Grimbeau

Scroodles

Category: creative non fiction

January 30, 2017

Chronic Ills #1

The funeral seems to have gone well; from which
I imagine that he has been buried, the
family did not kill each other, her
mother did not walk around with her
knickers round her ankles, and nobody
died of tedium during the older
brother’s peroration.
However, I may well be wrong.
We are only renters here, because if we sell
we need somewhere to live.
I am, for some reason
unplumbable, drawn to the
Robert Donat’s political speech in
The Thirty-Nine Steps; something to do with
wearing a pair of purloined
handcuffs and having a piss. Indeed when
shackled together, he and
Madeleine Carol must have been
bursting for a pee: mutual micturition in
1930’s cinema anyone?
Who’s Gone for a Piss!

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January 27, 2017

Trade Winds Blow Off

gust impudent sleep;
Scantily clad warily
rest still just gone dawn;
special chumley warmers
consummate love over
chlorinated chicken soup…

Only time will tell of course
Proof of pudding found
In Venezuela…

(Loud cheers and tobacco spits)
New deal struck post EGGPLASM
(35 squid a month saved)
‘Today the Gas Board—
Tomorrow the World!’

Did not dream (at all?)
on grassy uplands,
snug summer pastures,
capricious morning glory…
Domesticated God
Portrait (of the) Artist (as
a) Vacuum Cleaner
Leaves messiah knackered out
Major events thus postpones
Only minor miracles
Tenable today—

writing guff, combing hair (singular),
Powdering my knees, reading these poems:
High on Rust (pun on Night Ours?)
Made up by Ray Webber;
blurb includes the usual
posthumous suspects:
Hindley, Brady, Ferlinghetti,
Ashbery, and O’Hara plus
beasts EZ & TS—
Critique suppose if the spirit moves
or more pressingly: the bowel

Gas Board-
apply The Art of the Scam
in its Original Jerkish

Horace, Horace wherefore art
thou if not here?
Fancy a smoke & a fag
Whooo o o sH!

Sudden Sou’Wester flusters galley
Oil lamps dervish dancing wildly
Cold pork clunks grace offshore hulks
Red jelly allover waffler…

Splo Ooos h a H aha!
Scalding hot boiling pot
Fair stood the wind for
Hispaniola
…
Sinister unidexters tweak
Spin ludicrous yarns
A Bernie* for Buck House
Queenie gets to stay
& as for the rest—
Make ‘em an offer
dat day cant refuse*

*One million pounds sterling (Bernie Ecclestone size bung*)
*Sweeteners, inducements, gift-horses
*Trash

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January 21, 2017

President Tweet

Drawing shallow air
 Fellow travellers feign
 silent indifference:
 (plush purple posies
 wilt in winter heat)
 events draw prematurely
to an abject close

~
 Overworm turns Underworm
stomachs churning inside out:

 Hail to the Chaffinch!
 Hail to the Chuff!

Enter stooge left Vladiator
God's own chosen quarterback


 Lions take five: Christian dada
 Untermensch ist ubermensch
 Triumph of the Wall
 Even Street investors blush
 At such an embarrassment of 
 witches and warlocks
 Servants of Beelzebubbles
 Hang on creaking rafters
 One eyed pyramid salesmen 
 jostle for prime positions…

 Assassination dreams
 occupy diligent couch
 potentates so they can say
 where they were when this one 
 gets richly deserved
 long overdue comeuppance
 or when children inquire:
 'What did you do in the war?'
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January 14, 2017

Smut!

Let’s call it a day for now
Just so as you know what time
I want to call it
It is as you can see a poorly lit room

A long haired pedestrian
In a floppy wooden hat
Leans, stretches out,
Pulls back the curtains, reveals

A full on fading
gawping gibbous moon
obscured by insurgent ghost riders
careering from the Northlands
~
Spotted a giant clear as day
Paddling in the sea
Of Tranquility:
Cubistic Eyebrow,
unambiguous stark cyclops,
Ivory orb under
shut umbrella eyebrow:
Window latch serpent handle
oily black lipstick
Groucho Marx pisstake
Squinting snootily:
Adolf holding pince-nez
for the Hitler family album…
~
You know the type, don’t you?
seen it all before, love
seen it all before…
as clear as day it
was as clear as day
…Smut!

2 Comments
January 12, 2017

diss-informatioN

Pressing buttons is fraught
With potential disaster
Self-destructive tendencies
Disregard consequences
Plunging headlong in the void
Swans dive slow in fetid lakes

Factors beyond dawn patrol
sense ebbs while love grows fragile
been there saw the t-shirt
savaged on the twilight wire
Scented sanguine tatters drip
On stony porous ground:
the first cut was the daftest
—how come we never learn
from our fascination
with cut & paste alibis?

Dubious communiques
arrive from far off lightships
coaxing weak sun jars pulsate
diligence smells of sawdust
meanwhile next door erudite
yes men jostle for number
one in the copycat charts
the truth fears for its life
in fugitive Siberia

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January 10, 2017

Undulations

Up and down
Up and down
That’s him today for a change…
Down now
Up later…
To invariably find
Graham Nash still talking
Woodstock and Joni Mitchell
Edging closer to a close
California dreaming
Manchester Trade Hall
I love Jennifer Eccles
Life comprising Cakes & Ale
Occasional taste of honey
Stolen on Saddleworth Moor

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January 9, 2017

Alptraums Ltd

While walking naked
Into the gas chamber one felt
A certain thrill at
one’s predicament:
bereft as one is of Ambassadors
Plenipotentiaries, creeps
& other former fellow
travellers
on the groovy train
to Gobbledegook Central

Nonetheless is more or less
A condition of extreme despair
Energises oneself to crave
A morsel to eat…
Or is it a trick
To lure me from this
Earth shat-a-ring-a-roses
Endeavour?
Like twits leave sinking ships
~
Tree up (this time round)
On the deal (what)I made
Wit (ha-ha) myself & eye…
One before breakfast
thirteen days a week
for twenty nine days
~
How could I possibly
Make a telling difference
Without self-regulation?
Better word up quick
Stop flying by the seat
Of my sovereignty
Call a May Election
Climb a few more Alptraums
Mourn far distant Maidenhead

2 Comments
January 9, 2017

One Stop Shoplifter

The first Human Contact of
the Week Award goes to…

F-Bomb,
who, while supersaturated
with head-crunching prescription
drugs, heard out my proposal
with consummate alacrity…

Attempts to remedy the parlous
tobacco situation have fallen on deaf legs
A canned orchestra plays wistful dainties on the window sill
I listen out for salvation—
no salvation arrives on the ten-fifty two

Emil Coiran cracks me up
We are all failures—like it
Dormant bureaucrat
Can’t wait to get on with it
Administration
More disappointment on demand
Basic human rights movement
Sings love’s old sweet song:

Academe, Sweet Academe
How still I see thee
Lying through your teeth
Understand you shortcomings
Before you start discussions
Terms of endearment
Fall on quilted ears

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January 8, 2017

Insolent Green

Life enhancement calls the old & infirm ,
the homeless amputee, the various frail sticks
the homesick summary rejects of this gruel regime,
clumsy messages lost on deaf or dormant ansaphones—
perhaps they did themselves in overnight
& were swept up in the alms of public thaumaturges,
cleverly disguised as aliens in lime reflective dayglo
Mickey Mouse onesies who compress them

into giant black bin liners and stack them aboard
green public transports and drop them off
for re-cycling as motorway bollards by
Maggot & Maggot Ltd,
Proud exploiters of anything that’s going
since shite drew its first corrupted breath
& fucking weebles wobbled but never fell down…
Alternatively they might be having
A well deserved lie-in on this soggy Sunday morning

Dreaming of spring lambkins
Gambolling tumbling spilling
leaping giant cowpats
& kissing dandelions to
drift off in four leaf clover…
or just say I’ll call back later
Or another day or never again
as I know they are
deliberately not
Picking
it
U
Ppppp…

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January 7, 2017

Twelfth Night Fiasco

Elsie Gassbang-Trott
always told it like it was-
essentially transvestite
noble by disposition
or by dint of nature—
girls will be the boys
& the boys will be the girls:

Whatever you want
Twelfth Night of twelfth day

—Now is the winter
of snide discontent—
Wrong Play, Belch
Burp, barf, bark…
Enter broken head:
Well, why you did ask!
~

Coming up three in the sub-post office, rain, pretty dull, quiet, the games have started, think I’ll take a break, go below for a quiet smoke, finish my too sweet coffee; brains gone native, so to speak, not responding to all this gender swapping on the company wireless.
I can see the Puritans giving out soon if they don’t put a sock in this…
~

—No
more cakes & ale, Toby-Baby
Think I’ll forge a billet-du or two
Set the ball
Gallivanting mad
in love’s tacky bagatelle

—Pray,
entreat those three interlopes
loitering by the knick-knacks
come hither nuncles
excorcise the stable stench
with bawdy ballads:

Feast of Fools, Feast of Folly
Indented coastline
enchanted Adriatic
Harbouring novelties
under your nose, Malvolio
Ship of Folly, Ship of Fools

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