The 49th and penultimate piece from the first collection of poetry is “The Lingering Fog”.
It is the work that I am most proud of from the collection-mostly for its metre, its playfulness and its economy of language. If you can say something in 8 lines rather than 80, then do it.
The Fog is the remnants of what the someone who has left the narrator has left them with. It is all they have left them with. The poet cannot see them but he cannot see anything else either- “Zero Visibility”-he is lost in the lingering fog. The person is no longer there and this is how it feels wandering about in their wake.
I liked the word play of “unaddressed” and “enveloped” and so used it. It is almost like our poet is willing the fog to fully engross him.
“And now cloaked (referring back to the “shroud” of the opening line) in your cold resistance”, the poet for the first time realises that he has “Lost all sense of reason, distance’.
In many ways for me, this was the full stop of the collection. Tomorrow’s piece is more a memorial to a part of my life that I only wish to revisit in print, a rhyming requiem for a relationship or dirge for the departed.
In writing this poem, I finally came to that realisation in the last line, that I had to move on, even if I couldn’t see where I was going.
The poem about losing your bearings had become a waypoint and ironically gave me direction, after a huge period of being lost-lost in my head and to the outside world.
Happy New Year to everyone!
Algo
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 