Poems
Birdhouse
Boy teetering on tiptoe, head tilted down,
his aquiline nose shadowed by the v-shaped roof.
Just enough height to glimpse them
through the little hole,
their only source of light.
Boy to man: ‘They look like little dinosaurs.’
Man to boy: ‘they’re related.’
Boy’s elated.
But to the man, the frantic movements
of the five gaping beaks,
necks strained as if gasping for air,
unsettles.
Birds teetering on tips of claws, heads tilted up,
their aquiline beaks shadowed by the v-shaped roof.
Just enough light to glimpse him -
the boy’s glistening eye
almost filling the aperture
through which they will be fed tonight.
Tiny birds. Small boy. Old man.
The sum of their lifespans but a breath of geological time,
connected for an instant
in the dying light of early night.
Man to boy: ‘it’s time for bed.’
Lost voice
Last seen in field far from here.
Chip on shoulder. Spot on ear.
Heart on sleeve. No tag. Quite light.
Responds when called and will not bite.
The early night’s his hiding space.
If seen, approach, but please don’t chase.
Less sensitive to sense than sound.
We miss him so.
Reward if found.
Pirouette
How long ago she managed to hold
herself on toe, and twirl, and twirl
with grace and charm, bold
as the little ballerina girl
who stares at her tonight,
the sad ceramic leg now chipped
and immobile. ‘Sleep tight’
she says ‘sleep tight my love’ light lipped.
The little mirrors have lost their sheen
a cloudy eye confirms,
tracing leg line flecked with tourmaline.
So these are nature’s terms,
So these are nature’s terms.
Office Pantoum
Answer to the call of duty
With decorum and tact
Bow to your superiors with deference and grace
As corporate law commands
With decorum intact
Refine and shape your act
As corporate law commands
Denigrate yourself in serving protocol
To refine and shape your act
For rise through rank and file
Denigrate yourself in serving protocol
Never dare to disagree with those in power above
There is rise through rank and file
For women who speak in soft and sultry tone
Never daring to disagree with those in power above
Sustaining status quo
Women: Speak in soft and sultry tone
Avert your eyes to apologize
To sustain the status quo
With your mastery of fixed form rules
Averting eyes to apologize
Men must follow suit
With equal mastery of fixed form rules
Of hierarchy and rank
In suit the men must follow their leader
In drunken stupor at bar barely loosening bonds
Of hierarchy and rank
Easier to succeed as man in man’s domain
In drunken stupor at bar, with bonds barely loosened
Frankness forcing fixed forms of intimacy
Making it easier to succeed. But as man in man’s domain spending
Half of life on jam-packed train
A form of intimacy rather avoided, frankly
Sweating in the stifling summer heat
Half of life on jam-packed train
Thinking of other life
Unlived
Aloft
I put them on a boat and sent them out to sea
To eradicate from memory
Spouting vitriolic
And bombastic bile embolic
No fathoming these figureheads
We’ve been jib rigged fore and aft
The Russian at the stern
The Brazilian at the wheel
The continental cads roped and hooked about the heel
And as ballast or’ the bulkheads
The American I did furl
No fathoming these figureheads
We’ve been jib rigged fore and aft
Aloft!
Dreadnought we fear their leeward tack
Windward wake and worried
The five will feature knotted true
Skull as lonely seamen do
No fathoming these figureheads
We’ve been jib rigged fore and aft
Salt Breathes Life
Gentle sound of clams purging sand
As ice cracks in early spring registered only by tiny attentive ears
Sensitive to sound with time in life to listen
No need for extraneous ornamentation
With richness of line, pattern, shade of shell together
Forming mosaic rivaling sand mandalas
Salt as balm stirring life
Salt as evil stifling it
Take your pick
But either way, as mandalas are brushed away
Something terrifying about last gentle movement
Before boiled death
Fall
From that impossible height
Taught ropes
Allowing tranquil sweep
Through ancient terraced canyon walls
Eons deep
Youth and yearning soft as liquid light
How Odd That Daring Dash
Seven of them floating in a five-line poem.
A little bit fanatical,
being ungrammatical.
By such audacity you engage
our curiosity.
Some called it a substitute for the devil –
Why the period had to die
is a riddle we can’t solve.
Nor need we bother. For we do sense
that cessation serves to
arouse our pleasure and imagination
drawing attention to the life
you lived through; your caesura,
retained for posterity in lead,
traced on paper, the weight
of your hand revealing such intimacy.
One has to wonder what is lost
in print, dash lengths analyzed
by the scholars who standardized
those mysterious marks.
How odd that the daring dance of your dashes
through its cryptic will, moves us still
teetering and tottering
robbing time its ebb, and through its flow –
we hear your spirit sing.
I Learned a Lot from Larkin
Simply said with light and limpid touch
A finely chiseled phrase works wonders
Nudged to the left but not too much
When register is right
Form and content quit the fight
Images held for just enough time
Jog the soul gently midst dull daily grind
While riding on the train
To help us feel with heart and mind
The shape of glass in rain
Rhyming couplets now might seem a little quaint
A British thing perhaps, that conservative constraint
Halcyon and soothing
Formal play to ponder pain
How to leave a word alone, alone out in the rain
Relinquishing the grandiose allows one to convey
Such depth in lithe and sylphlike forms
One seldom sees today
Let the little words hold weight
Cut the fat, truncate, truncate!
My little ode to you now done I’ll pass it on to everyone
And when my friends come round to chat
I’ll tell them Larkin’s where it’s at
Gone for over thirty years and yet
Fresh images, still now, beget
A Question
O wise one please enlighten me
On art and artifice
‘Artifice is trying to be
And art, well, art just is’
More Numbers At
10,000 poems, proudly titled and proofed
500 more still awaiting their name
half of them nervous and bowing in shame.
As ‘Numbers’ was taken
mine’s ‘More Numbers At’.
Rather sharp, like the chic of a well-balanced hat.
Trailblaziing
I slowly traced the great network of interlacing trails
You made with your hands through the sand
On your knees in the park
Your last kingdom
This raw play of imagination
Moving your body through endless space
Now that the screens have claimed your attention
I miss cleaning the dirt from your knees
Smelling the fresh grass stains
And wonder what is lost in this forging of new trails
Through vast electronic fields
With you, immobile, staring into flat space
I've heard the cyber prophets say
Bodily play is falling away
With ever more to explore far from where we are
I’ll remember your face, utterly absorbed
Fulfilling innate earthly desire
Trailblazing
Herr Brahms and Mr. Edison
“it’s as though one were living a fairy-tale.”
- Johannes Brahms in a letter to Clara Schumann
I strain to catch the distant sounds
of long dead vibrations,
caught, preserved and brought to life
through Edison’s magic machine.
‘Johannes Brahms’ a faint crackling voice confirms
before he plays his Hungarian Dances
bravely battling the onslaught
of relentless clicks and pops.
I discovered that the stylus was to blame
for that slow death of his voice over time
as each fatal turn of the drum
further scarred the fragile foil.
As I listen I wonder
how a poem resists time’s attack
Can it win if it fights back?
Or should it just admit defeat and fade away
As children’s voices wither
after play at end of day
The Snake Charmer
So I’m the evil one.
Not you, who sliced my neck,
severed my venom glands
and sewed my mouth shut.
If you had just defanged me
I’d be granted my only act of defiance
of tonguing you and your audience
as you ply your trade with your pungi.
What a farce your soundless melody!
Even the children know I lack an outer ear
and only respond to the movements
of the gourd and your bony fingers.
At night when the low dull vibrations slink
into the soil, granting me my only refuge of silence
I dream of life before this hell in a basket,
how it felt to slither so free through grass and sea
to a placid village far from the throngs
of tourists onto the soft laps of the priestesses
to be gently held, coddled and kissed
on the top of my divine and delphic head.
Grand Gran
A visit with you then
Was like lunch with the queen
British and lavender clean
A twinkle in your eye, cig in hand
Everything regal and grand
I’d listen to your stories
Of Shanghai shops and of the war
Of British ships and glories
Of the colonies and all that fell before
The lovely liners brought you
To this gentle western shore
Where you could scan the sea
Driving scooter on the quay
Through sand salt woven windswept land
Shopping list in wrinkled hand
To buy the dainty doilies
For Royal Albert cups of tea
We’d drink with scones and butter tarts
Or Yorkshire puds and pie
Before I’d say goodbye
And kiss you on the cheek
In reddening room of crimson sky
At end of dying day
And wave to you from the road outside
Where they say you passed away
Who has time
to follow the gentle sway
of my pedicles and umbellets
but the children,
their birdy eyes and fragile fingers
delighting in my decay
in the breeze that tilts
these fourteen crests of seed,
my progenies survival
held in these handsome stilts
soon to be tossed as weed
or set in suspended animation
preserved in liquid amber jars
for my limonene and manganese
my seedling's tiny stars
my fronds a sheer chemise
my last and lonely sexy dance,
a little strip and tease.
The Star Gage
The tiny inkblot paper thin
Impossibly lets light within
Renders real within the brain
All that’s seen in light’s domain
As mirrors play their tricks on light
Inverting letters left to right
Here the world divides
Inverting letters left to right
As mirrors play their tricks on light
All that’s seen in light’s domain
Renders real within the brain
Impossibly lets light within
The tiny inkblot paper thin
Commuting
I saw a child today
on the train
red glove held firmly
in grandmother's hands
and something in the way
they gazed at the rain
shattered my future
dissolved all my plans
Peitho
With eyes like stars in disguise
Through the pallid night light stalks
Steals her men away from their wives
On orphic evening walks
For Charlie
Your supersonic cyber savvy art and words
Eyewink light and candid crisp
Soothes my soul and keeps me young and yearning
Just write like Charlie speaks and words will flow
I say to myself racking little brain
Battling fear and loathing
Trying to write a poem that just manages to float
A few inches off the ground for an instant
Before collapsing under its own weight
I vow to lighten tone with tongue firmly held in cheek
Toss “breadth of our domain”
Get up, dry tears and start again
A Covid Christmas
I want to have a party
and live life to the last
But my leg is gimp and gammy
I fear my life has past
I want to have a party
and dance out in the street
But everyone is sat at home
There’s no one there to meet
I want to have a party
and eat and drink and sing
But every song I start, well….
I can’t remember a thing
I want to have a party
And end this poem right
With a little something positive….
I’ll think of it tonight
Home
How nice of you to come today, anyways
You must be busy with the kids
Just put it over there
Next to the flowers from Jenny
You must be busy with the kids
Yes, I think I still have some
Next to the flowers from Jenny
No, I’ve no need of that anymore
Yes, I think I still have some
Oh look! you can see the little bird from here
No, I’ve no need of that anymore
Did the kids pass their exams?
Oh look! you can see the little bird from here
They raise the blinds at 8:00
Did the kids pass their exams?
It’s Jen and David, right?
They raise the blinds at 8:00
I can see the children playing in the park
It’s Dave and Jenny, right?
When can I come home?
I can see the children playing in the park
Cindy here takes good care of me
When can I come home?
You look like my son
Cindy here takes good care of me
She brings me water when I ring
You look like my son
Who are you?
She brings me water when I ring
Just put it over there
Who are you?
How nice of you to come today, anyways