Disco Demolition

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Disco Demolition

Disco sucks
When it’s made by corporations,
Disco sucks
When it’s got no good vibrations,
Disco sucks
When it’s played to saturation,
Disco sucks –
On ev’ry bloody station till the end of the dials,
With mindless hedonism and compulsory smiles,
Just smothering with strings, suffocating other styles,
With too much of a good thing round the clock.
So if we just can’t face it,
Then that doesn’t make us racist,
Or homophobo hateist,
Just because we wanna rock.
Yet rock music sucks
When it’s made by corporations,
But all music rules
When it undergoes mutations.
So play your disco, sure,
But play other stuff as well,
To live in multi-Heaven and keep out of mono-Hell.
When I hear too much rock,
Then I mentally must clear it,
To find something else pumping
At a thousand kilojoules –
And if I don’t hear disco for a while,
And then I hear it,
That hearing is the time when
Disco rules !

My Bang’s Bigger Than Yours

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My Bang’s Bigger Than Yours

Astronomers love hydrogen,
And hydrogen alone –
The primal, elemental gas,
That lights up the unknown.
They’re not so keen on helium,
But tolerate it yet –
But hydrogen’s their number one,
As airy as things get !

Astronomers hate lithium,
As dense and overweight,
And ev’rything beyond it is
Too scarce to even rate.
They label them as ‘metals’,
As a grey and seething mass –
Yes, even carbon, even sulphur,
Even chlorine gas.

Astronomers know metaloids
Have properties each shares,
But magnets and electron soups
Are no concern of theirs,
And dabbling in impurities
Requires them to atone –
For ’stronomers love hydrogen,
And hydrogen alone.

Drop the Tittles

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Drop the Tittles

Its time to ditch the postrophe,
Its use is a catostrophe –
A snare for those who cant decide
Just how these ticks should be applied.
Theyre deathly silent in our speech,
Beyond the pedants overreach,
Yet still weer well and understood –
Just cos theyre there dont mean we should.

Old Acquaintances

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Photo by Dennis Ariel on Pexels.com

Old Acquaintances

We never say goodbye
Because we never know we’re standing at the change –
For all that time must fly,
That’s somehow always in the future, out of range.

We only see the end
In retrospect, once it has long since been and gone –
A few words with a friend
That don’t mean much, except of course they don’t go on.

We say we’ll see them soon,
Although in truth it’s less a promise, more a hope.
Before we know, it’s June,
And then we notice they’re no longer in our scope.

Not ev’ry friend is ‘best’,
But still the casual ones are needed just the same.
Just twice a year or less
We get to meet, but still we’re always glad they came.

Tomorrow never comes,
Until it does, and then a thousand slip on by.
Don’t fret about the sums –
The world moves on, that’s sometimes just the way things lie.

We never say farewell,
We say we’ll see you later, don’t be strangers, cheers.
And that’s the last we tell,
A moment’s pause to punctuate the crowded years.

Seven Seven

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The Lord Fulfilleth All his Works by Clark Price

Seven Seven

The ant, the sloth, the kangaroo,
They came to Noah two-by-two,
Except the clean ones, those were more,
But just how many ?- he’s not sure.

You see, the perfect word from Heaven
Told to load-up ‘seven seven’
Of the creatures that are ‘clean’ –
But what on Earth does that all mean ?

Which are clean and which are tosh ?,
When all these beasts could use a wash.
Perhaps he’ll know the spotless souls
Because they’ll come in multiples.

Alas, the Lord is too discreet
In sharing what his folks may eat –
But does give Noah one strange clue –
“You’d best pack extra locusts too…”

So is it seven beasts, all told,
That he must harbour in his hold ?
The Lord has reasons, without doubt,
But still – which sex is odd-one out ?

Or is it really seven pairs
That he must cram below the stairs ?
Well – “seven seven”, that’s the line –
But damn, that could be forty-nine !”

So how’s he meant to feed all those ?
Will they be small, do you suppose,
Like tortoises – who barely browse ?
Of course not !  It’s the bloody cows !

Mentmore-or-less…

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Mentmore Towers by R~P~M (with help from Joseph Paxton & George Stokes who designed the house in the first place).

Mentmore-or-less…
 
Mentmore Towers, a fortress of a Rothschild –
Safeguarding the badlands of the Buckinghamshire wild.
You’ve never heard his name, but his face may look familiar –
A character performer and Hollywood’s new star –
Standing in for Chequers, Gotham City, or a pleasure dome.
He’s classical of ornament, though Gothic more than Rome,
His facade looking perfectly at home, as you do,
And always coming to a screen near you.
With O’s within his pediments we know we’ve seen before,
Yet we’re facing the unknown when we knock upon his door –
Butlers or rock stars or new-money wealth ?
He’s a Chilterns Vancouver, playing ev’rybody but himself.

Spark

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Photo by Byron Sullivan on Pexels.com

Spark

Iron burns so blurry,
Oxidises at the rate of years –
Rust is in no hurry,
As it slowly eats away the gears.

But sparks are over in a flash –
A firework fountain, arcing, dying,
Leaving just a ruddy ash
And the metal tang of iron-frying.

We think of rust as cold and dark,
And yet this self-same light appears –
It’s just it takes that second’s spark
And stretches it to last for years.

Loopiter

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Loopiter

I never understood loopholes,
I mean understood it as an actual thing –
I get that they’re escapes from laws –
But are we then fenced-in by string ?
They might have referred to arrow-slits,
But they only fit an arrow’s stem.
They might be thinking of knotholes,
But only secrets can pass through them.
The breach in the wall of the castle of law
Would be a backdoor, or overhanging beams.
So I never understood why ‘loopholes’ at all –
Their meaning escapes my logic, it seems.

Needle-Norths

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Some examples of mosaic compass roses from Paverart

Needle-Norths

Compasses never point to the Pole,
Not quite,
They have their own North Star –
It’s close enough to true, on the whole,
Despite it also being quite far,
Wandering through Canadian isles
To sway
The needles off the mark.
But then, True North can sometimes be miles away
From where the gridlines hark.

I recently came across an interesting theory put forward by Lance Weaver that true polar wandering had occurred during the last ice age, putting the top of the world firmly within Greenland, which might explain why Europe was covered in ice-sheets while Alaska was mostly ice-free. I have no idea if it’s correct, and would welcome a chance to read some counter-arguments, but everyone seems to be ignoring it.

Homonym

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Tick by Ryszard

Homonym

A tick is a bug that sucks up meaning,
A tiny check-mark on the skin
That no amount of language-cleaning
Will dislodge now it’s sunk its snout in.
A facial tic on our pristine tongue
Of too many meanings from a single noun –
Oh for a speech that’s regular and young
Before the parasites invade the town.
We use words on tick, to be paid for later,
Like the stuffing in a tick-case that is already frayed,
Or the ticks on a rule till the namesakes are greater
And we’ve spewed-out enough for a tickertape parade.
It ticks us off that such gaudy schlocks lurk,
But they’ve plagued us forever, syphoning their fraction –
Older than moments, older than clockwork,
The tick is as ancient as Anglo-Saxon.

‘Tick’ is also a Middle English word for goat (whose latter name is even older), and though thoroughly out-of-use can still be found in placenames such as Tickenhurst.

Incidentally, what does a twitcher call the first whinchat of the year ?  A tick tick.