finished his lesson by shamelessly bumming a kiss .. and it was his expression “fishing for birds” which provided the inspiration.

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