Author: Toastingfork

Not afraid to rhyme.

Giving Cynicism a Bad Name

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jaded
Jaded by Daisyland Official

Giving Cynicism a Bad Name

Gods dammit !, I’ve let myself grow optimistic !
I can’t believe I’ve let myself get hopeful-careless now !
“Cynical and real”, a jaded zeal and nihilistic tantra,
That was long my mantra, was my self-improving vow –
Forever “Cynical and real”, from Shangri-La to Slough.
Expect the worst – the worst exists – be never solipsistic –
I’m not alone, alas ! – there’s people ev’ry-bloody-where,
Who seem to think their mission is to try and make me care.
But hey, I seem to say, chuck that away for anyhow,
For maybe and perhaps and if-I-dare, and worth-a-prayer,
And gleaning gosh and go-for-it from what-about and wow.

Oh, this is gonna hurt, I know,
Oh, this is gonna crush me in the vice of lessons-learned.
But truly I deserve this blow,
Because the flame of Hope must feed on hope,
Must burn-up hope, till hope is burned.
I should, I do, know better than to think that this old rope
At which I grope, is yet a lifeline, not a noose.
Ah, what’s the use…
However much I tell myself
That hopefulness is bad for health
My under-mind is getting drunk on jubilation juice.
Defeat is gonna flood this town
Because I let my shields down,
And all because I let the bastard Hope get on the loose.
So come and claim me, He-Who-Wins,
Come poke my eyes and kick my shins,
My inner-voice needs dowsing and my spirit’s due a sluice.

But still…but still I hear its whisper, even now –
I hear it over ev’ry chanting of my vow –
“Cynical and real, must keep it cynical and real.
There’s no repeal.”
And if that’s bleak and bitchy, good !
It’s time I understood that harsh reality’s a cow,
It ain’t some sweet and sad-eyed pup.
So please, Defeat, please shoo the mutt
And shut the damn thing up !
Please be the poison in the buttercup,
The fungus in the bough.

Please, Defeat, for once, for all,
Please stop me dreaming quite so tall –
I cannot take another fall,
Another draining of my tao.
A swift one-two into the gut
Should hobble me my cocky strut
And fill my saccharine with gall.
Quick !  I feel another wave of optimism building –
But lilies aren’t for gilding,
They’re for bearers of the pall.
Quick !  Construct a wall to keep my pessimism filled in –
I pray for mental doors of bronze
To shut out Hope and all his cons,
And fire arrows at his swans, until the dread is drilled-in.

Please drag a plough across my brow,
I must allow more worries and more fears.
So please, to anyone who hears me
Hear me now !
Pray dim my eyes and salt my tears,
And help me chant my vow:
“Cynical and real, keep me cynical and real.”
And all you optimists, forgive me,
For I never meant to sign your deal.
“Mumble, moan, and squeal – always cynical and real.”
Let my dread of life outlive me,
For I never meant to let me feel.
Chant it with me,
Chant it with me,
Never let my let-downs heal.
Cynical and real, beneath the ever-groping thumb –
Keep me coping, keep me numb,
Before all Hope is come.

That Old Old Song

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love song

That Old Old Song

I must have heard ‘I love you’ sang,
In ev’ry song they always sang,
A hundred thousand times
Or more –
And wanted to believe it…

I must have heard them sing about
The love they had to sing about
A hundred thousand times,
I’m sure –
And who could disbelieve it ?

And yet, no matter how they sing it,
Still their songs can never swing it –
Love is not, and they can’t bring it in,
No matter how they rhyme.

Have they got nothing else to sing,
In all the world and ev’rything ?
Because their endless songs are wearing thin
The hundred thousandth time.

I must have heard ‘I love you’ sang,
I must have hoped and also sang,
A hundred thousand times
Or more –
And never did achieve it.

Pissing on the Pedants

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get a life

Pissing on the Pedants

Do you remember, back in school,
When teachers, parents, busybodies,
Told us, told us, told us how
Our grammar shamed our tongues ?
They called us slovenly and coarse,
No better than the brats of squaddies –
Smacked our hands and clipped our ears
And bellowed out their lungs.

They were wrong.  So wrong.
On ev’ry single point they taught.
Wrong that we couldn’t,
And wrong that we wouldn’t
And wrong that we cared what they thought.

Sometimes we mixed up laying and lying,
Or fewer and less,
But I guess that we just didn’t care.
The meaning was clear from the context,
As clearly as there is from their is from they’re.

We thunk and we brung and we beated –
The more they cared, the less we core.
And even today, they get heated,
But they can’t clip our ears no more.

Punctilagogaloquociatude

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dryden
John Dryden by Gary Brown

Punctilagogaloquociatude

Poor poor Johnny Dryden
Thinks that English is too English –
Wishes it could be more Latin,
Than this horde that he’s combatting.
But he’s heading for a hiding
If he thinks our mongrel language
Is a synonym for Latin,
Somehow ripe for reformatting.

Poor poor Johnny Dryden
Hates those final prepositions –
Keep them out, just like in Latin,
Else we’ll really let the cat in.
Always ready for some chiding,
He polices our transmissions
Should we stray away from Latin
In our ungrammatic chatting.

Poor poor Johnny Dryden,
Hates infinitives to split –
After all, you can’t in Latin…
Oh, to truly scholar that in !
But the mobs are over-riding
All his careful rules to bits !
Ripping off their hairshirt Latin
For their English shifts of satin.

The title is pronounced PUNK-till-uh-gog-uh-low-KWO-shah-tyood.

Pride & Vanity

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vanity
Vanity by Marta Dahlig

Pride & Vanity

If Gluttony is diff’rent enough from Avarice
To warrant a sin of its own,
Then how is Vanity denied ?
Is Gluttony not simply greed
Of a specialist and ravenous kind ?
And yet it claims to need a sep’rate plus-size Deadly bride.
So a fascination with one’s looks – why, surely this
Is sin enough to stand alone ?,
Wanton in its slow and catwalk stride.
Is Vanity not a diff’rent breed
Than mastery of the hand and mind ?
She needs to fight for a Sin of herself, an Eighth on par with Pride.

Some would add-in treachery and cowardice –
And lo, our list has grown
With these bonus sins we haven’t tried –
For ev’ry virtuous life we lead,
There’s even more to leave behind,
And takes us ever further from our short and handy guide.
Perhaps, when staring into the grim Abyss,
It’s not the time to tut and moan
At just which name should be applied.
But if there really is a need
To see these twins be redefined –
“I Am” belongs to Vanity, “I Can” belongs to Pride.

Of course – each deadly and elicit bliss
To which our mortals souls are prone
Is coupled with a better side –
A saving, which has been decreed
To counteract such moral grind –
Is Scruffiness a virtue, then ?  That seems undignified.
But honestly, the whole thing seems amiss –
If anything, this thought has shown
How Vanity is quite cock-eyed.
Yet still she struggles to succeed
To stand alone, not left behind,
As proudly Vain – and thus of course she’s still consumed by Pride.

After the Aftermath

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broken vinyl

After the Aftermath

I heard a cautious plucking
Of a rubber-banded string,
And a nervous, tuneless whistle,
And a doorbell’s lonely ring.
While the birds were oddly quiet
Till a starling risked a ping,
And a chorus of the grazing ewes replied.

As note by chord by tonic,
So the melodies returned –
For all we needed silence,
They cannot, will not be spurned.
We’ve lost them many times before,
But somehow never learned –
On the day beyond
The day the music died.

I heard the constant background hum
Change key,
To slowly raise the dead –
From tinnitus to the thrum of industry,
In C,
Inside my head.
From the tapping of the plumbing
To the footsteps that I tread,
Even my heartbeat was a drum
Which would not be denied.

One, Two, Three, Dead

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protest

One, Two, Three, Dead

Where are all the protest songs ?
Where is all the agit-pop to tell us ev’rything is wrong ?
I hear they’re out there, chanting still –
But somehow never reach me, and they prob’ly never will.

Where are all the protest songs ?
I mean, I know that pop has always
Been obsessed with love and lovers.
It’s rare than politics belongs
Beside the sugar on the airwaves,
Saving all its love for brothers.

They try to set the world to right,
But only in a quiet corner of the dial, late at night,
And fight-the-power-chords and tears
Are never crossing-over into unsuspecting teenage ears.

Best to use the tools you find
By marching to a funky beat
And tapping into pop’s romance –
For if you want to move the mind,
Then first you move the feet,
By making earworms of your chants.

Hypocrites

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LE BON SAMARITAIN
The Good Samaritan by Aimé Morot

Hypocrites

Many believers, I know, are heretics,
Spitting in the face of their Lord.
Not that they would credit my judgement,
Not that they would ever spit.
But their God, their God of love,
Is a god of hate with a jealous sword,
And His book, their book, is a pompous monster,
That they know is a monster, if they’d only admit.
Burning witches,
Slaving slaves,
And all because their Saviour saves –

But many believers, I know, are lovers,
Who love the world and who love its people,
Its ev’ry people, without exception,
When giving their time, their strength, their soul
To the homeless, hungry, the troubled and lonely,
Inspired, for sure, by their Sunday steeple.
Point to the scriptures, they shrug about ‘context’,
And get on with giving, and charging no toll.
Gays and women
Welcome here –
Despite each prophet, priest and seer.

Many believers, I know, are heretics –
And thank God they disobey !
Pray, God, turn all of your faithful to hypocrites,
Help them to spit, and to show You the way !

Everything from Shells

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coccolithophores
Various species of coccolithophores.  Each is a single-celled alga surrounded by plates.

Everything from Shells

Downs go up and downs go down,
As wave on wave of frozen ocean
Built each ridge and vale and crown
With ev’ry ancient tide in motion.
Tiny creatures swarmed the sea
And dropped their tiny plates all over,
From Stonehenge to Normandy
As deeply as the Cliffs of Dover.

Singular alga sounds all wrong, as if the term has become strictly a mass noun.

Handle for a Han Girl

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woman wearing eyeglasses
Photo by Phong Bùi Nam on Pexels.com

Handle for a Han Girl

Don’t ask me her birth-name,
For I never heard it
Till many years later – too late to take root.
No, she was called Clover:
So terribly English,
So strangely old-fashioned, and strangely un-cute.
And pure Anglo-Saxon – her name, but not her –
No, she was as Chinese as any I’ve met,
With excellent English and excellent manners,
Yet bearing the name that was all Somerset.

And as for her birth-name,
I knew that she had one,
But she never told me, and I never asked.
And had I been told it,
I’d only be baffled
By which was her first name, and which was her last.
So she plucked a new one, did Clover, a new name –
I don’t know why this name, but this name is she.
She chose it at high school, I gather – they all did,
Her classmates and Clover, they chose who to be.

She still has her birth-name,
She hasn’t erased it,
She still has her birth-name for using back home –
But here she is Clover
For living in London,
(Though maybe she’s Cleo when living in Rome).
We in the West are too jealous of birth-names,
We get what we get, and we lump what we got,
Then sneer at the actors and writers for daring –
But Clover is Clover because…well, why not ?