Fiffle-Faffle
Liza Eliza,
Daughter of a Kaiser –
Plumper than cuter,
And something of a miser.
Asks her advisor
To find her a suitor
Who never will despise her
For eating off of pewter.
Liza Eliza
Master of disguiser –
Spying on her diners,
Incase they criticise her.
Better to be wiser,
For fear that they’ll malign her,
Or else they might surprise her
By eating off of china.
The Book of Numbers
As a kid, I had a Bible,
But I only read the bits I knew.
Yet in the front, it listed all
The endless books therein, and quite a few !
I read the titles, wondering,
What ancient tales they must contain –
Though most were called by random names,
Which sounded boring, sounded vain.
But one stood out – The Book of Numbers !
Was it all divine geometry ?,
Secret cyphers ?, Sacred fractals ?,
Heaven’s holy trigonometry ?
Did it declare why the speed of light
Is the very speed it is ?,
Or how the cosmos banged so bright ?,
Or how the atoms whizz ?,
Or how entangled is the quark ?,
Or why is so much matter dark ?,
Or are the anti-particles still His ?
I should have known –
Nothing but a census, a way of keeping score.
When asked for facts, the Lord has shown
That nothing matters more than tax and war.
Not that taxes in themselves are a bad thing, as I’ve mused on here and here.
Guttersprites
Gargoyles: always too damn small,
A squander of a spitting spout –
An impish whisper, not a shout.
Apologies atop a wall,
Embarrassed to be there at all,
When always far too mono-grey,
And always, always too damn far away.
A shame, because their gothic clout
That any stonechip ought to flout,
Is blurred into a lump of flint.
And yet, there’s so much hidden booty
In their twisty, gnarly beauty,
If we’re just prepared to climb or squint.
But otherwise, these witty beasties –
Masterpieces, have no doubt,
A burst of sneer and snot and snout –
Will never scare the nuns or priesties !
Make them bigger ! Carve them deeper !
Ev’ry goblin, troll and creeper,
Give them gravitas and grout !
Let us see each gruesome grizzle,
Else the mason works their chisel
Long and hard for all of nowt,
And all those wings and fangs and scales
Are lost to time and frost and gales –
But most of all, to apathetic drought.
Don’t leave them overlooked, forgot,
Or we shall lose the lonely lot,
And long before their warts have weathered out.
Psycho-Allergy
Peanuts will not kill me,
They just make me want to retch,
And chestnuts cannot choke me
But they sure can make me kvetch !
Coconuts are pussycats
That scratch my taste-buds raw,
And almonds leave me bitter,
Should one sneak into my maw.
Macadamies lack the proteins
That could send me into shock.
Cashew, beech and pecan – each
As puny as a hollyhock.
A pish upon pistachios,
Your toxins well withstood –
My shell is hard as hazelnuts,
My kernel strong as wood !
No nuts will ever crack me,
Be they pine, brazil or wall –
My body couldn’t give a fig,
My brain, though, hates them all !
The Electric Universe
I heard about it on the wires –
From out the noise, a brand new spark
That’s causing quite a buzz, it seems,
With those who dare to cross the streams –
The stars are not atomic fires,
They claim, and matter isn’t dark !
Instead, across all empty space
Electrostatic charges race…
The stars are merely filaments
Amid a galaxy of bulbs,
The cosmic pulse, at super-C,
Will form electro-gravity.
Now, many physicists resent
This theory, and the place it holds –
But then, how can they fail to see
The holes in relativity ?
I heard the crackle in the air,
And tuned my head and felt the spike –
For all that maths and physics bore,
I saw at once the metaphor !
The Universe and I must share
In cells and galaxies alike
Electrons – tiny, yet so large –
So much potential in their charge !
Just in time for the first image of a black hole, I learned about a theory of space that denies their existence (also referred to as Plasma Cosmology). As I understand it, it basically posits that (though I’m sure I’m butchering this):
the reason no definitive evidence of black holes or dark matter exists is because they don’t actually exist,
that over 99% of matter in the universe is in a state of plasma, which readily conducts electricity,
that the lack of matter to hold the galaxies together is due to electricity itself amplifying gravity,
And that stars are not nuclear furnaces but more akin to the elements in lightbulbs, that is the places where the Universe’s electric fields ‘discharge’.
But like I say, I’m sure I’ve got that mostly wrong. And I make no claims to its accuracy. What attracted me to it was simply its poetic possibilities.
The Cester Slur
Launceston is an English town
Which stubs its name and hacks it down.
And likewise Leominster says it strange,
While Fowey and Wymondham short our change,
And Cholmondeley too is slave to fashion,
Following the -cester ration –
Alcester, Bicester: trochees truly,
Frocester, Gloucester: spelled unruly,
Leicester, Rocester: letters wasted,
Saucy Worcester: under-tasted,
Towcester: always worth a snigger –
Spoken short, but written bigger.
But then there’s stuck-up Cirencester –
Siren, maybe, but no jester.
She’s no sissy, she’s no sister.
Strong like -caster, long like -chester –
Who’d have guessed her lack of slur ?
For she’s all -cester, not a -ster !
I should point out that the towns menstioned are pronounced Laun-ston, Lem-ster, Foy, Wind-ham and Chum-ley. All of the rest are xxx-ster (except Cirencester, obviously, which has all four syllables). Except some folks in the past have tried to insist that the latter should be pronounced as Sis-is-ter, which even be the rules of eliding that the others follow still doesn’t make any sense…
Oh, and Towcester is said as Toaster, which gets the Toastingfork prong of approvement.
Brownfield
Groundsel grounds, where nettles nest
Between the tyres and scattered glass,
Where breeze-blown wrappers come to rest
Amid the hedgehog-hiding grass.
Round the corner from this waste
Are streets of white suburban palings –
But in here the bees make haste,
And foxes slink through rusty railings.
Snakes and lizards keep discreet
Amongst the clinker, bricks and stone.
But crickets, toads and parakeets
Still let their whereabouts be known.
Broken concrete catches rain,
Which lures the newts from nearby parks.
Mosquitos fill each pit and drain
With twitching ink-black question marks.
The bats all chase the moths all night,
The wrens all chase the flies all day,
The moles chase worms, but out of sight,
But slugs won’t run – they’re here to stay !|
Ferrets stalking, hamsters feeding,
Both escapees from their pens.
Cats are courting, bugs are breeding,
Badgers building urban dens.
Spindly stalks with leaves too large –
Some saplings from the gardens near.
So will they get to swamp and barge,
And grow an urban forest here ?
But suddenly, this patch is gone,
As diggers turn it into town.
The residents will soon move on,
And find another field of brown.
April Smarts
We sense the sun is on the scout,
With Winter nothing but a pout,
And Spring a whisper to a shout,
And mornings quite the charm.
But hold, before we’re dashing out
And leaving coats to hang about,
For dressing down, not dressing stout,
Could lead us into harm.
I know the sun is warm today,
But sneaky Spring has form, they say –
He loves to send a storm our way !
Yet no cause for alarm…
Just run your mornings by the book
And take your coat down off the hook,
To lodge it safely in the crook
Of a shirt-and-cardy arm.
Moveable Feast
My poor, befuddled Easter cactus –
Sometimes early, sometimes late,
But never can it bloom in practice
On the actual Easter date.
We set a day for April Fools,
We set a day to change our clocks
But Easter follows loony rules:
The first full-Moon from Equinox.
Early April’s worth a shout,
I reckon, for a stable day –
It’s warm enough for going out,
And far enough from busy May.
But all this shifty, ancient mess
With sense as empty as the tomb,
Is why my cactus cannot guess
The week in which to bloom.
Value-Added Tax
Every pound that I pay
Has purchased a share in my nation.
I’m part of the budget, I’m part of the say
Of the flashiest, costliest product around:
A civilised civilisation.
Income and Council and Capital Gains,
Sell me a future with teachers and trains !
Bring me some hospitals, bring me some parks !
Streetlights and windfarms and paintings and quarks !
Make my tomorrow’s that little bit better,
And p’raps I’ll remember when I get your letter,
And grumble a little bit less as your debtor,
Amidst all my curses to Keynes, Smith, and Marx.
But every hour I slog,
Has paid for another back-hander or bullet –
I’m part of the problem, a complicit cog,
An atom of grease on a lever of power,
That’s slightly my fault when they pull it.
Yet still we must pay up, for bad and for good,
To give unto Caesar, and not Robin Hood.
For we all have to fork out, and that is its beauty,
(Though exiles and pirates find loopholes for booty).
Yet still I believe that the wars and the royals
Shall wither away in the face of our toils,
So earn hard, oh Britain !, and fair-share the spoils –
For these are our Customs, and this is our Duty.
Rhyming Couplets 