Half Forgotten Riff

That night was long ago
Forgotten almost
To everyone
Nothing special, not even for me

Everything happened that night
Nothing happened
Depends on the viewpoint
Perhaps you do not remember
The joke I made
You laughed at the time
I remember
Maybe not that night, but I remember
Something

A couple of drinks
Pictures that no one really likes
When they appear online
I wasn’t looking
At the camera
Wasn’t thinking about the camera
Just felt tired

But then that song
Woke everything up
Came and went
Back to obscurity, I enjoyed it whilst it lasted
Didn’t like what followed
The unknown song was the highpoint
Of a low point
Of my year
But unknown it remained

Time passes
Not so foolish anymore
People forget
Not me, I remember
Just the riff
Over and over
Can’t exorcise the memories till I find it

There’ll be joy when I find it
Even though it may wake the memory
That you don’t have
And I wish I could banish

Meh

If I have learnt anything from reading and writing blogs it is this – Nothing happens as planned.

If someone says they’re going to blog on Friday, check back on Monday. If the subject is supposed to be films, then anticipate music. First in a series? I doubt the topic will ever be mentioned again. In short, your average blogger tends to make lots of plans and forget about them just as quickly…and I’m pretty much your average blogger.

Hence my earlier blog suggesting a topic for last Friday, obviously that went out the window. However, despite Dave’s first law of blogging (Don’t expect the expected) I am going to try and stick to a couple of very generic ideas.

Firstly come wind or rain, sun or snow, nuclear apocalypse or Armageddon I’m going to blog twice a week. The only exception being holidays and other periods where I can’t access a PC. That said I’m just a poor ex-student so holidays are fairly limited at the moment.

Secondly, I’m going to alternate between a blog style post and a piece of poetry. Hopefully this should force me into at least a little bit of creative writing each week.

Any more targets than that and I would be doomed to failure (curse my own innate laziness), so I won’t even try.

Right, on to a semi-serious post.
As you, my intelligent, well dressed, good looking readership, may be aware from your daily perusal of your favourite broadsheet or red top, ‘Meh’ has been recognised as a word by Collins (they make dictionaries, but you already knew that).

Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for the general addition of new words to the dictionary as they move into everyday parlance, but surely you have to draw a line somewhere. Meh, is not to my mind a proper word. Internet is a new word, fantastic, stick it in the dictionary. Meh is more of a sound, like saying hmm or tutting. Lol is probably recognised as a word now, what next? Zomg? Rofl? (actually rofl is probably recognised as a word already…what is the world coming to?? FFS?)

I guess my basic feeling is that terms that are widely used multi-cultural slang or abbreviations(particularly relating to the Internet) should not necessarily be added to the English language. What makes something a word?? Lots of people using it? Millions of people play World of Warcraft, so should we just add terms from that into English?? Of course not. Should we add every technical or slang term from every pastime, hobby or community (online or otherwise) to the language?? We could, but we’d end up with a dictionary substantially larger than what we have now (and the full English dictionary is pretty huge as it is).

On a similar note, I feel that in most cases you should wait a reasonable period to see if a word continues to be used. When I was eight, perhaps the two most common words were lush, and cool. Both obviously used outside of their normal context. People still say cool, but it’s a pretty long time since I heard anything called lush (do primary school kids still say that??).

No doubt, you’ll have your own opinion on this and fair play to you for that. However I feel there should be a line drawn between what is ultimately slang that may just be passing through and real words, the ones that everyone uses every day…like zugzwang and fianchetto

Until next time this is Dave Marshall telling you to use a spell checker (it won't recognise meh)

Ethereal Journey

It was dark when I woke
Urged from slumber by that persistent alarm
Washed, dressed but still the night
Cloaked my passage as I pulled away
Beneath the swollen moon
And into the mist

Leave behind the concrete
Enter the maze of hedgerow
Both grey in the half-light before the dawn
The birds yet silent as I speed into the East
Behind me the stars yet shine
But not before me

Ever I race in twilight
No limits can hold me
Soar along a causeway
Rising among the waves
Those ethereal strands
Dancing at the feet of ghostly trees

As I crest a hill I see her
Magnificent
And a golden tide sweeps toward me
But still there is silver
The one among the other
And I can barely watch the road

Onward I fly
It is early yet
But finally the enchantment is broken
And I wake
Though I left my bed an hour before
The dream starts to fade

That's handy Jose

So here’s the thing. It’s only the first week of this new blogging network and already I’m verging on obsession. Any hour in which I don’t get the chance to check for updates is an hour wasted. I’m joking of course; I only check every third hour.
In all seriousness my working day has been brightened considerably knowing that each evening I’ll have the opportunity to spend an hour reading intelligent and well written posts, be they blogs, poetry or creative writing (and I still need to find time to listen to Marsh But True).

As more and more people start to blog there will be an even greater variety of quality posts to read, which is both fantastic and problematic at the same time. Fantastic, because with more activity and greater feedback the standard of the posts can only get better and better, but problematic because ultimately each individual can only read so much. In a sense our small network may become a microcosm of the internet as a whole, plenty of diversity, but no conceivable way to see (or hear) everything.
Hence our first problem, albeit a happy one, if more blogs start to appear (and considering that the rapidly growing facebook group has 40 plus members, I certainly hope there will be many more) how can anyone (not least me) be sure not to miss something great.

The first option is the obvious one, read everything. Right now that’s what I’m doing but with just a few more blogs you’d need an awful lot of time to be sure not to miss anything. You would have to be in front of a computer with nothing better to do for hours everyday. In short you’d need to be a student.
Clearly this is not much of a solution for all but a small minority, so we need to think again. If we can’t read every post of every blog we’ll have to be more selective.

Assuming that you’re only going to read a couple of posts each evening, or each week, how do you make that selection? Entirely at random? I suppose you could select your favourite authors and just read their posts, but as the bard said if variety is the spice of life, play on. You’re going to want a third choice.

Having reached this conclusion I’m going to help you (the discerning reader) as much as I can. Each week or fortnight or month, as appropriate, I’ll post some links to a small varied selection of blogs that you might enjoy. Obviously this can only ever give you a taste of the whole meal, but still, hopefully that’s better than nothing.
So far so good you say, but here we hit our second problem.

How do you or I, or anybody else for that matter, decide which blogs are most worthy of attention?

It’s troublesome to be sure, but please think about it, leave a comment and I’ll share my thoughts on the subject on Friday.

Until then if you’re reading this and haven’t got a blog of your own, why not sign up and get involved? It's great fun, even if you can only post on an irregular basis. This really is a case of the more the merrier.

Until next time,
D

What was said

If only I could open my mouth
And for once not regret
The words that spilled out
And escaped

Better would have been to
Even though not proved wrong
Eat my words
Chew them over and swallow
Never to break forth
Erupt
Destructive as any volcano

Where was my wit
Sparkling intellect run dry
Or washed away
Did drowning cause the sorrows
It’s not like this with anyone else

But the words did escape
And you laughed at my confession
Turned away
And left me to mourn
What was said

In the beginning was the word… and the word scored pretty poorly when used in scrabble

So, as they say, what on earth is going on?

I have to concede that I’m not entirely sure myself, but to try and give you some idea you probably ought to check out this link.

Hopefully that makes things a little clearer, and if it doesn’t, well c’est la vie as I believe they say in Yorkshire. Let’s cover some basics.

Who am I?
I am Dave Marshall, formerly a student of religion at the University of Kent in Canterbury, more recently a low level administrative assistant for Wiltshire County Council. You may think that my job sounds quite boring, you would be absolutely right. I shall endeavour to steer well clear of the subject in all future posts.

Why am I blogging?
As the link above hopefully explained this is just one small part in what should be a whole network of other blogs. Many of the people in this group (including myself) are connected by the UKC Creative Writing Society, so please anticipate a fair amount of poetry and writing of a creative nature in among these assorted blogs. I’ll endeavour to draw your eyes to as many of the best pieces as I can.

What about this blog?
When I started university I blogged on a semi-frequent basis for the best part of two years. You can view that now defunct blog here. With this new project I’m going to try and move away from those longer personal posts/rants on a wildly eclectic set of subjects, instead I’ll be aiming to stick to the stated purpose, namely poetry and creative writing. With a different aim in mind I thought it best to start an entirely new blog.

What can you expect?
Well, I’ll have to wait and see how much activity there is across the network, but I’ll certainly be aiming to blog pretty regularly for the first month or so, then we’ll see where we are. Any predictions I make about the subjects of future posts are almost always doomed to wild inaccuracy, but if this blog doesn’t contain a fair few poems, a good helping of comment and terrible spelling and grammar then I would be very surprised.

So thanks for reading, check back soon and please feel free to drop me a line if you’ve got your own blog that you’d like me to take a look at.

Until next time, this is Dave Marshall telling you to wear more hats