Make Mine a Manhattan
Across the trail that hugs the conifer-spiked edge of land mumbling into November sea,
Bohr makes a statement carved thoughtfully into the whitewashed wall of an outhouse,
That bit about “everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real”.
I can’t help but look beneath my hole-for-a-throne and wonder
If underneath the black ooze of unmentionable,
There is a ticking little bomb with its nose pointing upwards.
Game Tree in Soft Focus
From my rented window view, with glasses put away for the night:
Myodesopsia in contra dance formation
Repeated over multiple plains with Comet and Lionhead goldfish
Over electric lattice
Lines punctuated by burning yellow Marigolds and Calliandra
Dance progressions disappear beneath pond slime and shadow
Or around upended draughts boards glowing a dull, brown glow
Going For a Song
Down on the dirt road made of your clay and mine
Your soft clay and mine
I am a man who likes quality
Okay, low-cost
Cut-price quality
But still
Quality
Together now we have this
Soldier of misfortune here in the studio
Let’s take our next caller
Go ahead, Gabriella
Gotta question for the soldier man
Gabriella asks
Why send off your warning from pneumatic tubes
Just blast out a tempest on a didgeridoo
Dust off your keening, earnest voice
Cracked in places but ready to go
Down on the dirt road made of your clay and mine
Your soft clay and mine
Klopstock Quadriga
The cheese in the harbour is made from the milk of
Tired clouds squeezed by high winds and circumstance,
Says Old Man Klopstock
He rides his fingers over
Folds of holes in winter pockets
Looking for a door to escape
Down there
Where cold, wounded thigh meets
Death shroud of Charlemagne
The ecclesiastical meets the fantastical
Klopstock slips into his own wound
But before his final departure
Tips his wig to suggest that you
Dig a hole in the water
And bury your tears at sea
Print a picture of your shadow
To prove you come by darkness
Honestly
Swimming Pool, Water Park, Snow
Life guard out in an apple orchard
Nice shorts there out in January cold
Lifeguard tower covered in frost
Interrupted step by step
With flip flop indentations
Shouting to displaced Jamaicans
Who did not make it home
Get out of the water
Followed by one, two three short blasts
The Jamaicans eye one another,
Convince one another to humour their fine
Life guard, and feign fatigue
They beg for assistance out of the invisible water
Exemplified
By snow-covered earth
The lifeguard and his distressed swimmers make it to shore
There is mollification
If not exultation
You Can Paint an Elephant, But You’re Still Gonna See Wrinkles
1.
Consonance sweepers
Bring out the hypocritical oath
In the many.
I asked the Baum of Gilead, “What’s your theosophy?”
He cried as he replied:
“Though it may sound hollow I swear by Apollo
That my dreams are screams in emerald green
Such as the world has never seen.
It makes you wonder where you’ve been. Still,
No one takes them…seriously.”
I am trying to be kind to
The rivers in my mind
Although the rivers aren’t that very kind to me.
They catch me in the undertow
And tell that they told me so
And that redemption is the missing key.
2.
Lil misshapen lump of melancholy
Says that on this side of Armageddon,
“Luscious lemon pudding cake
Seems sadly out-of-reach. Might
Settle for a 4 lb bucket of
Marbled corned beef brisket,
A geisha girl and a biscuit.”
4.
Cockalorum’s beard found a kitchen midden
Of seashells and broken, dirty dishes.
The beard’s conclusion:
“Death
sparks death
sparks
Sun,
Sun…”
This is where you get unbuckled and let some other kid ride. Tsum vider zeen….
Poems From Fenwick Tower Page 2