Blah... Blah...
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. - Paul Valery
Cameo of my psyche
Lets move on
They say,
the academic daddios of the world,
that poetry slipped into a coma
sometime during the hip joint beat
of the sixties, and now it's dead!
Like, real dead.
Like_
never woke up man.
______________________________
As you love it
All the world's a siege,
and all the men and women merely warriors;
they have their hopes and their defences,
and one man in his time wounds many hearts...
______________________________
Before I write
The first act is a little odd,
simply put, I unscrew my head,
hold it tight under the crutch of an arm,
and with a free hand, preferably clean,
pull out the tulips and daffodils
to plant the seeds of surrealism.
I then place the house on mute.
It is important to note
that I don't actually press a button-
to leave the pendulum in mid swing
or the dog, jaws open, in the throes of a bark,
its just a figure of speech.
But sometimes the topic,
that little something I'd been thinking of,
mulls about in a trough
in a far quarter of my brain
before it waves farewell,
retires to a quaint cottage in Nova Scotia
where its midnight
and fog rules the land with a shadowed fist.
And so to the theme, the idea,
the vary nature of the poem
is largely forgotten,
lost, misplaced.
But to anyone who enters
that silence of the room
before I'm ready, vague, uncomposed,
the image of a headless man,
knee deep in the petals of spring flowers,
will forever remain.
__________________________
Sausages
The strangest oddity
about sausages is:
they may sound great in the pan
but in the cold waters of verse
they're lousy.
_____________________
A Blooming Thorn
Where are my flowers?
Where are the roses? The peonies? The daffodils?
Where are all the niceties of life which you so passionately embellished?
All you offer is a sweet kernel of a poem, a half nurtured rendition of love.
And your meagre explanation -an arrow to the soft butt of my heart-
that it will grow in an anthologies garden,
a little thumbed plot in the middle of a book,
sadly, it must be said, this does not our relationship make...
And we haven't made love for a week!
Other people make love every night!
Why don't we make love every night?
Why do I get the feeling that I'm a door and you the bolt?
My feelings are open and you hold yours back!
So what are you going to do about it?
Its late. Put down your pen and snuff out the light.
Have you bolted the door? Fed the cat?
Are you sure? Check the door again.
And what did you mean, when you said,
'Even the blind will see them.
The diligent trace of a finger
moving over the soft wind of a page
to reel back, for a wary moment,
on the first prick of a scorn.'
Ha, ha! I get it. You write of me.
I am the thorn, the hole in the bucket.
But I see no sense in your work!
It does not mow the lawn of modern literature;
it does not paint a fence, a- bold - white - picket fence
around the structured grounds of your poem;
it entices the sundry reader, that casual slipper of an arcane society,
to trample on your well manicured lawn;
it's neither a wild orchid to the trailered lapel of critics,
nor is it a vivid carnation to the buttonhole of a passing mind.
Don't look so glum! You can write again_ perhaps next week.
Is the window open? Are you sure? Check it!
And did I tell you Mrs Morrovitch has a new suite?
And did I tell you *D.F.S. has a sale?
...I'm tired, the heady stream of the day has been
a flash flood to my head_,
so leave your verse, the budding rhyme,
in your notebooks shallow fields,
and by the way_,
we need to be there for nine.
* DFS is a major store in the UK for suites and room accessories.
_____________________________
Confucius say
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Unless, of course, there's a lawyer involved
and then it becomes a Chinese meal:
sweet for some, sour for others.
_____________________________
The Planetarium.
Of gravity and other things
Bubbles rise!
And so does smoke!
We congregated in the science room.
A gathering of infants.
Young minds waiting to be expanded.
The science man spoke with big words:
inertia, relativity, Einstein.
He seemed not to know what it was
only how it operates!
As it had yet to be proved, he said,
beyond mathematical doubt.
Even so, he filled our minds
with the heaviest of explanations
about gravity and other things,
how to earth all things come, whether an apple,
a meteor, an object tossed from the hand;
and he demonstrated with marbles.
He mentioned a resistance to it all,
a growing velocity that can be calculated,
and I asked him, 'these upsurges,
these none believers to the gravity thing,
did they use computers or an abacus?'
He was not amused, his face contorted
as if weighed by infantile views.
____________________________
Recipe for war:
Take one middle range country,
preferably hot,
and marinate in oil for a million years.
As for spice: add a despot.
____________________________
Hard Times
Fathers clock - -
it still ticked in the room,
in the hall,
in the pawn brokers to save the bread line.
And slowly my mind would crawl
along the corridor to the kitchen
to hear him cough
and mutter a little
as he prepared his box for the Mine.
_____________________
Hive of the City
It starts with a slow whine:
the long drawn out moan
of a train, its empty carriages rattling
like cheap china cups to a table,
the 6 O’clock toots Of taxies,
the paper boys and their pleading cries
of 'Paper! Paper! Daily News!'
Morning joggers with their heavy wheeze,
‘Delilah’ sung by drunken fools,
the club footed postman who tests hinge and flap,
the milkman who rattles his wares,
and when he moves
- from lane to street, house to flat -
violins strum from his electric cart,
the neighbours car, three attempts to start:
at first a cough, the second grinds a tune,
and the third: an applause, a tremendous boom.
When silence beckons
memories come all too soon.
I lie awake in the soft breast of the country.
I'm surrounded by calmness and scented air.
Here the sounds are muffled, almost mute.
But there's one, a sonnet to my ear: close-by
honey bees go about their route,
and on this buzz, their daily activity
-a rhetoric hymn from budding workers-
committed and industrious, I hear the hive of my distant city.
___________________________
Commercial
It must be midnight!
But the gold imitation, authentically embossed, carriage clock,
charming to the pensioner's eye
and comes with a month's free trial,
says otherwise; it chimes, tock! Tock! 4 O' clock.
A trio of mallards,
hand crafted by the Benedictine Monks
on an Isle that has no birds,
or even a gantry of an airport,
lay as paint-ball splats to a wall;
in a corner, by a thimble-sized lava lamp,
on an Edwardian, 17th century video rack,
a TV flickers help in morse; it is the late film:
an anvil-jawed hero, T-square shoulders,
stained flight jacket and Cuban cigar,
wanders backwards down a cobweb tunnel-
with a torch made from a skeleton's attire;
music plunges from an elevator tempo
to the pulsating beat of a marathon's heart.
...and the room's sole occupant, senses something
is terribly wrong: "Why does the battery commercial
last longer than the battery?
And that Italian take-away with mozzarella,
anchovies and forty types of cheese
have the same chemical properties of super glue!
And that damned soap advert! It makes you think!
How can they improve it - - AGAIN!"
It is quarter to four
[the carriage clock tells you so].
In the melting shadows
the trio of 'looks good in any room' mallards
make a break for it, slide down the 'Ronco- easy to wipe' wallpaper,
as the lava lamp
-made in Taiwan and came with a free Bic Biro- overheats,
and what little light there is, is lost.
The Movie returns.
The Occupant screams, "look out behind you!"
And you know, as he sits in his alpine fresh clothes
wiping lips from a microwaved pizza,
jabbing at buttons on an unresponsive remote,
a single attempt to change the impromptu station in his life,
that its all, a little too late.
__________________________
Short Tale - Big Rabbits
By a house there is road
and from this road
a rickerty lane,
from that lane a field
and in this field you'll find
that wheat is tightly bound
in shinny films of plastic.
To locals this is normal,
to tourists quite a sight:
to find a field of droppings
from some enormous rabbit!
_________________________
Your poem is your child [not sure if I wrote this one, found it on my works HD]
You grunt and moan at the birth of it.
You may not know where it came from
but there it is, wriggling on the page.
You are its mother and father.
You are undoubtedly the creator.
_________________________
Beware Subliminal Messages
If the compulsive nature of desire was compared to a commercial
[inter spaced with subliminal messages-
and soap box one liners]
it could be like this:
you'd start at opposite ends of a poppy field
-or some other weed infested garden
inter spaced with pollen and the odd butterfly-
and pretend to be Nassa's latest Astronauts.
When you meet [which is usually beside a tree]
you revolve like a Carousel, music springs from nowhere,
there are no horses, but you have a strong, insatiable desire
to blow into the vacuum of your partners mouth.
You then swap pleasantries,
such as: 'at last we're together...'
Followed by: 'if not for you, I would never have discovered...'
Adding: 'and its good for you-- too!'
If desire, that all inclusive package, was a commercial
[which lasts 3 minutes and then it's all over
so sit back and watch the Movie
entitled 'The Rest Of Your Life' on a two piece sofa
with a loved one and a box of hankies asleep on your thigh]
you'll probably wait for the next one
while pondering on a strange, compulsive desire
to gorge on chocolate, which you never buy, never eat
and comes with a name you cannot pronounce.
Whilst your partner, on the other hand,
is busy rooting the CD collection,
a dizzying search for the musical tones of a group
he can neither recite nor hum,
but it sounds like: Love cocooned - by the Horse Astronauts.
______________________
My Fathers Zen
[still working on this one. The '99' means I'm searching for a word]
Give the man your wallet
if one hand shuffles like a trapped eel
in the muffled cage of his pocket,
and hunger, a 999 mask,
is mascara to his eyes;
for it is easier, he says,
to remove the bulk of a cows hide
from the silken threads of a camel coat
then a lead slug from the heart.
_____________________
The Old Barn [a re-write]
The Old Barn breathed years of neglect,
and silence, with its equatable need for peace,
its only sign. Although to some,
it was the untidy image of a beggar:
drunk on a lawn
with uncut tuffs of grass
barking like wild dogs to his heels.
But now, with a coat of paint and a jazzy sign,
a few hand pumps selling quaffing's of real ale,
to the locals, it became known as the Tavern.
People travelled from miles around
to drink in it, eat in it, be in it.
Posh cars would park outside,
the one's with little animal motifs protruding from the bonnet,
and off-roaders, wheels thicker then tractor tyres
would spin around the barn creating deep ruts in the grass--,
and everyone would cheer, and drink, and dance,
and make general fools of themselves.
Until one day, someone looked up at the barn,
probably through the bottom of a champagne glass, and said,
'it looks like an old beggar lying down on the grass
with a classy coat and a smart badge,
holding his breath, waiting for us to leave.'
And no one went there anymore.
Fear of being associated with tramps I suppose.
Nature played her hand; seasons ran like rabbits;
and the old barn, with paint pealing and sign singing with the wind,
let out a great sigh of relief as the roof collapsed.
But to some it still remained as the old beggar,
who, drunk on a lawn
was content with the image,
the solitude,
the long howling grass.
_________________________
While You Slept
"Morning rose with a jubilant yawn
and on they came
sliding on sunbeams
through cracks and pin holes of the curtain:
weary stares
- after a night of hard labour -
tired and lost
finding refuge in kiss curls:
the little blond hammocks of your hair.
You were the vessel
and stars the crew.
Jealousy became me:
to blow hot and lustful
like the harse wind of zephyr
to the soft sands of the sahara,
it was cruel of me.
And so I woke you."
___________________________
Cameo of my psyche
Lets move on
They say,
the academic daddios of the world,
that poetry slipped into a coma
sometime during the hip joint beat
of the sixties, and now it's dead!
Like, real dead.
Like_
never woke up man.
______________________________
As you love it
All the world's a siege,
and all the men and women merely warriors;
they have their hopes and their defences,
and one man in his time wounds many hearts...
______________________________
Before I write
The first act is a little odd,
simply put, I unscrew my head,
hold it tight under the crutch of an arm,
and with a free hand, preferably clean,
pull out the tulips and daffodils
to plant the seeds of surrealism.
I then place the house on mute.
It is important to note
that I don't actually press a button-
to leave the pendulum in mid swing
or the dog, jaws open, in the throes of a bark,
its just a figure of speech.
But sometimes the topic,
that little something I'd been thinking of,
mulls about in a trough
in a far quarter of my brain
before it waves farewell,
retires to a quaint cottage in Nova Scotia
where its midnight
and fog rules the land with a shadowed fist.
And so to the theme, the idea,
the vary nature of the poem
is largely forgotten,
lost, misplaced.
But to anyone who enters
that silence of the room
before I'm ready, vague, uncomposed,
the image of a headless man,
knee deep in the petals of spring flowers,
will forever remain.
__________________________
Sausages
The strangest oddity
about sausages is:
they may sound great in the pan
but in the cold waters of verse
they're lousy.
_____________________
A Blooming Thorn
Where are my flowers?
Where are the roses? The peonies? The daffodils?
Where are all the niceties of life which you so passionately embellished?
All you offer is a sweet kernel of a poem, a half nurtured rendition of love.
And your meagre explanation -an arrow to the soft butt of my heart-
that it will grow in an anthologies garden,
a little thumbed plot in the middle of a book,
sadly, it must be said, this does not our relationship make...
And we haven't made love for a week!
Other people make love every night!
Why don't we make love every night?
Why do I get the feeling that I'm a door and you the bolt?
My feelings are open and you hold yours back!
So what are you going to do about it?
Its late. Put down your pen and snuff out the light.
Have you bolted the door? Fed the cat?
Are you sure? Check the door again.
And what did you mean, when you said,
'Even the blind will see them.
The diligent trace of a finger
moving over the soft wind of a page
to reel back, for a wary moment,
on the first prick of a scorn.'
Ha, ha! I get it. You write of me.
I am the thorn, the hole in the bucket.
But I see no sense in your work!
It does not mow the lawn of modern literature;
it does not paint a fence, a- bold - white - picket fence
around the structured grounds of your poem;
it entices the sundry reader, that casual slipper of an arcane society,
to trample on your well manicured lawn;
it's neither a wild orchid to the trailered lapel of critics,
nor is it a vivid carnation to the buttonhole of a passing mind.
Don't look so glum! You can write again_ perhaps next week.
Is the window open? Are you sure? Check it!
And did I tell you Mrs Morrovitch has a new suite?
And did I tell you *D.F.S. has a sale?
...I'm tired, the heady stream of the day has been
a flash flood to my head_,
so leave your verse, the budding rhyme,
in your notebooks shallow fields,
and by the way_,
we need to be there for nine.
* DFS is a major store in the UK for suites and room accessories.
_____________________________
Confucius say
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Unless, of course, there's a lawyer involved
and then it becomes a Chinese meal:
sweet for some, sour for others.
_____________________________
The Planetarium.
Of gravity and other things
Bubbles rise!
And so does smoke!
We congregated in the science room.
A gathering of infants.
Young minds waiting to be expanded.
The science man spoke with big words:
inertia, relativity, Einstein.
He seemed not to know what it was
only how it operates!
As it had yet to be proved, he said,
beyond mathematical doubt.
Even so, he filled our minds
with the heaviest of explanations
about gravity and other things,
how to earth all things come, whether an apple,
a meteor, an object tossed from the hand;
and he demonstrated with marbles.
He mentioned a resistance to it all,
a growing velocity that can be calculated,
and I asked him, 'these upsurges,
these none believers to the gravity thing,
did they use computers or an abacus?'
He was not amused, his face contorted
as if weighed by infantile views.
____________________________
Recipe for war:
Take one middle range country,
preferably hot,
and marinate in oil for a million years.
As for spice: add a despot.
____________________________
Hard Times
Fathers clock - -
it still ticked in the room,
in the hall,
in the pawn brokers to save the bread line.
And slowly my mind would crawl
along the corridor to the kitchen
to hear him cough
and mutter a little
as he prepared his box for the Mine.
_____________________
Hive of the City
It starts with a slow whine:
the long drawn out moan
of a train, its empty carriages rattling
like cheap china cups to a table,
the 6 O’clock toots Of taxies,
the paper boys and their pleading cries
of 'Paper! Paper! Daily News!'
Morning joggers with their heavy wheeze,
‘Delilah’ sung by drunken fools,
the club footed postman who tests hinge and flap,
the milkman who rattles his wares,
and when he moves
- from lane to street, house to flat -
violins strum from his electric cart,
the neighbours car, three attempts to start:
at first a cough, the second grinds a tune,
and the third: an applause, a tremendous boom.
When silence beckons
memories come all too soon.
I lie awake in the soft breast of the country.
I'm surrounded by calmness and scented air.
Here the sounds are muffled, almost mute.
But there's one, a sonnet to my ear: close-by
honey bees go about their route,
and on this buzz, their daily activity
-a rhetoric hymn from budding workers-
committed and industrious, I hear the hive of my distant city.
___________________________
Commercial
It must be midnight!
But the gold imitation, authentically embossed, carriage clock,
charming to the pensioner's eye
and comes with a month's free trial,
says otherwise; it chimes, tock! Tock! 4 O' clock.
A trio of mallards,
hand crafted by the Benedictine Monks
on an Isle that has no birds,
or even a gantry of an airport,
lay as paint-ball splats to a wall;
in a corner, by a thimble-sized lava lamp,
on an Edwardian, 17th century video rack,
a TV flickers help in morse; it is the late film:
an anvil-jawed hero, T-square shoulders,
stained flight jacket and Cuban cigar,
wanders backwards down a cobweb tunnel-
with a torch made from a skeleton's attire;
music plunges from an elevator tempo
to the pulsating beat of a marathon's heart.
...and the room's sole occupant, senses something
is terribly wrong: "Why does the battery commercial
last longer than the battery?
And that Italian take-away with mozzarella,
anchovies and forty types of cheese
have the same chemical properties of super glue!
And that damned soap advert! It makes you think!
How can they improve it - - AGAIN!"
It is quarter to four
[the carriage clock tells you so].
In the melting shadows
the trio of 'looks good in any room' mallards
make a break for it, slide down the 'Ronco- easy to wipe' wallpaper,
as the lava lamp
-made in Taiwan and came with a free Bic Biro- overheats,
and what little light there is, is lost.
The Movie returns.
The Occupant screams, "look out behind you!"
And you know, as he sits in his alpine fresh clothes
wiping lips from a microwaved pizza,
jabbing at buttons on an unresponsive remote,
a single attempt to change the impromptu station in his life,
that its all, a little too late.
__________________________
Short Tale - Big Rabbits
By a house there is road
and from this road
a rickerty lane,
from that lane a field
and in this field you'll find
that wheat is tightly bound
in shinny films of plastic.
To locals this is normal,
to tourists quite a sight:
to find a field of droppings
from some enormous rabbit!
_________________________
Your poem is your child [not sure if I wrote this one, found it on my works HD]
You grunt and moan at the birth of it.
You may not know where it came from
but there it is, wriggling on the page.
You are its mother and father.
You are undoubtedly the creator.
_________________________
Beware Subliminal Messages
If the compulsive nature of desire was compared to a commercial
[inter spaced with subliminal messages-
and soap box one liners]
it could be like this:
you'd start at opposite ends of a poppy field
-or some other weed infested garden
inter spaced with pollen and the odd butterfly-
and pretend to be Nassa's latest Astronauts.
When you meet [which is usually beside a tree]
you revolve like a Carousel, music springs from nowhere,
there are no horses, but you have a strong, insatiable desire
to blow into the vacuum of your partners mouth.
You then swap pleasantries,
such as: 'at last we're together...'
Followed by: 'if not for you, I would never have discovered...'
Adding: 'and its good for you-- too!'
If desire, that all inclusive package, was a commercial
[which lasts 3 minutes and then it's all over
so sit back and watch the Movie
entitled 'The Rest Of Your Life' on a two piece sofa
with a loved one and a box of hankies asleep on your thigh]
you'll probably wait for the next one
while pondering on a strange, compulsive desire
to gorge on chocolate, which you never buy, never eat
and comes with a name you cannot pronounce.
Whilst your partner, on the other hand,
is busy rooting the CD collection,
a dizzying search for the musical tones of a group
he can neither recite nor hum,
but it sounds like: Love cocooned - by the Horse Astronauts.
______________________
My Fathers Zen
[still working on this one. The '99' means I'm searching for a word]
Give the man your wallet
if one hand shuffles like a trapped eel
in the muffled cage of his pocket,
and hunger, a 999 mask,
is mascara to his eyes;
for it is easier, he says,
to remove the bulk of a cows hide
from the silken threads of a camel coat
then a lead slug from the heart.
_____________________
The Old Barn [a re-write]
The Old Barn breathed years of neglect,
and silence, with its equatable need for peace,
its only sign. Although to some,
it was the untidy image of a beggar:
drunk on a lawn
with uncut tuffs of grass
barking like wild dogs to his heels.
But now, with a coat of paint and a jazzy sign,
a few hand pumps selling quaffing's of real ale,
to the locals, it became known as the Tavern.
People travelled from miles around
to drink in it, eat in it, be in it.
Posh cars would park outside,
the one's with little animal motifs protruding from the bonnet,
and off-roaders, wheels thicker then tractor tyres
would spin around the barn creating deep ruts in the grass--,
and everyone would cheer, and drink, and dance,
and make general fools of themselves.
Until one day, someone looked up at the barn,
probably through the bottom of a champagne glass, and said,
'it looks like an old beggar lying down on the grass
with a classy coat and a smart badge,
holding his breath, waiting for us to leave.'
And no one went there anymore.
Fear of being associated with tramps I suppose.
Nature played her hand; seasons ran like rabbits;
and the old barn, with paint pealing and sign singing with the wind,
let out a great sigh of relief as the roof collapsed.
But to some it still remained as the old beggar,
who, drunk on a lawn
was content with the image,
the solitude,
the long howling grass.
_________________________
While You Slept
"Morning rose with a jubilant yawn
and on they came
sliding on sunbeams
through cracks and pin holes of the curtain:
weary stares
- after a night of hard labour -
tired and lost
finding refuge in kiss curls:
the little blond hammocks of your hair.
You were the vessel
and stars the crew.
Jealousy became me:
to blow hot and lustful
like the harse wind of zephyr
to the soft sands of the sahara,
it was cruel of me.
And so I woke you."
___________________________