By Rhys Hughes
I wrote this work on my honeymoon on a remote coffee plantation in the mountains. It is surely obvious which major poem inspired it, namely the famous disjointed epic by T.S. Eliot that I have struggled to understand since I first encountered it. But although The Waste Land baffles me, I can’t dismiss it as nonsense. It has a logic I find obscure, yet I have no doubt it is authentic literature. Therefore, my own effort isn’t a parody. A parody requires a good understanding of the thing that is being parodied, a willingness to oppose it, or at least to disagree in part with it. I am unable to disagree with what I don’t comprehend. And so, my poem isn’t a parody of Eliot’s famous poem, but a parody of the poem I might have written if I had written a parody. It is a parody of a parody that doesn’t exist.
1: The Denial of the Trees October is kind: the pumpkin headed men with toppled isosceles eyes are satisfied. The wise befriend the skies: bone dry the hallowed undersides of the sober-minded anthropophagi still mummified. They cogitate clearly, those fellows: one thought alone ladled from the universal soup pressed flat and joined into an eternal loop: October is kind. The leaves that sweep my face, tongues of autumn winds made visible: in the forest the trees gradually mimic old bicycles, skeleton finger spokes. The path wanders away, slowly deflating. The puncture is the part of the dream not worth pursuing and yet we hasten to pedal our goods into oblivion. Alice is making daisy chains. Daisy is oiling tandem bicycle wheels again. This is the realm where everyone hurries. The Haste Land. And the only way out is to float unafraid on the stream that rises in the glade of snake-tongued Narcissus and hope it hasn’t been dammed before it reaches the mouth in the shade of understanding. 2: The Backgammon Front The dice are shook, our nerves rattled as the trenches fill with bets: the surly players no longer smoke cigarettes. Ifs and buts, whiffs and butts, they hunker in the nettles whistling tunes of breakfast longing they learned from steaming kettles. Counters, saucers, the forces of good are evil: the weevils in the biscuit wait, hibiscus blooms meditate, always odourless. One quarter insane already and it’s getting worse: the terse verse is a curse that won’t be lifted soon. The pips of the dice are like pumpkin seeds: the scarecrows aren’t pleased. But is this really war? 3: Advice About Water The poor man pours while the fat cyclist puffs past and the future is never an unwrapped present. The ribbon is the thing that won’t be untied: both tried in their own way. Today the pump has broken, the water thickens as it trickles out and the cyclist gives a shout as he plunges through. I knew you well in the days before grinding wheels when the spray of an accidental puddle was unremarkable. Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer, do. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, the question was not put to you. The track becomes a path, the path a road, and the road slopes down to the eerie quayside: wide enough for the ships of petrified wood to knock against full length. We lack the strength to marvel at this: an illicit kiss between land and sea, fortunately brief. The hulls were damaged on some distant reef and sluggish the overused crews. On the horizon a whirlpool of gigantic size washes the sails of the vessels it has turned to splinters: those made of metal are still intact but rattling like shirt buttons in the deep spiral. Mostly the maelstrom destroys but sometimes the helix can fix ancient wrecks, joining snapped planks back together and the only question is whether anybody truly wants this. The fat cyclist can’t say. Out of breath but never out of pocket he is still too far away to have a worthwhile opinion. 4: The Triangular Raft Adrift, the shipwrecked sailor clings to planks nailed into the shape of a pumpkin headed man’s eyes. He is the traumatised sum of all the internal angles. Spangles of salt spray and he glistens like a society woman who is drowning in champagne. Daisy, Daisy, how does your garden grow? I’m half crazy. He had already dried his hair. It wasn’t fair. The waves had the last word. But what was the first ever uttered? Thirst! He wouldn’t dare to sip the brine in which he flowed like time: the wine of extinction. The garden under the sea will welcome his bones to their new home eventually. The society woman is drinking tea and politely refusing to voice her views, the same way she declines to observe her worthless words. 5: Lightning on Strike For higher pay the atmosphere won’t obey those dictates of meteorologists called predictions. Today the lightning has a predilection to be absent in the valley yonder. I was breaking nuts with a hammer in the toolshed and I thought you said: the thunder still rumbles, the bed is rotating, our fate insists that I remain under the weather. Take my temperature, quick! Take it far away, release it into the wild, far beyond the pumpkin fields. But I was mistaken. While breaking shells that boomed quite unlike bells, my ears were playing tricks: you do not exist. Daisy, Daisy, or is it Ruth now? the pumpkins are aglow. We will always find at the back of our minds one simple truth: other months might be mean, cannibal chewed, serpentine, but October is kind.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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