They’re funny things, are names, As they rise and fall with fashion, And so fluky in their claims For what newborns they can ration From the finite pool of name-less youths To whom they shall be handed – To turn them into Bens and Ruths, And leave them tagged and branded. And sometimes from colloquial obscurity Comes suddenly a surge into maturity, As sweeping ’cross the country comes The choice of sev’ral-thousand mums. And maybe just as quickly as they flourished, So we find them lost and undernourished: Out-of-date and now a joke, Just withered names on withered folk. They’re funny things, are names: They’re just sounds and signs and smoke.
These words are mine, And you shan’t have them – These are mine, and mine alone. I guard them close So none may grab them – Guard them close, these words I own. Oh, how much you want them, want them, Oh, how much you seethe and pine So here, take envy, just for you… But jealousy is mine, all mine !
It should be pointed out that the conflation of jealous to mean envious has a long history, and Wiktionary provides quotes of both Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain using it this way. As a strict descriptivist, I have no problem with this (as shown here), but tend not to use jealous at all, preferring envious and possessive. But that’s just me.
detail from Experiment with an Air Pump by Joseph Wright
Soul-Lights
Perhaps she is just a chimera, Or otherwise born with this curious guise – For ev‘er‘ytime that I’m near her, I cannot but help to look into her eyes. Perhaps she has suffered a trauma, Where blood is now staining her iris tattoo That partially came to transform her, With one eye of hazel, the other of blue. And further, her hazel is golden Encircling her iris, but greener beyond. Her stare surely has me beholden, Her pupil eclipsing its het’rochrome pond. No contacts nor tumours nor ’Shop-tricks Are needed to give them what rarely occurs. If souls can be glimpsed in our optics, Then softly she carries a rainbow in hers.
The banks all held a holiday, with ev’ryone invited: These pin-striped bowler-hatted gents were thoroughly delighted To paddle in the briny sea with crowds of day-trip workers, And hike the green and pleasant hills and join the mansion-lurkers. They greeted bakers, plumbers, teachers, ev’ryone from ev’ry measure – Watched the doctors, taxmen, postmen, ev’ryone about their leisure. ’Cept for those, of course, who had no need for such a lazy day, Because these reckless banker shits had stolen all their jobs away.
Judas in paintings is often the one Who’s sporting the bright carrot hair. What does this signify, why was this done ? For redheaded Jews were exception’ly rare. Maybe he dyed it with henna, of course, For most nat’ral gingers were Celtic or Norse, So who were the genealogical source Of Judas Iscariotson ?
Edom has nothing to do with Judas, being the brother of Isaac in Genesis, but his name means ‘red’ in Hebrew.
There, on every table, As the best man gave his speech, There was a box, about a hand’s-width each. With a couple of pretty bows, And little holes in rows.
The day was cooling off As the sun was slipping down the sky. A blackbird sang duets With the buzzing of a fly, And the garden’s sweet perfume was in full bloom.
And then the moment came At the bidding of the bride – The bows were soon untied As we gingerly undid the lid, To find a single butterfly inside.
Large, by British standards, Their leaded-lights stained orange-red, And quick enough they roused from bed. Their wings all beating seagull-slow As up away they go.
A cloud of monarch butterflies – A plague, almost, a scarlet host To start the dance and lead the toast – A starling-swarm, a bridal crown, Confetti that went up instead of down.
They soon dispersed into the beds, A doddle for a bug collector – Crowding any flowers still in nectar. A little sugar on the hand, And maybe we could bring one in to land.
But if, like any wedding guest, They hoped to meet their future mate, Or else at least to score a date, Well, better come on strong – They’d all be dead before too long.
And as for starting families, They’d find no milkweed here. Their kids will starve to death, I fear. Some metaphor for wedded life – A pushy groom and barren wife !
I met her in the silly season: Ace reporter Lisa Leeson – Met her in the Summer, as it moved from high to late. She said she newly had the time For chilling with a gin and lime, And meeting with a stranger for a secret steamy date. Until the proper news arrived, She churned-out waffle, faffed and skived, To dodge the z-list luvvie-spotting at the village fete. And so we spent the Summertime Away from wars and wonks and crime, And nothing went on happening in law and trade and state.
Not a love-nest, romp, or threesome, Just myself and Lisa Leeson, While the ever-greedy presses must procrastinate – And so we joined our choice of queues, With not a thought to check reviews, For visits to the restaurants, the movies, and the Tate. But Summer changed to Autumn brown, And cooler breezes teased the town, And she could hear the calling of the headlines and the hate. So Lisa Leeson bid farewell, And broke our silly Summer’s spell By quitting idle drifting for a world that would not wait.
As a child, I loved to pore Upon an atlas like a book. The early chapters laid out Europe, Where I knew it’s ev’ry nook. Later on came Africa or Asia, I forget which first. The other next, then North, then South America Would be traversed. Oceania bringing up the rear, And scattered islands next, With local names italicised beside The faithful English text. That was the story’s climax, now the coda – Now the final pair of plates – The Arctic, then the Ant, in round tableaux, The Baring and Magellan Straits.
Antarctica, to my surprise, Had place-name labels scattered round – The Ross Ice Shelf and Ellsworth Mountains, Kemp Land, and McMurdo Sound. Such British names ! The Arctic, though, was foreign – Though I’d love to think How Queen Victoria might send The Royal Navy out to turn it pink. Take Greenland, with its Anglo-Saxon name – From Cape Farewell down in the South, On through Discov’ry Bay to Upper Tooley, And out East there’s Scoresby Mouth. The Viceroy has his Residence in Goodhope, With the inevitable railway lines – Heading South to Hope St Julian, Through Greenvale and the Squarehill mines.
And the Great Green Mainline steaming North, With a branch and boat-train out to Sugar Top, And via Lower Streamouth aerodrome, To Foxborough – which once was the final stop, Until the junction to Jacob’s Harbour, (Ferries to God’s Haven from the pleasure pier), Then the final push to Springfield Isle, On viaducts of steel that we’d engineer. Of course, in time the Esquimaux would learn The ways of cricket and the bowler hat, And in later years, there’s some would settle down In Blighty, in a council flat In Ashford, Accrington and Aberdeen, To drive the buses and newspaper stands, Opening churches, opening restaurants, Marrying the local girls and forming bands.
I know, I know, so many problems Unthought-out in the fantasy of a kid. Just as well it never happened – And yet…on a parallel Earth, it probably did.
The were some map produced in Edwardian times which mistakenly let the pink from Arctic Canada bleed across the Nares Strait inot Wasjington Land, as shown below, but the UK never had a claim to Greenland, and their attempt to insist on ‘first refusal’ in 1920 was thoroughly rebuffed by Denmark.
How will love fare on a far, strange planet ? Something tells me, just fine. Astronauts are after all as human as the rest, On those long and lonely voyages to Sigma Ceti Nine. It really doesn’t matter how Control attempts to plan it – Some eventualities are harder to decline, And improvised solutions are unlikely to be guessed Until that fateful moment when our instincts come online.
Then to the fore comes ambiguity, When foreign incongruity’s the only game in town. But, when it comes to promiscuity, Then human ingenuity will never let us down.
We are the pioneers Across the galaxy we plumb We are the copuleers We boldly go and boldly come
So Human-Alien exchanges probe To grasp a firmer bond – Exploring green and grey and blond, Until enquiring ends combine In intimate communion. We’ll scout each sucker, fin and lobe, And softly test how they respond To fingers from the great beyond – And arms and tentacles entwine In interstellar union.
I have heard it suggested that humans would be disgusted by anything even-slightly non-human. After all, for all we snigger at bestiality, it’s a very rare proclivity. And just look at our closest neighbours, the chimps – when the females are in heat, their genitals swell up to advertise the fact, though good luck getting any human gentlemen callers with that trick !
So if we’re six million years too distant for Pan-spermia, what hope have we of getting horny for alien horns ? Well, I think it’s a case of uncanny valley and not marrying cousins. After all, there’s way more octopus porn than monkey business.
Infact, they both used pencils Up until Nineteen Sixty-Seven, When a privately-researched pen was announced And NASA and Cosmonauts quickly renounced Those flammable, lead-shedding pencils – Americans first, with Apollo 7. They should be so proud, that commie space-guys Are writing with Yankee-most free-enterprise.
