Truffles

 

Truffles

 

A swaggering, overbearing,

tin-plated dictator

with delusions of godhood,

see you later

Truffles - viewing figures

scraping the barnacles

off Bill’s bottom,

with banal lo-fi hi-jinks -

don’t kid yourself, pal, the Devil’s bored

gets to thinking up yours,

Pantheon of Discord -

I’m locking the piano’s lid, you fraud:

back, back – the time of the Osirans

is long past

because this time round

the scripts were trash,

here’s a horrid thing

hear the song I sing

of Mr Ring a Ding Ding

no one’s watching –

there’s a tavern in the town (in the town),

where horrid hacks hung around

shipping slash fiction,

Spock/Kirk, 60 years too late,

seven writing fake Blakes –

ideas that were well past

their sell-by date like –

here's one, Ron, Oo I could crush a grape,

servicing black gay mates

rocking kilts down the disco –

because, Doctor, they let you go

butchered butchers’ hooks

and took delight

in setting alight

some other hard-working chap’s farts

because the past has been bottled

and labelled with art.

Does The World?

 

Does The World?

 

I once thought if I closed my eyes,

the world would disappear –

cease to be like it was just memory

but I didn’t tell, in case it was true –

like how can you know

that your blue is his blue

if blue is the colour?

 

That was when I cared about you

or such stuff as dreams are – you know –

but now – on leaving home of a morning,

catch the bus -

I wonder if all that fuss

she makes is apropos of something,

or something of nothing

and maybe if she stops, the world does too.

 

Scraped back her oven-bun hair

and running to fat -

perhaps - but careful, cancel – puckered lips

blow goldfish bubbles

or like a red snapper snaps air

pitched medium to high –

a ball toss the batsman misses –

she’s forever blowing kisses,

pretty kisses on eclairs.

 

Sometimes words are chucked

casual, forwards, backwards,

over the shoulder for luck

as a pinch of salt

on the last chops in the chiller,

handled, thumbed, pressed to the back

where all the unlucky flies get trapped.

 

From first to last verse

it’s prattled and pursed,

an endless bargain bin flutter of fascinators –

words to erode riverbeds

fashioned from basalt ballast

she’s a bedload of corrasion

for every occasion

a shedful of din

to collect your clutter in -

while the world upon its axle spins

I close my eyes...start to grin.

Despair Thy Charm

 

Despair Thy Charm

 

There were tears before bedtime - as prophesied.

It did not give him any pleasure

to behold her blinking red eyes,

or later, his - in anger, sorrow or measure for measure –

 

and when the drummer in the band

stretched out hands

to the bassist

there were traces

of red – caught in-between – he confesses

saw sobbing tears tumble upon her breast  –

and is this the price of some such success.

 

Later, when the band assembled

to tune up, the violinist trembled

when breasting her sunny C major

and Adam ripped it out from his chest – let it be, let it be –

taking up arms against a troubled sea.

 

So, in extemporis, all five of them gladly play

catch up - perhaps in doing so, wanted to say

to these three, who do not see

I am the song so sing me

or here is the false face of futility –

because it will never, ever be enough.

 

Pave the roads

from Lands End to John O Groats

in evidence, surveys, spreadsheets fit to be ticked,

because it was Thor who was tricked

to take draughts from the Ocean’s horn

still the tides returned

ground and churned

this rock into a million, million grains of sand –

 

Despair thy charm,

that only can oftentimes win you to harm -

and there’s a chance that you might see

there may be an answer, let it be.

She Looks Like A Sugar In A Plum (Plum Plum)

 

She Looks Like A Sugar In A Plum (Plum Plum)

 

And when he emerges from the shower,

toweling his back,

rubbing deep and dirty between the toes,

up the knees and onward elbows,

puddle-duck feet filling ceramic cracks

there’s a naked body –

small, caramel toasty and he could rest his chin

on that raven-black crown,

as capital C clasps her lower case –

cannot see her face

she’s penciling wall, something on the paper there,

and fronts him in full despair:

‘Oh, it’s gone up again.’

‘Ah, you could be right,’ he grins,

lifts and retires within –

until later, she’s slicing banana, assesses

that the small Malaysian ones are best

and should they put it to the test?

On his way, after all, to buy from Palengke,

this sweltering day, marked by EmJay

coming from there within and shouts ‘What Ah-Teh?’

Well, he could say that where he's from,

she looks like a sugar in a plum 

(plum, plum).

In The Morning The Sun Will Sing My Lifetime Away

 

In The Morning The Sun Will Sing My Lifetime Away

Black coffee in bed is something I never did –
but there were black beds
too numerous to count,
buried in black grounds
that slipped a French press’s mesh
found mugged and swirling around.
Black thoughts like blackthorn—
and then, come dawn, you were born.

Five days later, hitting 50 out of the park,
you attended – a scrap, a spark,
swaddled in thick blankets,
Inuit faced, but your blue eyes scoped skies
until nightfall – you were home by last knockings
as I cleared up the dregs,
chewing knuckles, shaking head.

He was there, and a year later held you
for the first and last time,
spoke to me about crime –
unjust that he had this and I had you
and soon after, he was gone –
turbid black plumes thickened air, I despaired.

It was in St Helier they contrived,
said someday next year you would arrive,
and how some fathers fly, far far away,
little baby Don – and I thought about it –
those black beds in black coffee
slipping and sliding and taking a dive –
and how would it have been?
Now, those black thoughts sit forever in me
and often make me cry.

Because we have built together
wondrous layouts that will last forever,
and as time unfurled, we grew whole again.
Fourteen summers have come and gone
since you came along –
I’m sitting here in Arabia, far flung,
whistling Clair, living long, still strong
in blessing your life and the years yet to come,
still young enough to play -
for in the morning
the sun will sing my lifetime away.

 

Delicious Is In The Details

 

Delicious Is In The Details

He’s already on his third coffee

and later he’ll try to sleep

without success - toss and wonder why

they’re slinging slabs of meat

on cheese, ladling on the salt

and claiming delicious is in the details.

There’s third rate brains that compete

for attention, leaders replete

with latest block transfer computations

forming thin entropy out of thick air,

sending striations anywhere

in faint pulsars beyond the farthest star

overlapping in convergent subduction -

and tomorrow he will try to work.

On Sky, views might make them weep

but they’re 20 minutes in, hip deep

in babbling brooks - cataracts who greet

each other, stone each other’s backs

fool gold for noises off the Richter scale –

and tomorrow he will try to teach.

Now this - she’s on the phone,

bodies gone to rack and ruin, with knees

chockful of some ill diagnosed disease,

cigarettes, chocolate, gin not tonics,

they say we’ve got it something chronic

send more money, please, won’t you?

And tomorrow he will begin anew.

Build

 

Build

 

We don’t build anything good anymore,

don’t drill, don’t pump, don’t mine -

no shipbuilding on the Clyde or Tyne,

or coal- fired plants that yawn and roar

bite into landscapes with feral force,

to turn the mills, to tap the source.

Honour Owen Williams’ M1 bridges -

block concrete stalwart staples stitch fabric

warps, majestic wefts, hauling traffic

to docks, to ports and to the world.

Now windmills squat by potholes -

silk spinning spiders in milk white cloaks,

vast fields sewn with rooted mirrors who live

and are all the better to see you with

whilst catching the setting sun over Albion.

They’re tapping on our broken pipes

- hey, who switched off the lights -

in morse codes, help, save my sole  -

tinpot echoes from drought linked cells

of dripping cloying honeycomb,

our millions indolent stay-at-homes –

paid in crypto to forget coined in iron,

told they’re sick, to give up trying

and, if they forget, then they maybe are –

to replace petrol with electric car,

remove hard shoulders and call it smart,

rebrand telegraph poles as abstract art.