The Broken Poet Repair Shop

Your poet is stuck on a stanza. Locked in a hexameter. Beaten by a beat, fingers blistered on a pencil. Stuck in a loop, endlessly repeating the words “Desolate...Desolation...” over and over again.

Think your poet is fit only for lyrical landfill? Thing again!

The all new custom “Wordy-smith Poet Poet Chop Shop” can get your poet rhapsodising again in less than a day with our new express service. We can remove writers block, stammering, excessive posing and a tendency to poet-ise to impress women while-u-wait, using parts ethically sourced from renewable sources.

No longer will your poet falter during your fancy dinner party recital of TS Eliot, and ever more will your curator of similical beauty trip up over his tongue in a Wordsworth. And your friends will love you too, as the hardrive on your newly upgraded poet can have many extra gigabytes of poetry installed, so no more will there be awkward pauses during your crucial literary dinner party with an English Literature student you would like to get to know better.

In case your poet turns out to be beyond economical repair, we can dispose of it humanely for you, and discuss some great deals we have on brand new dada-ist and avant garde models custom made just for you!

Only at “Wordy-smith Poet Poet Chop Shop”! Your bard, is our business.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.05.14

Poets in Space

Is there a use for poetry in space?

Can the language of apogee, perigee, declination, right ascension, thrust vectors, newtonian mechanics and lagrangian points harbour those for whom words are a means to an artistic end? And not a means of requesting more oxygen be let into somewhere from a valve to ensure the survival of pocket humanity against the vast all but emptiness of space.

Space loves capital punishment, and is the harshest of hanging judges. Who can need beautiful wordsmiths where a single mistake of prosaic human or engineering frailty results in certain death.

Everything is checklist, double checklist, instruction manual and zero gravity suction lavatory. The incredible Commander Hadfield took beautiful photographs and sang a little Bowie, but if he had started declaiming Homer while bowing on a lyre, his fellow astronauts would have bundled him out of the airlock faster than you can say “tin can”.

Yet, when humanity does colonise the stars and planets, the arts will have to play a part. A society will surely go mad without them, without an outlet to perform and express. The all encompassing sterility of space must have an antidote; steel domes and plastic furniture won't be enough.

And so, in addition to the square jawed heroes, science nerds, brilliant women, engineers, doctors and folk who's hair looks good in zero gravity, so there will need to stained trouser artists, dusty sculptors, and lank haired writers in tweed jackets with elbow patches. And the poets, space berets and polo necks, astro beatniks, will have to go to.

It seems strange to think of it, but it is true. Mars needs poets.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.14