Margarita Time
Cleopatra dropped a pearl in vinegar
To win a bet,
And watched her bead dissolve away to nothing
Without one regret –
Although in truth it must have fizzed a day or two
Before it’s done
And in that time she’d lost her land and lost her life
And lost her son.
And Rome, while once her lover, saw her lustre tarnish
Bit by bit –
For strip away her cultured beauty,
And she’s just a speck of grit.
Toxic
Poison and venom – the diff’rence between them
Is pedantry.
Biologists may take exception,
But only they should.
Most of the rest of us navigate life
Quite pleasantly
With a definition that’s still close-enough
To be good.
The Blacktop Jungle
Evolution has no use for wheels –
It walks, it never rolls –
Beyond a tumbleweed or spider
That the random wind controls.
For real life lacks our perfect strips
Of smooth and tarmacked roads,
These alien technologies,
These edges linking nodes.
Biology’s against it anyway,
Unless the wheels are dead –
For how can blood and nerves attach
To grow the spokes, repair the tread ?
Though germs can grow their flagellates
Upon an axle, loosely bound –
And they can drive by swimming,
Just by spinning tendrils round and round.
So give a million years or ten,
And life may well adapt
To these ribbons of oil and gravel,
If they haven’t been buried or snapped.
But while terrain is bumpy
And a bogged-down caster cannot trot,
Then legs will always run the show –
The world may turn, but life does not.
Auto-Desire
I remember watching the cars go by
From the back seat of my Dad’s Cavalier –
A rep-mobile, that would sometimes change
Into a Sierra, or something near.
I could name them all, down the motorway,
From the back seat of my Dad’s works’ Rover
By make and model, and sometimes trim,
And dreamt of driving them all twice over.
But when I left home with a job,
It didn’t come with its own Passat –
And I was living in digs in London,
Without a garage, and that was that.
Besides, there’s never any parking,
And what there is will costs me loads –
And if the Tube is crowded, well,
Then you should see the roads !
But still I eye the kerbside cars
Beyond the pay of my nine-to-five –
And fantasise which one I’d have,
If I’d only learned to drive.
Until my sensible shoes recall
The fossil fuels and rusting hulks –
And the boy inside with the brum-brum dreams
Just sits in the back seat and sulks.
Any Colour You Like, as Long as it’s Charcoal
When did cars become so boring ?
When did roads become less roaring ?
When did bland become okay ?
Paintjobs dull as office flooring –
Offered in a monochrome of grey.
Call it Silver, call it Graphite,
Brooding Shadow, Summer Midnight
Any guff that comes to mind –
But once we see them in the light
You’re surely fooling no-one but the blind.
White and black are offered too,
And boy, that’s really big of you,
But what will people think ?
Leary over red or blue,
And terrified of lemon, lime, or pink.
Remember – we were bright and fun
Before the mortgage and school run ?
Oh, we were colourful and proud !
The dial tuned to Radio 1 –
Not Archers, Proms, or Magic, not too loud.
The reason, I suspect, is that
Our Chelsea Tractors grew so fat
Our excess-baggage showed.
And so we dressed them down in matt
To blend in with the tarmac of the road.
And as a side-effect, we get
To hide the dirt and hide the threat
That purple-headed Greens advance.
So boring cars are worth it yet
To motor on in blissful ignorance.
The Sins of the Fathers
It wasn’t our hands
Which pressed the button, pulled the lever,
Signed the warrant, wrung the neck,
Or delivered the commands.
It wasn’t our hands
Which pointed the gun, swung the cleaver,
Stiffled a yawn, cleaned the fleck
Of bloodstain off our bands.
No, those were our fathers,
Our monsters, whose surnames we bare –
Names that echo everywhere,
Our shameful brands.
But we are not our fathers,
Despite all that we share.
We carry still their genes, their glands –
But not their hands.
If we had been where they were,
Would we have acted the same ?
Do they run deeper than their name,
Through our hinterlands ?
We’ll never know, though we prefer
To think that we would not have killed.
But we are here, our future in our hands –
Let’s use them now to build.
Tidal Locking
The Moon is locked into the Earth,
She only shows her best side,
Keeps her dark side turned away.
But the Earth has nothing to hide,
Beneath her gaze, we spin on full display,
For the Earth is not beholden to the Moon –
Not yet, at least –
And it won’t be soon,
For the Earth is a massive beast.
Yet the Moon is trying, trying,
And will yet succeed, one day –
But not before the seas have boiled away.
Now take a smaller star instead,
Like Proxima Centauri –
Very dwarven, very red.
But orbiting we see Proxima Bee –
A planet similar to Earth,
An eighth as close as Mercury,
With liquid water on its bed.
Except, to be precise,
More likely steam and ice,
With one side always baking dry,
The other frozen, dark and dead.
You see, when this close in, it does not spin –
But wait, that’s wrong,
We ought to say it has a year-long day,
Where the tide is strong.
Now let’s imagine orbiting round Rigel,
A super-blue, so hot and bright,
And though a massive mass, his heat and light
Outpace his gravity –
So if we were to move the Earth to where
We’ll get a decent share to keep it all anthropical,
To keep the Arctic icy and to keep the tropics tropical,
We wouldn’t be so deep within his spacetime cavity.
You see – we’d need to be about, say, twelve-times-Neptune out –
That’s over two light-days.
Our seasons would last centuries, our year now thirteen-hundred years
And all to catch enough, but strictly not too many rays.
And actually, the daylight would be rather dim, I hear –
As most of Rigel’s output, it appears,
Is in the UV band,
And not the visible so much, not that far out.
So even though it’s warm, no doubt,
The photosynthesis of plants now won’t get such a shout,
While all of us get super-tanned.
His stellar wind is vicious, but I think we could withstand
From this far off – but satellites may end in tears.
But at least we get to spin on our own gears,
So that’s a win.
Rigel hasn’t got a hope to lock us in !
As I understand it, a planet wouldn’t naturally form so far out from its parent star, as there’s not enough material. Of course, it could be a captured rogue planet or ripped from another star.
Also, I saw Rigel’s name written down in the astronomy books of my youth long before I heard anyone ever pronounce it, so for me Rigel will always have a hard G.
Meanwhile, you can catch-up some more with Proxima Bee over here, and see a cameo by Rigel thisaway.
A Nonny Mouse
We all of us
Are branded and defined –
So that must make me…
Well…nevermind.
If you catch my name
Then all the better,
But it won’t be me who drops
A single letter.
Cos if I’m any good,
Then you’ll find out in the end –
It will beam out through the ether
It will sneak out round the bend.
But just for now,
Go easy on the fame –
My ego, it can take it
If you don’t know what’s my name.
If you really wanna know
Then you can learn it –
But honestly,
I think I gotta earn it.
And as for folks
Who helped me get along –
They’re worth a hand,
They’re worth a whole-damn song.
But they’re more then gabbled names
And anecdotes –
And since you’ve never heard of them,
Best save it for the liner-notes.
But if you leave my presence
With a head full of fun,
Then whatever be my name,
My work is done.
Purity Error
Back in the days of cathode rays,
Electron guns of RGB
Would bring the colour to TV –
Except they could get out of phase
When untoward magnetic strays
Would tamper with the purity.
And boy, were mine unpure !
With ev’ry colour out of sync,
Where skies were green and trees were pink !
They told me there’s no easy cure –
“But you’ll get used to it, I’m sure”
I tried so hard to think.
I might have made it through,
But for the glaring lack of red
That ultimately screwed my head –
Faces, lips, and roses too –
Those cyan people made me blue
As if the aliens had bred !
I thought I dug the mood
To love all races in my sight –
But skin-of-denim just ain’t right !
So I rejected modern dudes
For old-time films and attitudes
That showed the world in black and white.
Momma Tongue
There are five times as many Yankees
Speaking English as the English,
So who’s English do you think will win ?
Whatever the linguistic tankies wish,
We’re just a little fish –
Perhaps it’s time to take it on the chin ?
Or, to be overt (and probably incite your wrath) –
You do the math !
Ow !, that hurt.
So stark and ess-less on the page,
Just stoking up my British rage –
Yet kids today are fine to say it –
They don’t care, it’s just a thing you say,
Like missing out the pointless yoos
And adding honest zees
That they know we’ll criticize –
They choose to do it anyway,
These wize-guys.
So what’s my beef ?
Am I so shaky in my self-belief
I have to wave my flag
At quickening American ?
Does my inner Anglo-Saxon gag
And want to ban their New-World-ness ?
Well, yeah…I guess –
We’ve traveled far, we dove right in
We took the rout of least chagrin.
But it’s all just arbitrary guff,
And how long can I really bluff
Until I must admit, their way makes sense ?
Time to quit – don’t be a bore,
For in this theater of war,
My silent letters voice me no defense.
I know I have no chance tonite
To tell the kids what they can say –
Just as my teachers had no right
To scold me for ‘okay’.
But oh !, it hurts to hear my cherished forms
Be cast away.
Yet if the kids choose that instead of this,
Well, who the hell am I then
To dismiss them for their choice ?,
As if I have a voice they’d listen to.
So on they plow their furrow
By their dollar, yard, and boro –
For kids will always marvel at what’s noo.
I can assure you that it isn’t only Americans who can make wrath and math rhyme. There are so many other British voices besided RP, despite the OED’s attempts to pretend otherwise.
By the way, I can’t help thinking the last line looks less New York and more Scottish ! I suppose I could say ‘nu’ instead, but I think that will look even stranger.
Rhyming Couplets 