Love Song

This is the poem I didn't send
that I didn't intend
that didn't end
(and couldn't mend)
the quiet affair that was never quite there.

This is the poem that never was -
my favourite poem of all, because
it would have meant that you were there
sharing the castle we built in the air
for a lost affair that was never quite there.

In the labyrinth that now is me
all rooms are open, you are free
to wander at will, no need for a key
not in our castle high in the air
in the quiet affair that was never quite there.

Alas for intentions. Unwittingly
scattered around - Catastrophe! -
"No Entry" signs - you thought from me...
How could that be, so high in the air?
Sad, the affair that was never quite there.

Writers' Block

Stare at the white page...
there's nothing there, and
nothing is what
will come from it.
Better to engage
a rainmaker,
a dancer or
someone who prays
or seeds the clouds
with silver iodide,
dry ice or flares.

We need a shower
of good ideas
or just ideas.
I knew a man,
brain damaged,
wrote like you or I -
as long as there
was something
written on the page.
But if he spoke his thought
he could not write it down.

It's habit forming, too.
The water when it comes
does not seem good enough,
still smells, is brackish
or discoloured. So
we let it run a while
then as we go to use it
it runs out.

It was Robert Lloyd at Poets United who suggested Writers Block as a topic.

Posh Doll and someone who might have been Jesus

Scores of them. On makeshift beds. Lying in the sun. Plastic dolls from round the world. A rabbit and a polar bear. Giraffe and tiger. Elephant and water buffalo. Dogs. Cats. Horses. Mice.

There are friends. Neighbours. Loved ones. Crying over them. Bringing them what comfort they are able. And sweets and chocolates. Flowers for the dead. Prayers for the just alive.

And then there's Posh Doll. Posh Doll lives in luxury. She has a doll's house on an ant hill in the garden. Posh Doll is married to Nkondi. Nkondi is a power doll from the Congo. Posh Doll is small. Made of porcelain. Big breasted. Wears a pelmet skirt. Low cut top. Killer heels and the fur-trimmed cape of High Priestess. She is heavily tattooed. Nkondi wears a grass skirt and boxing gloves. He sits on a white marble throne in the garage of their home.

The house is an ant-free zone. No ant has ever crawled upon it or within it. They are banned by the power of the power doll. Posh Doll is broken.

From Posh Doll's point of view the marriage, though happy, has been a disaster. The result of a mistaken identity. On first meeting Nkondi she had believed that he was Jesus. True, the grass skirt and the boxing gloves gave cause for hesitation. Against that. He looked like every picture there has ever been of Jesus. And there were repeated promises that he would give her of his body and his blood.

The gardener hated the couple. For the protection they afforded to the ant hill. One morning he arrived early with boiling water and a fork. Posh Doll realised what he was about to do. She threw herself beneath the descending tines. The gardener was committed. Could not pull back. The tines shattered her fragile porcelain. That is how she became broken. Rosie, her owner ,
commandeered her mother's novelty cruet carriage. She converted it. Made a wheel chair for Posh Doll. Alfie, her brother, fixed an electric car beneath the chassis. Posh Doll was now mobile again. At speeds up to 50 M.P.H.

Nkondi began to talk of Reverence for Life. Because of that. Because of his fanatical protection of the ants. She came to think him Albert Schweitzer. One question bothered her. Was Albert Schweitzer also Jesus? She asked him outright. Pow! There was darkness across the land. Then came light. And there was he, sitting at the organ playing. Then she knew what she must do. Find him some lepers. He had to start his leper colony.

She waited until the Power Man was out powering with his mates. Then she struck. When the Power Man returned she had them all laid out in makeshift beds awaiting his return. The lumpy skins and blisters were her with mother's giant matches. The missing digits. her again. With pincers from the shed.

The power man threw a powerful rage. Pow! There was darkness across the whole land. The light returned and there he was. Back in his old routine. Like some latter day Pied Piper of Hamelin. Without the pipe. Leading all the dolls. The animals and garden creatures. Out of the garden. Away from Posh Doll. He saw her now to be a witch. And that is what they do. Power Figures. Protect the life around them from the witches.

Posh Doll wished that she could be a life enhancer. Life changer. Could have been the one to have been nailed to that cross. Have everybody worship her. That would have been more good than she could say. But what about Nkondi? Was he Schweitzer? Jesus? At 50 M.P.H. she was bound to catch him up!

This is Davina

Davina was referred to me by the staff of the Special Needs School
                                       at which I was Deputy Head.
They had just heard that I was leaving to set up a similar school 
                                       in another county.
Davina was referred to me as my first pupil.
She came, as you would expect, with a complete set of records:
                           Educational
                           Medical
                           Speech Therapy
                           Psychological
                           and an overall assessment.

Here is a flavour of what they contained:-

        The speech therapist had written that Davina suffered from:
                           "a considerable inter-cochlea cavity".

        The school assessment contained these questions: 
        "Can the pupil manipulate numbers?"
to which the answer was: "Yes, by a complex computational method
                           which the examiner was unable to follow."
        "Why do people go to church?"
to which the answer was: "To nail Jesus to the cross."
        "How is a ball like an orange?"
To which the answer was: "I can bite it and I can spit it out".

The School Report carried the information that she had been 
                          excluded from two previous schools,
from the first for "Misbehaviour on a school visit."She had sung bawdy
                          versions of the hymns at the school's Parish
                          Church Harvest Festival Service, and under 
                          the pretext of going to the loo, had managed
                          to leave  pornographic graffiti by the font;
and from her second school for "Trying to eat the class hamster live."
(She did seem to have a special talent for pornographic drawing.)

That was all 30 years or more ago. When she reached school leaving age
I, of course, adopted her. She is still with me.

Fissures are Us.

The above prompt is from Magpie Tales to whom much thanks

The world is fractured
and here we see the truth of that
made manifest.
The motor car is villain of the piece.
Once inside the metal box
there's nothing of the world outside
but it's reflected face.
Reflections of reflections,
reflections laid upon reflections.
Glass shines like steel
and slices steel, while slivers
of that steel slide back and forth
dissecting glass. Dissection
overtakes the world.
Man
caught in the reflections' crossfire
stands no chance.
A flick of light, a flash
reflected endlessly
and monoliths of steel and concrete
splinter with sharp edges. Fallen shards
are littering the town.

The city might be made of ice,
it breaks the way ice breaks across a pond.
We see a spider's web of cracks.
The cracks run deep
and cannot be repaired.
Only the car escapes decomposition.
The car which should connect us
root to stem to flower or leaf,
becomes the disconnect,
becomes the only world we know
of which we can be sure.
Only the drunkards fail to see the difference
and wander over cracks
that can't be papered over.
The car is such a claustrophobic world,
but small and tight are its two secrets:
small enough to hold its wholeness -
a fortress in this wilderness.

my first driving instructor

change down here!
the man on the corner
just standing there
potential suicide

change down here
steep hill to your left
that lorry there
its brakes about to fail?

change down here
see the lime tree?
could hide a boy
about to run across the road

don't change yet...
my early lessons
all in first -
know your bottom gear!

I changed up then
found a new instructor
lest I became
the suicide.

The Value of a Gift

My Granddad built the house in which I grew
from birth to adulthood. Not solo, but with
builders working under him. A master plasterer,
he turned his hand to many trades. Three bedrooms,
end of terrace and two loos (unusual back then)
and solid as a medieval castle. (You could not
knock a nail in any of its walls, was his
proud boast.) The total cost: one hundred pounds.

My granddad gave me once a golden guinea
to keep safe. Years later I would lose it
moving house. That would have pained him, but
by then, granddad had died, and dad had learned
the house was still insured for that one hundred pounds.
(Granddad would never trust insurance companies
or banks - Low, robbing buggers was his phrase for them.)
By then the house was worth around six thousand.

A conundrum for you: what was the value of
my granddad's gift to me? A guinea - one pound
and five p in our new money? Even then
the coin was worth far more than its face value,
but to me the value of a gift is what
it cost the giver. Granddad, seemingly, thought he'd
given me a coin worth one per cent of what
the house was worth - or sixty pounds just then.
Half that, maybe, back when the gift was given.

the contemplations of a torturer

Why does this bloodied sweetheart smile at me?
Smile with that special smile my father had?
I will not - cannot - look at him from this time on...
The patient will not speak, the surgeon cannot look!

Somehow I have to open up this gentleman...
Open up? A slip most Freudian! I'm back
at my first op', the need to steel myself. I'll do
the same again, I have a duty to perform.

I have to make him talk, tell all he knows.
He and his kind contaminate the earth.
I have my orders from the very top. From those
who know what pestilence these people spread.

I made a promise once to do no harm. What did that mean?
Is that a No to torturing the Anti-Christ?
I know of pain, have studied it and learned its ways.
I harness it to save the world. I spit on him

and ready all my tools for the long night. He'll die,
I do not doubt - or care - but not before he talks.
I am familiar with these tools: the scalpel and
the probes, but some are new. The hammer and the irons.

Why in the mirror do I see myself
in wedding dress or nurse's uniform?
Why does my past life haunt me so? (I know, of course,
but she is dead until this job is done.)

And does it need to justify itself to you,
my new, enlightened self to that which clings to me?
Why will you not lie down and take your cue from him?
Why do you put my mother's face where his should be?

But yet it will not work, this blackmail that you try...
I've learned the techniques of persuasion, tried
them on our guest, but now we have not time. What we
must know, we must know now - and shall, I promise you!

I'll try the tape again, another night
of hearing his wife scream - this time with pain,
his pain to make her pain more real to him -
and that should do the trick. He'll crack.

All this he's brought upon himself - and me.
I'll kill him for the trouble he has caused. So like
his kind. How dare he put me through all this!
Where's his compassion for his fellow man?

I am submitting this poem to Poets United for their Poetry Pantry #72.

On seeing a row of oaks

I am drawn towards these oaks
imagine them
as carved from some great silence
by a man who knew what silence is.

Not that they are silent.
No tree is that,
but that they come from silence,
are its inheritors.

A tree is many things:
hard working, for a start,
just ask the chief executive
of its hydraulic plant.

Its workshops are frenetic:
sap slurping in the pipes,
air pressures lifting roofs -
or if not that, then bursting cells -

to drive or energise
the process of osmosis.
The best of tissues rupture,
and though you may not hear,

a thousand little buggy things
will catch the pop.
Maybe they'll stop
their noisy chumping,

burrowing
or making love.
Maybe they'll not.
But to return to silence:

could you imagine
you are one such tree
as carved from silence
by my enlightened man?

Like all things living
you exist as twins.
Non-identical. Inseparable.
An inner and an outer oak

The outer oak is what we know:
great strength, longevity
dependability and calm -
the silence that we seek.
.
But now the inner oak...
how does that feel?
And can you sense your spirit's strength,
your heft, what made the Druids

worship you and link you
to their summer solstice,
use you for their wands
and as a centre for their world?

Or do you simply fret
about your outer oak,
the roughness of your bark,
the fruitfulness of fruit?

I am submitting this poem to Poets United for their Poetry Pantry #72

Killing Gaddafi

He was not found, as we all suppose,
beneath a road in a concrete drain,
but on our square, where scooters scoot
(and shooters have been known to shoot),
where holes are now for a water main
and pipes are plastic, a snake's head wide -
Exactly right for a rat to hide,
now dead and bloodied from head to toes.

And he was not thrown in the back of a truck,
but tied to a scooter, bound and chained,
not shot in the head as our screens proclaimed,
but done to death by a digging machine
(the one they had used to dig the holes),
its bucket cracking Gaddafi's head -
well, that's what his murderer up and said.
I heard all this as I cut the grass.

They buried the body back in the hole
and filled it in with tar and dirt
(recall, this didn't occur in Sirte),
the concrete mix having set too hard.
All this was yesterday. And now they choose
the government they want to rule. The boy
who cracked Gaddafi's head, bags
he's in line to be Prime Minister.

Some say it's kicking off again...

Talking Rubbish...

Snow flakes
           fall like confetti
ice-cold on oil-dark sea
           melt at the touch
and are gone
            the sea absorbing them completely
as it absorbs all that fall into it -
or so we thought
                and threw in far too much.

Below the surface
                 - say seven thousand feet -
where oil-dark turns to total blindness
hydro-thermal vents
                   (underwater geysers,
                   "black smokers", as they're called)
spew iron and sulphide -
four hundred centigrade, let's say - too hot
for any creature known to us to live.
But even there our waste is killing them.

          Strange, eyeless adaptations
          of entities we thought we knew.
          Like creatures out of some Sci Fi
          thriving in a temperature
          four times our boiling point

          and poisoned by our heavy metals.

A small boy drops a lolly stick.
Rain washes it:
down drains;
           through sewers;
                          to the sea
where currents known as gyres
shepherd it onto a floating tip
now growing exponentially

          factory waste, insecticides
          toxic chemicals and human tissue
          plastics, high and low grade radiation
          and waste from hospitals.

How many little boys
to make this tip -
as it now is -
two U.S.A.s in size?

Talk to a Painting

Talk to the man you don't understand,
invite him for supper or tea -
or if it's a piece of impossible art,
chat like you would to a friend;
take it home in your head,
pillow-talk it in bed
and give it some quality time.

I'll give you a case I bumped into by chance
as I was doing my rounds:
a gallery space
and me face-to-face
with The Dance of Life by Munch.

I was puzzled at first by the masks,
the facades of people having a dance -
and said so: "The shame,
the gloom and the grief,
not enjoying the hour
of their dance by the side of the sea."

"I am no Dance of Life, my friend,"
the picture disagreed.
"My title is an irony.
I'm more your dance of angst.
I am obsessed,
as my creator was obsessed,
who painted many canvases
of his anxieties.
I am the grand summation of them all.
He wrapped them all in me: his three
iconic forms of womanhood: the virgin,
inaccessible and pure; seductress,
predator and vampire; and the mother,
stiff and suffering, yet stoical."

"And yet, you're something ghostly, ethereal,"
I said. "Not flesh and blood. How can that be?
The sea is calm, the moon
a ring of beauty with reflections in the sea.
These things should influence
the scene - not leave you cold."

The Annual Pilgrimage

buds and yellow leaves
spring and autumn on one bough
stranger times to come?

On Sunday last, our annual pilgrimage to Wisley, the home of The Horticultural Society.(Actually we like to go much more frequently, but Sunday was the first time this year! Fortunately, we had perfect weather: warm sunshine. We were even able to have our lunch alfresco.

Two shots showing parts of the rockery

This handsome fellow (below) is called Bigfoot. We found him in the greenhouse. He is a member of the cucumber family - believe it or not! I should have included something for size comparison, but he is perhaps a meter across.

I saw the fellow below on the lake. He was some distance away, the zoom was up to the job, but my shaky hands were not. Ergo the shot is a bit fuzzy. I think he's (or she's) a heron. Does anyone out there know if I am right?

I was quite taken by these grasses.

Devil Birds

being my response to the picture prompt from Magpie Tales

Six years ago they came,
a dark smudge in the sky,
no more than that at first -
but then they came to Earth.
On land they were supreme.
Big as Christmas turkeys,
with wings that hid the sun;
claws fit to rip a rib
cage bar from flimsy bar
and take the beating heart;
and beaks like bayonets.
They'd run you through without
a flutter or a qualm.
They might have come from Mars.
No man or beast was safe.

The spellbinder was spell-
bound, for a change. Poleaxed
he was, with that same awe
he'd strike into our hearts.
For all he tried this charm
or that, wails to the moon
or potions by the score,
the birds just laughed at him
and wobbled on their way.

And then one day our plants
began to wilt and die.
Followed by our children.
"Disease," the charmer said.
Dunno if he was right
or not, not for meself.
Anyways, he mixes up
a new concoction: blood
and scrapings from the dead,
and disappears. Where to?
Your guess... soon after that,
the devils start to die.

So what's he do? Tells us
how we must hang them - string
them up to decompose.
Each day he takes one down
and roasts it - not to eat,
oh no, we has to smear
ourselves with grease and blood.
Protection's what he says -
from evil influence,
the birds themselves, their dread
disease... and from ourselves!
Can you beat that? Ourselves indeed!

Titchtown United

When they demolished the stadium
the fans bought squares of its turf
and took them home
and fitted them into their well-kept lawns.

Then nothing disturbed the tranquil ways
of their well-kept town until the day
when the brand new season dawned. Which was when
they found the squares were out of control
and the grasses therein were thicker
and longer and stronger and far far greener
than those which composed the lawns of old.

And then there was something else:
the grasses could not be cut, they found,
not with mower or shears or any mechanical tool.

And still they were growing
and not only growing but spreading,
and not only spreading but singing.
Yes, that's right, the new grass was singing,
horrendously singing, way out of tune.
It was singing the songs of the fans,
the songs that the terraces knew,
the songs that were green, but also blue.

And not only singing, but swaying
swaying in time to the singing.
And not only grasses, the town:
the whole town was singing - or so it would seem
if you happened to pass that way.

Soon it was taller than sunflowers, taller than trees,
and still it was singing and still it was swaying
and people covered their ears
and they closed all their doors
and not even a window was left ajar.
And only the fans and the players of football
enjoyed the songs that the grasses sang.

Then experts came with knowing ways
and examined the grasses, and let it be known
That: "of course they will sing, for their stems are hollow,
they've reeds in the wind to sing!"

For by now among them was pampas grass and several reeds
and sugar canes and tough bamboos,
and cocksfoot and fog and perenniel rye,
and the roughest of rough-stalked meadow -
though not one of these grasses and been in the squares
that they'd bought when the stadium closed.

And their little town became known as the town
with thousands of towering towers.
There were leaning towers and straggly towers,
thick towers and thin towers, all manner of towers,
and all of them towers of the living grass.

Next thing they found: the grass could be cut
as long as the cutter would sing along
in tune with the grass that was out of tune
and sway in time to the swaying grass. Next thing,
the grasses developed an orange stripe
- orange and green was the strip of their team.

So the fans cut wands of the waving blades
and took them along to cheer the lads,
and they waved and they sang and made such a din -
and never again did they win.

Jackson Pollock

Here is violence absorbed,
a wildness, a ferocity,
a turbulence of stick,
ferocity of knife,
pigment wildly thrown:
a clash of disparate energies -
all somehow harvested
as from a tangled garden bed
where buds appear
and tiny leaves
and trailing things
like brambles drawing blood.

"Be still," it said
"and know here is a god."
The canvas knows.

"Be still," it says to me,
be as a tree
with its deep roots
and broad reach of its arms.
Take in the world,
take the world's mess,
Be still as me."

image from Wikipedia

The German Way With Words

The Germans like portmanteau-words -
with not a single dash in sight.
New lexicons are for the birds,
their words will never see the light.

Inventors of a language glue
by means of which
a word will stick
to any other word they pick.
ThelongestwordthatIcanfind: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz:
(the labelling of beef, I'm told): like Topsy, it just grew.
Concatenation is their choice:
pronunciation takes your voice.

The words spool out, mile after mile -
and some are longer than the Nile
with words like trucks of endless trains.
They never have to scratch their brains
to find a word for something new
when strings of older words will do.

Or is it shortness that offends?
and joining makes the length that mends?

A World in Passing.

A response to a prompt bydVERSE Poets for a poem modelled on one by an established poet. I have chosen Ted Hughs's Conjuring in Heaven

Children's chalk games on the square,
squares within a larger square,
and in the squares are icons drawn -
though mostly scribbled out in blue
where two dead zebras white on black
in passing have been spared.
(The rain has washed out Africa.)
Close by, a circle,
top half sun with earth beneath,
the two at the equator met. All this to show
the two can live
in harmony?
that neither is a threat?
Pie in the sky while all the trees
burn merrily. Their leaves,
like insects, cover earth.

Then look again
where two white suns
collide in space
and ask of us, "Can earth survive?"
Incredibly, impossibly
they've chalked blue numbers on them all.
What do they do,
these children, skip
from one disaster to the next?

They've left some pieces on the ground...
personal belongings
scattered round
like tokens on a board:

a plastic man

theatre plan

a recipe for fish
beneath a stone for paperweight
beside the cataleptic beasts.

---

Conjuring in Heaven

So finally there was nothing.
It was put inside nothing.
Nothing was added to it
And to prove it didn't exist
Squashed flat as nothing with nothing.

Chopped up with nothing
Shaken in a nothing
Turned completely inside out
And scattered over nothing -
So everybody saw that it was nothing
And that nothing more could be done with it

And so it was dropped. Prolonged applause in Heaven.

It hit the ground and broke open -
There lay Crow - cataleptic.

Little King

I bet he walks two steps behind his queen.
Self-effacing little king,
he holds the sceptre of his power
and majesty behind his back -
not to be seen.
Bashful little thing!

He stands upon The Daily Rag,
the news of common man, consumer man,
but hasn't opened it.
Such outward things dwell not in his desires,
his mind is on some astral plane.

His ermine trim is faux, of course;
he's greener than the bees.
He sings from angel hymn sheets -
but when they sing, he leaves.

His morning coffee has been served.
He's turned his back on it,
prefers the nectar of the gods -

and walks two steps in front of them,
insisting on his right. But here, his queen

of six feet seven, blocks out all his light.

---

My thanks to Magpie Tales for the image/prompt.

"My best friend died here"

dVerse Poet's Pub Open Link Night speaks of superstitions and particularly those involving the number 13. This set my mind working along that particular track.

"BROMPTON HOSPITAL
FOR THE CONSUMPTION
AND DISEASE OF THE CHEST."
Big letters on Victorian red brick
above a too-imposing entrance.
(Red once, but soot-encrusted now.)
I and the day are both thirteen.
I'm not exactly superstitious,
but in the light of those dread words
can not afford to take too many chances -
or so I feel. I ask my mother
and my aunt, "What are my chances?"
My aunt is quick to reassure: "It's lovely here -
My best friend died in here just recently."

I should have brought the rabbit's foot
my friend had offered me. I am not ill.
Not now, but have been so each year
since I was five years old. I've come
"for observation only" - which, I reason,
should improve my prospects.
(The family are frightened of T.B.
I do not know at this stage
that consumption is T.B.)

Neither do I know the treats in store for me:
a stunning view across the London roof tops -
from the hospital's theatre;
and then a fun broncoscopy - a periscope
inserted down the windpipe. No fibre optics then;
a rubber pipe with lights and mirrors
like a prestidigitator's dream.
I didn't see the show. I couldn't wait,
went into shock and saw them all
back stage when it was done.
My aunt was still in form:
explained how many patients died -
though not me! (Which I
already had worked out.)