Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2026
Left to My Own Devices, poems by Oz Hardwick.
Left to My Own Devices
When I open my eyes it’s still dark, all the lightbulbs are cracked, and the candles have grown wings and flown south for better tax rates. It feels like the weekend but without the days off, or like a hand-knitted balaclava worn in sleet. Everything I remember only makes sense until it meets something else I remember, then all bets are off. At least once a week my sister hangs like a China puppet over a pit that is sometimes full of new-born chickens and sometimes nettles. Occasionally, she looks down at a blue door that opens to a corridor lined with old mops and fire extinguishers – a lot of old mops and fire extinguishers – which leads to a bunker where one day we may all be saved, assuming Jesus doesn’t save us first. Even in such darkness, the promise of salvation sends shivers up or down my spine, because it’s so dark that up and down are meaningless, and I set out up or down to the shops with the reassuring weight of pennies on my eyelids, my mouth full of cold, wet wool. I join the queue for oil lamps and flint. If I time things wrong, I’ll miss the weekend completely, trapped in endless aisles, labouring for crusts, Dr Pepper, and pistachio ice cream with the blessed saints and all their earthly avatars. From up above, I hear my sister’s voice as clear as a breaking window, calling me to look at all I’ve done and all I’ve still to do to set it right, but it’s still so very dark and I’ve a feeling my balaclava may be on backwards.
Machine Learning
and the Subconscious Cat
Not knowing what to do with my data, the algorithm selects images of cute cats dressed up as pirates, superheroes, and ballerinas. I have no interest in any of these categories – pardon the wholly unintended pun – but there’s no denying I love cats, and I can’t help imagining the distress and ensuing carnage if I attempted to play dress-up with the ginger lad who’s currently curled like an Oxford comma on my lap, adding emphasis to the pause before the final item on a list of possibilities. Notice the further pause/paws homophonic pun, again unintentional, because I can only manage meaning to a fairly limited extent, and I spend my days struggling with language, as if I’m trying to wrestle my cat into tights and a tutu, or a cape, or an eyepatch, and it never looks as good as it does in the pictures, and it ruins both our mornings. And because my cat both is and is not a metaphor – note the dependent clause – the algorithm keeps churning out more of the same.
How, Being Autistic,
Everything is My Fault
What frightens us is not the helplessness that oozes from every retro transistor radio, catchy as a 60s hit. It’s not even the vastness of the situation, as inevitable as a B-movie asteroid creeping closer in every desperate cutaway. Rather, it’s the intimation that we could perhaps effect a change through small actions, like Lorenz’s seagull flapping its wings to initiate a tornado. How, we ask in our panic, can we possibly agree on when and where to flap, in order to depose dictators, reverse the worst of our spiralling climate, or even just call those slippery ranks on private islands and in the backs of cars with tinted windows to some kind of account? And maybe it’s our flapping that caused the whole damn mess to start with. More specifically, it was likely my flapping, which is why I’m at pains to still my hands, and even my fingers, whenever anyone – even myself – might see, confining such actions to when I’m fast asleep in darkened rooms. Of course, being something of a poet since 1972, I can, with a stroke, transform that seagull into a butterfly: there is, after all, a precedent, but it’s a tough line to write and it’s all the responsibility my brittle wings can bear.
© Oz Hardwick
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional dabbler in other arts, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe fifteen” full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in back rooms of pubs.
With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), and with Cassandra Atherton he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).
A lifelong space rock obsessive, Oz has recently contributed to albums by Space druids, Incubus Lovechild, and Otherworld. www.ozhardwick.co.uk