Metres by the Foot
Ev’ry morning, half past nine,
And Pixie Prentiss writes a sonnet –
Seven minutes, and it’s done,
With notebook, coffee and a bun.
Thirty seconds for a line
Is all she’ll ever spend on it –
Surely nothing good can come
From scribbled scans of tum-de-tum ?
Yet I, who labours hard and long
To craft my wrought and weighty song
Must always envy Pixie’s fleeting fun.
She takes her pen and daily mines
Her fourteen brisk and punctual lines,
While my new verse has scarcely yet begun.
No Man’s Pie is Freed from his Ambitious Finger
The Tudors – always the bloody Tudors !
I’m sick of the Tudors, sick of their tricks –
Bloody Marys and bloody Henrys,
And bloody Bess and her politics,
And wimpy Eddy, and snow-white Jane –
Tudors bloody Tudors – since I was six.
Papists in priestholes, Proddies in the Tower
And the heroes end up dead and the villains stay in power.
Ev’ryone’s a bastard,
Anyone who’s Tudor –
Henry’s shagging ev’ryone,
But Bess, no-one has screwed her.
Both have shafted England,
Made the whole place prude-er.
The Tudors: bloody Tyndale and Shakespeare,
The bloody Armada and Raleigh and Drake,
The bloody plots and the bloody spies,
And witches burned at the bloody stake,
And Irish, Jews and Gypsies shunned –
Nasty bloody Tudors – more than I can take !
Monks changing habits and monarchs swapping spouses –
A-ring-a-ring of roses and a plague on all their houses !
Ev’ryone’s a bastard,
Ev’ryone’s a bluff:
Ev’ryone in sackcloth,
Or codpiece, hose and ruff.
Who will spare our England,
Who will cry “Enough !” ?
Evolution Chant
I am an ape-man,
You are an ape-man,
Just like my great-great-granddaddy ape-man.
I am a monkey,
You are a monkey,
And so is the queen, her ministers and flunkies.
We lost our tails, we lost our fur,
We grew up bigger than we were,
We kept our hands and eyes and hips,
So we’re still monkeys to our pips.
One mill’yon, two mill’yon, three mill’yon, four –
Back in time, back in time, back to before.
I am a mammal,
You are a mammal,
We’re just like my great-great-grand-uncle Samuel.
I’m a reptilian,
You’re a reptilian,
Just like my great-great-third-cousin William.
We lost our scales, we lost our eggs,
We grew up with less-bandy legs,
We warmed our blood and changed our ears,
But we’re still reptiles to our gears.
One era, two eras, three ears, four –
Mill’yons and mill’yons of years by the score.
I’m an amphibian,
You’re an amphibian,
Just like a German, a Chinese, or a Libyan.
I am a swim-fish,
You are a swim-fish,
Just like our sisters, the curvy and the slim-ish.
We lost our gills, we lost our fins,
We grew up with our necks and chins,
We gained our lungs and lost some cones,
But we’re still fishes to our bones.
One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four –
Hundreds of mill’yons of years to explore.
I am a wiggle-worm,
You are a wiggle-worm,
Just like our brothers, who squiggle when they squirm.
I am a wet-sponge,
You are a wet-sponge,
Just like our neighbours, the blond and brunette ones.
We lost our universal cells,
We grew up bony, without shells,
We gained our teeth and gained our butts,
But we’re still sponges to our guts.
One eon, two eons, three eons, four –
Ages and cycles and epochs galore.
I am a germ bug,
You are a germ bug,
Just like the scorpion, the skylark and sea-slug.
I am a virus,
You are a virus,
Far enough back, and ev’rything’s a virus.
We lost our tiny little size,
We grew up big and strong and wise,
We may not think so anymore,
But we’re still microbes to our core.
One bill’yon, two bill’yon, three bill’yon, four –
Back in the days of the yoriest yore.
Feel free to change the opening lines to ‘ape-girl’ if you wish.
Ammonites & Moabites
Ammonites are ceph’lopods
With spiralling shells,
A bit like the nautilus
With gas-chambered cells –
But larger and groovier,
These kings of the ocean,
These chosen of Ammon,
These Jurassic movers,
These Cretaceous shakers –
In the Fathoms of Mammon,
From sea-beds to breakers,
Till the shark and the salmon
Cast out these apostles.
But there in the fossils,
Their statues awake…
Moabites are ceph’lopods
We’ve yet to discover
They’re out there, still buried,
In one rock or another –
And each slab we lever,
So hopes the believer,
May yet be inscribed
With this prodigal tribe:
A bit like a nautilus,
A bit like an octopus,
A bit unlike either.
And just like the ammonites,
They need us to free them –
We know not what they look like,
But we’ll know them when we see them.
The Pillars of the Earth
What is this power
That holds up cathedrals ?
That bring in the pilgrims,
And keeps out the gales ?
It isn’t lord Jesus,
Nor bishops and beadles,
It isn’t the faithful,
Nor relics and grails.
Forget all the masons
With stone tetrahedrals,
Forget all their chisels,
And braces and nails –
The answer is columns !
Those load-bearing needles,
Those orderly uprights,
Those masts without sails.
And the finest of columns,
So stately and regal,
Use marble from Purbeck
In multiple scales.
Now, wildlife in Purbeck,
From roe-deer to seagulls,
From rabbits to lizards,
From fishes to whales,
Are nothing compared
To her beasts without equal –
But who are these heroes ?
Well, there hang some tales…
For hidden in hedgerows,
There lurk her great people:
Like bees in her fields,
And yeasts in her ales –
But her mightiest creatures
Have built ev’ry steeple:
The lime in the limestone
That polish unveils –
For marble from Purbeck
That holds up cathedrals,
Is held up in turn
By the shells of her snails.
Losing my Wretchedness
Amazing space, how blind and vast,
To fluke-up life like me.
I once had faith, but now at last,
I have infinity.
Halal Hammer
“The young of North Africa are increasingly finding an outlet in home-grown heavy metal.”
– Thrummeister Magazine
The veils hide the mascara,
The crimson lips and purple hair,
And even through a burqa’s slit
The cat-eye contacts stare.
The tats are mostly stick-ons
And the piercings come right out
These rebel yells are smart enough
To know when not to shout.
The Imams don’t approve, of course,
They fear the Devil (or the Norse !)
Has led the youth astray.
But many a goth, a mosher, or geek
Is still a good Muslim the rest of the week
Whatever the papers may say.
No souls have been sold, no Faustian deal,
Just amps and guitars and a grunt and a squeal.
There’s probably others more doubtful,
But music is not the cause –
For would they still be faithful
In the Taliban’s harsh laws ?
The Great Satan’s power-chords
Do not ‘corrupt’ alone,
For censor foreign songs, and they
Will simply write their own.
The Imams don’t approve, of course,
But grumpy teachers hold no force
To tempt the children back.
For ev’ry skull, and cross, and vamp,
Is less Satanic, more high-camp,
And who doesn’t love to dress in black ?
So, headbanging hedonists: hairy kids or heretics ?
Either way, the thrashers come to give them forty licks.
Dwarf Planet
Of course he’s not a planet !
That shouldn’t be disputable.
That shouldn’t make him any less the beautiful,
That shouldn’t make him any less –
His surface is so mutable,
And not the long-expected pockered granite
Of our Earth-restricted guess –
But plains and ridges run instead,
In shades of red,
Across which canyons slice.
And we were right about the ice,
But not the mountains that it forms !
Mountains that could melt away,
Except he never warms at all –
His crystal peaks that should reflect the sun’s weak glow,
Except they’re covered by the nitrogen that falls as snow.
Dwarf perhaps is too pejorative,
But then, if you’ll forgive, he’s not the same,
And after all, it’s just a name.
There is no magic line
Where we can suddenly define
The class of planets from the dwarfs at just below his size –
To let him cling to planet-hood,
But sorry, Eris, all you other guys are just a might too small.
It’s hardly wise to be so arbit’ry in what should get the planet’s call –
It also shows that gravity is quite misunderstood:
For lack of mass is why he swings
In tilted rings around the sun,
And why he’s kept at bay by Neptune’s sway,
In the long, long run:
So no, he’s not a planet, he’s a diff’rent kind of thing –
We know because we’ve seen him: he’s the cosmic Kuiper king.
Out in the Styx
Pluto – the solar system’s Greenland,
Cold and remote, an inbetween land,
As way beyond the horizon he lies.
Infact they are a similar size –
And Charon is Baffin – who watches him sleep,
While facing each other across the deep.
An arctic fox and a polar bear
Of the Kuiper Belt, that pair.
If planets are continents, these two are islands:
So icy and ancient, yet teasingly shy lands.
Their names and status are pure propaganda
The truth, of course, is both lesser and grander –
Fascinating for their own sake,
Despite the islets that clutter their wake.
But here, their orbits must diverge:
As Greenland enters its warming surge,
While his long summer cannot last –
His perihelion has passed.
So into the Hadean depths once more,
Upon the night’s Plutonian shore.
Paley Ontology
William Paley,
(Still quoted daily)
Chanced upon a timepiece while out walking on the dale.
Pondering its presence,
Mulling on its essence,
He saw it was a Made Thing, and all that must entail:
Here there were no surplus parts, no way to make it less dense –
If this must have a Maker – why, then Man must likewise hail !
Grand Mr Paley,
Postulating gaily,
Never knew the fossils that were lurking in the shale.
So too have the watches
Seen their share of botches:
Dodgy trains and axles who have never found a sale.
Cruel is such selection as inflicts their cogs with notches,
And calling time on any found irregular or frail.
Poor Mr Paley,
Breaches in his bailey,
Holes in his hypothesis, all bigger than a whale.
Thermal compensation
And grand complication
Have grown in watches gradu’ly, and clearly leave their trail.
So tick evolves to tock with ev’ry not-quite-iteration,
In the coiling of the spring as in the spiral of the snail.
Rhyming Couplets 