A Masculine Rhyme
Positive charges
And negative spin,
Strong verbs and weak verbs
With preference baked-in.
Group B and Group 2
Subconsciously mocked –
Pejorative adjectives,
Loaded and cocked.
We’re judging the diff’rence
From concept to mouth,
And neutral assessment
Is all heading South.
Skritch Skritch
If depression is a black dog,
Then I reckon that
Paranoia is a grey rat:
Small and sulking,
Squeaking, skulking –
Always watching,
Always gnawing,
Never passioned,
Never thawing.
Yes, that’s about the sum:
A greyed-out rat who always looks askance –
A rat who feasts on ev’ry crumb,
And looks for plots in ev’ry chance.
A rat who thinks the world must think
About his each and ev’ry thought –
A rat who sniffs at ev’ry chink,
And always find the intrigues sought.
He pads in silently, and whispers how
The world conspires to bring his doom,
The righteous woes that plague him now,
His whiskers twitching in the gloom.
Then scuttles off to disavow,
And seep his piss across the room.
Ah-wub-duh-dree-furr
This is the time of the viral star:
Of the unintended baritones,
Of sudden blasts on nose trombones,
And the throaty roar of bass catarrh !
The husky whisper strains with grief
To the beat of mints against the teeth.
All The Best Tunes
Out of work and out of dole,
While high on blues and low on soul.
And all the songs we’d ever hear
Were old, and theirs, and insincere.
We hung around in aimless bands
To stop us feeling suicidal,
But the Devil makes work for idle hands –
And boy, were our hands idle !
So we are why the faithful flocks
Must mumble hymns while Satan rocks !
We’re drowning-out the choirs of Heaven
With three-chord worship at 11.
His music fills a hole in us,
It hugs our pockmarked skin –
If God gave rock & roll to us,
Then Satan plugged us in.
Oh, this again…
So,
Once again
Do I find I have nothing,
Not one-thing worth saying,
Just faffing and milling.
And so,
Once again
I must stretch out my nothing,
My say-nothing saying,
In space that needs filling…
I’ve been here before,
And I’ll be here again,
And again,
And again,
And again evermore.
And each time is longer,
And each time is worse –
So churn out a poem on lacking the verse.
The song is the same,
And, well,
So is the tune –
And my thoughts are a hiss
And my spirit is flat.
Hey ho,
Looks like it’s a long afternoon
Like the time before this,
And the time before that.
I’ve said all I said,
And I’ve said it before,
And my muse is still dead
And my think-nothing head is a victim of war.
Ho hum,
It happens,
We blow through our haul,
Then find we’ve got nothing
Where once we were tall.
Ah well,
It happens,
Our thoughts hit a wall:
From red meat to salad,
From flying to fall.
So,
What can I say,
Okay,
What can I say
When you come round to call ?
Shall I read you the ballad of sweet Fanny Adams,
Or sing you the song of sod all ?
Armchair Philosophy
My thoughts on love and politics
Have authored pamphlets by the score –
I’ve told them twice and thrice and six,
Since days of teenage yore.
I’ve made my case and made it strong,
I’ve preached and pleaded with the throng,
From Tory-shires to Bolsheviks
I’ve met them all and all before.
I’ve set the world to rights so long,
And still the world continues wrong –
There’s no point labouring a fix
We both know you’ll ignore.
It’s time to sing a diff’rent song,
It’s time to bang a diff’rent gong –
Or else I’m dreaming just for kicks,
And dreaming should be something more…
Sun-&-Planet Gears
Take a reflecting telescope
And point it anywhere up in the sky
And what do you see with your all-seeing eye ?
Cogs and drums and springs and rope,
And the ticking of ellipsoid gears,
By distance squared, by lighted years.
But can you find between the lights
The constant-heavens’ clockwork soul
That’s somewhere in the blackest hole ?
We all are squinting through the sights –
From omega to omicron,
We seek the great automaton.
Alas, as mirrors have got clearer,
So the wheels we saw have blurred
As though the constant tick has slurred.
And just as we were getting nearer,
We misplaced our guiding stars
Amongst the lost canals of Mars.
Welcome Proxima Bee
I heard you’d moved into the neighbourhood –
So welcome to the Spiral Arm !
The stars are getting occupied – that’s good.
It stops the gas clouds doing harm.
We’re pretty much a quiet street
Without a noisy supernova –
Just a place for middle-stars to shine.
And if your life-forms get beneath your feet,
Then send them over –
I’m sure they’d simply love to meet with mine !
Have you any moons about the place,
To give a sense of scale ?
I’ve just the one, but that’s alright.
The darkside lacks a little grace,
The seas are rather pale –
But hey, it still looks heavenly at night.
So call me on the long-wave radio,
I’m always in.
I hope that ours is not too loud,
We tend to make a din.
And you are such a quiet thing,
I’d barely know you’re there at all,
So close and yet so small…
So welcome to the Local Zone,
The garden of the Milky Way –
Welcome home, and long to stay !
So glad to find a fellow stone
With whom to play, a friendly face –
It’s good to know I’m not alone
In all this empty space.
Proxima Bee is very-likely tidally locked, which I’ve explored some more elsewhere. It’s also usually written with a lower case b, to show it’s a planet and not a companion star. I have considered this convention and rejected it.
Fractured Metre
There comes a time in ev’ry poet’s jotter-book,
A time when odes and ballads must be set aside,
Where clever wordplay fails to catch the sombre mood,
And pleasing couplets suffer from a glut of rhyme.
And so the chastened poet takes a modern look,
Discarding all the baggage that had been their guide –
All that regularity – predictable and crude –
And even rhythms jangle with their tyranny of time.
That stuff works for jokey stuff
For dum-de-dum and call-my-bluff
But how can Terror, how can Truth
Be captured in the games of youth ?
And so there comes a time when ev’ry poet
Makes the same mistake they always make –
They try to turn their free-verse loose, because
They think that’s how such verse must be –
Instead, they force unforcèd-ness, and blow it !
Instead, their archful art is bland and fake.
And finally, they see what skilful rhyming does:
It emphasises by its very unreality.
The Light Brigade, Decorum est,
They fuck you up, Before I rest –
A decent couplet tells us what
A thousand noble words cannot.
Two Minutes Silence
Ordered by social convention into inaction,
I sit at my desk and abstain –
I keep my head down and stare at my pen till I hear
The murmur of morning again.
Like most, I start on my shutdown at ten-fifty-eight,
And end at eleven-oh-four,
To cover the randomly-synchronised watches of colleagues –
And never mind minding the store.
Across the room, someone is typing. (Is that still allowed ?)
Their rat-a-tat keystokes clatter.
A phone rings out the alarm, which nobody answers,
Till voicemail settles the matter.
I ought to be thinking, I know, of tommies and trenches,
Of birdsong, bombardements and screams –
Instead, I just notice this shuffle’ing silence-by-rote –
My thoughts are deserters, it seems.
Rhyming Couplets 