Champion

 

Champion

 

Sometimes, Dobson claps a telescope to his eye.

In fairness, a phrase that could suggest many things -

for when they weren’t thinking,

The Beatles would burble on about diamond rings.

Think Can’t Buy Me Love or Eight Days a Week –

or why is K T Tunstall putting her thick eyes there

when she was lacquered up and want to speak or greet

an uncaring audience, her apathetic listener

who couldn’t give a toss that she was irate

about whatever people called Katy and spell it K T

get knickered up about. Bargain bins, he suspects.

However, whether or not it is correct

to clap that telescope, to offer up applause

to raise from the bowels of the hall seditious roars

or drag up words from some old classic like Peter Pan

because she’s painting her nails by Costello’s lake -

if he’s not a mop, why, of course he’s a rake

who never gets the point, for goodness sake.

Well, here it is, thinks Dobson, indeed it is here,

how very difficult it is to raise a cheer

after all these wasted fucking years

rolled by, like Fat Nelly Melba and her Elephant Parade

and if that wasn’t something, it should have been,

when, after all, he stares through one end or the other

big, small, perhaps macroscopic,

but always inconsiderate in black analysis,

always selfish, or so often enough he was told:

Blake sold us out Avon, even you, we’ve been sold,

and now all those hawkers are getting comfortably old,

comfortably numb, forgetful in their ancient dotage,

through false teeth sucking gruel and potage,

pea and ham, oh, how apt,

dropping dead, like flies fall from a window sill

you dust into a shag pile of suffocating carpet –

here’s an A Flat Major, well, he can work it now,

a single most important scale that exists,

but back then, they were taking the piss,

and he’s stuffing hay-bags, cleaning shit from hutches,

holding axes while the other hefts a sledge,

thinking he should risk the ledge,

the noose, the shotgun, out run pellets,

fashion a workable home from pinewood pallets,

live above donkeys farting in the barn

with straw enough to keep both warm

or use a double-bass as life raft, downriver with the bow,

as Vonnegut said, well, so it goes, thar she blows,

oh, he could forget that which he should forget,

forget, forget they’d beg – or would if Dobson ever arrived,

but, the problem is, he’s still fucking alive.