Bills and banks bob up
blankly blinklessly
Ghoulishly gawping,
gazing, and grinning
Sink back, you wish, but
they are sure anchored
(remotely controlled
hydraulic timer)
until you will dive in
sever the drogue cord.
Then watch them drift away
out of sight but never mind.
Winter’s been a long trudge, gummed in mud, bogged down
in deep, awkward ruts, dense and dark forest,
lost and alone, despairing, plenty drunk,
ill with dysentery in sight of home on
a hill fort moat full by water, like Ely without eels,
Hereward the Wake, and Roman quislings.
Bare, blue bummed witches hurl abuse from towers
in the rushed bogland, but no heed is paid.
Their order is clear, give up and get out.
But No! We squit and squat, lugubriate
in stinking mud, rotting leaf and twig, leaf mulch
and loam. My friends are toads in the thicket,
Yellow, shocking pink, emerald, amber
eyes blink calm, slow, gaze fixed on prey prone,
incapable of flight, that they shall despatch
with a quick, languid, silent lashing tongue flick.
Big bugs like us are too much like hard work
we wait on longer days and higher tides
With grace, a measure of luck, we will be
in soft, juicy, new architecture then.
Warm under kind sun through larch leaf, eyebeams
and sunbeams, drogues of sorts, hold this fast
floating canopy secure, and we watch
sycamore helicopters gliding past
On her veranda
a landowner
Exhales
…a gust of codeine cloud
On Parrot Woods West
where buggy water
sits stale
on crowded crow dead flats
a sun limps homeward
wounded in windless
sheeting mist
Look out!
An ill wind
Coughs: spits out
Lilac phlegm.
Now smell
sweet almond waft
angry onions:
this garden is
full of livid
sad mad
bramble.
Ghoulish dead potato
crazed leek
rise up to
taste
doomed decay
reeking havoc
hear
the cluck as
amok chickens
weep behind trembling
toffee wrappers
See
Behind that mauve shed
a terrible lettuce
is born.
Pull the curtains and reveal that wow sky.
Thin cloud sculpts a convalescent moon:
wondrous shivering sad silver presence.
The clouds permit this harbour of head space
Provoking basks to chill before dumb dawn.
Then watch through the fan window,
gaze past the submarine aerials and chimneys
and glimpse a fulsome face on Kerry’s mad coast.
Promenade across sad Bantry and stark Beara,
then southward to Baltimore and the big seas.
When bright dead and other sleepers cop this
they abandon calm: and bark wild with wonder.
Soft verse for the rolling on day
rich corpulent berries:
shiny cherries make windows for
the platinum moon
and smooth lies curse yesterday’s
setting sun.
So, farewell then, Ray Manzarek
Baroque’n’Roll Pyro:
Vox of Reason
Of Strange Doors.
Cremation?
Special Friend.
He was known to live life dissipated:
Gambolling in crazed buffonery,
Guzzled half a modest brewery.
When his liver, bored, emigrated.
My Uncle Head was steadfast and insistent:
‘Feed me!’ he yelled ‘Til I’m wild euphoric.’
For a pint of gin, no tonic: chronic.
So immaculated homeward: distant.
Ten Afton and a quart of Barleycorn,
stern tea and two, too loud radios
Unwelcomed him the very next morning
as he dimly recalled Jack de Mannio,
gave up on a shower and yawning,
levitated outsidewards to soil the patio.
Back inside he trawled in his shotaway head
and dredged up from its slum, the aviator,
Louis Blerio, who, a century and
one day ago, fetched lobster thermidore
and ate it for breakfast on England.
Head sloooshed a tuft of dog and considered
The perilous return voyage while his liver withered.
Woof
Meteors used to be warplanes when I was younger, Comets were for paying passengers, they were the future but they were fatally flawed and crashed to earth. Stealth speaks for itself as does Concorde and although it is a helicopter, Apache or Crow.
As a doodling child I like the Lightning and Vulcan, this changed into the Phantom and the Kite. Now I tend to consider Nimrod and Hercules, but this is just a fancy, meteors are real. So are asteroids.
Grimbeau 