Neuroprocessing I: The Welcome Screen
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
As if staring at clouds until they become faces, I concentrate on the screen in search of sense. Blocks of colour slide from left to right, while words hide in the notional space beyond the plastic frame. I’m as wishful as a widower, trusting to an end-of-the-pier medium for news of the dear departed, or phoning a dead line at midnight in hope of someone picking up. But all I see is a picture of a tree, a bench, and a group of young people I don’t recognise, smiling blandly as they tick a range of demographic boxes. Something is blinking for no reason, and those young faces and their intimated world become disarticulated pixels, then something akin to a simulation of Brownian motion. I see my old Physics teacher, gesturing with his cane like Sterne’s Uncle Toby, his eyes sparkling like the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 83), and his wispy grey hair like a cloud. Words form in notional space – Click to Enter – but I’m already 15 million light years from Earth.
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Framing
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
In the guesthouse, the frames have no pictures, being windows to seaside absence and small doorways into stories we barely half remember. As I walk towards the tideline, the sea shrinks back, irretrievable after all these winters. The pier sinks skeletal into sand and painted boats crack open like …like … I’m at that point at which similes cease to function, and I can’t be certain what’s metaphor and what’s simple observation. These, I think, are the verifiable facts: I stalk the beach alone; the sea wall hums with poems set in stone; a siren sounds an aching tone from the tip of a boulder-strewn spit, and a child’s book flaps face down into a rockpool seething with life. 73% of the human heart is water, while most of the rest is stories. I pick fragments of tales from the crap that clutters the shore, then scuttle back to the guesthouse where the frames have no pictures. I’m at that point at which central coherence breaks down. There is an old woman in the room across the hall. I knew her when we were both on the run from linear time.
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About the Author
Oz Hardwick is an international award-winning poet, who has published many collections, edited numerous others, and written countless articles on various subjects close to his heart. He is also autistic, and is currently obsessed with temporal non-linearity, which has informed his two most recent chapbooks with Hedgehog Poetry Press, My Life as a Time Traveller: a Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (2023) and Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (2024). Away from the written word, he is at something of a loss. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK).