Scribble And Shout - Welcome to The Crow

Intelligent, inquisitive and playful writing that’ll stop you in your tracks

FINALLY! I’ve been waiting a long time to launch The Crow and share with you a range of engaging and arresting writing.

This will be a place to stop you in your tracks, and let you rest and contemplate, and make you laugh and feel and remember what it is to be really alive.

If you’ve come here from Arsenal Wonderland, welcome old friend. If you’ve come here from another source, welcome new friend.

Over the next few days I’ll offer a variety of the writing you might expect from The Crow: Intelligent, inquisitive, playful, mischievous and always surprising. After that I’ll send out regular missives to keep you entertained.

So, without further ado…

I was recently thinking about Love and the strange way love is treated today, as if it were a commodity, like everything else, instead of the most beautiful of human powers. So I sat down and found myself writing this:

Credit: Jonathan Foster

Scribble And Shout

Once
upon a winter dawn
came a love 
as light
was born
came a love
from far flung galaxies
that none had seen
and never will
and never could
through ancient trees
a flame
upon this darkest chill
this coldest wood
saw I, saw she
through half closed eyes
by chance
midst of this 
eternal dream 
saw I, saw she
That none had ever seen
saw I, saw she 
this love supreme 

---

I once wanted to write love poems.

My love poems would hypnotise people, entrance and drug them, like remedies for the broken down hearts beating inside our chests.

My love poems would be a kick in the head, a halo of love would sparkle like a circle of birds. They’d be a Ju-jitsu move, throwing people to the floor in a love-lock from which they’d joyfully tap out, overwhelmed by love.

If I worded them just right, got the cadence just perfect, filled them with just the right words, they’d rock the world like a delicate butterfly wing setting off a hurricane of love.

All I had to do was write the perfect love poetry.

Who could resist?

No one, that’s who.

But it turns out that I’m not the only poet in town. There are far harder working rhyme masters struggling day and night and night and day through all the hours writing and writing and writing their scrupulous, meticulous poems. And they don’t only use quills. They use crayons and pencils and pens and typewriters and keyboards and tablets and spray cans and small planes that write in the sky. They even create algorithms that do their writing for them after they’re exhausted from all their exertion through the long day. They are the ultra-marathoners of poetry.

But these interminable scribblers aren’t writing love poems. Instead they’re plastering the world in monstrous, depraved and barbarous poems. They’re writing poems of division and cruelty. Poems of certainty and rigidity. Poems that look the other way as their words tear the world apart. Unyielding, despotic poems that size and sort and look down their noses in disgust at everything. Cursed, poisonous poems that cling like viruses and inject nefarious rhymes.

And everyone is snorting up these terrible word-slinger’s poems. Rapacious and insatiable, like poem junkies, scouring gadgets and devouring devices and reaching into their pockets every two seconds to pull out and caress their screens, reading and reading and reading these poems of ego and fury and screams.

These hatchet-poets write sonnets and haiku’s and lyrical prose and every combination of word flows, so brilliantly and prudently that my love poems became just another forsaken fool paraded like a victory, like a madness, like hubris. The blood of love is being spilled on the streets and no one seems to care. Instead people inhale poems of resentment and avarice and indulgence. The world has succumbed to these enslaving poets with their ripe cruel doggerel.

And so I tired of writing love poems. I lost faith. Yes, the rains might come, this famine of love might abate. But I had watched the world dry out and I had lost hope in this lovelorn desert of fools. I wrote my love poems in quieter and quieter places and shared them less and less until I shared them no longer for there was no one left to read them. No one could feel in all this din. My love poems were merely whispered in unpeopled places alighting upon the breeze and sailing away unheard. No one cared to listen. No one cared.

And in that empty cold echo-less chamber of torture where love poems were not even scrawled on the walls I fell to my knees and cried. When would my epiphany come? When would the pendulum be re-swung? When would the rise outrun the fall? When would the moral kernel grow a mighty canopy to shade us all? And my tears fell like raindrops in an ocean. And my tears fell like raindrops on the desert sand. And my teardrops fell like raptures I can no longer recall. No longer. No more.

But this will not do. This cannot be. These terrible poems so casually flung, from a word-slingers gun, shall not destroy my time half-spun. I will not capitulate. I will not be exhausted or regret or let go and I will whisper my love poems louder and louder. I will take you by the arms and shake you and shout my love poems into your face and shake you out of your stupor. And if you do not listen I will scribble my love poems and thrust them under your nose and I will scribble and shout and shout and scribble like a madman until you point and laugh and say look at that fool, thank god I am not him. But something in you will wake from hibernation. Something will vibrate through you, deep in your chest, where your broken heart is still beating. Something will raise the alarm in your eternal languor and lethargy and you’ll emerge from this strangeness and search once again for love. Won’t you? Can you not hear the love poems on the breeze? Can you not hear my voice calling in the morning mist? Can you not return my glance as another heart is hankering to be seen? Seen by you? That none other could see but you? Will you not open your eyes and be seen?

I’ve had enough of these other poets with their blood ink and their crazed poems. I’m sorry I let them get to me. It was but a moment. They pass these moments. I shall write my love poems once again and whisper them in your ear and I will hear your lips whispering your love poems and once more we’ll set off a hurricane of love that will spin and spin until all this devastation is put back together again:

Once more
upon this winter dawn
will come back love 
where light
was born,
will come back love
from far flung galaxies
that all can see
and always will
and always could
through ancient trees
a flame
upon this darkest chill 
this coldest wood
I will see you
through half closed eyes
by chance
Midst of this 
eternal dream 
I will see you
My Love Supreme