The New, A Poetry Selection, #1

Death would be a Masterplan

Jun 10, 2025

I have been neglectful and not posted any poetry for a while. So now I have a plan to correct this. Not necessarily a masterful one but it might just work, you never know.

Marianne Stokes, La Jeune fille et la Mort (1908)

I have two more lovely artworks on the motif of Death and the Maiden for you, so don’t go anywhere just yet. It crops up in stories too, as it happens. Think Hades and Persephone, or certain fairytales, like Beauty and the Beast, or gothic horrors like Dracula.

Anyhow, as I may have mentioned before when burbling about Kundalini, I did in fact produce two little collections of poetry at around the same time, all of it fuelled by a combination of licit and illicit substances, a burgeoning aloneness melted with contentment, and a solitary trip to the beautiful and magical Cornish coast armed only with a notebook and a copy of Dylan Thomas. As you do.

The second collection I ended up calling The New. In my defence I had been listening to a lot of Interpol at the time. They had kind of become my new favourite band, as happens when you discover some new magical thing. This version of the song in question is truly awesome. Especially the amazing ending. If you want to know what my poetry sounds like if it was music, then it’s definitely something like this. Or the inside of my head for that matter. Well, at least at the time it did. I’m a lot calmer now, believe it or not.

Well, I do like this title, though, and I’m sure Interpol wouldn’t mind.

The collection is split into three parts, ‘the old’, ‘the now’ and ‘the new’. So it sort of works.

What I am minded to do is tidy these poems up a little and then (self-)publish it, as with Kundalini. By ‘tidying up’ I don’t mean rampant editing, as that would be sacrilegious to my soul and an insult to my younger self (she would hate me for it, that is), but having re-read the whole thing just now there are a few words here and there which she would absolutely not mind me altering. She’d probably be a little embarrassed by them to be honest. In those days we had a tendency to fire and forget, as it were. Today, I am a little more contemplative before sitting down to write.

So, in lieu of this, what I thought I’d do for you lovely readers is give you a selection. There are around forty poems in total in the collection, so I will probably select maybe twelve of them, and present these to you over the next month or so, whilst I discipline myself into doing the publishing thing.

These probably won’t be in any particular order in terms of the order they are in the book. They are just the ones that perhaps I like the most, or which leap out at me as I’m formatting the thing.

One aspect I noticed on re-reading them is that there are quite a few more what you might call traditional-seeming poems. That’s to say, ‘what people think of as poetry’. Meaning they have an obvious structure to them, rather than being my usual free style. This one I’m starting off with is one such. As you’ll see, it’s even got clearly defined verses and repeated rhyming in all the right places! Ceasing wonders shall never be!

Anyway, I like it, and I feel confident enough to present it to you with zero editing.

I hope you like it, even if it is a bit goth.

Like this piece of dark art…

Brömse, August Mrtvá, z_cyklu_Dívka_a_smrt (1902)

Death would be a Masterplan

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Death would be a masterplan,
Pearly full of promise and the perfect things to come,
I will wish you well in my western land
And warm your hearts when I am the morning sun.

I figure my timing time has run out of flair,
The solar glare I once knew is gone,
Outshone by my foolish ambition and care
And sharing compassion is a wasted wrong

And death would be a masterplan.
I am shadowed by my imperfect memories
And my figured future is not glass, but sand,
These hours, longer and dark and leaving me

To run out and away could be a delicate delay
But no further shore could rock me to sleep,
And no distant island would wreck my crashing shame
And no waves cracking my heart to open and feel

And death would be a masterplan.
Reincarnate in a different place, another side,
Dream my futile existence away, be again child
And dive.