Equality
There’s a glassy ceiling above me,
Way up the greasy pole
But I’m still down in the basement
Just pence above the dole.
A fraction of us may hammer the ceiling,
Always demand more,
But most of us working stiffs are afraid
Of the rise of the quicksand floor.
A Friend in Blend
All through Europe, there I’ll find you.
(Never back in Blighty, mind you.)
Ev’ry café, ev’ry table –
Lipton’s Yellow Label.
St Random’s Day
The 6th of June is ev’rywhere, it seems,
It turns up all the year.
This av’rage day has gained the fate
Of ev’rybody’s av’rage date.
The 6th of June has crept into my dreams,
The Swedes have whispered in my ear –
Or maybe D-Day’s up to tricks ?,
Or the Devil claimed oh-six-oh-six ?
I guess we each of us have such a day,
For tripping-over, bric-a-brac finds –
It pings our sonar, winks our eye,
And scores us another proof, we cry !
So patternless-patterns will work their way
Into the slots at the back our minds –
We know they’re wrong, but still they fix,
Just random rolls of double six.
I Am Bix
I was instructed to iambicize,
And keep a strictly penta-metric beat.
Alas, I could not fit within this size:
I could not keep my bloody stride within my bloody feet.
Less than Nothing
Antimatter: it bugs me –
It doesn’t feel likely, it doesn’t feel clean.
But maybe it’s here and it hugs me,
Maybe it’s here and will never been seen.
And it really doesn’t matter if I really don’t believe,
Cos it doesn’t even know it, and it doesn’t even care –
So it just goes on existing, with no thought to beg-my-leave.
Unless, of course, it doesn’t – cos it isn’t even there.
Stowaways
I am the B in doubt and in womb,
I am the G in gnostic and brougham,
The P that’s in coup, and in pseudo and pneum-,
The N there in autumn, the dumb L in Hulme,
The W lurking in answer and whom,
The E that is freeloading gaffe.
And I am the H and the T in whistle,
The K in knife and the C in scissel,
The S in debris and the comma in this’ll,
The F in lieutenant and laugh.
A poem about silent letters. Because spelling in English is always an adventure.
Queen of the Silk Road
Since long before the Russians shook your walls,
And ere the Prophet’s prophets spread his word,
Or Alexander feasted in your halls
And found you even fairer than he’d heard –
Your golden domes upon your golden sand
Have tempted men and kings since Darius.
Who needs the Muses when we’ve Samarkand ?
What would ye, Ladies ? It was ever thus !
I met a maiden from an ancient clan,
Who held a gaze as old as Summertime,
She traded finest silks by caravan
Across the Steppes that only camels climb
I should have bid her health, and gone my way,
And never mind the henna on her hand,
But no, I had to make excuse to stay –
Men are unwise, and curiously planned.
She showed a little of her precious stock,
The bolts she brought from China to Tashkent:
She laid them out upon the desert rock,
And stroked the fibres of the Orient.
Countless caterpillars gave their lives for each,
In patterns joyfully superfluous –
Not that they care what moral they may teach:
They have their dreams and do not think of us.
We spent the chilly night beneath their thread,
As she unveiled the promise of the East –
But come the dawn, her cloths-of-heaven bed,
Like her, had fled – and I woke ached and creased.
I wonder if, in dehydrated spunk,
I’d summoned her mirage at my command –
We Englishmen, when we get hatless-drunk,
We take the golden road to Samarkand.
Two Ways to Samarkand
What wouldst thou, Flecker, it was ever thus –
Readers are wise and rhythmically planned.
They have their Road, so do not make a fuss.
They think your Journey never really scanned.
This is a sort-of rondeau redoublé, except that the first verse whose lines then get repeated as the final lines of the others is missing, and wasn’t written by me, but by James Elroy Flecker in his famous(ish) The Golden Journey to Samerkand. From what I can gather, the poem appeared both ‘album length’ in a play, and cut down to a ‘single’ containing only the last part, both of which end with the four lines I’ve borrowed here. However, different references seem to say either ‘Golden Road’ or ‘Golden Journey’ in the last line, hence my second poem. ‘Darius’ is intended to be pronounced with the enphasis on the first syllable – I realise that some people place it on the second, but that just wrecks my rhythm. Incidentally, by ‘hatless-drunk’, I mean sunstroke.
Sing a Song of Sixty
Liar liar lyrebird, imitating ev’rything:
Ev’ry chord and ev’ry word – nothing roared and nothing slurred.
Never tire, lyrebird – add another to your role –
Ev’ry song you ever sang, you stole.
Liar liar lyrebird, add another to your role:
Ev’ry chord and ev’ry word – none ignored and none preferred.
Never tire, lyrebird, imitating ev’rything –
Ev’ry sound you ever heard, you sing.
Hymn of Mimicry
Mockingbirds mock,
And the mocking-hens flock –
But how do they know
It’s a mocking-cock’s show ?
Two for one – the second poem is from a former verse of the first which never really fitted, and then the first one was substantially altered and out if had to go.
Rhyming Couplets 