Poet, Musician, Storyteller, Teacher, Voice Artist

@FayRobertsuk writes: I’ve decided, for the moment, not to say what my seven are. They’re quite famous, so it will probably become apparent as I go along (or I might change my mind later and say anyway…). The gateway to the seven stands right here. You…

  (You would not believe how long this took @FayRoberts.bsky.social to put this graphic together) Full text for the Seven Deadly Sins follows: The gateway to the seven stands right here. 🍎 you long to touch, but cannot quite commit to all…

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s fourth sonnet this year is inspired by Agnès Varda’s nouvelle vague observational tragedy (can you tell I’ve no idea how cinema language works?), French movie, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), written by Agnès Varda, and starring Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dorothée Blanck, and Dominique Davray She turns the cards out one by one to see the only colour in this tense affair. But please don’t make a fuss, ma belle chérie – you’ll mar this mask they need of savoir faire. We flirt with luck, and check the numbers twice; I don’t have time to list out all the signs the auteur uses in this room’s device. Ça ne fait rien – this angel’s not resigned. What hope she has is sculpted in the curve of friendship; stares define what she’ll become. Grotesqueries abound at every swerve, but c’est la vie – hold fast and chew your gum. Mais si tu n’est pas fort, la chance prévaut, car sinon l’avenir arrive… trop tôt. Still sourced via The Criterion Collection If you have access to the BFI, you can watch the 1:30 long, French language movie here. Content warnings include: medical concerns, cancer, period-typical misogyny, grotesque street theatre, racism. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it!

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s second sonnet this year is inspired by Satyajit Ray’s groundbreaking novel adaptation: Bengali movie, Pather Panchali (1955), written by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (author of the autobiographical novel) and Satyajit Ray, and starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Sarbojaya Ray, Chunibala Devi, Uma Das Gupta, and Subir Banerjee. A mother’s worries never seem to end, and father’s dreams are solipsistic, vast, so what is she to do but scrape and mend, and cling to hopes betrothed to class and caste? A web of obligations resonates in sickness and in health, and dimly lit. As seasons come and go, she numbly waits, her daughter not content to fret and sit. She runs, and climbs, and perturbates, and cares, and swears that she will never be a wife. And what’s the punishment for she who dares the crime of wanting better for her life? You’ll find out, being hitched to faulty stars, what disappointing creatures poets are. Image of Karuna Bannerjee as Sarbojaya Ray from the Cinematograph review If you have access to Wikipedia, you can watch the 2:04 long, Bengali language movie here (or on Amazon Prime with very different subtitles and worse image quality). Content warnings include: poverty, death, casual family violence. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it!

Headache finally over, it’s time for @FayRoberts.bsky.social to tackle #Pride while messing with form… How dare they swan around like no-one cares? It’s easy, really: simply be the best. Forsake all other notions, let the rest diminish to a distant…

@FayRoberts.bsky.social apologises for entirely losing a day, and proffers this hastily written, iambic stream-of-consciousness on the subject of Envy, which turns out to be more complex than ze’d anticipated. How dare they shout to claim your starry…

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s final sonnet this year is inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s romantic, mythic, surreal creation, the Thai movie Sud Pralad (2004), written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and starring Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, and Huai Dessom I do not want to watch this fi@leannemodenpoet tonight. Don’t get me wrong: I want to see the thing, to get engaged with strangers’ layered plights, suspend myself, and feel my spirit sing. The critics call it vivid, taut, and lush; ambitious, beautiful, and quite surreal. The thing is – art that good should not be rushed, but, damn it all: I signed up for this deal! Well, fine, I’ll check the platforms it was on; both English phrase and Thai to be quite sure… It’s disappeared; it’s vanished – up and gone! So was it ever there, or just a lure? It seems they’ll have to wait another day (until I’ve found a price I’m game to pay). Image from the Sabzian listing of the press kit for the movie Humph! I was really looking forward to this one, but was worried I didn’t have the spoons to focus on subtitles and complex, mythic symbolism tonight. Now we’ll never know! If you have access to the DVD, which is the only legal place it seems to be (and too short notice for my deadline), you can watch the 1:58 long, Thai language movie there. Content warnings include: violence, homophobia, heartbreak (I guess… from the stuff I’ve read!). Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it!

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s fifth sonnet this year is inspired by Federico Fellini’s metatextual bit of sophistry, the Italian movie, 8½ (1963), written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Claudia Cardinale. The first 31:30 made a strong impression… Of all the tropes that I despise in art it’s this one that can bore me in a trice: that every single character, each part’s despicable, with no redeeming slice of virtue, humour, sweet humility, affection for their friends, or even half an ounce of kindness, unless they’re to be discarded, punished, nameless, fatted calf. And worse! Fellini knows he’s got a dud! He makes the writer tell us to our face! He hopes to smear his audience with crud, to make us all complicit in this waste. I’ve failed my challenge: watch each doled-out reel. But I won’t play the voyeur for this heel. The precise moment where I tapped out If you have access to the BFI (which I won’t shortly because my free trial runs out), you can watch the 2:18 long, multilingual (but mostly Italian) movie here. Content warnings include: misogyny, xenophobia, toxic relationships, suffocation. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it! But please don’t try to tell me I’m a philistine for tapping out. That won’t go well.

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s first sonnet this year is inspired by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s short, surrealist, USAmerican movie, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), written by Maya Deren, and starring Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid: She runs and runs, but never hopes to catch the chiffon billowing, the mirrored stare. She rises, clambers, thinks she’s met her match. (But who’s to say, in this dim place, what’s fair?) It’s soft and hard, she’s bright and dark, alone? The key’s inside, and gravity’s a glitch. Acknowledge nodding roses, keys, and clones... Is this prediction? Time to flip the switch. Now tread each texture down, don’t run in place – the sea’s a sighing echo of the land... We rise to find the only speaking face; this is no accident, but was it planned? Was she possessed? What did the dream portend? And who’s the one who’s dreaming, in the end? still of the movie, from of the review on THE CINEMATOGRAPH If you have access to the Internet Archive, you can watch the 0:14 long, mostly wordless movie here. Content warnings include: implied violence, unreality, blood, nightmares. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it!

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s third sonnet this year is inspired by Billy Wilder’s screwball/ gangster/ romantic comedy (kinda), USAmerican movie, Some Like It Hot (1959), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (from stories suggested by R. Thoeren and M. Logan), and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. She says she loves the ones who play the sax and, bitterly, she knows she’s in their thrall. But now, in sweet escape, she finds that all her wonder is encompassed in cold facts, because it’s not the instrument that lacks it’s her, existing dimly, sipping gall, anticipating some or other fall, while hope remains a glimmer in the packs. If peace is what she’s seeking, heaven knows she’ll never find it, playing with a band, and millionaires don’t drop out of the sky. So she’ll confide, and cross her fingers, grow in confidence, while all this time a man is lurking, as a perfect, single spy. - FAR Still from the movie via the New York Times If you have access to MGM+, you can watch the 2:01 long, English language movie here. Content warnings include: gang violence, Prohibition, alcoholism, and misogyny. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it!

Turns out at least one of you clever folks already guessed @FayRobertsuk’s theme and the topic of the last poem (Lust of the Seven Deadly Sins), so here’s Gluttony: You’ll gorge yourself on all you might desire, pick this and that, fill platters to…

Ironically enough, @FayRoberts.bsky.social was asleep (with a migraine) so couldn’t write Sloth last night. Hence it being late. (Ze thinks it’s likewise only fitting that ze’s chosen the sonnet form with the fewest rhymes…) You can’t let tyrants rob you…

@FayRoberts.bsky.social fought off another bloody #migraine to bring this bit of #Wrath your way. They all deserve a big piece of your mind. They say restraint is all the rage again, but leaving fools in ignorance? Unkind. It’s time to crack your…

@FayRoberts.bsky.social’s penultimate sonnet this year is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s epic, surreal sci-fi classic, the USAmerican movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain. In pain, this late, I don’t know if I’ll last; I tried to read the book when I was wee. (my television’s not exactly vast) it’s not the way he wanted us to see… This fearful symmetry, this awful drone; intelligence is warfare, death on hand? And what’s a stylus but a sharpened bit of bone rotating, waiting for the right to land? The choir shrills their harsh, triumphant skirls, the people decorations, afterthoughts (the future’s white, and all the servants girls) a way to highlight scale, the plot for naught… As splendid isolation is the way this final human touch calls it a day. Image from Wikipedia If you have access to Prime Video, you can watch the 2:29 long, English language movie here. Content warnings include: violence, flashing lights, murder. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it! Maybe don’t watch it knackered and in lots of pain, though, unless you enjoy obsessing over tapirs in a sleep-deprived state… And conception metaphors…

#NaPoWriMo Day 24 and I wrote a piece of free verse inspired by the prompt “an Inconvenience Store”, after something in a conversation with one of my partners sparked the notion. I started riffing on what books in an inconvenience store would be like, and then this poem turned up later. Remember that, if you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you can hear a recording of this piece (and the twenty-three preceding it) there. The link to the relevant post is here: https://www.patreon.com/fayroberts/posts/franchise-168468340 --- The opening hours are on a rota, operating on base thirteen-and-a-half, and staff aren’t expected to start until half an hour past the advertised time (if you can find it). The push-to-open door is marked Pull, and the chime it summons does so somewhere in the range beyond human hearing, endearing itself to a range of nearby creatures. Every knife is as blunt as your uncle, made up for by the teaspoons, scooping their scalpel way free of all confinement, which is how they hide after purchase. The labels for the food are all in Ge’ez, directions to the exits in Quipu, while the WiFi password changes every 49 minutes, a blend of Tagalog and Tengwar. Welcome to the books section, where nearly every volume is the second of a trilogy, and printed in point 2 or 200, the paper gossamer-thin or thick as vellum. The shopping baskets have one handle each, the trolleys, once you’ve prised one from its mate, have wheels that are distinctly non-Euclidean, myriad, or solo. If you’re interested in opening your own branch of the singular Inconvenience Store, the application forms are comprehensive, and only accessible on Internet Explorer 4. Don’t ask about the bags. Trust us. Oddly enough, I made this one myself. (Yes, there’s an alt-text transcription!)

Poet, Musician, Storyteller, Teacher, Voice Artist

Poet, Musician, Storyteller, Teacher, Voice Artist

Finally, and only an hour beyond the threshold, @FayRoberts.bsky.social finishes zir musing on the Seven Deadly Sins with the crowning horror: #Greed. Not everyone can grab a second chance. The pusillanimous will whine and fret, but you can call the…