Walking with Scissors
Don’t be so angry, they said,
No screaming tirade –
Don’t be so angry, so terribly angry,
Your cause is ill-made.
Speak your words quiet and potent, they said,
Sugar your bile and soften your tread,
Keep your breath focused and reckoning dead,
And sharpen your blade.
Taking Care of Business
Machines have always given lip.
We used to use the rule of thump
To make ’em jump-start with a jump,
Until their clutches got a grip.
So have things changed ? Not on your nelly !
When they claim ‘does not compute’
We kick ’em with a hard reboot –
It’s just a diff’rent sort of welly.
The Case for Privacy
The things you don’t know about me
Would surprise you,
I know –
Or at least, I would hope so.
If I thought that you knew,
If you’d even a clue,
Of the things about me
That I daren’t let you view –
Or if upon learning
You showed no surprise –
Then you’re far too discerning,
And worldly wise.
I know how I’d feel
If I thought it could be
That you find the appeal
In the same crap as me –
If I thought it were true,
Then I think we’d be through –
So I swear, never share,
What you secretly do.
We can laugh and engross,
And pretend we are close,
And gossip on who’s seeing who –
But keep a firm grip
So you never let slip
All the things I don’t know about you.
And maybe then, maybe,
You won’t get to see
All the things you don’t know about me.
Basecamp
Wherever you have got, and how you got there,
Is less than I could care – you come, you go –
And sometimes you will telephone from out-there.
You’re somewhere else, and that is all I know.
And so I’m left back here, back in your old life,
To vaguely wonder where on earth you haul –
And if you can remember what’s my number,
Then maybe I shall someday get your call.
Holy Trinity, Batman !
The Son is the Father,
And the Father is the Son,
And the Ghost is the both of them,
And yet is also none.
They all three knew the Virgin,
Since they all are but a-one:
So the Son is dad to Father,
And the Father son to Son.
They always are and always were
Since time was first begun,
So the Kid’s as old as time itself,
Yet Dad’s the oldest one.
So Son is full of peace and love,
But Father’s down on fun,
And who knows what the Ghost’s about,
When all is said and done ?
Pro Crastinator
I promise that I’ll sweep the floor,
When I get around to it.
I promise that I’ll paint the door,
Feed the hungry, clothe the poor,
Or find the grail, learn to knit,
And cure the cancer, stop the war –
I promise you all this and more,
When I get around to it.
Armistice Sunday Blues
If this were a day just to celebrate peace,
And the end of the stupidity –
If thenceforth we’d learned and if henceforth we cease
All nationalist hostility –
Then maybe I could be a little less blue,
And not blame the soldiers so much
For orders they only were following through
For empire, oil, and such.
And yes, I am fully aware that a war
Is complex, and that leaders are deep –
But still they are all politicians at core,
With pollsters and headlines to reap.
So soldiers get orders and carry them out,
And sometimes civilians die –
But that’s total war, and it’s too late to shout –
We knowingly grabbed for the lie.
They don’t want me carping, but fighting there too,
But I know this war isn’t cricket.
When his country comes calling, the patriot true
Tells his hypocrite homeland to stick it.
Unwise in the Ys
We start the wars, we fight the wars,
We win them and we lose them –
We argue out the truces and the peace.
We write the laws, we break the laws,
We honour and abuse them –
And either way, our meddling shall increase.
For we are Men, alas, we’re Men,
We’re being masculine again:
We’ve got the whiskers, got the beer –
We’re patriarchitypes, my dear.
For we are He, alas, Himself –
We’ve got the jobs, we’ve got the wealth.
We must be heard ! We shall be heard !
We started with the final word.
At least, that’s how it’s always told
By critic and historian:
From hunter-gather days of old
To present times – the myth is sold
That ev’ry man is brute and bold,
And endlessly Victorian.
But we are more than legacy,
We’ve learned to share and redefine.
The mercy that you beg of me
Is yours these days as much as mine.
For we are us, thank god, ourselves,
We’ve equal now, not trolls and elves –
But that’s enough from me today,
I’d rather hear what you might say.
Makeworking
There isn’t enough to do today,
There isn’t enough to do.
It isn’t as though I enjoy what I do,
The tiresome woe they employ me to do –
But wouldn’t you know, but my tedium grew
As soon as work withered away.
I’ve finished the paper, the internet’s gone,
I have to pretend that I’ve got something on,
I’m barely awake and I’m boozy-lunch tight,
I’m sharpening pencils with nothing to write.
Eyebrow Stroking
At school, they taught us poetry,
And how to read them, and just what they meant,
And we recited dutif’ly –
And still I think they barely left a dent.
Strange, they never taught us songs,
But we still understood them well enough –
Their loves, their hopes, their rights and wrongs –
Cheesy, sure – but boy, they were the stuff !
Poems once were fun and catchy,
Now they’re Worthy, now they’re Art.
My mem’ry of their lines is patchy,
Yet I know a thousand songs by heart.
At school they taught us poetry,
On long and stuffy afternoons –
But we learned far more humanity
From crappy lyrics sung to catchy tunes.
Rhyming Couplets 