Nonsense Avenue
Why can’t our road names
Be honest and neat,
As regular codenames
To Gardens and Street ?
A road name is two-fold,
That ought to be checked
To see me and you told
Just what to expect-
A Lane should be narrow,
A Way should be broad.
Alas, this clear arrow
Is often ignored –
Our naming mis-uses
And gives itself airs,
With Prospects and Muses
And circular Squares.
Picture Perfect
Once, a photo was all the proof we needed –
Unfakeably real.
From journalists to private eyes,
They’re cutting-through a thousand lies.
Snap it, print it, we’ll believe it,
Wasn’t that the deal ?
But Stalin should have taught us right
To never trust in black and white.
A photo’s a tangled weaving –
Of light, and of how we feel –
They’ve always been a compromise
Between our out and inner eyes.
So now, with AI’s bold deceiving,
Why make such a meal ?
As if King Kong and Georges Méliès
Had not exposed the shades of grey.
Gallybaggers
How do scarecrows scare crows ?
Who knows ?
They seem such feeble foes.
Do they even work, do you suppose ?
With their hessian nose and wooden toes,
These crucified guards in hand-me-down clothes
Must scare the birds that thieve he rows.
But corbs are smart, and their learning shows
As they crop the crops while their wardens doze…
The Blue Mosque
Clad in creamy marble,
With a hint of steely blue,
Inside, plenty of reddish ochre,
And glints of gilding too.
There are some cobalt tiles,
But these are swamped by the full display,
And the low-slung chandeliers and their wires
Just get in the gen’ral way.
Big and grand, and in no-way monochrome,
And it’s not her fault what others call her dome.
Crowded, of course, but this is expected,
Scrumming to doff our shoes –
You’d think a series of ante-rooms for this
Would help the queues.
Within, some turquoise headscarves
Give a nod to her azure fame –
But in the end, she makes no bid
To accept her heavenly name.
It goes to show that marketing ain’t new…
So all-in-all: not small, not bad, not blue.
The Red Plague
Rust never sleeps,
That’s why it looks so tired –
Red-faced, unpolished,
And so flakily-attired.
It’s silent as it creeps,
So unnoticed in its zeal –
Until it has demolished
All the strong but sleeping steel.
Flying Mice
The city is full of urban sparrows,
A hundred to each tree –
Flocking under the tourists’ feet
And dicing cars along the street.
They steal the food from off the barrows,
And ride the trams for free,
Nesting anywhere they can grab
In any old wall or concrete slab.
Finding their hedgerows far too narrow,
They seek opportunity –
When it’s just too dry for rainy pigeons,
Up-pop sparrows with ambitions.
Rhinos In Name Only
Somewhere, in a parallel taiga,
There they are – they never died.
The woolly rhinos guard the Eiger,
Symbols of the Russian pride.
Standing ground against the polar bear,
And hauling Santa’s sleigh,
And touring with the country fair –
In brown and never grey –
But not this Earth, and not this tundra –
So it goes, and so they went –
The climate changed and they went under,
Leaving bones from Greece to Kent.
Their naked cousins still exist, I guess,
Though less divine –
We won’t find them near Inverness
Or swimming in the Rhine.
Uncharted
The maps of old were full of monsters –
Terra incognita !
Back when the darkest continents
Were mysteries of consequence.
Wherever our landlocked pencil wanders
Faster than a cheetah,
Then here be dragons, rest assured,
And natives with the heads of birds.
The maps of old were full of empty,
Till we filled them in.
We went and saw, and came back sad,
That there were no beasts to be had.
We’d spare imagination plenty,
But behemoths were thin –
We’d no leviathans to spare,
Just boring humans, ev’rywhere…
Fill Me
They bought me a beautiful, vellum-weight notebook,
For writing my poems, they said –
I guess they were picturing pages of captures
As soon as they popped-in my head,
With my trusty Mont Blanc that’s uncapped at the ready
To lay down a copperplate hand,
With barely a cross-out or spelling mistake,
Just as though my impromptues were planned.
Alas, I am a spidery poet
With so many stabs at a line,
And a cack-handed script from a leaky old biro,
That smudges and tatters the spine.
I write all my poems upon the computer,
That freely forgives me my sprawl –
It isn’t the least bit romantic, I’ll grant,
But it’s that or no verses at all.
I am in awe of those Victorian authors who could write a three-volume novel entirely in longhand, without constant insertions, deletions, and revisions. Did they infact need to write-out the entire book again as a fair copy ? But my greatest admiration must go to the Victorian editors who could manage to read all of that handwriting for a thousand-plus pages…
Eternal Journal
Ev’ryone lies to their diary,
We write it with one eye on who will consume it –
Intruders, historians, even our future selves –
Taking the time to polish and to groom it.
We wish it be penned by the person we wish to be,
Entries intended to shine and outlive us –
For who can admit to their ev’ry dark thought ?,
So instead make it safe for our kids to forgive us.
Ev’ryone lies to their diary,
Pretending there’s nothing made-up or excluded –
And maybe we don’t see the spin that we’re adding,
Or the innermost thoughts that have somehow intruded.
For we are the hero of internal monologue,
Archived today as the first-draft of memories –
Write down the best bits, erase all the errors –
We’re rationed for pages, so we only cherish these.
Rhyming Couplets 