A Thousand Years A Thousand Words
Extracts from a poem written to accompany the Royal Mail's Millennium Stamps. It was published by the Camberwell Press on 15 December 1999
"This is a tale about time
A tale that time alone can tell
Trouble is
You don't tell time
Time tells you
Tocktocking its tales
Making things old
Making things new
[...]
This millennium
This garlanded, pilloried thing
Waits
Tales all told
Slouched in night silence
Time ticktocks to dawn
O brave new world
This is the beginning
And this is the end."
By Michael Benson
Untitled
Future's life is exploration
Happiness its dream
Each day a pool of fascination
With change in every scene
But Love itself must have no change,
Its Truth must always be
The foil to evil selfishness
And rampant misery
So
The time has come for each to know
How all the world does live
And find in exploration
That Love, itself, must give
By Michael Goodman
A Song for the Millennium
As words give arbitrary meaning
millennia make sense of centuries
centuries structure years
years: months
months: days
days: hours
framing
this chaos of seconds wrapped in minutes.
A mega thousand lines
might fix those
countless wars, plagues, explorations
inventions, descriptions, obfuscations.
I'd swap it all
for one bare lyric moment.
By Derek Summers
Mobile Fun
R U cumin out 2 play 2nite?
F U want. Meet me @ W/loo.
Bring Es, CDs & dex. DJs shite
So were mixin. OK. Hold on. 1-2-
1 goin. Jed sez heez got tix 4
MM Dome. Can U Cum? No swet.
Be there wen? 7 - mite need 2 score.
Cool. Zoned out. WYSIWYG.
Hv U got NE dosh? VISA maxed, need £££.
Hv got £25 4U. Nuf? Grrreat!
Jedz X gonna B there? Nah - in2 thrash
So off 2 R2D2?s. CU mate -
Battereze flat - better B goin.
:) :) Xmas - R look - its startid snowin.
By John O'Donoghue
Untitled
Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow a mystery,
Today is God's gift,
that's why it's called the present.
By Jon Gardener
Untitled
Festive holly draped on the hearth,
Wistful mistletoe is hanging from the frame.
Angels on the tree dance in the lights of Christmas,
Your lonely soul expires like a candle in its flame.
The Ale warms your blood through,
Vodka lights your soul and dims your mind.
Once more the old question haunts you,
Can you afford to be kind?
Are you worthy of those who love you?
To yourself have you been true?
Your life has something missing,
And the missing piece is you.
New year, new century and a new millennium,
yet the old slavery remains the same.
So stand up for yourself and be counted,
refuse to play the profit game.
By Fawaz
Untitled
Dans les clapotements furieux des marées,
Moi, l'autre hiver, plus sourd que les cerveaux d'enfants,
Je courrus! Et les Péninsules démarrées
N'ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.
By Foinchem
Millennium Countdown
Empires built by the craftsmen's hand, monuments forever across the land.
Memories of events that last and last, heroes and legends from the past.
Art, science, inventions and sound, all the stars the world has found.
Men of vision, who had a dream, sporting giants - stars of screen.
Songs that will never fade away, The Beatles, love and yesterday,
History, medicine, space and time, all the worlds' clocks are waiting to chime.
A new dawn - has begun, racing toward the Millennium.
By Nicholas Fletcher
Untitled
panic in grozny
peace in northern ireland
pokemon everywhere
By HannahP
Ship of Fools
I'm dreaming of the Mandledome in all its glorious splendour
all our tinsel town politicians heading off to another bender
the emperor dresses in new clothes he found on tracey emin's bed
Michaelangelo is pissing himself looking at a dead sheep in a jar while Buster 'one take' Keaton smiles and shakes his head
false prophets on the take with jam on new Jerusalem scones and lager cans littering the streets
In the age of enlightement Bill the conqueror yields to Ronald the burger king
roll over Rule Britannia move over cool Britannia
daffy duck rules the airwaves
poet laureates do as they must
knighthoods await
backhanders
heroes and villians call a truce
El Harrod and Hamilton bury the hatchet
and the saviour has come as the messiah with the mercedes courtesy of Lottery UK plc
By Miscreant
Retrograde Motion?
As calendar cogs whirl and 99 turns to 00
The Millennium Mall's open for 24 hour trading
And the Big Bugaboo's got it all in his sack for grabs:
Rent-a-womb services, albums of cute kiddie porn pics,
Court perjury on demand, personalised airbrushing,
Made-to-measure spin-doctoring,
All-purpose ethnic cleansing lotion, even hack poetry -
Each at a specially inflated neo-capitalistic seasonal price.
Yes folks, the muse girls have recently had a Sunday Magazine makeover:
Calliope, ex-epic leader, is a latterday tawdry tinsel whirligig.
Clio, once in charge of heroic verse, has become a compact car.
Thalia's pastoral poems have been cut back to green belt rhymes.
Erato, doyenne of erotic poetry, has sunk to dealing in dirty limericks.
Polyhymnia, lyricist supreme, is currently writing advertising jingles.
In this stripped-pine kitchen-sink school of poetasting
Our word-defying world is bathetically reduced to
A cabbage boiling in a pan of beaded green water,
Or a glazed christmas pudding revolving in the microwave's glare.
Where once Shakespearosaurus and Miltoniraptor roamed the hills
Now cockroach feet patter round crumbs in the pantry.
By Bill Bowler
Extracts from For Millennium Night
Down the snow-covered Hill of Allegory
(Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the CD player
and in our laps the Pictorial Anthology of
The Century's Most Memorable Images
which we received as a Christmas present)
who comes towards us but Time, scythed,
hourglassed, and a little unsteadily tracking
the slope of the last few hours that take him
towards midnight and his extinction;
his two daughters, Falsehood and Truth
(Truth the elder), attentive with medicinal
phials of laudanum, aloe vera, wormwood,
and in his wake the footprints of history
whose images captured by photo-realists
in the same street where they happened, or
dreamed and schemed in the skin and paint
textures of the artist's studio, we may examine
more closely and much more conveniently
in the warmth and comfort of our own homes
by referring to the same Pictorial Anthology
open at this very moment in our own laps.
[...]
Let's drink to youth then, while the year's young, and a third
millennium's still in its infancy; we have a long way to travel.
It's early. Stars fleck the millennium sky with faint pinpoints
of light. They will fade soon, before we are in bed. There'll be
a red sky in the east, and the sound of the dawn birds singing
the sweetest of all dawn songs for this next thousand years.
By John Gohorry
