Grey

Mark Wyatt

I am your age encroaching, sad

with worries. Silver is unable

to take me away. I will always

be with you, dulling carefully

curled hair, even infiltrating

a chin with magnetized stubble

I am an enemy you killed, just

a boy in German uniform, still

transfixed by a bayonet, stuck

in your mind. I don't hate you

How many pals did you see with

iron lodged in decaying gills?

I am a rain-cloud, dismal over

Munich or London on a gloomily

depressing sort of January day

when concrete and steel appear

to be growing yet more quickly

filling landscapes with grubby

tears. Found with a spanner or

paper-clip in stapling hand, a

voice like a shovel tearing at

gravel will allow you the past

disembodied through fog, vague

and unreal. So much we need to

forget in these anonymous soul

destroying office-blocks where

trapped people worship the new

filing cabinet which knows all

their secrets. Outside a dusty

pollution wrinkles flesh paved

Mark Wyatt’s pattern poems employ a monospaced font. The reader interested in writing shape or pattern poems in this way could use a monospaced font in Microsoft Word, such as Aptos Mono, Cascadia Mono, or Courier New. Once the poem is conceptualized, the technique involves first developing the poem’s shape with the help of graph paper or ‘x’s on a computer screen. This step is crucial for determining how many characters (letters + spaces + punctuation marks) are required for each line, though poems with strict geometrical shapes, such as squares, will of course be even (e.g., 40 characters per line x 20 lines). While drafting the poem, the poet using this technique will constantly be counting letters, which thus function as number-like particles, contributing syntactically, semantically, and visually to the poem’s design.

Mark Wyatt’s pattern poetry is in the tradition of the 4th Century Latin poet, Optatian, and the 20th Century American poet, John Hollander. Some of his earlier such work, in maps and geometrical shapes, appeared in Ambit, Echo Room, P.E.N. New Poetry II (Arts Council/Quartet), Nine Muses Poetry, Poetry Nottingham, and Slow Dancer. Recent work, produced after a long gap while he was teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-8280), has appeared in Greyhound Journal, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Sontag Mag, and is forthcoming from Full Bleed, and Osmosis.