Incels

The world belongs to the charismatic –
The ones who grab the eyes,
Who get the jobs and get the praise
As the rest are shrunk to size.
They’re the ones who get the lovers,
And who get to say their piece,
Who limber-up the shiny pole
Before they’ve poured the grease.

Not like we losers, dumped-on and ignored,
Who you gladly shun.
I could write a thousand poems,
And you’ll read not a single one –
And I have !  I’ve put myself out there,
For the whole world to ignore.
Always the tenth choice, always forgotten,
And kindly shown the door.

Not even my family bother.  Not even my friends,
Those few I have.
You don’t even trouble to mock me,
You don’t even point and laugh.
And when you notice at all, it’s only in hate,
At my loneliness –
You stoke-up your loathing, and relish your spite,
In panicked phoniness.

So spare me your pity, but also spare me a thought
Without disdain.
The world is cruel, but I’m not gonna go
On a killing-spree to complain.
I don’t hate women (sorry to disappoint),
I just want to connect –
Yet the world has labelled me as a weirdo,
A friend of a friendless sect.

The world belongs to the charismatic,
And even I am charmed.
For all I try to help-out likewise-souls
Before we’re harmed,
I get sidetracked by a beautiful smile
Or a loquacious mate-to-all,
And I send my eyes where a million others are looking,
Forever in thrall.

Kismet Cat

Felix the feline is one lucky cat,
When he’s flexing his whiskers and flicking his tail.
He flows full of favour wherever he’s sat,
As his belly is fed and his wishes prevail.
He’s better than strays, he thinks, when stroked and patted –
This fortune’s no fluke, but his fate, he infers –
For this Felis felicitous, flea-less and fatted,
The flux of the fluence is heard in his purrs.

The Pineal Soul

When my father fell into Parkinsons,
He also fell out of God.
Month-by-month, a little less able,
Month-by-month, a little less holy.
It took some time for me to notice,
This sense of something odd,
But he stopped his hymns and stopped his hopes,
As he sank to silence slowly.

When it came to planning his wake,
When we both knew it was soon,
He showed a mild disinterest,
Where he once was so devout.
He hadn’t, I think, had a long dark night –
He hadn’t changed, but hushed his tune –
As if his soul had sprung a leak,
And faith had trickled out.

So is belief just a bunch of neurons ?
Is God just a ghost in the genes ?
Or does it take an untroubled mind
To think beyond the ev’ryday ?
When my father stopped his praying,
Was he lacking now the means ?
I guess what caused that small still voice in him
Had slipped away.

This poem is in no-way about my actual father. Do not assume the I of the poem is really I.

Saurosaurus

Did God like dinosaurs ?
The towering of sauropods ?
The horns of triceratops,
The T-Rex with his massive chops,
And soaring-over pterosaurs
Were all these monsters god’s ?
Did he marvel at their size,
Their armoured backs and pumping thighs ?

Were these both bright and beautiful to him
A great romance ?
And did he curse the asteroid
That saw his lineage destroyed ?
Are mammals just a consolation, then ?
A second chance ?
Does he look down on what we’ve bred,
And slowly, sadly, shake his head ?

Did god love dinosaurs ?
His scary scaly boys ?
And does he toast us with his cup
Each time we dig a fossil up ?
Are we bringing back the scores
Of memories and joys ?
Does he anguish at their lack ?
And wonder, should he bring them back…?

Bob-Bob-Bobbing

The robins are chirping all night long
In the tree by the streetlight over the street.
I wonder what is the point of their song
That they keeping on chirping all night long ?
Perhaps this tree’s just a place to meet
When they fancy a branch for a late-night tweet ?
A nightclub where the music is strong
In the tree by the streetlight over the street.
I thought that robins were territorial,
And yet this tree is a truce-arboreal –
Chatting and chirping in one big throng,
In the tree by the streetlight all night long.

Fourthtides

The Celtic quarter days are out of sync
By six weeks or so, all said.
Not on the English solstice and equinox,
But behind (or ahead).
Now May Day and All Saints are obvious links,
To anchor the year secure –
But Lammas and Candlemas slip their docks
When they don’t mean much anymore.
And so the seasons grow and shrink,
And won’t be tightly bound –
The year won’t fit a nice square box,
When its orbit is a round.

I’ve discussed quarter days before, and their mixed-up child the tax year.

On a bit of a tangent, but I’ve long thought the perfect year would be made up of 6-day weeks – with five per month, or 60 in a year (plus five spare days, interspersed one every three months, plus one extra for New Year’s Day). This would mean that a particular date was always the same day of the week each year, and we could finally ditch Mondays…

Mudbricks

Humans, like water, flow down from the hills
To the lowest and easiest level to settle –
On floodplains and coastlines, the habitat fills
With the tides of the houses that sprout-up like petals.
Until, as the towns and the centuries grow
There must come a reckoning one stormy May,
As the flood meets the flood – so the undertow
Shall sink all the streets that stand in its way.

We have to live somewhere, but so does the water,
And so we must share the valleys and lakes –
In a constant battle of marsh and mortar,
To raise-up the levee before it breaks.
The humans are clever, but the river is long,
And gravity draws then both to ground –
So the silt is as soft as the stones are strong,
Till the continents rise or the roofs are drowned.

From Mighty Acorns…

As a child, I’d wander Hundred Acre Wood
On the pages made from paper from its trees.
I heard that they chopped it down right where it stood
Because the bears were eating all the bees.
But I later learned that it never had grown at all,
There was no-such place, it was all just make-believe,
Or some said that it did in the pencil and the scrawl
Of the author who had plucked it out of his sleeve.

Pooh wouldn’t care, of course,
He knew the woods he knew –
But he isn’t here to ponder
Where his fav’rite forest grew.

I heard some people claim it lives within,
That we carry it, us all, inside our minds.
But since we can’t agree on where our common thoughts begin,
Then the woods we’re thinking of are diff’rent kinds.
And some say it simply is a real wood in Surrey
Which has only undergone a change of name.
But others say an inspiration source is far too blurry
To be ever thought as all-one-and-the-same.

Pooh wouldn’t care, of course,
The trees were just the trees –
But he isn’t here to wander-off
To put me at my ease.

The Eve of the Eve

Christmas Eve would last forever,
Or so it would seem like, afterwards.
As a kid, of course, wanting it over,
And yet, not yet – while it still affords
The family gathered, watching the specials
And singing the carols, and sipping Dad’s beer.
And did we really do any of that ?
Well, we did in my memory, every year.

Christmas Eve still lasts forever,
As it did last Christmas, all night long –
Where we snuggled down with the sofa and sherry,
As the radio played an endless song.
But I never remember to notice on Christmas Eve,
Not till the following day,
Which is far too busy to hang around –
But at least we get that sweet delay.