Local history courses

Weep, far away,
For funny leachates running, sweltering,
Capillary forcing, filtering out the nothing.

For archiving is the realisation of
The opposite of nothing,
And all of us might just as well go home.

Local history courses, link-wraiths undercover,
Shedding scales on brushing past so close,
Wreak remembrance, spattering motes, calling down

Broken pencil on their current position,
A running dream, a progress, heading thenceward,
Feet don’t touch the page.

Entry level time-weavers hunt the most-wrapped answer,
Sweeping outcrops, race remembrance.
History welling like a solution.

Collusion or saner Int.
The shadow of all doubts is pencilled in as gone.
But always on inside.

There’s hardly space for what is found.
With village workers singing rounds,
Late animal mask time.

On paper you could be anywhere,
Without expression,
Claims of experience suck and dischord,

Without fictive intelligence,
Restraining archive factoids,
Which dreams intensity before it happened.

In Lewes, mobile fire teams chaining irrationality in gutted loving
Responses to frittered continuities,
Plus, the holiness of homely meanings.

Faith-up from wrong-remembered grandfathering.
Not the sap, the pulp, the work,
The stinking leisure rind’s what gets them going.

Ritual extras individualled-up.
Time and a collective mood-mind diverted,
Forging dwelling thoughts for the time being.

Not the road to work, the old green lane.
Tasselled armaments, club uniforms and banners
To rival others in the past whose apples shone brighter,

Whose utter cunning bore them naturally.
Calling into the past,
From a future neither theirs, nor ours.

All nameless, but for retired pencils
Unknown as those they trawl in births and deaths.
And all of us might just as well go home.

Neil Palmer, 2004