Delay Pedal
Strike a note – an A – with a delay to fade away and underlay the next you play.
Strike a note – an E – and you will see how easily it echoes free within the key.
Now slide away and do you see how this delay shall carry me
Across the stay, the next, and three, till they decay in filigree ?
Why did those Feet…?
I’ve often found it fairly odd,
The way the English always had
To borrow someone else’s god,
And rush to join the latest fad –
From Mother Earth to Father Woden,
Merlin and Sir Galahad,
Until at last, through constant goading,
So we fell for Jesus, bad !
But what was the attraction
In a bunch of desert-nomad tales ?
The sarabands that blew their action
Don’t translate to English gales –
I guess we want to get along –
A thousand martyrs can’t be wrong !
When cult’ral cringe is at its height,
The chariots are burning bright !
So Adam loves his country Garden
(Never naked, always blond),
But once he’s out, why would he harden
In a world so green beyond ?
And Noah’s rain is not a threat
To those who never felt a thirst,
And Moses needn’t raise a sweat
When native plagues of gnats are worse !
And Jesus, what about the lad ?
Politely yet at-length ignored,
Where nobody would call him mad,
Yet nobody would call him Lord.
“He’s far too foreign”, they would say,
“And far too showy – not our way.”
Yet somehow (why, though, isn’t clear)
Jerusalem was builded here.
Vaguely Georgian
When I rail against the bland sterility of Modern style,
Then this is not the antidote I seek !
These cut-and-pasted noddy-boxes miss the measure by a mile,
With all the mumbled sorries of the meek.
Sure, their bricks are red, their roofs are pitched, their gables high and wide,
But why the chimney-pots, for goodness sake ?
Windows (though they’re never sashed) may these days keep the warmth inside,
But why must all their glazing bars be fake ?
All wrapped around such tiny rooms of hollow studs and plasterboard
Which any neighbour’s sound can penetrate –
And basements don’t exist, nor anywhere luggage can’t be stored,
And the ceilings are so low, they suffocate.
Of course, compared with houses of the past, they have a lot to offer –
Plumbing, carpets, wires and insulation –
But still they’re easy prey for ev’ry Brutalist and Bauhaus scoffer,
As these clones have spawned across the nation.
But worst of all, these mega-builders have the blueprints on their books
Of many variations on the theme –
And yet, in any field, they seem so terrified to mix the looks
Incase there’s fewer profits left to cream.
And oversighting councillors, with targets jacked and budgets slashed,
Are powerless or spineless to allay.
And so this new Jerusalem is jerry-built and pebble-dashed –
And yet, still beats a high-rise any day !
One-and-a-Half
Rhythms march in syllables,
They count both on and off the beat,
But syncopated signatures in words
Can never fall as neat –
They last too long, or maybe
Not quite long enough to find a home –
They fuel our fire and flour our fear,
To foil and foul the metronome.
Exit the Dragon
Once were dragons, so they say,
In ancient times on ancient hills,
In red and gold and green and grey,
And some with teeth, and some with bills.
They say they slept in riverbeds,
Or lived in caves beneath the bats,
And some were spawned with seven heads,
And some would flock as thick as gnats.
Here be dragons, once-a-time,
Their shrieks were oft upon the breeze,
They flew where only geese could climb,
And nested in the tallest trees.
Their breath was hot, their blood was cold,
Their snorts would burst in fiery jets.
They snatched the sheep from out the fold,
And plucked the fish from out the nets.
Here were dragons, hereabouts,
With glossy coats of chequered scales,
And some with whiskers on their snouts,
And some with manes and feathered tails.
Dragons ! Dragons, ev’rywhere !
A horde of wyverns, so it’s said.
But none was safe within its lair
From he who bore the Cross of Red.
Good old George – he fills the aisles
As England’s saviour, brave and true.
We love to hear his quests and trials,
The wily beasts he stalked and slew.
He chased the wyrm from out these Isles –
But how I wish he’d spared a few !
If folks can live with crocodiles,
They could have lived with dragons, too.
Trees in Threes
1.
Trees are nice and all,
But I feel I’ve already seen ‘em –
They’re big and fat and tall,
With not a conker between ‘em.
And they’re so brown,
So endless brown,
Except where the leaves have greened ‘em.
2.
I’ve spied these trees before
On the other side of the woods –
They’re taunting me, I’m sure,
With their secret brotherhoods.
They move about at night, I swear –
For how else did those trees get there ?
But when I question them, they just ignore,
And won’t give up the goods.
3.
Poplar black and willow white,
I think that I have got that right –
But easy to confuse them, each,
Like copper birch and silver beech.
The Scream
Never mind the drama queen
Who’s posing by the railing,
As camp as a jellybean,
Just wibbly-wobbly wailing.
Never mind the sky of red
Or bay of blue-macabre –
Like Jupiter is overhead,
As streaky as the harbour.
Never mind if we can’t find
What makes the screamer crazed –
The couple coming up behind
Seem perfectly unfazed.
Scharfes Ess
I don’t care what you tell me,
It’s a B !,
Whatever Germans see.
A Beta-B, a bit more curvy,
Cool and verve-y,
Filigree.
This ligature is formal dress,
A symbol of the bourgeoisie.
But who could guess that it’s an S ?
Well, okay, two, that you compress
(or is it three…?)
Enough !
Don’t squeeze your esses into messes,
Let each ess breathe free !
And let’s supress this guff, unless,
We let it be a B !
I almost called this poem βcharfeβ-Eβ.
Te Deum
The hymns we used to sing at school,
The same we sang again in church –
With dreary verse by dozen verses,
Crawling by as slow as hearses.
Hymns we had to sing at school
Beneath the master’s gaze and birch,
We mumbled and we croaked along
In vain attempt to kill the song.
Amazing Grace,
Thou art no friend –
Oh, will thy tortures never end ?
But maybe those Victorians
Were not so grim in what they wrote –
They knew the lack of vocal fires
Within the souls of conscript choirs.
Those mutton-chopped Victorians
Were scoring for the weary throat –
Just make it monotone and slow,
And not too high and not too low.
Oh, Rock of Ages,
Hear our shout –
Pray let thine organ drown us out !
Of course, they almost killed the music,
Almost beat the rhythm from us –
Generations, stripped and cold,
With not one note that we could hold.
But still…there sang another music,
One with joy and lust and promise –
Yet the faithful still can’t figure
How the Devil’s tunes are bigger…
Hallelujah !
Mutants rule !
With our song Bright and Beautiful !
Asterisks
To my mind, at least,
For all their charms,
A starfish only has five arms –
Or fewer, I guess – the occasional fours –
Those species (or mutants ?) from stranger shores.
And then there are those that have been in the wars,
And still clearly lack what they’ve yet to grow back.
But more than five, at least to me,
Must clearly be a sea-star, see ?
Now, I have no idea how far or near they are,
The -fish and -star –
If species with x-number limbs displayed
Are brothers-in-arms within a clade ?-
Or whether an extra arm or three
Is all within the family ?
But since the urchins are based on fives,
And brittles and dollars and cucumbers too,
It does seem like the higher numbers are the lives with something new.
But when you tell me not to call them
(Any of them) as starfish,
I’m sorry, I cannot grant your wish.
You claim that they ain’t fish in fact,
They broke off from the stem before
The backbone got I on the act.
But what the hell ? There’s plenty more,
Like jelly-, silver- and shell-fish by the score,
Which are even further from the core !
The word is Anglo-Saxon
And it simply meant a creature from the sea,
But now you claim the taxon
Is whatever you decide that it must be.
And then you say that we are fish as well,
It’s in our genes, you tell –
Well yes, but then the fishy way you preach
Is stinking up your speech.
I know that I’m a vertebrate –
That I am closer to a lungfish
Than a lungfish is to any trout.
But that’s not what I’m on about –
It’s not the science that I hate,
But how you cannot separate
The mathematic from the ev’ryday.
So would you really try to ban the lot ?
The sea-horse is no horse, you say.
(The hippopotamus is not
A real river-horse, of course –
But that’s in Greek, so seemingly okay.)
You want me to favour the sea-star for starfish,
So even the fives will henceforth be
Now sea-stars in perpetuity.
But that still makes no sense to me –
They may not be strictly fishes like we are,
But stranger by far to name them after a star !
Rhyming Couplets 