Wondermentalist

The suggestion for the audience poem at yesterday’s Ways With Words Wondermentalist Cabaret came from Satish Kumar, whose suggestion of ‘windmills’ was preferred over ‘cream teas’ and ‘praying mantis’ and did seem to inspire the collective metaphor-making faculties…  Here’s the poem as it appears on a Ways With Words poster produced the following morning… 

The Wondermentalist Cabaret

Audience Participation Poem - 14 July 2008

 

Windmills… what are you like?

 

Do you mind how I wind the windmill will?

Gyratory, vibratory, mistral–seeking blades

Sentinel shifters of airy semaphore

Windmill nimbys, nimwill wind me, spin me

Whisking up clouds for a sunset soufflé

An un-winged plane, going nowhere fast, forever…

Turbine be forever mine

Swish, swoosh, swish, swooshhhhh!!!

Oh how revoltingly Dutch.

Wind mills – (on) tall hills – (are) modern ills – (with) fancy frills

Puffing, blowing, huffing, flowing

Ghostly forms, foolishly arrogant in your ridiculous white attire

Why do your wings wave like a waffle?

A pickled onion spinning with its stick

A Spiro-graph of air-borne flight, fights…

Wind grinding pepper-pot, slow sail stew

Scarecrow comedian making a point

A lighthouse on the land, warning of approaching corn

Making flour by wind power, takes about 59 minutes! Doh!

Big sails waiting for wind kiss, sky caress, open arms

Sail this steeple across swollen sodden swamps

Slender blades generating “power”, strong stems – 3 turning petals

She loves me, she loves me not, “she loves me”

Whooshing, whirling, wheeling

Web, windy, wild, westerly

Focused on flour or flux

Though the mills of god grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small

Revolving doors

A Mandala milling the wind 

Ranks of slim white sentinels saving our skins

No ill winds please, keep it sweet

The sails on the mill go round and round…

Who can mill the wind?

And, once ground, what kind of cake would it bake?

Something light and airy? Self-raising? Or f-air-y?

Windmills – do they always wind with time?

Do wind farms really make all the wind?

There once was a windmill in old Amsterdam

Where mice loved to dine on bran flakes and spam

The slow wave of the giant’s arms

Not waving, but drowning.

 

 

Written on 14 July 2008 by the audience of the Wondermentalist Cabaret as part of Ways With Words Festival of Words and Ideas: The Great Hall Dartington

Edited and created by Beryl The Feral

Brought to life by Matt Harvey

 

I’ve been remiss and not sent up the audience poem from the wonderful night at the Phoenix. They opted to investigate the aubergine, and were pretty pleased with what they came up with - quite rightly, I think. Aubergines what are you like?

 

Aubergines – an egg’s ugly cousin

Purple and sexy you make me smile

Saviour of my cheap night in

Aubergines,

Oversized liquorice jellybeans

Lick-able like me

The purple shiny skin of a sweaty bald patch

Plummy, roundy, purple bumbly

Green pokey stalk

Aubergines have feelings too

A personified bruise

An English pear with a suntan

Aubergines, broken dreams, silent screams

Aubergines are fancier than Under-gines

Rakish squishy pulpy thing

The big but small fruit of life

It’s like a giant tomato but purple and slimy

My love is like an Aubergine: big hearted, shiny and delicious barbequed

Aubergines you’re fat and thin, you’re purple like a lucid dream

In America they’re called Eggplants, either way they’re beautiful

Aubergines would make good weapons of mass destruction, if they weren’t soft

Black dummies for big babies

Dressed up marrows

Aubergines are a culinary challenge

A Greek holiday with Germans

The colour of our bathroom suite, the colour of my wedding suit

Goodbye Aubergines…

Aubergines are difficult to shove up your arse.

 

By the people of Exeter and put together by Beryl the Feral The audience liked it all, but especially the last line…

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we need suggestions for the audience poem. Open your mouths. Be free.’ (I didn’t say this last bit. I might have done). A voice from the back pipes up playfully, ‘Giraffe Café’. There is a low groan, with an element of ‘tch!’ to it. In case you didn’t know, and why should you, the respondent was referring to the café in nearby Exeter that was, last week, the scene of an attempted terrorist attack, bringing home the dark realities of contemporary extremism to us sheltered south-westerly breeze-blocks. Not the kind of start you’re looking for in my position as ‘theme-find focuser’. ‘You’re steering us toward a dark place,’ I acknowledge, ‘but we don’t seem to want to go there.’

Others begin to chip in. ‘Toffee apple’ is offered from near the front, I can hear that everyone’s relieved. We’re not into being edgy tonight it seems. Someone else suggests ‘good taste’, which I reject on the grounds that it’s a bit abstract and they were just making a point. A muffled voice from the middle of the room shouts ‘putty’. Or was it puppy? It’s unclear. I ask for clarification, but there are too many contending voices. Someone woofs, helpfully. But can I trust them? I decide to go with putty, it’s more interesting, less expected. Offered the choice of ‘giraffe café,’ ‘toffee apple’ and ‘putty’, the audience also opts for putty.

Liv Torc put the poem together, and it goes like this…

 

Putty

Pick it lick it roll it flick it

You are the smooth edge to all my panes

Push and press it feel it smooth and oily

Friendly bendy all-purpose squishiness

I modelled you on my own image and was unhappy

Like playing with my balls – with oil

Oh the pain of your thumbprint as the putty pushed and pored…

Pretty shitty smelly smutty putty

You’re so slutty

And oh, in my dreams, you will be putty in my hot, hot hands!

Oily chalk beneath my nails

I glue you, join you, fill you, bond you,

Aren’t you glad that I belong to you

Putty come quick, putty come slow,

Give me your stick and I will start to glow

Putty sticks things together, in this poem

It oozes out of the Mastic Gun

Can be all things to all men

Picks up the imprint of the morning news,

Expanding and stretching obscenely under thumb.

Putty potty, potty putty, pity putty

In your hands

Without putty, life would be paneless   (geddit?)

Use that putty to fill the holes of life

Putty is now obsolete, it isn’t what it used to be…

Before the interval, after the Dead Poets’ Slam, I ask the audience to set a theme for the collaborative poem. I never know what to expect. The first suggestion took me by surprise. ‘Penises’. Why should I be surprised? I’d asked for a concrete (as opposed to abstract) noun. Penises qualify. Then someonesaid ‘pasties’, fair enough, and someone else said ‘male genitalia’ – as if they really hadn’t understood what was being asked of them. Interesting. The audience eventually settled on ‘handbag’. When it came to the voting – the informal expressing of a preference – there was a very muted response for penises, which, again, surprised me. I’d honestly thought they’d generate more enthusiasm, not in themselves but as subjects for a ‘what are you like?’ poem. but they didn’t, and there’s an end to it.

 

Here’s the poem as put together by Beryl the Feral and read out on the night. A standard was maintained, I’d say.

 

Glambag, handbag, miscellaneous slam bag

An unnecessary accessory

Nosebags for the donkey that is the female ego

Holder of all secrets tawdry and sublime

Collector of tickets and old lipstick slime

Clutter collector, essentials dispenser

Incontinent cornucopia of miscellaneous Matter

A repository for a suppository, a pessary or a tampax

Essential survival sack for seriously extreme shoppersssssss

All of life is here, and a bit extra

A lonely lady’s dance floor respite

Labyrinthine conundrums

A portable black hole, a tiny tardis with a Gucci label

Prada – a larder for Pina Colada

When the floods come, my handbag can be a sandbag

Clutch, clasp, a place fro the rasp

A grand in a handbag is worth two in a busted sack

All the world is  handbag, with pockets and corners and zippers

In black leather to match my mood

Hard and horny like a crocodile’s winkle picker

Mother confessor, diary professor, pen and ink, kitchen sink

Handbag, sandbag, old bag, bagman, douche bag, swag bag

Men confusers, lipstick losers

A place for things I’ve never needed

Accessory of mass Oestruction

Weapon of man’s destruction

Dense dark dangler

Not a penis though,

The Queen always carries a handbag – it always looks empty…