Series introduction
This new series of prose poems began at the end of March 2026. I hadn’t written a new poem for a couple of years at least and was beginning to imagine that ‘being a poet’ was something in my past. That’s OK. I am comfortable with moving on and there are poets aplenty out there. However, poetry has been one way of me making sense of the world, and it returned suddenly, with some surprise on my part, as if a tap had been turned on full. Having said that, after 68 years on this earth, it’s clear that the world often makes little sense (or at least not the human bit of it), so perhaps all I can do is to let my thoughts and feelings about what I see pour out. I do have an inkling that these pieces have something to do with ‘unpsychology’ (whatever that means) and that’s why I’m posting them here. All these prose poems appear in the original form in which they were written, though they’ve had some light editing along the way.
Context #3: Something ANOHNI sang…
This piece was written on 1st April 2026.
On the song ‘Drone Bomb Me’ from her 2016 album, Hopelessness, ANOHNI sings: “Drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains, and into the sea”
In her words: “It’s a love song from the perspective of a girl in Afghanistan, say a 9-year-old girl whose family’s been killed by a drone bomb. She is kind of looking up at the sky and she’s gotten herself to a place where she just wants to be killed by a drone bomb too.”:
Drone warfare is just a lethal value-free extension of gaming, it seems to me. All the colour is on the screen, but only once the drone has hit and killed or destroyed its target. And the targets are often ordinary people, going about their daily lives – lives that have colour, poetry and music in them, as a matter of course; snuffed out in unthinking game-play. We know where this girl will be living right now…
3. Game play…
It’s a cool grey, a colour from the middle of the world, a backdrop to a scatter-gun of hues, all the hot shades, exploding in the city. The last red salvo took out a hospital, the orange one before, a school. But that’s OK, the drone operator beat his top score and he's celebrating down the whisky bar. The broadcasts are full of snide triumph and you-can’t-touch-me. The bars are full of drone operators and influencers celebrating another hit. Here I am standing in front of a Ferrari. Here I am with my joystick sending the love of Jesus to fry a barbarian. Here I am starting up a start-up. Shades on. Suit sharp. Face chiselled. Muscles honed. Here am I looking down on the city from a room in the clouds. Here I am shovelling unwanted opinions into a a desktop folder and pressing DELETE. Here I am obliterating the Matrix. Then... ...the sounds of music loop softly skyward, patterns that don’t submit to algorithms, created by people – down there somewhere – who do not know or care about the ‘narrative'. In a township somewhere, a rhythm escapes, sounds a little like gunshot, but when it falls on our ears, we can hear the subtle whisper underneath; a warm sound, like pink blossom with a touch of green, and it's a contrast with the original grey, creating something like a a song, a picture, a poem, a home. People hum a tune, are startled by an artful painting; are moved to tears by a poem; or they sit calmly in this space – proportions just right – in the courtyard of their dreams. The sky clears of noise and we hear birds again, whose songs were there all along, the ones we always joined in with. Beneath their melodies, the Earth is rhythmic and vast, and we catch its beats with drums and samplers. So then we can dance and the world is dancing. The gamers can press DELETE all they like, and gamble their bitcoin till the cows come home, but those cows will be dancing, and we’ll sing for their freedom too. As evening spreads, cool grey shifts to star-studded, moonlit, midnight blue, and another day turns its way into new life.
Brave. True. Strong.