If I was ten years younger
I might make a fool of myself
so I am glad that I am not.
I smile
and suck it in.
Why would I think
things would be any different
to how they were
ten years ago?
If I was ten years younger.
Except, like, for facebook and stuff.
***
I found a shoe
by the side of the road
There was no foot in it.
Not this time.
***
Tell me.
What I want to know,
is where
do the dead women go?
I can dream about FISH
all I like,
I can dream about FISH
all I like,
The bastard’s can’t stop me now
I’m dreamin’ ’bout fish right now,
I can dream about FISH
all I like.
…
Here is a poem about fish for Good Friday. Its not a very good poem, because really it is a song. If I did podcasting, you would be able to hear the true beauty of it. Lines 5 & 6 really have to be belted out. I can imagine Shirley Bassey doing a great job of it. She should have recorded it straight after ‘Gold Finger’. Except of course it wasn’t written then. Technicalities keep getting in the way of the development of my artistic career. Babs would probably do a good job, but she’s a bit nasally for it. “Dream” is stretched out, to represent the endless nightmare that being a fish is, having to continually move, never able to rest or sleep, until the relief of being eaten.
All the spider webs are glistening in the light of the full moon. If I go outside, they’ll run all over me. And they’re huge.
Industrial rocks
do not fall
on Albania
They need
an industrial land
in which to land.
Its hard to believe in love
when you’re in so much pain
Its hard to believe in art
When you can’t remember your name
***
Do you remember
when they started to fall?
Do you remember
the first time you were hit?
All this bleeding
is getting me down.
…
…
We’re all DEVO.
An important story about rocks may be found here, and I strongly encourage you to have a look at it please. Thank you. There, that’s manners.
Can you articulate
a vocabulary of longing?
Imagine a culture
with words for all of the varieties
of the piquancy of despair.
Do the number of eskimo words
for snow,
exceed ours for the
bouquet of anxiety?
The aroma of fear?
The astringency of depression?
The tannin of mania?
Or should we look
to those
whose palate desires
such a pallette?
Those hidden connoisseurs.
The old man,
he is dying
he is smiling
he knows he is dying
and he thinks
“I made it”.
The money didn’t run out
I didn’t go mad
kept it under control
kept going.
Food on the table
shoes on feet
wolf from the door.
Cut it close sometimes
but in the end
he made it.
He is smiling.
Everybody dies.
Not everybody makes it.
He is happy.
At last, he can let go.
All his very many one days at a time,
and now there are no more.
***
Corey the pondering clown had a competition for a poem with this title. I wasn’t interested in the competition [there wasn’t a million dollar prize 🙂 ], but this idea and this image came to me in the early hours of the morning. (It is very quiet here, so sometimes it is harder to sleep. When you hear a noise, it is harder to convince yourself that it is not them coming to get you. One day, it will be.) The cliches are deliberate. He might be happy, but in many ways it is very sad, that his happiness comes from scraping through, from making it. For those of us who struggle though, you get through one day at a time, each little triumph, and then one day, there are no more days to get through. Perhaps that is the final victory. Then what comes after? Don’t judge him too harshly if there are no references to loved ones here – whose feet did he keep shod, who did he protect from the wolf? His love is expressed practically, and that is the greatest poem, and it is not one that I can write.
A bit of a contrast with “Young Love, with scar” below, which I like more, but if I only every wrote down the one I liked the best, there would only be one (actually, there would be none, because that is the fatal flaw of perfectionism).
Poetry and Paranoia 