Miniatures
Model railways run in circles,
Through the days of steam,
All cobbled-streets and Northern quirk-ful,
In a Thirties dream –
A spotless, frozen neighbourhood,
Bedecked with tiny trees,
And terraces of balsa-wood,
And cardboard factories.
This world had vanished long before
These modellers were born,
But here, in H-O scale once more,
It’s elegantly worn.
They never show the modern world,
It seems – no urban sprawl.
Perhaps they take so long to build,
It sets their sights so small…?
Frame-Fillers
What makes Mona Lisa smile ?
Well, some say it’s the genius
Of Leonardo’s toils –
That undefining dreaminess,
That soul bared free, that hallowed style,
Not me –
No, I say it’s the pigments in his oils
That manifests his guile.
And now that she’s been painted, see,
She’s micrometre points-of-colour –
Sometimes brighter, sometimes duller –
Quantified by RGB,
And shared by log and file.
Leonardo’s canvas is just that,
And not some holy relic –
Just a poplar panel, nothing more.
What matters is no artefact,
And art critics aren’t clerics,
And a gallery is not a sacred store,
With treasures by the pile.
No – it’s the image, not the paint,
That we must cherish like a saint,
And never leave to perish –
But the board is just wooden tile.
And though there’s some may be indignant,
We can print with oil and pigment
Perfect copies, big and small –
Let’s have a thousand-Lisa free-for-all !
I’d say she’s worth the while…
Her beauty should be on the move,
Beyond the Louvre, to ev’ry wall –
So anyone can recreate her smile.
Apple-Woods
Orchards are lower these days,
The rootstock is stumpy on which they are grafted –
The trunks barely over our shoulders,
The branches still reachable, that’s how they’re crafted.
Their forests don’t crowd in a maze,
But spaced to let sunlight turn crabs into plumpers –
And these aren’t some wind-fallen moulders,
But lures to tempt deer in, and blackbirds, and scrumpers.
So take care when walking these ways –
For all that they’re waxen, these fruit can be hairy
When boughs can be heavy with boulders,
All lurking at head-height, to catch the unwary…
Well, there’s no denying that Autumn is with us, so it must be time for the annual month of fertility that is Inktober.
As as in previous years, my lack of drawing talent shall not restrain my fingers from sketching across the keyboard in a series of short and silly vignettes.
Though I do have to say that I have been thoroughly underwhelmed by the choice of words this year, as if all the interesting ones have already been taken. And I made a concerted effort to write them strictly in order, without looking-ahead at later prompts, all the time thinking ‘surely the next word will be something more potent…?’
Apple
Relic
Miniature
Cactus
Smack
Ogre
Panic
Stinky
Ram
Mystical
Rescue
Toss
Flimsy
Lady
Hooray
Gangly
Contraption
Flightless
Confused
Lounge
Hero
Beacon
Dapper
Bake
Fracture
Zip
Dumb
Trophy
Tusk
Cookie
Flex
Duff Said
This verse is not a winner,
That you really should ignore –
It’s a heading-for-the-bin-er,
Or a shoved-into-a-drawer.
This poetry is not your friend,
It’s smug and anodyne –
I really would not recommend
You read another line.
This verse is just a filler,
That you really should reject –
It’s a lacking-basic-skill-er
Or a flowery-unchecked
This poetry is all a lie –
This flim-flam’s such a flop –
I’m writing it, and even I
Am begging it to stop…
Dadgad & Zimmerman
I must be getting old,
But this doesn’t feel so much fun anymore.
Lis’ning to a pub band this weekend,
And suddenly the music’s not my friend.
The racket left me cold –
It wasn’t they were bad, as such, for sure…
But the PA was too loud – now there’s a phrase
That I never thought I’d utter all my days…!
They looked so middle-aged,
And so much less rock-&-roll as hokey-cokey.
So bald and fat and wheezy, just like me,
As they played their wall-of-sludge cacophony.
For all the singer raged,
His voice was lost within the karaoke –
I hate to say, but cranked up to eleven,
How they felt so out-of-place in rural Devon.
It’s me, though, truth be told –
My hearing just can’t tease their notes apart.
Though what has left me breathless ain’t the loud,
But the unrelenting crushing of the crowd.
I must be getting old,
If I’m waiting for the interval to start…
So sad and sobering a Sunday a outing
Now…where are all those clouds that need a shouting…?
The Mole in the Mole
Is mitochondria a parasite
That burrowed-down so deep,
That it had to shed its shell, its genes,
And then its very self, to creep ?
Yet at that time, the world was set alight
By plagues of oxygen,
That poisoned all these slow machines
And killing ninety-nine in ten.
But mitochondria had a superpower !
It ate-up all the gas,
And got so greedy gorging ATP
It spat some out as frass.
It took a fair few million years to flower,
To slowly shrink and dig –
And become the ghost in all life we can see,
All life that grew-up big…
Glitter Bugs
Diatoms are single cells,
Bedecked in crystal armour –
For unlike all those other shells,
They make theirs out of glass.
Some are pucks, and some are rods,
But ev’ry jewel a charmer –
They’re far too small to see, these pods,
Yet bloat with biomass.
Each greenhouse eating sunlight
Is a carbon-locking farmer –
They see the clean-up’s all done right,
Their fresh-air is world-class.
They filter-out pollution,
And they leave our water calmer –
These seaweeds in solution
Are the diamonds in the crass.
Ealingianki
I watch two Polish women
Talking small-talk, fluently, –
Talking waiting at the school-gates
For the bells of half-past three.
They’re talking English, with an accent,
Till their girls are free –
That’s their SSB-tongued daughters,
With a hint of estu’ry.
They’re talking both in English,
Until suddenly their not –
As their code-switching switches
For their mother melting-pot.
They sound conspiratorial,
A fiendish Polish plot !
Or is it me they talk about ?
They’ve seen I’m in earshot…
Except if course, it’s just their talk,
As back-and-forth they flow –
Why shouldn’t they ? And then I think,
Well, do they even know ?
As their Polish moves to English moves to Polish,
Round they go,
With their small-talk that is too-big
For one language to tableau.
Then all at once, the school-gates open
And the classrooms spill,
And they gather-up their Londoners
To walk them down the hill.
And I hear my daughter’s SSB,
With a hint of of Polish-frill,
That she’s picked-up from her classmates
As they teach her how to trill.
I Need Some Air
At first, I was dumbfounded by the rush,
And squeezed within the crush,
And now I think I’ve danced myself to hush –
My chords aren’t made of steel.
I just don’t have the breath to tell you,
Panting, how I feel –
I just ain’t got the means to yell,
Or roar, or even squeal.
I just don’t have the the vocal chops,
Or the power in my burning lung.
I can’t go shrieking from the rooftops
Like I did when I was young.
I cannot thrust my diaphragm,
To serve as my pneumatic ram.
I’m far too dizzy, too deflated,
Far too hyperventilated –
Strung-out, wrung-out,
Lost my shout,
And my words have got no clout upon my tongue.
I haven’t got the oxygen
To sing the chorus yet agen,
I guess it’s time to shut up when
My whistle just ain’t whistling.
But let me mumble, let me rasp,
In one more whispered, breathy gasp,
Before the words slip from my grasp:
Thank you all for lis’ning.
