Arch-Angels
Michael’s ones are round,
But Gabriel’s are pointed –
With orders, each is crowned,
And mouldings, each anointed.
With stonework tightly joined
And structurally sound,
Gabriel’s are pointed,
But Michael’s ones are round.
Arch-Angels
Category: Art & Architecture
The Three Orders
The Three Orders
Tusk-tusk, Tuscan,
You’re just a stripped-down Doric,
Sat squat upon your plinth –
You don’t fool me.
And don’t posit Composite,
You ain’t so long historic –
You’re just Corinthian
That’s running-free.
If Bassae’s still Ionic,
(And it is),
And so are Ammonites –
Then isn’t it moronic
To insist that Serlio is right ?
To favour Romans over Greeks,
And not allow some playful tweaks,
Patrolling boarders of the orders
Just to keep them pure from mutant freaks.
The Tuscans and the Composites
Were born in the Renaissance,
When Italians made counterfeits
To stand-up in response.
Well fair enough, by why stop there ?
Now that we have this president,
Let’s have a hundred orders blare
To prop-up ev’ry pediment.
Moody Lintels
Moody Lintels
This building, is it still so great ?
No masterpiece or pioneer-
And now it’s looking quite a state,
And none too safe in brick and slate –
It really ought to face its fate,
Admit the end is near.
It did it us proud, it served us well,
But now it’s really past its best –
And as its city-centre dwell
Has far more worth as bank, hotel,
Or office block – we had to sell,
In public interest.
So down it comes, and in its place
Development beguiling new:
A fresh design this site will grace,
A source of jobs and conf’rence space –
We may yet choose to save the face,
And gut the insides through.
These architects with magic touch
That turns the golden into shite –
Their helping hand’s a concrete clutch
Which crushes, smothers eversuch
And chokes the life they hate so much,
Because it shone so bright.
And when they try to match the theme,
They cannot think along that line –
Just vague pastiche and stripped-down scheme.
Yet form must come from vein and seam
As penetrating all like steam,
And scream these forms are mine.
Their new designs cannot be stood
Besides the old, for both then wilt –
So segregate each neighbourhood,
And save the past whene’er we could
For once it’s gone, it’s gone for good –
Will never be rebuilt.
I n the last line of the second verse, ‘interest’ should be pronounced with three syllables.
In Finity
In Finity
“I’d rather believe in an absolute something
Than trust in an absolute nothing at all.
And thus I choose faith in an undefined coming,
Than ponder the empty and chanceful and small.”
But how can an absolute anything be
In a finite and singular universe host ?
And as for an absolute nothing, well see,
That nature abhors of a vacuum the most.
Four Thousand Million Years in the Making
Four Thousand Million Years in the Making
Unbeknownst to exis’tence,
Who lived in bodies, firm and dense,
There looked upon with apprehence –
An unknown entity.
Beings of a diff’rent class,
Not formed of solid, liquid, gas:
For not one atom had they mass,
But weightless energy.
When they looked upon the Earth
In hill and cave and brook and firth,
They found the rocks had given birth
To life most tangible.
Life alive as mould and trees,
And slugs and crabs and honeybees,
And frogs and crows and chimpanzees,
With tooth and mandible.
“This is outright blasphemy !”
They screamed in thought-like energy
“For never life can ever be
Built with a hard physique.
And they live at such extremes
In ocean depths and fissure seams
And in another’s fluid streams.
With mutant-gained technique.”
Terrified by solid life
They blew apart this world-midwife,
For only there could such be rife,
And now it was destroyed.
Rock and lava shattered thence
And sped across the void immense,
Without a single thought or sense:
A thousand asteroids.
Thus were ended carbon forms
In fumigating magma storms,
Biomass now dusty swarms –
Extinction voracious.
But all this life is hard to kill,
And even in the deathly chill
Of outer space, it’s clinging still:
Patient and tenacious.
As the debris drifts afar,
So come the tuggings of some star
Upon this frozen reservoir,
And bring about a thaw.
Let them countless orbits make,
And with an endless time to take –
One bacterium shall wake,
And life resume once more.
The Gods of Melodrama
The Gods of Melodrama
I swore I’d never once again be fool
For the lies of actors.
To open up like that, it’s all too cruel,
To be only actors.
But when they looked at me with such a look,
Like we’re likeminded –
And yet the stalls were dark, and I mistook,
We both were blinded.
And yes, I know, I know, I’ve always known,
Yet fooled I always am –
They make me feel and feel in ways
Alone in life I never can.
Parable of Architecture
Parable of Architecture
Imagine that you’re sat at home,
Lis’ning to some Bach, let’s say –
When thudding through the party wall
Comes Iron Maiden, ev’ry day.
Now perhaps you rather like
To mosh from time to time –
But not at home – for home is Bach:
Subtle, delicate, sublime.
You’re not a snob, there’s room for both,
Though Eddie’s really out of place
At festivals of lilting strings –
They ain’t the stage to show his face.
And Glastonbury’s Pyramid
Is likewise not the perfect gig
For chamber-orchestra-quartets
To strut their stuff and make it big.
But ah, you say,
There’s shuffle-play:
A random stream shall come our way.
But if you try another’s Pod,
I bet you find their choices odd.
But now imagine, ev’ry day,
Their music blares until it bleeds –
They always crank it to eleven,
Cos that’s what our music needs.
And all your pastiche must be crushed,
For that is old and we are New –
We are the only tune allowed,
Cos all your heathen hymns are through.
But long before they moved next door
There used to live the sweetest song –
It’s gone forever, now, that air –
Alas, the future came along.
They took the song and stripped it bare,
Then slowed it down into the grave –
They tore its notes out, cleared its score,
To build their tune upon its stave.
But ah, you say,
That’s what we pay
To progress through to come-what may.
But I say we can play them both
If we just learn some civil growth.
Your False True-Colours
Your False True-Colours
America, no ! You’re doing it wrong !
It’s red on the left, and blue on the right.
The rest of the planet can all get along,
But you Yanks as usual are picking a fight.
For red are the hands that must labour and toil,
And blue is the blood that possesses the soil.
It hardly takes NYPD or the Feds
To spy just how blurred is the choice of your hues –
With red-meat Republicans labelled as Reds,
And New England Democrats down with the Blues.
But red is for passion, and rage, and hard knocks,
And blue is for loyalty, culture and stocks.
America, no ! What you practice today,
We follow tomorrow – and follow you blind –
Our system for centuries soon shall decay
As crimson and cobalt get quite misaligned –
Then blue are the collars that lefties much cite,
And red are the necks of the folks on the right.
I debated whether I should leave out the superfluous ‘u’ in colour in the title, but I just couldn’t let logic overcome my desperate need for identity.
Mortal Remains
Mortal Remains
These tombstones are listed, these crypts are protected,
Preserving the love and the pride that erected
These grand mausoleums and gravesides historic,
Their statements and passions to questions rhetoric.
Yet time shall erode with its rain and its frost,
Till their dates are obscured and their epitaphs lost.
It weathers their angels and softens their urns,
As lichens enshroud and subsidence upturns,
And insects will burrow in mortar and crack,
And ivy will clamber and marble turn black.
Yet do not repair them, their tarnish amassing –
Such monuments solemn are records of passing.
Anatamour
Anatamour
I love the way your halves combine.
I love the way you place each lung
With careless grace and good design
On either side your centre line,
And equidistant from your spine.
I love the way your ribs are strung.
I love the way your shoulders fit,
I love the way your arms construe.
I love the way your kidneys sit,
So each, the other mirrors it
To keep the couple quite legit.
I love the way your hips are two.
I love the way you wear your legs,
So nicely paired, and just enough –
For with a third, the question begs
Of where upon your frame it pegs.
I love the way you keep to regs.
I love the way you’re up to snuff.
I love your face with eye and eye,
I love the way they both are blue.
I love the way they flit and fly
In unison, to watch me pry
Upon thy tygrish symmet-try.
I love the way you’re balanced-through.
The penultimate line is inspired by how I always read the fourth line of a certain poem of William Blake’s.
Rhyming Couplets 