Alphabet Soup
Any fool can bake a poem,
Far too many do.
I was once a fool myself
Who thought he’d have a chew.
My fruits were mushy, overripe,
My verse a sickly brew:
With plums that withered into prunes
In scrag-and-gristle stew.
Any fool can bake a poem,
Ain’t no hill of beans.
I was once a fool myself
With burnt and stodgy means
But ev’ry sour mouthful will
Yet teach us fine cuisines:
We cannot dine on peaches till
We finish up our greens.
More than a Footnote
The dawn light is welling in the dams –
Hold it back a little longer.
The thunder is rehearsing for its roll –
Don’t give the cue, don’t let it blow.
The dragons on the moon are all asleep –
Let them dream, let them hunger.
The gargoyles are watching from above,
As are the dwarves from down below.
If we can only stop the Disc from spinning,
Maybe we can stop the ever-grinning-one
From winning,
Do you reckon ?
No, I know, that isn’t how it works,
And none escape from he-who-never-shirks,
Come the beckon.
And so the Disc must turn,
The dawn must gleam,
The lives must flow,
The turtle swim.
It isn’t fair, we scream,
Because we know:
It isn’t fair, it’s only Him.
So cuckoos are winding their clocks up,
And pine trees are counting the years,
And you, who saw it all, yet laughed at seers:
You are not there, you are gone –
Yet still it goes on.
You know, some say that no-one truly dies
If someone else remembers them in once-a-while.
My friend, I think you’ll live on in disguise
However long that we can read, and we can smile.
Love in Letraset
She asked if we could correspond –
She asked of me in Garamond.
She wrote how long her pen had dried –
She wrote it out in Franklin Wide.
She thought my slugs were growing cold –
She thought me that in Goudy Old.
She wept how I was needed back –
She wept it all in Cooper Black.
She’d search through slab and Monolith
To strike upon her perfect glyph,
And thought I could be just her type:
A heavyweight, not Candy Stripe.
When I wrote back, she liked my scans –
No Dingbat, I, nor Comic Sans –
My quick brown fox was framed and pressed,
And from her font my text was blessed.
She inked her heart across my page,
Italicized, in 10-point gauge,
In boring secretarial –
But god, I loved that Arial.
I flew upon its static chill,
As if she’d signed in Baskerville.
Her monotype shall answer me
As fine as Blackface Chancery.
Composited in forme and mould,
Our love is set in Gothic Bold –
We’re written on such plates as these,
My mistress of the matrices.
I place my serifs on your sort,
Your metal hot, your kerning taught.
You shape my bowl and soothe my stem:
My Century, my Requiem.
Circa Circumference
“And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other…and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.“
– 1st Kings 7:23
There’s so many reasons for faulting the Bible,
From walking on water to capturing brides.
There’s so many reasons, it’s scarcely a libel
To call God a fool, and a mean one besides !
There’s so many reasons for calling it tribal,
And local and ancient – the worst-of-all guides.
So many bloopers and so many slayings,
Just so many errors and terrors astounding –
So why do you focus on one of its sayings,
By claiming the value of pi is worth hounding ?
You won’t get the faithful to doubtings and swayings
With petty point-scorings that don’t allow rounding.
Bright Satanic Mills
My bow is of dull brown wood,
For gold does not spring –
My arrows have less divine good,
And more barbs to sting –
My spear is aimed not at cloud,
But targets more solid –
My chariot’s unburned and proud,
Efficient, if stolid.
Examined, explained, demystified,
There’s no room left for your god of Zion.
With science and reason, his will is defied –
For mine is a chariot of iron.
Chromium Dreams
They promised us of Things To Come:
The Future’s oscillating hum,
When dreams of Progress are unfurled
And pitched to claim this Brave New World.
We always knew it’s coming soon,
Those holidays upon the Moon,
The robots, ray guns, rocket boots,
The purple hair and silver suits.
But look at what infact we get:
The wind-farm and the internet.
Organic foods, not protein pills,
And terrorists, not air-raid drills.
We never got to live like gods
In fully-automated pods,
We never got to touch the stars
In UFOs and flying cars.
There’s no-one chilled in cryo-sleep,
There’s no-one dreams electric sheep,
There’s no-one swashes laser-swords
To saves the Earth from Martian hordes.
We’ve waited, just to find, too late
The Future now is out of date,
Yet still unripe its promised plums –
Alas, Tomorrow never comes.
Rock Pocks
Speckled is your Öyster and freckled is your Crüe,
Spıñal is your Motör and Hüsker is your Dü.
The diacritic critics may de-tittle in their punditry –
But I say, let umlauts roll with wänton-döt fecündïtÿ.
The ‘n’ in Spinal should of course have an umlaut, not a tilde, but the WordPress font just isn’t up to such awesomeness.
But of course, when it comes to the real stars of heavy metal, nobody is higher than Boötes !
Night-Shift
Whenever I’m stumped for an effortless rhyme,
Whenever the words won’t fall easy,
When wheezing about on the gravely climb –
So that’s when the words come to tease me –
Late-night linguistical lethargies seize me,
Whenever the trumps are the harder to find.
And oozing from creases all over my mind
Come scuttle the lazy, the sham and resigned –
“Who needs a poem to rhyme ?” so they whisper,
“Nobody else is much bothered these days.
You labour at making all endings the crisper
But is it all worth it, the pittance it pays ?
Every poet, from preacher to lisper
Has long since rejected this overgilt craze.
Why must it be you who won’t flinch at their goosing ?
Still clinging to structures when others are loosing.
Oh, haven’t you seen all the standards reducing ?
And haven’t you seen all their rhythmless fame ?
All of the while, so your petty obtusing,
Is leaving you sleepless and out of the game.”
And so on, and so on. I hear them, I hear them –
At three in the morning, it’s hopeless to clear them.
For all of their carping and mocking and chiming,
And trying, so trying to foul and coerce.
But still my resistance I’m loading and priming
To shoot down their posy and prosy-like verse.
If only, if only I unearth some rhyming,
Some trove of concordance to echo my timing,
Some anything, anything with the right sounding –
Some something to stifle my wheedle’ing head.
Something to root for, to bring their confounding,
Something of proof that will shutter their hounding,
Anything splendid and outright astounding –
Anything quick, or the voices will spread !
I must end the poem, I must end the pounding,
To let this poor poet at last go to bed !
Index of First Lines
I just can’t think who wrote it,
And I never learned its name.
But I know it begins
With a line about sins –
Or maybe a line about shame.
I know I used to quote it,
But it’s long since slipped away.
But I know at its head
Is a line about Fred,
Or maybe a line about Ray.
I always meant to note it,
But I let the words grow faint.
But I know at its start
Is a line about art,
Or maybe a line about paint.
My mem’ry just can’t float it,
For I’ve racked yet can’t recall
But I know at its lead
Is a line that I need –
Just that line, just that first line is all.
Sex & Death
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”
– William Yeats
Expunge from mind your blue-remembered hills,
Put out your tyger tyger burning bright,
Dig up your host of golden daffodils,
And walk no more in beauty like the night.
Don’t take the golden road to Samarkand,
Or raise a lamp beside a golden door,
Don’t meet with trav’lers from an antique land,
Or laughing fellow-rovers anymore !
Ignore the stately pleasure-dome,
Forget the lays of ancient Rome,
Don’t hear the steeple peeling its half-chime.
No Raven or ascending Lark,
No Jumblies or the hunted Snark,
In rose-red cities half as old as time.
Don’t fill the unforgiving minute
With a nightingale or linnet,
Hiawatha or Macavity.
And wish not cloths of Heaven,
Nor for Player Queens or Seven-Woods,
And do not rise and go to Innisfree.
Rhyming Couplets 