‘Tache-less
Those clean-shaved chaps all suffer hell
From a lack of stiffened upper-lips,
Their razor-bothered mouths are far too sleek.
When it comes to cunning twirling, well,
They simply cannot get to grips –
Their naked filtrums wobble when they speak.
No rakish pencil wits
For these tongue-tied sunburned Brits,
But the unconnected stubble of the meek.
No bushy walrus manliness
On faces long on gangliness,
Whose claims to hairy days are bare-faced cheek !
Quad-Ops
Spiders have eight, and box-jellies twenty-four,
Scallops have hundreds, and dragonflies thousands,
And digital cameras even more !
But vertebrates make do with two,
Plus the odd ocelli peeping-through –
But only a couple of retinas –
A pair of light-bucket dishes –
Well, except for a few strange fishes !
And I don’t mean the four-eyed anableps,
Who see through both the water and air,
And focus the light through diff’rent steps
But onto the same old patch of cells,
That parallels the ones we chordates share.
No, I mean the brownsnout spookfish –
They may not look as swish as barreleyes,
Until we realise that here may be
The ancestor of a whole new tree
Of multi-looking vertebrates to arise –
That one day may just populate
The future Earth with their future eyes.
Cats’ Eyes
Life is one long side-quest,
With its sub-plots and distractions –
Existence is the Wild West,
That is claimed by countless factions.
The through-line soon gets lost
Amid the threads of deviations –
For attention has a cost
That must compete with new sensations.
I’ve never been much single-minded,
Far too often getting blinded
By the flash of something new.
I’ve never had much use for blinkers,
Seem to me to just be shrinkers,
Shutting down the field of view.
Wait, what’s that they’re playing ?
Now it’s lodged into my brain…
Sorry, you were saying…?
Guess I drifted off again…
A Legacy in Bits
Ev’rything I’ve ever written,
Ev’ry poem, ev’ry play,
Are strings of ones and zeros on a flickering display.
Permanently hidden
In a hard-drive or a cloud,
So hard to leave behind for work so proud.
No-one knows my password,
Save my hacker and myself,
Since I never passed it on to someone else.
This security we’ve mastered
Will leave all my work unread –
It might as well be locked-up in my head !
Parasites
Out there in the wood
Is the old oak tree,
Just lapping-up the sunshine,
All of it for free.
But there in its branches,
There lies the mistletoe,
Just sucking-up the sap
Of its clueless host below.
And there on this shrub
Is a little caterpillar,
That’s munching on the leaves
Like a cute and stealthy killer.
And inside of the bug there lurks
The grubling of a wasp,
As it chews-through the organs,
Squatting like a boss.
But inside the grubling
Is another, smaller maggot
Of a teeny-tiny wasplet
That will wear it like a jacket,
And inside of the maggot
Is a nematody worm,
And further inside that
There is a microscopic germ…
So they each are chowing-down,
And they each are getting fatter,
Till they burst-out of the body,
That they leave in such a tatter.
But the enemies of enemies
Don’t turn-out to be friends agen –
Just ask the plague that bit the fleas,
Then bit the rats, then bit the men…
Walking Fishes
Bichirs, eels, and climbing perches,
Sometimes swim and sometimes crawl –
See their wriggles, flops, and lurches,
Up up out of the water all.
Like lobe-fins did so long ago,
They make a hopeful bid to leap and grow.
Distant species such as these,
Who gulp the breezing air with ease –
Distant species, all who please
To give the land a go.
But why do gobies only skip the mud of late,
And not before ?
Just what has changed to make it worth the risk to skate
Upon the shore,
And dip their ray-finned toes upon the sands of fate
Once more ?
For surely, this cannot be new –
This must be something that they do
Since days of dinosaur.
I guess that they were out-competed,
Couldn’t play the odds –
I guess they found the land replete
With hungry tetrapods.
So why did they think they ought to ?
Small fish from a big pond,
Who sought beyond for everlasting worms,
And spurned the nice-yet-dull –
These fishes-out-of-water,
Inventing bicycles.
Mudskippers diverged from the other gobies around 140 million years ago, or at around the time of the American Civil War according to this method. Of course, that doesn’t mean that their particular lineage of goby started venturing out of the water until much later, though I cannot find any details as to when this first happened.
Dioxide Diet
For years, I built-up energy,
Laying-down my layers of fat
As batteries, never running flat.
But now, those bonds are breaking free,
Are draining-down, are being spent,
Are liquified to pay the rent.
Each breath contains a piece of me,
A tiny sliver of my store
That was sequestered years before –
As all those good times, all that glee,
Each choc’late cream or hearty stew,
Escapes my lips as CO2.
Inner Beauty
Skeletons are wonderf’ly spooky,
The freaks that lurk within –
They look both menacing and kooky,
Skinny without the skin.
Skulls with empty orbits,
Missing noses, plenty of chin –
Now freed from the muscles’ corset,
They can flash their toothy grin.
The shoulder-blades hang down behind,
In-front the breastbone juts –
While the ribs are like Venetian blinds,
Or a prison with no guts.
The pelvis is a pair of ears,
To form the butt of our butts,
And the legs and arms are rod and gears –
All held by strings and nuts.
Skeletons are wonderf’ly spooky,
Almost designed to shock –
Though evolution is rather fluky,
And frightens us ad-hoc.
They’ve been the backbone of vertebrates for years,
Our building-block –
So ev’ry October, it’s good to say cheers –
Deep down in our marrow, we rock !
The Red Plague
Rust never sleeps,
That’s why it looks so tired –
Red-faced, unpolished,
And so flakily-attired.
It’s silent as it creeps,
So unnoticed in its zeal –
Until it has demolished
All the strong but sleeping steel.
In Reply to the Handwriting Appreciation Society
I cannot think of something worse
Than writing long by hand –
How much is my electric verse
Beyond my wrist’s command ?
It’s only thanks to ones and noughts
My words are ever read –
Or else, my messy, speeding thoughts
Would never leave my head.
For who would bother to unpick
My blotchy, crossed-out pages ?
But thankfully, I type and click
My wisdom for the ages.
Rhyming Couplets 