It’s all Greek to me
Ev’ryone thinks of Alpha,
Alpha waves and alpha dogs –
Beta has its beta blockers,
Beta tests and beta logs –
Gamma gives us gamma rays,
And tennis gives us Gamma strings –
And Delta – so much Delta !
With its rivers and its wings
But no-one thinks of Omicron,
As obscure as you get,
What excitement could there be
In the bowels of the alphabet…?
Yesterday’s Revolution
My daughter is getting into vinyl,
And I wonder why,
She can’t have much nostalgia
For its world of middle-fi.
It ended long before she even started,
Dead and gone,
Revived by boomer hairshirts
Who cannot accept the world moves on.
She’s far too young for this old man’s hobby,
Far too poor for these rich man’s toys,
She never had to twiddle knobs
To boost the signal, damp the noise.
She never had the pops and crackles
From the deep-down dirt that rocks her records as they roll –
She never had to live with scratches,
Etched across her far-too-fragile sheened and spiralled soul.
Give me digital to feed me,
Give me digital to save,
Give me megabytes of songs
To last me to my grave.
She’ll find out in her own time,
And till then, let’s let have her thing –
To swing the arm into the secret vault
That makes the diamonds sing.
My teenage self would envy all her
Easy access to her tunes,
With soundwaves at her fingertips
For filling busy afternoons –
And not just playing them, but finding them,
No matter how obscure.
And yet, she wants to give it up
For the world of the analogue-pure.
But maybe she’s cosplaying other lives,
With second-hand vinyl bought-up cheap –
I’d gladly give her my old forty-fives,
But I long since chucked the useless heap.
Music shouldn’t need kid-gloves,
To tiptoe past, afraid to jive, to keep her groove on track.
Let each girl play the songs she loves
In beautiful fidelity, unshattered by shellack.
Give me digital to sing to,
Give me digital romance,
Give me cold hard ones and ohs
On which the lasers dance.
She’ll find out in her own time,
And till then, let’s let her have her bliss –
To open up the gatefold gates
Of needle-drop and soothing hiss.
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
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
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.
This poem was kindly accepted in the Spring 2023 edition of Blue Unicorn.
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
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…
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
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
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.
Rhyming Couplets 