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Snapshots
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Being doused with warm Dijkstra's illuminations are still beyond me. The lanterns pass, one proof succeeds another over forty years a commination each mutilation of sense remarked upon as sense goes on uncommon audacious in its purity. The basic things astonish and delight. I am found out in my ignorance. It is late for me to be starting off on Codd and Date; to be learning that an algebra is - quote - "a set of operations closed over a domain". At school they taught Algebra, not what an algebra was. Dominic Fox Leicester UK 23:53pm, 7/09/03 A sudden shower, heavy and short-lived, like a bucket being emptied. I was in my shirt and tie, on my way home. Later, thunderstorms. My daughter smiling when I played guitar. Dominic Fox Leicester, UK, 10.21pm, 7/16/03 "Streets of houses": two facing terraces, two rows of cars, a strip of one-way traffic. Impossible to get from my front door to the main road, without meeting someone. Bhavesh stands in his doorway. Baumica scowls and smiles. Shrey pedals up and down. Oliver greets adults with a beeping noise because he is a bus. Dominic Fox Leicester UK 23:07 7/23/03 There once was a fellow named Fox who thought so far out of his box that the surf-happy slob quit his programming job for another, which totally rocks. (A fellow more full of conceit than this Fox you're unlikely to meet: he rates himself highly enough to date Kylie then dump her, for someone more l33t). * * * "l33t": l33t-speak for "elite". Popular usage amongst haxor-d00dz, a.k.a. script kiddies. script kiddie: teenaged (or younger!) exploiter of buffer overrun-based security vulnerabilities in Microsoft server products. Dominic Fox Leicester, UK, 7/30/03 Aruna sends round three mats, old patterned fabric sewn into a rectangle and plumped with rags, for the baby to lie on. Radhika is attending nursery now. Doors up and down the street are open; Hanesh waves back from the shade of his front room. Bhavesh has email, and stays up past his bed-time. The next morning he pokes his head round the door: "you didn't answer me". It was past my bed-time too. Asylum seekers make good water-cooler conversation: their aggressive dirt and religion, how they provoke racism in decent folk by abusing toleration. All of us are tolerant and so abused. Our taxes buy their liquor, cure their diseases, send their kids to uni. We have to struggle; they glide by in rags, imperiously needy. One day soon I'm going to start quoting Auden, "Refugee Blues", the whole thing start to finish, riding out the "yeah buts" and the scorn. I'll shout if I have to. Someone bloody should. Dominic Fox, Leicester UK 22:45pm "Standards of evidence": massed banners on parade as witnessed from great altitude. Correlation and causation mooch past each other, like cows in the night. To prove is to draw out the entrails of the thing, long spools of algebra - "worked out with a pencil", as one joke has it. Headline: NEW VACCINE SCARE - what I would call anecdogma, which is this world's inexorable answer to itself, wherever the question comes from and however it is phrased. ASYLUM TB MENACE, says our autistic savant columnist, pricked by danger measles jab; barren of empathy, not knowing that fire burns. Assemble expert suicides, forlorn stalwarts of hard-pressed causes: truth will outlive lethe provided you don't swallow. What is given is not innocuous, but is medicine indeed for self-inflicted vertigo. Dominic Fox, Leicester UK 23:19pm Worcester, canal-side: new flagstones where the insalubrious lavatories once stood. Canals have plugs! We know this, because someone inadvertently removed one and a long stretch of waterway drained on the spot. There were the shopping-trollies, traffic cones; the accumulations of silt; here and there perhaps a few discarded wedding-rings. No clean-up was attempted. After four months the authorities replaced the bung and refilled the trough. Dominic Fox, Worcester UK 20:54pm Share prices up; all expectations exceeded. Sparkling rose is our dividend. New SMS release not without glitches - I get commended for "nifty troubleshooting"! My tarot reading for today is doomy, which signifies renewal - at some cost. I used to have deaths-to-self once every weekend at least. But it didn't change me very much. Something is up, afoot; don't need the tarot to tell me I've been dreamy, welling over with sap of adolescence. It's the wedding: I knew that boy when both of us were boys, that girl when I was a boy and she a girl. Don't laugh, you old sods. This is news to me - that all you get for your time is iterations, exams to resit, glasses to refill. Dominic Fox, Leicester 03/09/03 22:29pm Oliver on a tricycle, then a scooter - afternoons at nursery include a vehicular interlude, where everyone races round the yard on two-plus-n wheels. No pretending. This is a real toy car, with a real hooter. The witch won't come back (in Hansel and Grettel), will she? No, she won't. Where did she go? She went in the oven and was burnt all up. She was burnt all up? Yes - to a crisp. She was turned into smoke, and went up in the air through the chimney. No-one comes back after that. But how did she turn into steam, and go up in the air? The oven was very hot. Did it burn her? Yes. Did she say ouch? I expect so. That's enough Hansel and Grettel: it's time for bed. Sweet dreams. Goodnight. (Four months old, and already my daughter thinks I'm a preposterous galoot.) Dominic Fox, Leicester UK 21:39pm Love is both grand and blind, by decree of common wisdom. Don't you think there might be something in it? Take a little heed for your heart's sake, and not only that - body and soul, dear, body and soul are staked out on that great wheel, in the sun's glare. Marriage is daylight robbery: you'll lose more than you knew you had. To be happy and married is to have made peace with destitution. You want to end up like us? Get real: it's you that will be deported. Exile in your own house - that's where "settling down" will get you. Lord knows how I love my wife; how my children vex me daily with astonishment. Still I must warn you: nobody *chooses* this. Dominic Fox, Leicester 22.50pm Sunrise and sunset seen from a moving coach themselves unmoving. Wetness on the ground warming and cooling. Silver threads of rain. Headlights in transit, glories of the mundane. Dominic Fox, Leicester UK, 22:21pm Tomorrow I will be 29 for the first time - but this is a poem for today. Today I am 28, ride home on the X7 from Northampton to Leicester: icy darkness without, numb knees and buttocks within, Locke's treatises on government in a critical edition unopened on my lap. A half-hour doze as the X7 folds the intervening null space between stops around the rumble in its innards. Kettering passes, and Market Harborough. It is quarter of an hour from here to the Owl at Oadby, then the London road's sequence of pubs and Indian restaurants; the shop called "In Harmony", that sells marital aids, videos and mags; the railway station's facade, another sex shop on the left up Granby street. Get off at the Haymarket, bus again - the 25 - to Melton turn. The neon diyas welcome Lakshmi up the Belgrave road. Harmony is attained as a husband, 28, comes home to his wife and children: Oliver bhai and Ruby ben, bathed and in pyjamas, ready for their beds of dreams and bedbugs too somnolent to bite. Dominic Fox 3:10 PM Thread-safety involves a few precautions, incantations before entering the fray.
rainforest brocaded with black ice. The thread-pool is an oily lagoon seething with electric eels:
no getting the little feckers out. Dominic Fox, Northampton 05/11/03 14:52pm Gastro-enteritis does the rounds. My son lies patient in his soiled pyjamas waiting for morning. "Why didn't you call?" I ask. "We would have come". He shakes his head. His driver was talking to another driver so he must be quiet and still. Later the same driver insists he go and fetch some cornflakes, bounce on the sofa and put a video on. I want a word with this guy. Oliver agrees: "he's naughty, a bad driver". But brave in crisis and quick to thwart the Pontypandy arsonist. Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. Hare, hare Fireman Sam. Bouncing again. "My driver's making me". I steer him quickly to the lavatory. Dominic Fox, Leicester 12/11/03 22:17pm Food drops and leafleting disperse the crowd our leader waddles through on stumps of prayer. Here is a rhetoric- al question: by what right if not of election (washed in the stream of His love, the white skein of water slurring with pollution) does he stand in his whiteness to bear such witness before the people? Dominic Fox, Leicester 19/11/03 / Northampton 20/11/03 Ruby has cut a tooth - or rather, a tooth has cut her: all night her cheeks flushed; she refused to be lulled, lay stirring in the middle of our bed, her right leg thumping the mattress. Dominic Fox, Leicester, UK 26/11/03 20:30pm TAKE PROMISES TO MARKET, come back perforated with sales-talk, high-velocity expectorations. This is all about oil, or more precisely lubricant: in olive groves, in greasy gloves, how triggers slip, how things go off half-cocked. Be careful out there, sheathed in patchy righteousness, poor irony of bloody ironies. Dominic FoxInternet access denied until 3pm productivity soars I write 2000 words by half-past one ...fuck me if I'd written my thesis that fast could've finished it in two months flat Dominic Fox, Leicester, UK *** MORNING HAS BROKEN all previous records for rosy effulgence, casts rays across a broad spectrum, warming cockles and muscles alike. Picture brave boys in soviet realist poses, caught on the yellow spokes of the sun. It's warm too where he has gone, into eccentric orbit around another, self-swallowing, star. Dominic Fox, Leicester, UK Poetryetc is a listserv relating to poetry and poetics which provides a forum for poets to debate their critical and creative work. The list has over the years run a number of projects for its members, of which Snapshots has been the most enduring. Every Wednesday, Poetryetc members were invited to post short poems on any subject or in any form they chose. The idea was to make a poetic collage of instamatic “snaps” of that day that reflected the international membership of the list. The project has generated an astounding number of poems. The first two runs, of six weeks each, and the first ten weeks of the third run, are archived at Wild Honey Press www.wildhoneypress.com under Poetryetc Project. The rest - amounting in all to a run of a year - are archived here. Poetryetc, like its affiliate Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com), was founded by Australian poet John Kinsella. Salt is managed by Christopher Hamilton-Emery (cemery@saltpublishing.com), while Poetryetc is owned by Alison Croggon (ajcroggon@bigpond.com). Poetryetc is now archived at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/poetryetc.html. and anyone interested can join from that url. To contact the listowner: Alison Croggon These pages are designed, maintained, and hosted by Rebecca Seiferle, the Editor of The Drunken Boat. To email. 
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