Saturday 27 April 2013

Bus note 51

       Time told
        in driver's mirror
        backwards.
A second, less than:
weird glyphs come
through eyeholes
        haywiring after
        in outside thaw.

9 comments:

  1. WB,
    This did turn my old brain a little "inside out." Liked very much the simple opening "Time told" and the transformations via the bus driver's mirror. "A second, less than:" - interior move, a nice.

    Stumbled a little on "glyphs" - mainly soundscapewise.

    Pinning the tail of "-ing" onto haywire was deftly done and the use of "eyeholes" and "thaw" - triguing-in.

    Peace,
    B.R.

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  2. Great to hear from you, B.R., and thank you for your frank and careful reading.

    "Glyphs" does stick out, but there are times it's right to be ostensibly ugly.

    "Eyeholes" came at the last minute. The original phrasing was far too technical. I wanted the suggestion of spaces you could put your thumbs into.

    All the best,

    WB

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  3. Dissonant's a better word than ugly. Or you could call it an interrupted cadence; there's a prettier way of putting it.

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  4. yywwv--feeling of up and down--interesting

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  5. The driver must always have eyes in the back of his or her head, figuratively speaking.

    On the late bus here last night, a woman sitting on the other side of the aisle, in the first seat behind the driver but separated from him by the rear wall of his cockpit, kept nodding, apparently passing out. On this particular line, the atmosphere aboard the last bus gives the term graveyard shift a new meaning. The breathers and the not breathers... rarely a simple thing to sort the one from the other. Eventually she slumped over in a dead heap. Assuming the driver was unaware, I said, after a bit, there's a person here who seems to be unconscious. The driver did not turn his head, but his eyes could be seen in his mirror, flicking upward almost unnoticeably. "She's only sleeping," he said.

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  6. Thank you, Sue and TC.

    There are stories - one hopes apocryphal - of passengers doing a few rounds of the Outer Circle having fallen to that deeper sleep.

    Bus driving has become a perilous profession. The conductors are long gone and the number of assaults have increased. The driver's cabin becomes the one safe corner. Indifference or a good pair of shades come to feel like a necessity.

    There's an unnerving intimacy in catching another's eye in the mirror.

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  7. Such a great poem Wooden B, and stories.
    Now I almost want to stuck both my thumbs into both my eyeballs to see if I see glyphs written backwards. Not that I could read them if they were written forwards either, but...

    (ps: the verification code I had to enter for the google anti-robot comment today on this post is 'Geofhey called'. I just wanted to let you know. Maybe there is a message there :-))

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  8. Thank you, Marie.

    If I remember rightly, Isaac Newton extended the science of optics by just such a means (not that I'm making any recommendations or anything).

    I hope no Geofhey comes calling round here. He sounds like a wrong'un to me.

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  9. For more mirrors, you might want to take a trip to Hiroshima bay.

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