Author: Toastingfork

Not afraid to rhyme.

Thou Shalt Not Gender with a Diverse Kind

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by light wizzi on Pexels.com

Thou Shalt Not Gender with a Diverse Kind

                    (in response to Leviticus 19:19)

I am the Lord your God,
And I clearly lay down word and rule –
Do not interbreed your cattle,
Nor produce a hybrid mule –
For if your beef is tough,
Then that is how I mean your beef to taste,
Do not allow these foreign cows
To make your home-grown bulls debased.
Don’t raise a mule, but make do with an ass,
And a smaller pack.
Don’t mix your strands,
But keep your garments pure upon your back.
Don’t weft your linen with your wool,
And mingle threads within your hem.
And though these laws be heavy,
Use no mule to help you carry them.

I say again, I am your Lord,
No things of yours shall fraternise –
Don’t plant your field with many seeds,
Or who can know what shoots may rise ?
Let pagans plant their carrots with their leeks
To keep them company,
But I say, let yours suffer by the fly,
For it is sent by me.
Now let the weevil dine on fruits and grains,
And slugs reduce your yields,
And praise my swarming locusts
As they take your monocultured fields.
Do not co-plant companions,
For all your crops must stand alone –
Just like my hungry chosen people
In this wilderness I’ve sown.

Mus laboritorium

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Mus laboritorium

We should put up statues
To the mice that we have doctored,
That we’ve prodded in the genome,
And remodelled in the womb.
We should hail as heroes
All these spidermen of rodents
With their mutant-managed powers
That we twist and splice and groom.

Quick-grown maturity,
Inbred for purity,
With white fur unblemished,
While their cultured cells outlive them.
Red-eyed and pink-eared,
Stripped-down and re-geared,
Free of fleas and all disease
(Except the ones we give them).

I try not to think of how much pain
We put them through –
It’s what we have to do
To avoid the pain ourselves, I guess.
They’ve brought us so much gain,
But we’re too ashamed to speak it –
The sterile dirty little secret of our great success.

We should sing a ballad
To the mice who helped us conquer
Tuberculosis, polio,
Leukaemia and measles.
Or give a quiet thank-you
When a treatment proves effective –
They keep us safe from swine-flu,
So we keep them safe from weasels.

Dozens, hundreds, millions,
A well-groomed swarm resilient –
And when they die, attended by
A white-frockcoated mourner.
These un-cavy guinea-pigs,
These wheel-running whirligigs,
These supermodel-organisms
Squeaking in the corner.

I try not to think how many mice
Have died for me,
Have lived a life of agony
Because they are expendable, I guess.
They are the devil’s price
For our seeming immortality –
Our flexible morality, that drives us to progress.

Photocells

~ Toastingfork ~ 3 Comments

Photocells

The stars only show up
When we open up our eyes,
With our pupils set on f-2
To maximise the skies.
With focus to infinity
To catch the light-years light
And fast-films for retinas
To turn the blackness bright.
Our long-exposure eyelids
Are timed to lift their veil –
Thirty seconds is enough,
Or else the stars will trail.
And then our nerves develop it
With not a blur nor wrinkle –
It’s just a little grainy
As the pinpoints gently twinkle.

All Aboard !

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
A Corgi model of a Bournemouth Wright Gemini bus. The model is discontiunued and RATP are no longer the franchisee, but at least the current buses are still yellow.

All Aboard ! 

Trudy Trusses loves the buses
Which she rides to town –
Urban-trekkers, double-deckers,
Ones that bend around.
Some are old and brightly bold,
And red or green in colour –
Some are new and grey right through,
And others even duller.

Trudy Trusses makes such fusses
Over diff’rent routes –
The stops and times, the sprints and climbs,
The stats and attributes.
She watches who is in the queue,
And who is getting off –
The chef, the nun, the doctor’s son,
The teacher and the toff.

Trudy Trusses swiftly susses
Someone has to drive –
The 12, the 3, the 7B,
The weekdays 55.
When she grows big, she wants that gig !,
She wants to sit in front –
To swoosh the doors of 24s
And make their engines grunt !

Trudy Trusses sees the plusses
In a job that moves.
There’s folks to meet on ev’ry street,
From pensioners to youths.
You need a ride ?  Then come inside !
There’s plenty room up top.
Then home again through wind and rain,
Just ring the bell to stop.

This poem isn’t necessarily set in Bournemouth, but I thought they deserved praise for one of the few places outside of London which still insist on the colour of their fleet.

Jacks-of-the-Green

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
An early HE 11200s corbel in Bamberg Cathedral

Jacks-of-the-Green

Green men – as grey as stone,
All talking with their mouths full,
Look in any ancient church
And you may find a houseful.
Part of the grotesque gallery
To keep watch on us mortals –
Lurking round the capitals,
And hanging from the corbels.

Green men, as Pagan as they sound,
As yews and birches,
As nature-sprites whose temples got rebuilt
As parish churches.
Or are they jolly demons, greening Hell
And sprouting lies ?
They don’t look very evil, though –
But rather rustic-wise.

Green men, as vigorous as weeds
Where priests don’t mow –
Though Jesus doesn’t mind, it seems,
Content to let them grow.
So are they harvest gods of yore,
Or mistletoes in larches ?
Or are they merely hunkypunks,
To decorate the arches ?

Black Fives

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Time Transfixed by Uli Mayer, after René Magritte

Black Fives

Puffing into Rugby,
But this loco’s not a pipe,
Shunting on to Inverness,
With giant apples, ripe.
Rolling out of Derby
When the trees are like a fern,
Let’s open up the fire-box,
And watch the tubas burn.
Pulling into Euston,
Where the bowler-hatted rain –
Then chuffing-up at Templecombe,
With clouds above the train
She’s right on time, in ivory black,
But never bright cerise –
The workhorse of the LMS,
From Crewe to mantlepiece.

Underlings

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
In Portugal… by Paul Fenwick

Underlings

We work in warrens, underground,
We’re basement-bound, beneath fluorescents.
Not much there that changes round –
The carpet-tiles are omnipresent.

There we shelter from the rat race,
Keep out of the sun’s harsh glare –
Jobs for life, because in that place
Ev’ryone forgets we’re here.

All the year is blurred together
In our air-conditioned limbo –
All the year is shirt-sleeve weather
Spent without a single window.

Coats and brollies shield us, though,
Between the entrance and the train –
Up there it could be fog or snow,
Down here, it’s overcast again.

It’s only once the clocks have changed
That we emerge before the dusk
To find the world has rearranged,
And we discard our woollen husks.

And then we notice how the Winter’s gone
And how the Spring has come.
How long have daffodils been on ?
Looks like we’ve missed cherry plum…

Traps & Loops

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels.com

Traps & Loops

I’ve got a sampler at my feet,
I’ve got a long synthetic beat
I’m strumming my guitar,
But there’s no-one on the stage but me…

It backs me up just fine,
And it always keeps in time
When I’m strumming my guitar,
But it never lets me change the key

I’m a one-man band
With my digital friends,
Just playing a solo that never ends.
And I can’t speed up,
And I can’t slow down,
So see me next week in Camden Town.

I’d love to sing a duet with someone
Who’s backing me up in analogue.
Could you syncopate me, someone,
To put some roll in my rock ?

I’d love to thrash about the stage,
I’d love to whip you to a rage,
But I’m strumming my guitar
To a hundred-and-twenty beats, inspite.

I’d love a ballad to unroll,
I’d love an easy slice of soul,
But I’m strumming my guitar
To a hundred-and-twenty beats, all night.

I’m a one-man band,
And it takes too long
To set up the backing for every song.
So I can’t slow down,
And I can’t speed up,
So see me next week in Lower Sidcup.

I’d love to sing a duet with someone,
Without the need of a metronome.
Could you be my freestyle, someone,
And let my tempo roam ?

Conspiracy of Habit

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Conspiracy by Edward Biberman

Conspiracy of Habit

The Illiminati is very real,
But it won’t be found in smoke-filled rooms.
It lurks in the back of every mind –
Subconsciously, it roots and blooms.
It inducts us before we can even speak,
And follows us into our tombs.
There is no central authority,
But the ghost of Tradition silently looms.

All of us, yes, ev’ry single one of us,
Carries a cabal at the back of their thoughts –
We feel at home with People Like Us,
We all do, like we’re cheering on sports.
But maybe, if we can recognise this,
Then we needn’t feel so vaguely frightened –
With a little patience, we’ll muddle through together,
And finally be Enlightened.

Incidentally, the original Bavarian Illuminati’s goals were (according to Wikipedia) “to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power”  No word on how they would ‘conspire’ to achieve this, but if by open persuasion then they sound like my kind of guys !  Unfortunately, the Catholic Church saw them as the Red Scare, and suppressed them.

But I freely admit to continuing the colloquial slander here.