Dear V (Cone Beam Mandible)
State of the nation
Dear V,
Hope you and Cody are doing good!
Gah, I can’t hear this song without feeling woozy have a sit down in a Santa Cruz arcade game and toilet water strobing.
Or this album without thinking of the car ride back to San Fran.
Currently, I’m
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
Which is actually Guy’s Hospital’s Cone Beam Unit. Not as romantic as Elizabeth Bishop’s waiting room, sure.
Homes Under the Hammer is playing on a mounted TV screen. I doubt you would have come across this, V?
It’s the sound of your grandparents’ house when you were off sick from school, if you were a UK 90s baby.
This week, they’re in South Wales and a property sells for £19,000 under the guide price!
I’m here because, as a doctor in Oral Surgery writes to my dentist:
On examination, there were palpable, non-fixed, non-tender submandibular lymph nodes bilaterally. Intraorally, there was prominent linea alba. His lower right and left wisdom teeth were partially erupted with inflamed operculae and 8-10mm pocket depths distally.
Anyway, I’m really excited to see you in May! Heads up, though, things are a bit different since the last time you were here.
The Duchess of Sussex now does podcasts. The Home Secretary Priti Patel nicks phones off asylum seekers.
Milkmen are back, but instead of milk they deliver ‘Fatal Blows’ gives you the chance to do a devastating combination of moves once per fight.
Fleabag. Hugh Grant’s back. Interest rates have been raised from 0.5% to 0.75%.
‘If nothing else, the inhospitable nature of the UK is demonstrated by our obsession with leaving’ writes Emma Garland in Dazed:
When we can’t get away, there is Love Island. It’s hard to imagine life without it.
Chris plays jazz flute now. I don’t really write poems any more, an app does it for me. Shellfish areas around the UK were polluted by human sewage tens of thousands of times last year, data reveals.
Hope this isn’t sounding off-putting 🙉
Just when you think it can’t possibly get worse, you’re wandering around King’s College between dental appointments and you stumble across a bronze statue of Keats. It talks.
‘The Talking Statue of John Keats was commissioned’ — I shit you not, this is a hundred percent real — ‘as part of MOUTHY: INTO THE ORIFICE.’
Scan the QR code and ‘John Keats’ calls you:
Hello, John Keats here. You might well ask, Why did I abandon a prestigious career in surgery here at Guy’s to become a poet? It wasn't an easy decision. However, despite all my medical training, my heart was just not in it. Besides, poetry is also a healer.
Wow.
Naturally, I messed with it to aid the listening process👇
The worst bit, for me, occurs at 00:41 in my version — the sexual mmm sound that the actor makes having just rhymed:
People are born and people die here. But people are loved, and people cry here. People care and people feel here. People cure and people heal here.
“mmm. That's not bad.”
In a British Library article, Professor Sharon Ruston quotes the Tory critic John Gibson Lockhart writing in 1818.
Looking down his nose at Keats, Lockhart advises him that ‘It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet’ and to ‘be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry’.
😏
Ruston continues, ‘Lockhart links Keats’s medical practice with his poetry, and finds that poetry can act as medicine. This connection between poetry and medicine has been made for centuries’.
So why does the The Talking Statue of John Keats make me feel so much my next job is in Cyber?
Because it sounds like just another John Gibson Lockhart: its shitty little couplets reinforce the Tory idea that poets are profitless ne'er-do-wells and anyone not in STEM is stuck in ‘dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt’. Who the hell signed off on it?
As an alternative option, I’m thinking how about the statue howls out the following?
Ode on a Cone Beam Mandible
much have I travell’d in the realms of gold teeth
cone and beam surround thee
form sickening sycamore boughs
round thy feet— now behold the dim—
the red mountains in many spots—
may ye feast on sparrows
in noble cypress-groves;
and let summer time roll over
through the air till afterward
thy three daughters
were returned to the deacon,
taking the bags of wine
with that pledge, ‘because the trees
will be bare, so shall we be’
and went to the faery bank
where they slept on the steps
for two days, with water
or cleaning products
to stop rough sleepers
using the space.
of which comes the true fear? thou mak’st
my heart ricochet of moths betwixt
venetian blinds, beyond the glade's trees;
only some chirping bird bats, and again
a flock of brown hens; only today the leaves
are giving up their day jobs
placed with occlusal restorations
and pocketing
in the silent face of the windless sun
the milkmen deliver fatal blows.
Feel free to give me notes — for old time’s sake.
See you soon!
All best,
Nigel Dulge xo
p.s. I’m trying to build a likeminded community of readers and writers. Come on in, the water’s fine.
I’d love to hear from you!
If you would like to commission me to write something for your publication, my DMs are open
Aaand me and Jack Bartrop are releasing an album for free. Each poem + music track is super short, there will be 22 in total, and you can subscribe to get each one delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday.
Thanks so much for your
Not 100% accurate.