Author: Toastingfork

Not afraid to rhyme.

Skew Left

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

Skew Left

When did we get so puritan ?
When did we lose our common sense ?
When did we get so keen to ban,
And get so keen to take offence ?
Why did we frown and lose our humour ?
Why did we break our self-made laws ?
Why did we credit ev’ry rumour,
Just as long as it helped our cause ?
A lie was told,
A line was crossed –
And this is how the left was lost.

We used to be the peace-and-love brigade,
We used to be on your side.
We used to be so unafraid,
So when did we grow so terrified ?
Now we’ve become the rage-and-shun regime,
The ones with the hate-filled mouths –
We loathe you almost as much, it would seem, 
As we secretly loathe ourselves.
Our bleeding hearts
Have turned to frost –
And this is how the left was lost.

When did we give up on forbearance ?
When did we grow so paranoid ?
When did we all become our parents ?,
Overwrought, not overjoyed.
We’ve bought into the capital con
Where individuals demand respect,
With all sense of community gone
For a constant “I object !”.
We won our place,
But at a cost –
And this is how the left was lost.

Shires Old & New

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Shires Old & New

English counties show a frozen glimpse
Of population,
Of where we lived, a long time since,
At the dawn of our English nation.
Cathedrals too, and the larger abbeys,
Hint at a bustling past –
Wells and Ripon weren’t so drab,
But boom-times couldn’t last.

Huntingdon, you once were free,
With Somerton and Appleby –
But people change, and trade moves on,
To Milton Keynes or Basildon.

Political constituencies
Can’t stand still too long,
Without some boarder-fluencies
To keep their numbers strong.
Postcode districts are a modern score
To count the blur –
If they survive a thousand more,
They’ll show where once we were.
 
Stevenage, you’re earned your key,
With Swindon and Southend-on-Sea.
But people change, and drift away
To who-knows-where and come-what-may.

Trad.

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by withneyzen ud83cudf3f on Pexels.com

Trad.

Strange, the oldest folk tunes have no authors known,
They’ve just been sung like that forever.
I wonder if a single soul created them,
Or many voices altogether.
Maybe over centuries, they’ve slowly grown,
Adding new words to old songs,
From bawdy balladry, through cherished hymn,
To terrace singalongs.

From London Bridge to Scarborough Fair,
Ride a cock horse to the old grey mare,
Lady Greensleeves, mistress mine,
And over the hills for auld lang syne.
We’ll never know, we’re never told –
They are too old and we’re too young –
Yet still their songs are sung.

Strange, the newest pop tunes come with artist names –
We know just who created each.
Yet maybe in a thousand years, a few persist
Whose origins are out of reach.
Carols may be sung to them, or children’s’ games,
Or earworms and lullabyes –
With half the words forgotten, and their meaning missed,
But hanging on in diff’rent guise.

From Ground Control to Billie Jean,
Go Johnny, go, come on Eileen.
All the lonely yesterday –
Sing for tomorrow, we fade to grey.
They’ll never know, the trail is cold –
We are too old and still of tongue –
Yet still our songs are sung.

The Gloves Are Off

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

The Gloves Are Off

Since art has lost the manual touch,
We’re losing grip of anatomy –
Our illustrations are in the clutch
Of the polydactyl travesty.
Digital digits and silicon glands
Make too many fingers, too few thumbs –
That lead to such unhandsome hands
From thought-machines that can’t do sums.
A sure way to uncover the witch
Whose fingers point to a lack of soul,
It only takes the flick of a switch
To over-endow a lack of control.
But they’ll slowly grasp to make a fist,
So we’d best stop smirking behind our fans –
They might not have a pulse in their wrist,
But our future’s held in their second-hand hands.

Ediacaran

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Life in the Ediacaran by John Sibbick

Ediacaran

The Victorians couldn’t have known, of course,
The abundance of life in the lifeless rocks –
The explosion before the trilobites,
With multicellular building blocks.
The fossils are rare, but they are there,
In Charnia and Kimberella.
What were they ?  We don’t quite know –
Foundation in the stony cellar.
Dickinsonia, Cyclomedusa,
You flourished, then you died away.
The Boring Billion birthed you all –
Our great ancestral stray.

Yet still the Paleozoic begins,
Long after the glories of Avalon.
That makes no sense, not now we know
What the Cambrian was built upon.
Dismissed as children’s stories,
We have had to wait a long long time –
Yet the Pre- was not so pre at all,
Its oceans teemed with some strange slime…
The end of the Cryogenian, that’s the border,
That’s when things got big –
Spriggina and Aspidella are waiting –
All we have to do is dig…

The New Victorians

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Gilberto Reyes on Pexels.com

The New Victorians

These days, just as we’re losing our prude
For fruity language that once gave the vapours,
Just shrugging-off cusses as barely that rude,
When reading them often in novels and papers –
Slowly reducing the shock of the swear –
We’re far too open-minded to care.
We’re liberated and in the nude,
Released from po-faced capers.

But then, out of the void, we heard
How modern ears are being rocked
At a brand new crop of age-old words –
That blanche the permanently-shocked.
We need to learn to take offence, or
We’ll upset the lib’ral censor,
Who demands our tongues are slurred
To keep our language locked.

The new lords of the orthodox
Are getting too big for their britches –
No longer just a chatterbox,
They’ve now become a gang of snitches.
Scanning all communications,
Seeking phantom motivations –
Boldly stating roosters can’t be cocks,
And canines can’t be bitches.

Let’s Do The Show Right Here !

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Let’s Do The Show Right Here !

All the world’s a musical,
A song-and-dance in rhyme,
A carefree waltz through happy life
In endless pantomime.
Just drifting by the numbers,
As they’re belted to the rafters –
So farcic’ly predictable
In happy-ever-afters.

The rest of us, we’re not the stars,
That’s always someone else –
The people with more talent,
And the people with more wealth.
We rarely even get to join the chorus
As they strut –
We’re just the understudies
To the bit-parts-who-were-cut.

All the world’s a musical,
That’s dancing in the street,
But some of us will never get to
Glimpse the lyric-sheet.
But leads become the leads
Because they’re who we want to see –
There’s few to watch the story of the life
Of you and me.

The rest of us, we’re not the stars,
We’re just the audience –
We go about our daily lives
With fading confidence.
We try to make a diff’rence,
But we struggle to be heard –
We’ll never be performers,
If we never sing a word.

All the world’s a musical,
A life that’s lit by lime –
Where strangers sing impulsively,
Yet sing in perfect time.
The rest of us, we’re not the stars,
We barely know the song –
But in the end, I guess we shrug,
And try to hum along.

Treasure Trove

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Photo by David Bartus on Pexels.com

Treasure Trove

Hoards of coins in shallow graves,
Unlawful death of wealth –
An inquest must be called
To let the gold announce itself.
The coroner shall ascertain
The trove’s identity,
And whether misadventure
Caused its current liberty.
Was it witness to a conflict ?
Was it lost or laid to rest ?
Do we need an autopsy
To open up its chest ?
It seems at odds with all their other tasks,
It must be said –
But it surely makes a pleasant change
From dealing in the dead.

The Cherry, Then

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

The Cherry, Then

Sweet cherry, bird cherry,
British since the glacier –
White of flower, red of berry,
Showing Spring is on the merry
With their blossoms looking very
Much the lacier.

And yet our folklore shrugs and mocks
Our modern-day delight.
Did Stonehenge mark the equinox
As cherry petals blew in flocks ?
Did Boudicca manoeuvre and out-fox
From woods of white ?

Did Patrick banish Irish snakes
From out of trees so halcyon ?
Did Alfred burn the cherry cakes,
Or Chaucer tell of ruddy aches,
As Easter breezes stir the flakes
Throughout old Albion ?

The Japanese have celebrated long
The bloom before the leaf,
But Europe only saw a throng
Of messy trees not worth a song.
Were rebirth metaphors too strong,
Or blossoming too brief ?

Judas Trees

~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment
Iudas Iscarioth by Abraham Bloemaert

     Judas Trees

Judas hanged himself, we’re told,
But from which tree in the potter’s field ?
Some say Elder, pagan and bold,
And some say Cercis bore his yield.
The Elder is likely the tale that’s old,
Though the Bible has the facts concealed.

Cercis may be a later rod,
So did logistics bring its birth ?
For the Elder presence is rather odd,
As a shrub which lacks both height and girth –
So the one who kissed the face of god
Must sway just inches from the earth.