A Halcyon Vision
A kingfisher glints like a galaxy,
We only see where he used to be –
A flash of white, a swirl of red,
But when we look again, he’s fled.
When searching with a lens, or two,
He’s there, he’s gone, a cloud of blue –
We scan the verge where the sparkles play,
As he dances in and out of the Milky Way.
Less Bohemian, More Czech
All great Artists have a vice,
But I’m a tepid type –
I try to keep my manners nice
And give no cause for hype.
I’ll never be a rabble-rousing rebel,
Nor a cad,
Just knocking back the trebles
On my way to going mad,
With my pockets full of pebbles
And a need for worship bad…
I’m much more pipe-and-slippers (less the pipe).
I guess I am a Larkin or an Eliot at heart
Than a Dylan or a Kingsley with a passion full of art –
I mean, I have a mongrel and a mortgage for a start !
And I always found Romantics over-ripe.
I guess I’m not an Artist-capital-A,
But that’s okay.
(And it really ain’t my mode, that way.)
I’m hardly a conspiracist, eccentric and uncouth,
I’m not a Goth or horny toad, or tender, tortured youth,
Or rainbow-dressed consumptive who is dying for some Truth –
That’s just a load of self-obsessing tripe !
A Small Tragedy
You gave me a bonsai, as a gift.
I don’t know why…
I surely hadn’t asked for it.
Alas, its decline was swift,
Was it too wet ? Was it too dry ?
So here it sat, sentenced to die.
Others had stolen its height away,
And spawned a lap-tree pet –
To start a forest on a windowsill.
My disrepair was on display –
Alone, neglected – yet I swear
I tried so hard to care and not to kill.
I know it wasn’t cheap to buy,
And ev’ry loss of another tiny leaf
Brought grief at failing you.
As ancient as a samurai –
And here was I, ungrateful thief,
Who stole its life in a month or two.
Kosher Slaughter
Why are there so many zombies on our screens these days ?
I’d say that they are testament to our improving ways.
We’ve beaten violence, beggared hunger, massacred disease,
And quarantined our lust for gore into our PG fantasies –
Safely evil, nicely ugly, non-stain blood in quick-rip veins,
Just round ’em up and mow ’em down in corporate campaigns.
Mumbling, lurching, fodder-johnnies,
Out-of-towners, dirty commies –
Revel in some mindless fun before they eat our brains.
Queasy over blaming Mongols for their famous hordes ?
Then let’s recast with green-skinned orks to quench our thirsty swords.
Coldly-logic androids cause no controversial mess
When we crush their next uprising – show no mercy for the merciless !
Shoot a Nazi, gas a pedo – harmless japes for kids to play,
Just regulation bogeymen without the shades of grey.
Exterminating creepy-crawlies,
Squashing greater-goods with trolleys –
Killing humans sure is fun when there’s no guilt to pay !
Mack & Mike
Some of us are lumpers,
And some of us are splitters,
Some are bulky-clumpers,
And some are little-bitters,
Some of us are big-tent stuffers,
Broad-brush roughers,
Close-enoughers,
Filling-up our grab-bags
Till there’s no more room inside –
And some of us are split-hair-threaders,
Sep’rate-bedders,
Excess-shedders,
Spilling-out and sorting-through
To further subdivide.
And honestly, we need both kinds of schemes
To help us to discover,
Masterplan and granular,
Millennial and annular –
Yet nobody can do them both, it seems,
We lean one way or ’tother –
Either rounding up or down,
With both the only game in town.
So some of us are throngers,
And some of us are sparsers,
Half of us are glommers,
And half of us are parsers.
I guess we cannot change the plot,
Our ways are set, alas –
But still, let’s proudly work our lot,
And classify with class.
Glabrous Glands
Facial hair is not for me,
It’s written in my genes –
And no amount of herbal tea
Or eating up my greens
Can furnish on my chinny-chin
A burst of bushy thatch,
But just the look of unwashed skin
For itchy nails to scratch.
You may think me unmanly
And my smooth-cheek a disgrace,
But it isn’t just the dandy
Has to sport a spotless face.
I guess I’ll never put to sea,
Or be a hermit, blind –
The hussar’s life is not for me,
Nor evil mastermind.
Deferred Divisions
A week is a long time in politics,
A decade is no time at all.
The pettiest points are scored in a hurry
While marches-of-progress crawl.
The only change is change that’s forced,
And always years too late –
A week is an age in politics,
While ages must shut-up and wait.
Aurora Australis
Way down South, where looking up
Is looking upside down –
The Man in the Moon is wrongside-right,
And the Plough ain’t even in town.
The Dog Star sails above the Pup,
Throughout the Summer sky,
With Betelgeuse kept low at night
And Rigel kicking high.
To Northern eyes, where looking up
Is looking strange and stark –
The Milky Way is far too bright,
The pole is far too dark.
Eye-Ee-Shah
Aisha Asher always thinks her name
Has too few letters in it –
It takes a whole three syllables to say,
But not to write.
She likes the sound, but oh, that spelling !
How she longs to discipline it –
Make those letters toe the line,
And keep their phonemes tight.
Whenever a teacher or a stranger
Tries, and fails, to call her,
They’re guaranteed to get it wrong
If reading it as penned.
Ay-sha, they would call her, like the Geisha from Croatia,
It appals her,
But…she cannot really blame them in the end.
Her A is really said like I,
Her I is really said like E,
But who would know to see it written down ?
She toys with splitting them apart with Y,
To keep her diphthongs free,
Or adding dots above the E,
Despite her mother’s frown.
But nobody respects her favoured spellings, anyway –
(It doesn’t help that they are apt to change).
It looks like she is stuck
With a name no-one can say,
Eternally surprising in her strange.
There’s no ‘We’ in Corpus Christi
There once was a priest
Who thought he was a priest,
But who wasn’t in the Lord’s own eyes.
For, to be a priest
You must at very least
Have already been fully baptised.
And I am that priest,
Who thought his path was greased
Right into the body of the Church.
But my own parish priest
Who performed on me the piece
Messed up, and left me in the lurch.
For old Father East
Was a jovial priest
Who knew that my parents were stressing –
So to put them at their ease,
He thought it quite a wheeze
To fully loop them into the blessing –
“To the Lord God who frees us
And in the name of Jesus
We all here christen you, our cute little guy.”
But God had closed his ears
To the heartfelt font-side cheers –
For the priest had said that ‘We’ instead of ‘I’.
So when the truth was teased,
How the Church was less-than-pleased !
For I wasn’t then a priest to begin…
Each wedding vow ceased
To be valid in the least
As the couples fornicated in sin.
Ev’ry moral I policed,
Ev’ry absolution leased
Was a sham in its promise and its hope.
Their souls had been fleeced
And sold off to the Beast –
For this priest has gone-on to be Pope.
Rhyming Couplets 