Giles Turnbull
Giles

I am a blind poet living in south Wales, UK. I lost my sight 9 years ago, so have written poetry as both a sighted and blind poet. I've been writing since high school and have started taking it more seriously in the last 5 years. My debut pamphlet, Dressing Up, was published by Cinnamon Press earlier this year. I used to play piano and am trying to re-learn it now I'm blind. You can find me on Twitter at @Bix_cool

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Gobsmacked

I struggled with this hour's prompt so have gone off prompt again. I was trying to write about my dinner, which was in the oven cooking, so I gave up on that but wrote this little poem about visiting the sweet shop (candy store) at school lunchtime. I realise that these are very British sweets so probably don't have US equivalents, but they're easily Googlable if your appetite is whetted :)

Gobsmacked

Down the road
at the end of a cul-de-sac,
past a ginger cat
that glares at kids
as they pass.

Up a little snicket
with anaemic-looking paving slabs,
walled on both sides
Roseville Road,
with Roseville stores,
a sweet little shop —
an emporium no less.

gobstoppers galore
brown chewing nuts
multicoloured midget gems
orange pineapple cubes
strawberry pink bon-bons
fizzy cola bottles
candy cigarettes
sherbet lemons and sherbet pips
pear drops
cough candy twists ...

I never have to hold up the line,
I've known in my mind
all the way,
all morning,
what quarter of sweets
I'll suck,
chew
crunch
through the afternoon.

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Start Your Engines

When there's a prompt that is entirely image-based, it'd be helpful for any blind or visually impaired participants to have a brief textual description of what is being shown in the photographs. An image called photo-1490823853387-09b84ca6227e doesn't make for a great jumping off point! So for this hour I've written an off-prompt piece, relating to participating in the Poetry Marathon 2017 :)

This poem is inspired by NASCAR, which I didn't get chance to go to when I lived Stateside (though we drove past the Talladega circuit in Alabama quite frequently. I did go to a stock car racing event in Birmingham, AL, at which Emerson Fittipaldi's daughter started the race :)

Start Your Engines

Gentlemen, Start. Your. Engines.
People, pay attention.

Mark your trail with rubber.
Digest your hourly prompt.

Foot to the floor, round and round and round and round
Pen to paper, finger to keyboard. Weave your words, dodge flying punctuation.

Pitstop crew wipe bugs from the screen

Wipe sleep from your eyes

Change the tires, fill up on petrol.

Drink tea, coffee or absinthe.

First hour down, only 3 more to go.
First hour down, only 24 to go.

This poem is sponsored by Monster Energy,
All proceeds to be donated to the 2017 Poetry Marathon.

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Hour 2: Dance Me to the End of Love

In the UK we're just celebrating the 50th anniversary of gay relationships not being illegal:
‘Britain marked the 50th anniversary Thursday of the first move to recognize gay rights by acknowledging that society was wrong to treat same-sex couples as criminals.’

I myself am not homosexual, but I have a lot of time for LGBTQI rights, so for this hour I'm using a scene in a movie called Stonewall, released in 1995, directed by Nigel Finch. It tells the story of the gay riots in New York City, from the perspective of the drag queens at the Stonewall Inn. In one scene characters Matty Dean (Frederick Weller) and Ethan (Duane Boutte) go to a beach where males are allowed to sunbathe together and, at night, they are allowed to dance together, but only after a token female has started to dance. The invigilator berates one couple for dancing cheek to cheek, saying, “It's not like that [hands palms facing each other], it's like this [palms side by side, facing the same way]”

The title is another Leonard Cohen song, Dance Me To The End of Love. The last line is from Stonewall, where drag queen La Miranda (Guillermo Diaz) ends the film by saying of drag queens, “We're as American as apple pie.” I visited NYC just after finishing my chemistry degree, and while there saw a Stonewall exhibition, which made quite a big impression on me, since we'd never been taught such stuff in school. When the film was released and shown on British BBC2 the following year, I was delighted by it :)

Dance Me to the End of Love

Here we can dance,
slowly
under a swaying spotlight,

momentarily red
beckoning all.

Jitterbug me under the the glitterball

let the cascading white light
play across your face,
its 11pm stubble

beginning to peek through.

Waltz me round the dancefloor
cheek to cheek,
illlumineted blue

our love,
deep as the Danube,
American as apple pie.

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Hour 1: Making Money

Hi all, here's my hour 1 poem. I don't know how many people outside the UK have heard this on their news channels, but we had a big fire in a tower block in London recently, when the exterior cladding turned out not to be fire resistant. In the weeks following it appears that there are a lot of tower blocks that have the same unsafe cladding.

In the air section, the SOx are sulphur Oxides, NOx are nitrogen oxides and VOC are volatile organic compounds, all the stuff that pollutes the air.

Giles

Making Money

Arms sheathed in starry
sleeves of shimmering silver
she waves the downpour
onto philosopher's red sulphur,
transmuting drops into coins of gold
that slip through fingers
as fleating as a dream.

Firey industry forging the means
to speed out of sight,
faster than sound,
rocketing up the sides
of ill-clad towers
returning residents to the ground.

Inhaling the air of city streets
rich with invisible acronyms
nutritionally empty,
poetically dense,
NOx and SOx, and Vocs
ozone depleting substances
knocks and socks drip off a chemist's tongue.

Pity the earth,
bearer of all
as she watches her fading capital
as those whose dreams
exceed her resource.

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