Axis of Up
Flatland always had all three,
All three dimensions on it –
Anyone with sense can see
The Flatoids are upon it !
It’s true, they barely used the zed,
But still the zed was there –
But as for other strings that thread,
These cannot cube the square.
Dream On
Sleeping is our right,
It is our patriotic duty –
And ev’ry dream is freedom,
And our freedom is to dream…
Sleep, my fellow patriots,
For sleeping is our beauty –
And dreaming is our industry
In which our twilights gleam.
Upward Spiral
A snail upon the concrete, half-way high,
Just scaling up the slabs to the broken-bottle prism
That shards into the crown that lacerates the sky –
It’s breaking up the straight lines, a bauble on the brutalism.
This snail is still there, years later, its shell becoming its coffin. I wonder if it were poisoned by the concrete ?
Unhappy Feet
New shoes, old pains,
Blister time is here again –
Old feet, new shoes,
Welcome to the blue suede blues.
No Biography
When I die, don’t worry who I was,
Don’t carve my name at Poets’ Corner –
I hope my rhymes still cause a fuss,
But let no stranger be a mourner.
When I die, let me die and be done,
Don’t raise blue plaques or rename streets –
I’d love to think my words still run,
But they weren’t written for receipts.
One-and-a-Half
Rhythms march in syllables,
They count both on and off the beat,
But syncopated signatures in words
Can never fall as neat –
They last too long, or maybe
Not quite long enough to find a home –
They fuel our fire and flour our fear,
To foil and foul the metronome.
Trees in Threes
1.
Trees are nice and all,
But I feel I’ve already seen ‘em –
They’re big and fat and tall,
With not a conker between ‘em.
And they’re so brown,
So endless brown,
Except where the leaves have greened ‘em.
2.
I’ve spied these trees before
On the other side of the woods –
They’re taunting me, I’m sure,
With their secret brotherhoods.
They move about at night, I swear –
For how else did those trees get there ?
But when I question them, they just ignore,
And won’t give up the goods.
3.
Poplar black and willow white,
I think that I have got that right –
But easy to confuse them, each,
Like copper birch and silver beech.
The Scream
Never mind the drama queen
Who’s posing by the railing,
As camp as a jellybean,
Just wibbly-wobbly wailing.
Never mind the sky of red
Or bay of blue-macabre –
Like Jupiter is overhead,
As streaky as the harbour.
Never mind if we can’t find
What makes the screamer crazed –
The couple coming up behind
Seem perfectly unfazed.
Shot Star
A country comet, blazing through
The skies of peace and status quo –
Your portents wasted to the blue.
You shout your name and on you go,
With not a trace of plague or coup
Or sparks beyond your pretty show.
Hieroglyphs
We’ve seen them all on ev’ry wall
In Egypt – carved in profile style –
But here’s a game to try and name
The most – Let’s see, it’s been a while…
The eye of the Sun, I know that one,
The wavy lines that mean the Nile,
The ankh, the egg, the owl and leg,
The feather, sphinx, and crocodile,
The scarab of course…and was there a horse ?
The slug-like snake, that’s worth a smile…
The goose (or duck)…and then I’m stuck…
But the walls stretch on for mile on mile.
Rhyming Couplets 