…..Well no, it’s about the cinema screen that is Life.
Today’s piece ,in excerpt form, goes behind the lines of “The Projectionist with an Inherent Negative Bias Examines The Life Print”. Catch-y title I know!!.(And yes another Fishing pun…on the -fly).
It is the 17th poem from Unreconciled Doors and finds our protagonist as projectionist in charge of their own “life shaped screen”.
I got the idea for the “series of nows” (and maybe it was the germ of the entire piece) from reading Alice Fulton’s poem ” Peripheral Vision” which contained the line- “and film of static frames”.
It is part of a wonderful selected collection of her work called “Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems”
My mind went to the Movies-moving (static) pictures- and related it to abandoning the concept of linear time.
There is no past, present and future-just a series of nows “projected from celluloid”.
“The still is still” when viewed on it’s own, out of sequence and as the poem describes, a now then becomes “isolated from any narrative”.
Time has always fascinated me-a man-made concept that we live our lives by that we can -spend, waste, enjoy, kill.
We note that the projectionist’s booth, away from the viewing public “smells of rumination” and “stale cigarettes”. I liked the notion that a word or a state of continued spiralling intrusive thought could possess an olfactory quality.
Looking back at this work, this was clearly when I started to see things differently. I had started to reflect on my life to date (which I found difficult), beginning the tricky process of being rather than doing and raising consciousness.
The being in the now of meditation rather than self medication or rumination gave rise to the phrases- “No sense of spoiler”/”Lacks any indicative arc”/’Any previous or next now”.
While this may seem negative, it is not meant to be as if we are living in the present, it is all we can really do.
Algo.
Unreconciled Doors is available to 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, order Unreconciled Doors, so you can read along with Behind the Lines.
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 