Klepto by Stuart Dunkel
Wonderlust
When does a walk become a hike ?
When does a saunter start to stride ?
Upon how many trails must I strike
Before I get to the other side ?
When does a trek become a wander ?
When does a road not lead to Rome ?
Upon how many paths must I ponder
Before I get to go back home ?
Blood & Treasure
Fortune’s just another word for fate,
A golden road to tread –
A set of contacts in one’s purse,
As gifted by the Universe.
A set of circumstances on a plate,
A warm and feathered bed –
The world is brandy and cigars,
As laid out in the genes and stars.
Yet fortune’s just another word for luck,
A trove of bonus corn –
For what is an inheritance
But life’s epitome of chance ?
You didn’t earn this gold you’ve struck,
Except by being born –
And yet you think you’re somehow worth
This prize you’ve stolen from the earth.
Just Add Light
What colour is gold that does not shine ?
Is it brown, is it yellow, or beige ?
Would silver be thought as quite so fine
If its greys glittered less with age ?
Diamonds have no colour or soul
Without their glint of a spark,
And jet is nothing but a lump of coal
If it’s only worn in the dark.
Here Be Dragons
Nothing excites like a fragment of coastline,
A ribbon of mountains, an island arc,
A river’s meander, an outpost upon it,
A highway to cross it, and leave its mark.
Fantasy maps have gotten much better these days,
With histories drawn in tectonics –
With rain-shadowed deserts and cyclonic trade-winds,
And conlangic place-names correct in their phonics.
Readers demand that their continents drift,
On a globe that is spinning through space –
Our increase in knowledge has moved-on our world,
And our make-believe realms must keep pace.
Adventurers trek across accurate kingdoms,
The blanks are uncovered, the borders expand,
And fossils are dug-up of earlier monsters –
The dragons evolve now, and so does the land.
Spiders, Plural
Spiders are only one-by-one,
Each web is a bachelor-pad –
We don’t see social types a ton,
Which might make the squeamish glad !
But how then does a spider dad
Make a brand new spider son ?
Some sexy-togetherness must be had
To see that the deed gets done !
So come the Autumn, see them run
On the carpet, ev’ry lad,
On the hunt for a lady, to have some fun,
When the urge to breed gets bad.
Usu’lly, company drives them mad –
Their perfect number is none !
But once a year, they get up and gad
From the loneliness they’ve spun.
Graduation
I remember dreaming,
Back in my later-teens –
I thought that I could be anything, anything –
God, it was good to be alive !
My many futures were teeming –
Cos I had the smarts, and I had the means,
To take this world and make her sing !
All I needed was muscle and drive.
That’s why they’re called dreams, I guess…
Cos waking up is such a bitch.
Nobody cares what we have to bring,
Just suck on beige till we love the taste.
We’re nothing. We’re just a cog in a press
Whose job is to make some others rich.
I thought that I could be anything, anything –
God, what a pointless waste.
So, here we are once more, in the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. But for poems to bear fruit, they must successfully avoid Mr Block…
And so I once again misappropriate the trusty-old list of thought-prompters provided by the good folks at Inktober to shake-out a few short pieces from the noggin over the coming couple of weeks. The important thing to remember is to not take these too seriously.
The illustrations, incidentally, are quite unconnected to the poems and are simply some works of art I’ve found online that I want to share with you:
Scratchy (as in a head-scratcher)
Bill-Knobs & Eyeliner
The Mute Swans have the pond to themselves all Summer,
So calm while their chicks are in fleece.
Oh sure, there are the quacks of Mallards,
And the Seagull squawkings never cease,
But all-in-all, they’re kings of the lake,
Seeing off the challenge of the Canada geese –
They even adopt the occasional Black,
And raise their cygnets in peace.
But come October, and in come the mobs of Whoopers,
Honking-up the air.
Even before the last of the cranes has flown,
These tourists are ev’rywhere !
The Mutes protest, but their voices can’t be heard
As the trumpets blare.
But in truth, they’ll soon be rubbing along,
As there’s duckweed-enough to share.
Bureaucalypse
Study hard, they said, and so we did,
And it didn’t help at all.
Be positive, beguile and kid –
Yet we still went to the wall.
Keep looking for the chance, they say,
As if just saying makes it so –
Don’t let your dreams all slip away,
As if they hadn’t, long ago.
If they can land such good careers,
Then why, they like to ask, can’t we ?
As if a job like theirs appears
With unrelenting frequency.
For us, we get to spend our years neck-deep
In drudgery and stress,
Where days are long and lives are cheap,
And no-one ever tells us yes.
But surely there must be another side,
That’s free from the pounds and the pence ?
Where we end the day with a sense of pride,
Having made a difference…?
And so we shrink our lives to spit them out
On a single side of paper,
And foist them on whoever is casting about –
And watch them vanish to vapour.
And if we do get interviewed,
There’s a thousand others like us.
It’s a lottery, really, with odds so skewed,
But hey, don’t make a fuss…
Capitalism has use for you and I,
No matter how bent and scarred –
Work hard, work long, and don’t ask why
We have to work so long and hard.
You Silent Bastards
You lure me in with job descriptions
Full of hope and fun,
You tempt with salary predictions
Nobody would shun.
You call me in for interviews,
That seem to go so well –
But when I wait to hear the news,
I’m left in limbo hell.
It’s crept upon us recently,
This lack of PFOs,
This lack of common decency
To notify the ‘Noes’.
You need an audit of your soul,
For your arrogance acquired –
To see your HR staff as a whole
Could do with being fired !
I know that I could do these jobs damn well
If given the chance,
So do I pass ? But you will never tell,
Not even a glance.
You won’t even admit I exist,
I’m scum to be ignored –
As long as your boxes get ticked off the list,
And your KPI targets scored.
Rhyming Couplets 