The Gravity Pin
Paperweight, paperweight, glorious paperweight,
Balanced on letters and jottings and files –
And whether beneath you are crooked or straight,
They are anchor secure in obedient piles.
The Gravity Pin
Author: Toastingfork
Not afraid to rhyme.
Star-Glazing
Star-Glazing
(In reply to Walt Whitman)
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged
In columns before me, to add and measure,
When shown his charts and diagrams strange,
When I, sitting, heard the Astronomer,
Where he lectured with much applause,
How soon, tired and sick, I stirred
And wander’d off by myself outdoors.
There in mystical moist night-airs,
From time to time I look’d up clear
In perfect silence at the stars,
(And thought them small, and rather near.)
This is my take on Walt Whitman’s poem of the opening line. I’ve shuffled things around and made it rhyme, but most of it is his words except for the last line. Turns out he was just a luddite after all.
The First Second-Coming
The First Second-Coming
“All praise to Buddha !
God-son of Maya,
Born unto a Virgin,
On the twenty-fifth December.
Heralding his coming
Was a brightly shining star,
Gifts betrothed by Wise Men,
Songs by Angel-Choir.
Teaching in the Temple,
Twelve and on his todd,
Then baptised in the presence
Of the Spirit of the God.
Tempted hard by Mara,
Tempted while he fasted.
Feeder of five-hundred
From a small cake-basket.”
Or so I’ve heard it said by a suspicious few
Who desperately, desperately, want it to be true.
Are deities amalgams, at least in the telling ?
I can well believe it, but not the kind they’re selling.
But then, what do I really know about such secret lore ?
Perhaps you ought to tell me more…
“Healer of the sickened,
Walker on the water,
Renouncer of the World,
And poverty supporter.
A Kingdom of Righteousness
He built and oversaw –
Then came he down unto us
To fulfil the written Law.
Died upon a cross,
The rumour-mill endorses.
Sealed up in a tomb
Which rent by magic forces.
Rose up from the dead,
Ascended to Nirvana –
Promised to return
For Judgement on our karma.”
Or so I’ve heard it said by the endless games
Who never cite their sources and never check their claims.
Are deities amalgams, or cliches, or hopes ?,
With ev’ryone drawing on the same common tropes ?
I guess that the gods are our latent thoughts aloud
And the prayers go to the ones who please the crowd.
I read all the facts for this poem on a website a long time ago, and have never got round to verifying them, so this version of Buddha might be total bollocks – but then, all versions of Buddha are total bollocks.
Edit – I’ve decided not to check (well, more like finally admitted that I couldn’t be bothered to check) into what I strongly suspect is complete BS – so instead I’ve added the third and sixth verses.
And Saw That It Was Good
And Saw That It Was Good
Life, it seems, is ev’rywhere,
An opportunist spiv:
And ev’ry nettle, ev’ry rat,
And ev’ry spider, ev’ry gnat,
And ev’ry roach and snake and bat,
Is one more proof of nature’s flair
Through evolution’s sieve.
So love each thriving organism:
Dandelion, botulism,
Dry-rot, fly-bot, feral pigeon;
Life, it seems, is ev’rywhere,
It cannot help but live.
There is no Plan A
There is no Plan A
First there was sunlight and bedrock and ocean,
And acids amino, all churned in a dance –
When somethings were randomly formed in that potion
Of nutrient flow in a soupy expanse.
They hadn’t a thought or a want or a notion,
They hadn’t the know that they’d barely a chance;
They had no creator to watch with devotion,
So where could they go, and just how to advance ?
But networks were working and systems in motion
Which favour and grow and compete and enhance –
And so, life is life – a fluky explosion,
A spawny crescendo to blind happenstance.
Yes, I know I put an extra ‘e’ in the title of the picture above, but now it’s so much easier to say ! Interestingly, I’m not the only one, though there is some debate over which letter should represent that extra schwa:
Animalacule (both singular and plural) yields 1 screen (at twenty returns per screen)
Animalecule produces 3 screens – this one is my favourite, as it could mean “animated molecule”
Animalicule turns up six screens
Animalocule generates just 9 entries in total
Animalucule scores a measly 8 hits
Animalycule strikes out completely – though that’s before this page goes live, of course, which will increase the result to one.
Epistophile
Epistophile
Her lovers’ ink, the sneerful think,
Is sentimental brine –
But no, I say, for each cliché
Is lyricment divine !
The very fact her tritesome pact
Is heaped upon my shrine
Is surely worth all laboured birth –
Her rapturelust is mine !
Her spotted graft becomes a draught
Of witticismic wine –
Her passion grows in purple prose,
To bloom incarnadine.
Falling Worlds
Falling Worlds
(After Molière, The Learnèd Ladies, Act 3, Scene 3)
Another world has passed us by
Just as we were sleeping,
And fallen through our vortex as we lie –
A happenstance unseen across our sky.
For all the while the linens we were keeping,
A momentary spark can live and die.
Of Lost & Found Cities
Of Lost & Found Cities
Nineveh and Babylon have crumbled into dust,
Carthage, Ur and Jericho are pillars in the sand;
Once they were such glories, true – bustling and august –
But now reduced to legends and faint markings on the land.
London, though, is still alive, still growing and unplanned,
Not like dead Persepolis, where only mem’ry roams.
Ephesus and Ashkelon are sinking, gust by gust.
Luxor, Thebes and Memphis, now preserved in ancient tomes,
Sumer, Sardis, Akkad and Knossos are unmanned.
London, though, is standing yet, and just as grim and grand.
Middle-aged, with stuccoed bays and stock-brick-golden domes;
Humble tracks now avenues, from Oxford Street to Strand,
Yet keeps forever youthful as it builds and fells its homes.
Many structures barely make a century’s employ,
Ere yet another edifice is raised upon its bones;
And so King’s Cross and Bishopsgate, and Knightsbridge and Savoy
Have thus by slow rebuilding changed their slates and paving-stones.
Once an early city stood, whose name we still enjoy,
But now that ancient London’s quite as lost as Kish and Troy.
Bleed All About It
Bleed All About It
They came at first in ones or twos:
Unseasonal, yet harmless.
And with a swipe of printed news,
I turned those lively flies to flews –
A dextrous-forearm mess.
I turned those bottled-blueboys black,
A stain upon the masthead group –
An asterisk to heavy flack,
An apt critique on pap and hack,
This headline now a scoop.
But long before I’d reached the sport,
I heard some buzzing overhead –
And looking up, I must report,
A dozen more of equal sort –
The paper’s filth had spread !
With tabloid reciprocity
And breaking news of utter trash,
With gutterpress ferocity
I blazed each fresh atrocity
Upon my front-page splash.
The Devil May Care
The Devil May Care
The old man lay in bed and watched
His body eaten to decay.
How strong he’d been in his old day,
How weak he was today, how scotched.
How great his all-too-mortal fear,
How much he’d give for one more year –
He’d even sell his soul to get
To keep it in his body yet –
For even thought the end was near,
He longed to ante-up for one last bet.
“Indeed ?” a voice replied at large
In answer to his silent thought.
“Perhaps the bargain you have sought
Can be arranged, and free of charge.
Yet not a miracle, alas,
But biologic working-class –
To give your soul an unfair bite,
I bring a little hope tonight –
For while it’s true all thing must pass,
It passes slower for those souls who fight !”
Rhyming Couplets 