Inktober – yes, we’re doing *this* again

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So, here we are once more, in the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. But for poems to bear fruit, they must successfully avoid Mr Block…

And so I once again misappropriate the trusty-old list of thought-prompters provided by the good folks at Inktober to shake-out a few short pieces from the noggin over the coming couple of weeks. The important thing to remember is to not take these too seriously.

The illustrations, incidentally, are quite unconnected to the poems and are simply some works of art I’ve found online that I want to share with you:

Dream

Spiders

Map

Golden

Fortune

Wander

Spicy

Castle

Angel/Demon

Frost

Chains

Scratchy (as in a head-scratcher)

Shallow

Beast

Sparkle

Massive

Rush

Fire

Bill-Knobs & Eyeliner

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Photo by Emir KANDu0130L on Pexels.com

Bill-Knobs & Eyeliner

The Mute Swans have the pond to themselves all Summer,
So calm while their chicks are in fleece.
Oh sure, there are the quacks of Mallards,
And the Seagull squawkings never cease,
But all-in-all, they’re kings of the lake,
Seeing off the challenge of the Canada geese –
They even adopt the occasional Black,
And raise their cygnets in peace.

But come October, and in come the mobs of Whoopers,
Honking-up the air.
Even before the last of the cranes has flown,
These tourists are ev’rywhere !
The Mutes protest, but their voices can’t be heard
As the trumpets blare.
But in truth, they’ll soon be rubbing along,
As there’s duckweed-enough to share.

Bureaucalypse

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Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels.com

Bureaucalypse

Study hard, they said, and so we did,
And it didn’t help at all.
Be positive, beguile and kid –
Yet we still went to the wall.
Keep looking for the chance, they say,
As if just saying makes it so –
Don’t let your dreams all slip away,
As if they hadn’t, long ago.
If they can land such good careers,
Then why, they like to ask, can’t we ?
As if a job like theirs appears
With unrelenting frequency.
For us, we get to spend our years neck-deep
In drudgery and stress,
Where days are long and lives are cheap,
And no-one ever tells us yes.

But surely there must be another side,
That’s free from the pounds and the pence ?
Where we end the day with a sense of pride,
Having made a difference…?
And so we shrink our lives to spit them out
On a single side of paper,
And foist them on whoever is casting about –
And watch them vanish to vapour.
And if we do get interviewed,
There’s a thousand others like us.
It’s a lottery, really, with odds so skewed,
But hey, don’t make a fuss…
Capitalism has use for you and I,
No matter how bent and scarred –
Work hard, work long, and don’t ask why
We have to work so long and hard.

You Silent Bastards

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You Silent Bastards

You lure me in with job descriptions
Full of hope and fun,
You tempt with salary predictions
Nobody would shun.
You call me in for interviews,
That seem to go so well –
But when I wait to hear the news,
I’m left in limbo hell.

It’s crept upon us recently,
This lack of PFOs,
This lack of common decency
To notify the ‘Noes’.
You need an audit of your soul,
For your arrogance acquired –
To see your HR staff as a whole
Could do with being fired !

I know that I could do these jobs damn well
If given the chance,
So do I pass ? But you will never tell,
Not even a glance.
You won’t even admit I exist,
I’m scum to be ignored –
As long as your boxes get ticked off the list,
And your KPI targets scored.

Horn of Plenty

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Cornucopia by Marina Tsuzuki

Horn of Plenty

Nature’s abundance
Is only abundant
Because of our breeding and care.
We keep safe with fences
From predators hellbent
On forcing our people to share.

We took weedy grasses
And made them triumphant
By winnowing pearls from the tat.
Through thousands of passes
We bred out redundants,
And kept only those who grew fat.

We took crabby apples
And looked for those farthest
From regular bitter and small.
So don’t pray at chapels
For bountiful harvests –
It’s farmers who let us grow tall !

We beefed-up our cattle,
And fluffed-up our sheep,
And we hen-pecked our hens to lay more.
We’ve long waged the battle
’Gainst ringworm and creep,
And upping our yields by the score.

And yes, it’s true sometimes
We’ve made matters worse
In our efforts to keep us all fed.
But we’ll undo such crimes
As we learn from the curse,
In our bid to be better well-bred.

But to reap all we sow
Could yet come to a stop
If we don’t keep our labours up still.
The hard row to hoe
For the cream of the crop
Could succumb to the dew of the mill.

Nature’s abundance
Is only abundant
Because of our breeding and care.
It takes great expense,
But it’s very well spent,
Till the earth is encouraged to share.

Tour de Force

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Photo by Henrik Pfitzenmaier on Pexels.com

Tour de Force

Thunder is the sky in primadonna mood –
Building, building – let her brood –
She won’t be hurried, none too soon,
Until the late of afternoon –
When, with a rumble in the wings,
She sings…

Soloing with a cast of thousands –
Turning-on her lights and sound,
And moving into centre stage,
While up in the gods her torrents rage –
As all-consuming, she performs –
The Queen of Storms.

Russian Rush

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Peasant Girl in Kokoshnik by anonski

Russian Rush

Is it just my ears,
Or are all these Slavic women baritones ?
Does the need to wrap their tongues
Round angular Cyrillics
Thus somehow feed into their very bones ?
Is it from the years
Of calling for Ivanovic, not Jones,
That ups capacity in lungs
Into those sexy and idyllic moans
They use to answer telephones ?
They always speak their English with a purr,
In a lower register.

Perhaps it’s their careers
As nurses or baristas, or tennis pros,
Or spies in paperbacks,
That slows their speech and drops it down a semitone or two ?
Or maybe it’s my ears,
And not some deep and cunning pose
To sigh like honeytraps ?
Of course, it’s just my vodka fantasy,
And even if it’s true –
The way they talk, their chosen key,
Is not in any way for me –
But nonetheless, I love the way they sound the way they do.

I have always thought that printed Cyrillic looks like it is written in all-caps even when lower case letters are used – perhaps it is the reduced use of risers and descenders, giving them less-indented coastlines.

I had originally called this poem as Deep Throat.  It almost worked, but ultimately the leaker in All The President’s Men was very male and very American.

What do you mean, there’s another film which uses that title…

Musical AI version generated by Suno.com – find more of them over here.

Film Pluvieux

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Film Pluvieux

In Hollywood, in black & white,
The private eyes come out at night –
And always, it has rained that day,
To douse the streets in glossy light.
I wonder if the dames who slay
Are better set when cars don’t spray,
And lonely streets are not so bright,
And P.I.s drink the dry away ?

Garden Overspills

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Garden Overspills

Low branches over pavements,
Should I bob or step out in the road ?
Who leaves wych-elms any which-how,
Never pruned, and deeply downward-bowed ?
Though less likely misbehaving,
More likely negligence at fault.
I ought to hack them off right now,
But more than like I get done for assault.

Double-deckers punch right through,
But my head has to duck beneath each stalk.
It’s worse when it’s been raining,
And I get a hairwash thrown into my walk.
But appletrees, and conkers too,
Are lack-of-headroom serial abusers –
Lurking, swelling, for each braining –
As the Autumn comes, so come the bruises.

Missing Keepsakes

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Photo by Masood Aslami on Pexels.com

Missing Keepsakes

“Upto 2000 artefacts are believed to have been stolen from the British Museum over the last ten years.”

– Curator’s Quarterly

Five-odd million artefacts,
Or maybe twice as many,
Filling dusty drawers and racks,
From Hull to Abergavenny.
Boxed-up, stacked-up, locked-up long,
With rusty coins and broken gems,
And set by law to house this throng,
Without the funds to open them.

Blame the politicians,
Blame the thieves,
Blame management as lax –
But never blame the public who believes
In paying less of tax.
But no-one ever thanks us for
The treasures we preserve,
That otherwise get lost to war,
Or buried in the earth.

Plenty on the left have sneered
At colonial comeuppance
While others on the right have cheered
At wokeness not worth tuppence.
And both have kicked the workers
Who are overworked and underpaid,
Because we’re just the lurkers
In the basement, in the way.

They never cared before,
Enough to fund the work they left to spoil –
And still they will not thank us for
Our centuries of toil.
It’s others source the objects,
We just clean, and log, and save –
And that takes funds, and takes respect,
And a culture well-behaved.