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To a gentleman of mechanistic means,
Who loves to read and read about ingenious machines:
I bring you word of piston, crank and drum –
And not just once or twice, but for a dozen times to come.
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Category: Literature
By George !
By George !
Bernard Shaw, as sharp as a razor,
Quite at home in a tie and blazer.
But his beard is less Belgravian –
He may be Shaw, but never Shavian.
An Ideal Crony
An Ideal Crony
Sir Robert Chiltern, Bart –
A plummy, chummy, bleeding heart,
Who made some loot insider trading –
Suddenly his star is fading
When extorted by a high-class tart.
What ho !, his chums in high-up places
Shall protect him from disgraces –
Don’t let on, don’t make a fuss,
For don’t you know he’s one of us ?
So stiffen up the lips on both his faces.
So what, a sacred trust was sold ?
We’d do the same for thirty gold !
So call the playwrite with the sharp wit,
Sweep it all beneath the carpet –
No need that the voting oiks be told…
Waifs & Fodder
Waifs & Fodder
Impressionist painters in poverty
On canvasses lacking in threads,
Glamorous silent-screen starlets,
And bereted and bearded reds,
Scientists seeking-out secrets,
And dare-devils pushing their luck –
They died too soon and died too young,
When fortunes came unstuck.
In days before the drugs did for,
Disease was the way to go –
Consumption, of course – or else it’s the pox –
Or the needs of the narrative flow.
Heroines, gothic or chivalrous,
In novels antique or sublime –
They’re dying too young from the loin or the lung,
Yet they’re dying precisely on time.
Katya
Katya
My life was good on Manor Farm –
Just catching rats and lapping milk,
And sleeping warm and safe from harm –
I had no qualms with Jones’s ilk.
Yet revolution saw it scrapped –
Ah well, a cat will soon adapt.
I let them give their speeches,
And I let them hold their votes,
As they banned all booze and breeches,
And they argued beets or oats.
I snoozed between the awed and rapt,
Because a cat can soon adapt.
By hoof and feather, cart and plough,
We each must labour, none must shirk –
But rodents are our comrades now,
So I am out of work.
My talents must remain untapped –
But hey, a cat shall soon adapt.
Yet I smell blood, and I smell fear,
Among the cowed who used to crow.
They ought to leave, but still they’re here –
For where else can these rebels go ?
They’ve made their home, and now they’re trapped.
Farewell – a cat must soon adapt.
Yes, I know – adult cats don’t drink milk. Or so the bourgeois would have us believe…
My Mind, She Runs
My Mind, She Runs
I’ve always heard them say
That Golden Brown and Perfect Day
Are smuggling in some heroin
Cos that’s so rock & roll !
But I don’t think that’s such a feat
When looking at each lyric sheet –
There’s nothing there to threaten or cajole.
The Stranglers waltz around with metaphor
About…well, what ?
Some vagaries that lapse into an ideal love, perhaps,
To fox our trot, but little more.
And Lou is not opaque at all,
Just thanks for needed company –
And if it’s from a needle, well,
He fails to wink sufficiently.
Now, there’s no reason songs can’t hide
Another message deep inside,
But usually they’re straight ahead –
And if we let our fancies fly
We’re chasing diamonds in the sky
And swearing blind that Paul is dead.
Another supposed drug song is Under The Bridge. I’m sure its author is sincere in explaining his motivation, but the lyrics themselves are far too generic, about nothing more than alienation in LA. Coming to this blind, there is little chance of the listener decyphering just why Mr Kiedis is so gloomy. Indeed, I still contest that the song is singing about lonliness, not about injections. The latter may have caused the former, but that’s completely irrelevent to the song, because the song only cares to tell us that the singer is alone, not why they’re alone.
As to that why, there is one line that identifies the eponymous bridge as the place where the narrator “drew some blood”, which might point us in the right direction, but there’s absolutely no other line to back it up – causing your teenage author to wrongly assume it was talking about self-harm.
Of course, songwriters are under no obligation for their lyrics to be able to operate in a vacuum, their’s is a different medium, but don’t be surprised if the groovy kids a hundred years from now are scratching their heads and think it’s all about urban planning.
And on a completely unrelated matter, is heroin actually golden brown in colour ? Not claiming to be an expert, but isn’t it either a black lump or a white powder ? At least, that’s how it’s always shown in the movies…
The Daphne Shanty
The Daphne Shanty
One man drifts upon a door –
Too far from home, too far from shore,
Without supplies, without an oar.
Or so I’ve heard it told.
Both he and raft, three days ago,
Were languishing upon the deck –
Now all the rest are ten below,
Yet he by chance has fled the wreck.
Instead, he gets to starve and stare
At water, water ev’rywhere !
Beneath the fierce, unflinching skies,
He waits his death and hungry flies –
When shadows cross his salt-caked eyes…
A figurehead in gold !
So weigh the anchor, hitch the stay,
We’ll blow you back to yesterday –
We’re all adrift and outwards bound,
An island’s waiting to be found.
So dance with the carambola,
By the fair isola of the giorno prima,
Ev’ry newborn gleamer.
One man drifts below a prow
Too far from home – but safer now,
If he can only climb somehow…
And so our yarn sets sail.
Up top, he finds no sign of life,
Yet down below are cages crammed
With birds, and beasts, and flowers rife:
As live as he, and just as damned.
A hold here to behold ! All brought
From out the land he sees to port.
But where are they who stocked this store ?
If only he could swim ashore,
To the island of the day before…
Ah, therein hangs a tale…
So drop the anchor, be becalmed,
We’re porpoised, parroted and palmed
In paradise, in distant climes
A long long way from Greenwich times.
So dance with the mola mola,
By the lost isola of the giorno prima,
Ev’ry shipworn dreamer.
This is based on the opening of Umberto Eco’s novel.
Necessary Narcissism
Necessary Narcissism
Yeats ? I’m better than him, any day !
Shakespeare ? Kipling ? Take them away !
Wordsworth ain’t worth a word, nor a letter –
Betjeman, ha ! Bet you meant to be better.
Sure, they have moments – as do I, if you only knew –
But it’s only their moments forever retold and adored.
I could write beauty, should it suit me – and it does !, and I do !
But it’s always their words get remembered, and my words ignored.
To tell the truth, I’d always hoped I could have loved them all instead,
But then they never wrote the lines I wished and needed to be said,
And so it fell to me to please myself with what I couldn’t find,
And that is why it’s only I who sparks my picky, prickly mind.
Oh, they all have moments, and I cling to these for dear love –
That just for once they get me – when they get me right and get me good !
I need these, only ten times more so – scattered crumbs are not enough –
Why must I hack my own damn verses just to feel I’m understood ?
Perhaps I over-dramatise a little, make too much a fuss,
But surely we’ve all felt at times abandoned, like we’ve missed the bus –
They make such lofty claims of how they speak for us, these sacred arts,
Yet often fail so mis’rably to touch us in our hungry hearts.
Sure they have their moments – as do I ! Ah, but you’ll never know.
I wouldn’t care, if only you could steal my thoughts and set them free.
I know I have some beauty, somewhere – Ah, forget it, let it go…
If only I could love them as you love them – but it ain’t to be.
Yeats ? I’m better, when we’re both said and done !
At least, to my audience of one.
Jellyfishes
Jellyfishes
“jellyfish – OED first citation, 1796
medusa – in this sense, 1752
sea-nettle – 1601”
What did we call the jellyfish
Before we called them that ?
Aristotle was the first
To note what they were at –
He called them akelephe
In his mighty omnibus –
While Pliny called them sea-lungs –
That is, pulmo marinus.
At some point, they were likened
To Medusa, with the snakes –
So when Linnaeus crowned them that,
He simply upped the stakes.
But what about in English,
From before the mighty Swede ?
Shakespeare never mentioned them,
Nor Caxton, Chaucer, Bede.
I guess those Middle Ages folk
Just neither knew, nor cared –
Though fishermen, at lease, you’d think,
Would need to be prepared.
Sea nettle, I suppose
Could make the strongest claims,
But hands that felt the stings were not
The hands that wrote down names.
Yet surely they are tailor-made
To populate in Hell ?
It seems their nightmares missed a trick,
When jellies did not gel.
They kinda look like floating heads,
(Though clearly going bald).
Much like Cthulhu’s nameless ones,
Who knows what they were called ?
‘Jelly’ entered Middle English between 1350-1400 via Old French, ultimately from the Latin root meaning ‘to freeze’. nbsp;’Fish’ is Anglo-Saxon.
Adle Strop
Adle Strop
Yes, I remember the poet’s train
That pulled up one afternoon,
And waited by my bare platform
Unwontedly. Was it late June ?
I had been whitless-still in fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky,
Listening to a blackbird sing
Of meadowsweet and haycocks dry,
When the express-train drew up there.
No-one left and no-one came.
The only thing they even saw
Were platform boards which bore my name.
And then they went, and took their noise,
Their hissing steam and flashing brass,
And left me once again in peace
With willow, willow-herb and grass.
Rhyming Couplets 