Salad Days
The radish is too ladish
To attract the carrot strips,
But tomatoes dream of celery
And blush down to their pips,
And the spring that’s in the onions
Send cucumbers a-twist,
So the feta beds the lettuce,
But the garlic stays unkissed.
State of the Art
You know, the public used to love
A crafted verse, a witty rhyme,
A fresh, bizarre or telling thought –
But that was all a diff’rent time.
These days, the public hardly notice,
’Cept for those they hear in songs –
Elsewhere in there gen’ral lives,
There’s nowhere where a verse belongs.
But, you know, I blame the poets,
Writing verse that’s too obscure –
Too aloof or crass or trendy,
Self-obsessed and immature.
There’s no-one wants to please the masses,
No-one wants to catch their mood –
I tell you, light verse is the highest
Form of poetry pursued.
Ah, but listen to me whinging –
Who am I, so untoward ?
After all, I try to please you,
And my verse is still ignored !
A Little Way Off
“Watching you daydream is like watching flowers bloom in real time.”
– Russell McLondon
When your eyes unhook their gaze,
Slipping back in time by seconds,
When your thoughts roam out to graze,
Something not-remembered beckons.
You are taken through by where-knows what ?
It’s all so ev’ryday except for when it’s not –
Just like random numbers, only with less plot.
And your smile is sort-of-just –
And never meant for those who see it.
And your breath is held in trust –
Softly, slowly, then you free it.
Waiting for your day to recommence,
You’re floating off beyond the realm of making sense –
Just like in the movies, only less intense.
Resurgam
At architecture’s stony heart,
The most intrusive form of art –
The hardest form to just ignore
It’s always there, forevermore.
And yet, each ancient monolith
Must first be built so they may live –
And stand a thousand years, or one,
The wrecker’s ball will always come.
Now see this cycle gather pace
As sprawl eats up all empty space –
To build from floor to chimneypot,
We now must find a victim lot.
To build, we first must pull apart,
A former draughtsman’s work of art –
Each building that we fight to save
Is stood upon another’s grave.
Tillers of the Ground
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat of thy bread
For here all the days of thy life,
And this is thy price when thou hearken instead
Now unto the voice of thy wife.
And the wheat thou shalt grow and shalt harvest and mill,
Where’erso the oak-tree may thrive,
Is fruit of the labours of farmers who till
To better the grains they shall scythe.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat of thy bread,
But sweet grow the grains in their ears –
For whilst thou lay pampered, they fattened each head
Since thousands and thousands of years.
Ghoti
Language is languid, it’s lazy at heart –
Refusing to change and keeping its calm.
Sometimes it’s hazy and falling apart,
But let’s view its ticks as a charm.
Cos under the surface, its footings keep shifting,
Its grammar gets shonky, it’s meanings keep drifting,
It’s making it up as it any-old wishes –
Till some fish are fish, but some fish are fishes.
Stagehand Biog
Beyond the tabs, there lurks this guy
Who hangs about in wing and fly,
Behind the flat and scaff and track
In creeping soles and black-on-black.
He waits in darkness for an age
To make his entrance on the stage
To set the prop and push the truck,
But only when the lights have struck.
So should you see him here tonight
Upon the thrust when all is bright –
If left exposed, a frightened stray,
Please pity him, and look away.
Human Nature of the Beast
We know that it isn’t correct these days
To dwell upon appearance.
We know we’re supposed to all scorn the gaze
Of probing and interference.
It’s what’s on the inside that’s worth all the praise,
If mutual respect’s to be more than a phase –
The package should never set eyeballs ablaze.
But have we the perseverance ?
We know this, we know this, we know it’s correct
That judgement should always be saved.
But on that first sighting, the verdict’s direct –
So tell our subconscious it’s badly behaved.
But in our defence, well, we must interject
That lust is a body that flexes unchecked –
So call it perverted, or lewd, or erect,
But still it comes grunting when craved.
We know that it isn’t correct at all
To dwell upon their beauties,
We know we’re supposed to quell the call
And concentrate on duties.
We know it’s absurd, but the order is tall,
And even the gentle and noble‘est fall,
And find themselves sweated and slavered of maul
At the hint of a glimpse of such cuties.
We know this, we know this, we know to our soul:
We’ve all of us bile and phlegm.
But don’t be ashamed, they’re a part of the whole,
A hangover from our primordial stem.
The things that’s important, to keep in our mind
Is that any such thoughts must be kept in our mind,
And to never be let out to leer or grind –
There’s more to our beings than them.
Adventures in Phantom Time
Charlemagne, Charlemagne, where did you go ?
Where is your kingdom and afterglow ?
Where is the Bede now, or Alfred the Great ?
Wherefore the burgeoning Byzantine state ?
What of iconoclasts spoiling the feast ?
What of the Slavs who are ruling the East ?
What of the Vikings’ unstoppable force ?
Just when will Lindisfarne fall to the Norse ?
Three hundred years, and none of it happened.
Three hundred years, and all lived in one day.
All of that history, artwork and trappings
Are nothing but forgeries, fooling away.
Nothing but myths and mistakes in the dating,
With stories conflating,
And years gone astray.
Charlemagne, Charlemagne, where is your reign ?
Where are the Arabs all storming through Spain ?
Where are the monks and the plainchants they sing ?
When will they bury the Sutton Hoo king ?
Where are the famines and smallpox and worse ?
Where is your Beowulf writing his verse ?
Where are they building their towers of bells ?
Where are they gilding the Vellum of Kells ?
Three hundred years, and none are correct –
Just three hundred years in the stroke of a pen.
All of that history – tattered and wrecked –
It’s either invented or happened elsewhen.
Nothing but legends and lack of hard data,
To make us all later, millennial men.
But three hundred years…
How many lives in those three hundred years ?
How many folks with their hopes and their fears ?
How many lovers, and soldiers, and seers ?
We shouldn’t ignore them, we shouldn’t mistreat them,
Or else we’ll be doomed to forever repeat them.
The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a conspiracy theory that purports that the period of history in Europe between HE 10614–10911 did not actually exist.
Complete bollocks, of course. Take away those years and the positions of the planets and the dates of eclipses as recorded in antiquity, and calculated backwards from today, wouldn’t line up. Oh, and the ancient Chinese would have to be in on it as well.
Posy Prosy
There’s no shame in prose,
In stories and sayings,
In thoughts and bon-mots,
And pledges and prayings.
But let’s not pretend
They are what they are not:
It’s prose that we’ve penned,
It ain’t poems one jot !
Be proud of our prose
For the prose that it is,
Cos ev’ryone knows
That good prose can still fizz !
And sure, we know sometimes
That prose is poetic,
But without the rhymes
Then our poems won’t click –
And ev’ryone knows
When there’s prose at the roots,
For poetic prose
Is still prose to its boots.
A verse without rhyme
Is a song without music –
But keeps its own time,
Which will helps, if we choose it –
For a song without music
Can still be quite stellar:
The beat lets us use it
To sing a capella –
The song is still driven
On metrical feet.
But a verse without rhythm’s
A song with no beat.
Yet a verse without rhythm
Can still be good prose,
And still can be striven for
When we compose.
So stop all this posing
Of poetic throes –
There’s no shame in prosing,
So let prose be prose !
Rhyming Couplets 