Think big

Think big was the mantra of my childhood, a symptom of sixties optimism, opportunities and seizing the day. I didn't question it. There were other things to worry about, like war. 

Soon it'll be a year since the first lockdown. I'd begun to think small, from force of circumstance - I have enough clothes and shoes, books, pens, paper, jam. I've paid off the house. I grow vegetables and fruit on my allotment. 

Month by month I've been shifting my expectation of what I can live on downwards to the £7,000 a year the state pension will give me at the end of January. Lockdown has helped. Nothing to spend money on. 

Big thought bothers me. Where does it live? In theory, in entitlement, in big statements, literary, artistic, economic, social, in tabloid headlines, gatherings. What does it take to think small? Is my fear about big thought, just that - fear? 

In the poetry I most enjoy, a writer hones in on detail that carries a metaphor. This may or may not be consoling, its aim may or may not be to drop an insight into the world I know and change it slightly. I have been struggling with poems of big ideas, poems disrupting narrative, language and syntax to the point when language is useless. I am reminded of cardboard box man leaving number 10 with his disruptive ideas. I wonder where big ideas will lead, not to understand a poem because it is so far from what's spoken, in a place without tunes or meaning, just an individual performing the big idea, with other individuals.