Mr & Mrs Sophocles
‘Will that do?’
‘No, it’s wrong’
‘Wrong?’
‘Yes, wrong.’
‘Who says gross moral turpitude is wrong?’
‘People…just people.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, would I?’
‘Suppose not.’
‘Suppose right.’
Grimbeau
Scroodles
Category: Poetry
January 15, 2021
Threadbare Phantasm
1
Worsted, Tweed, Galician calicos, reamed
cotton screed, diaphanous silks, dour,
coarse linens, Chinese screen tableaux
of mislaid epochs, safe and unsafe tapestries,
sad stacked in the old mead hall, the conference centre,
the hubristic hub of soft arrogance now
Abandoned.
2
The once sure folk have fled, melted or mutated,
The meek ones headed for the hills, where they crouch
and mooch, sucking on stale breadsticks
in their shell holes, caves and calcified barrows.
The diehards who fought foolhardy rear-guard actions –
smoulder in stockyard bone stooks stand pyrrhic
before the Sacrifice
3
With the Labyrinthines gone away, nature is displeased,
Ever abhorrent of void it convenes
Bison, heck, leopard, eel and titmouse,
Louse, curlew, ptarmigan, to settle
a modus of repair. They soon conclude the obvious:
You are only as good as your last, worst
Aberration
_
January 7, 2021
She Sings Good
Way downstream
in Swindon
waters rise
spring tides surge.
How very dared
I met her
then,
And brave the dangerous voyage?
The grass lay
down in the valley below
Where milk cows
numinous mull–
hands work
fields that never end
dawn to dusk
the cuckoo toiled
January 7, 2021
Swinish Multitudes Arise!
Let us pause for smoke and prayer…
Teeming sardines in the Arab Sea
A billion starlings over the Fens
Sensing food and predator.
Poor old religion gets another lambast
Courtesy of these withered digits
Hens in the back are revealed as angels,
a blackbird coyly juggles rats
Louche, pleasant, twisted opiate dreams.
The bayou shoulders slow magnolia
Grits for slow, big, muddy river that quivers
Magnificent regardful like a python
Weighing up the yearly weenie
…in the Jacuzzi of good and evil
January 6, 2021
Mews
In
Seamless
Sleep
I saw you
Gallivanting
A
Sumptuous
Blaze
consumed me
Juvenating
the wake
November 28, 2020
Après Ultra (Diego Marijuana RIEP)
New Grub Street records below for future delectation; and on the ruby doorstep, a letter for Professor Phipps containing a packet of pulverised sage to keep the lonely onion happy & engaged in crazed seasonal endeavours lies. A nuclear fog subsumes Trollenberg as zombies fill the diswashers incanting the curses of Mali and smiling on the memory of Nkrumah’s wizard foxtrot.
‘Maradonna’s dead’
‘Good, but what of little Diego?’
‘Mudlarking, no doubt. Slicing dentures from washed up concubines of the East Indian in inky sepia drab. A crow observes from a tendrilled groyne. All is muted, unspectacular. Waters lap. A heat pipe giggles in Abrasia.
‘Will he wash?’
‘In good time, when opportunity arises.’
‘The crusty stench is beyond the daily luminal’
‘Crud!’
‘Poor wee Diego’
November 17, 2020
You is the One
Herr Hemmingway’s new fangled card tricks garnered whoops of ghoulish euphoria; cryptic brevity entranced the maidens in the downstairs parlour. Whip cracks of girlish giggle and pinch play pierced the dour scourge of curfew night. A carriage pulled up before the sombre granite Manse. A parcel was delivered in speedy silence.
Casaubon ate freely of the doctored truffles. Mary Ann rested back to wait the denouement, puffing gaily on her long clay pipe and petting Daniel Absconda, her Sicilian spaniel. All would be revealed next Monday in The Infidel if they were spared.
*
Silas Marner pitched up unexpected the following day, dressed in limpid russet homespun which reminded Willoughby Dunlop, the virile batman, oddly of withered futuristic inner tubes.
‘Your luculence become you Massa Silas’ Dunlop growled with syrupy menace. ‘Do you bear subversive notions for the mistress?
‘That I do, swarthy vassal of capricious empire, that I do’.
Willoughby scuttled away to disarm her, the sound of his chains echoing through the capacious lobby as he went. A smile of brute rapaciousness broke cross his ashen face.
*
The eagle dripped on Zion as Ezra piled up the faggots in Parousia, Tertullian gazed on amazed on the third day of the shining wall in the morning sky. Nereus took his leisure, replete in still dry oceans. What was in those truffles? Precious time had drifted away. Calypso’s suitors fed the fowl with pith and peel.
‘Nightshirt!’ demanded Funk.
‘I shall be with you shortly; in the fulness of time; post haste; forthwith…’
May Ann appeared at the door, dishevelled, her cheeks a roseate hue, panting.
‘There you are, my dearest. But why…’
‘A spot of bare Pilates for the circulation. Doctor Jasper’s orders.’
A boneshaker hustled over the gravelled drive.
‘Mice?’ suggested Casaubon, aroused.
*
‘So Dude, what’s your beef? I post a lot? I am a friggin writer, a communicator. It’s a subject to object relationship. Intercourse. God proposes: man disposes. That kinda set up. So quit your incessant carping, Buster. Just because my numbers turn out better than yours. Get a friggin life Godammit!’
‘Discouraging words from Herr Hemingway, Adolf. He gets so reckless when he’s on the saucel I’m sure he will come round in the end. We all have our eccentricities. Our peccadiloes and foibles.’
But Adolf was inconsolable.
The rest is
Off course
Is history.
*
Chesney reached inside his great coat pocket and took a slug from the vial in the brown paper bag. The liquor! Dammit the liquor. Huxtable was wrong. He took another swig. It was then she emerged though the Bourbon mist of the cold November carpark. Zelda Zuchenslooper. What a broad.
‘Who you screwing, Small Fry’, she chirruped from some distance, yet somehow audible over the hubbub of a not inconsiderable crowd. All eyes turned on Chesney. He cleared his throat. It was now or never, and he hollered.
‘You baby. Only you. You is the One of it’
Fin
November 16, 2020
Big Ox for Iapetos
The Night of the Bog Heat plays out below as ballooning over Tara above the steam stench peat and course heather the summer thermals waft muesli west to titanium ships that calibrate conditions for the fleet. A neutral landscape unforgettable and unforgiving to the bug eyed.
Drought brought us down with a sharp shallot, shed from an upset colander
Hey Mister Storekeeper, quit that cruel gruel rustic fabric. Don’t leave us besmeared by steerage stirring for a box of frogs! Give up and yield to sunshine and snorage.
Pay off the elders with jalop and deploy quick wits and cutesy metaphors.
So deep the seeds of self-movement sowed. Patience is its own discord said the blueberry to the snail. Adding:
‘Be gone you irksome carry house from this esteemed wilderness. Talented Cromwellingses of all stripes and zealous alkyhorlicks abound in well clad tower blocks throughout the land, I’m unreliably told by sources near to the ketchup.’
Why so sorry? Why so sad? It could be worse; it’s not so bad…
Well, yes it fucking is. It fucking is. It fucking is. It fucking fucking is…
On Tuesday the Twentieth of June 2017 it became, at 5am, 24c and in the corner the fan purred loud. It was sat on a spare chair slowly watching tennis from Queen’s. At the end of the encounter superglue handshakes were exchanged. The combatants wore green flip-flops.
Pink is the colour of my true love’s ears
In the morning
When we rise
Like a fridge over troubled waters
I will cool you down
Chuck bread out the cookhouse
windy for the birdies
For the birdy birds
Slice potatoes down the grain
& fry
Like an eagle
To the sea
Working in the hot sun
uninterruptedly
Egg hard boiled
Tomato sliced
Cumbercu flintly slitheroo
Rindless salami
Door step:
Batch
November 16, 2020
Dorftrottel Allegro
The Faber Book of Neurotic Plants & Fruit lay open at ‘Gallimauphy’ when Inspector Funk arrived. The only witness was a mute cook who went by the name of Chum. The blinds were closed. The only light was marsh gas. ‘This setting is inappropriate’ was scrawled across the artexed wall. Water dripped into a blue trauma bucket.
A surgeon minced nervously from door to door. A fat man rested his eyes in the corner of the crowded annex. Chum was taken off for interrogation in the wet room. The clock was stuck at seven twenty-four. On the lawn red fungi grew in the mulch of scattered yellow maple leaves. The rowan tree was barren. A youth rode past on a black bicycle. his aspect adamant and grey. She was fleeing the clutches of a thousand-armed family that dogged her every move. Belatedly the phone rings, it is limpid doomed Patricia, destined for the abattoir. Funk is lost for words. Platitudes are all he has to offer; he winces at his indifference as he does so. His varicose veins were clearly visible in the low November light.
A chicken jalfrezi and chapati were all there was on offer. His bane, patrolled the galley in the hungry times. Nutrition was rationed out like peter’s pence to supplicants, the law of inbuilt negligence condoned her every move. Chum would be released on good behaviour. He had done nothing heinous. The Faber book of Neurotic Plants & Food was closed and sent to Coventry. Funk gave way to apathy and sniffed the food for truffle spores.
Grimbeau 