Today in that space between the end of BE.aGaIN and the release of Unreconciled Doors * in just under a week, I attempt to go behind the lines of a partial fragment or orphaned Ode. Today’s piece is a little bit of a collector’s item however, a complete piece that was never submitted to journals or used in a collection-“Holding Pattern”-Fragment number three of seven.
“Holding Pattern” starts out with what I saw while cigaretting one winter just after dawn had broken at my back door-“Shimmering in sharp contrast with morning”- A spider’s web.
The “lives” referred to in the first lines are that of the spider, the silken sculptor of said set trap and that of any unsuspecting fly or winged insect who by lack of luck or a faulty guidance system will end up in a sticky situation.
The life or death through the hunger of the Spider and the life or death of the Fly is interdependent on one thing-The quality and positioning of the arachnid’s apex architecture.
Both hunter and prey live day to day in the “Fragility of it’s existence” whether that be from weather- “elemental destruction” or a cigarette toting morning malcontent-“The curious other”.
You cannot hold a web or take it where it was from as it will lose it’s purpose- “A beautiful trap”- Something that is both deadly and beautiful has always been intriguing to me-how can something so well crafted and geometrically gorgeous also be the killing fields of what the spider feeds on.
The title itself struck me quickly while thinking of airplanes holding to land and the spider holding onto hope of a fly landing on it’s terrible threads.
As a child-I had brilliant primary school teachers(from age 4-7)who would read us stories out loud-The Enchanted Wood, The Magical Faraway tree etc etc.Their oratory of the oral tradition of story telling daily chapter by chapter ignited my imagination. I had a clear idea of where the story took place, what the characters looked like and how they spoke in my head without ever seeing an illustrated edition.
My favourite of all these afternoon readings was “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White. I remember most of the class, even us tough little guys, developing dewey eyes by the end. How the author gained sympathy for a barn spider was extra ordinary. There was of course the darker and more grown up themes of death and lost innocence there to discover too -and maybe that stuck with me and influenced this piece (and others).
Well ,that-and an obsession with comic books and a certain friendly neighbourhood crime-fighter.
*Unreconciled Doors is available to pre-order in Kindle format now on Amazon for just $€£ 0.99
*If you like and if you can, having being delighted by this daily dose of dissonance, maybe Buy Me a Coffee please ,or even better, pre-order Unreconciled Doors, so you can read along with Behind the Lines from next week.
Stay Hungry,,
Algo.
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 