Puddings and Poems
This is a very odd subject to set off the urge to write a poem. Also it's only a day old first draft so will no doubt go through changes, but I've kind of promised myself to make a few posts of poems in progress - for discipline and variety and to keep myself writing.
This one stems from watching one of those reality-therapy TV programmes; the subject in question was a freaky eater who mainly survived on twelve homemade yorkshire puddings every day, supplemented only by nutritionally deficient chips and chocolate. The young guy's eating was highly ritualised and had to be as monotonously predictable as possible; the puddings were his preference partly because they didn't require much chewing. It was quite remarkable actually how much real progress he made towards a more varied diet, but I kept thinking about the shut-down of choice and engagement, the hankering after safe childhood repetition and simplicity his former patterns embodied.
Rules around eating are common in disorders such as anorexia too of course - and I've recently been reading Philip Gross's powerfully moving sequence 'The Wasting Game' about his anorexic daughter and the vanishing tricks she tried to play through her own bodily reduction to nothing, to zero. I haven't explored this aspect of disordered eating here. I may think about it more in a future post.
The Pudding Club
What’s as exquisite as milk’s simplicity -
soul food, snow-pool purity,
all colours and none, from the breast’s curve,
You see-
How Yorkshire Puddings nearly quench a wish:
each oven-conjured into a curled puff,
small bodies of warmth, a lucky dozen,
twelve discrete disciples daily. He’s
in charge of their egg-based essence,
reduced from brief-bloomed life by pinch and bite
to barely a stutter. And every day
the plate is piled, and every day its fare dissolved
predictably into thin air.
It has to be the same –
You think his story’s unique, extreme,
refusal of taste’s panoply, but then
remember candyfloss childhood;
its pink-cloud-on-a-stick expanse:
spun sugar shrunk in the mouth
to a sweet nothing, again, and again,
and suddenly water with hunger
for vanishing things.
This one stems from watching one of those reality-therapy TV programmes; the subject in question was a freaky eater who mainly survived on twelve homemade yorkshire puddings every day, supplemented only by nutritionally deficient chips and chocolate. The young guy's eating was highly ritualised and had to be as monotonously predictable as possible; the puddings were his preference partly because they didn't require much chewing. It was quite remarkable actually how much real progress he made towards a more varied diet, but I kept thinking about the shut-down of choice and engagement, the hankering after safe childhood repetition and simplicity his former patterns embodied.
Rules around eating are common in disorders such as anorexia too of course - and I've recently been reading Philip Gross's powerfully moving sequence 'The Wasting Game' about his anorexic daughter and the vanishing tricks she tried to play through her own bodily reduction to nothing, to zero. I haven't explored this aspect of disordered eating here. I may think about it more in a future post.
The Pudding Club
What’s as exquisite as milk’s simplicity -
soul food, snow-pool purity,
all colours and none, from the breast’s curve,
You see-
How Yorkshire Puddings nearly quench a wish:
each oven-conjured into a curled puff,
small bodies of warmth, a lucky dozen,
twelve discrete disciples daily. He’s
in charge of their egg-based essence,
reduced from brief-bloomed life by pinch and bite
to barely a stutter. And every day
the plate is piled, and every day its fare dissolved
predictably into thin air.
It has to be the same –
You think his story’s unique, extreme,
refusal of taste’s panoply, but then
remember candyfloss childhood;
its pink-cloud-on-a-stick expanse:
spun sugar shrunk in the mouth
to a sweet nothing, again, and again,
and suddenly water with hunger
for vanishing things.
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