Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov 150th

Off stage the seagull mews in the wintry sky
Above the island of Sakhalin, as the passage
Of all that went by, the Russian penance bent
On the knees of the Orthodox Christ and the Tsar
The history of the ever-stretching Empire
Has a page of news billed to a lonely silver beech
Anton is coming, Anton is coming, to see for himself
The burden of expansion and lack of freedom
The good doctor on his way beyond the Moscow
Crowd, beyond St. Petersburg, beyond the drama
Of reception, off he goes, a man with a conscience
Whose good deeds like the Prince, are not recorded
In the popular myth, all eyes and ears to the Cherry
Orchard, to the three sisters, to the Seagull, to Vanya,
The man who felt the tug of the lowest of the low
Off stage the seagull mews in the wintry sky.

Robbie give us one of your turns

for Robbie Burns

the mouse, oh yes, that mouse

like the frog of Basho, and the pug

of Hogarth, the mouse, that wee creature

of my reading, sports with my memory

and the Anglo-Scottish sounds reverberate

like the vauxhall viva starting upon a cold

winter morning, the starter playing up

and the mouse, not the rat, we could not have

that! the mouse, with those cute jerry

whiskers, and bright eyes, creeping in

and out of William Blake and Wordsworth

and all the forgotten poetry, the tug of

the burr, it is, gaelic we commemorate

today Robbie your birthday, and it is for

you Robbie to give us one of your turns!

John Keats (iii)

Sleep and Money

Slike like, the like, the likeness

of which there is no like in likelihood

a simile slithers between the bedsheets

like a soft whisper stolen from John Keats

a pastoral revelry out kilter with Now

if you were to go to prosperous Hampstead

they sleep like the interest earned on Sadness

money the bloody stain on the shirt of Saville Row

reddens the eyes and quickens the pulse

as the sleeper in Voltic convulsions

runs after it like Hares stoned on Acid

hopping erratically and priapically

then the revelations of the Poetic

Justice hampered the consummation

the fuck of the numbers, the feel of notes

the jingle of coins, the size of credit cards

For Money liquid in form, is silly and salty

to taste, the thirst sadly unquenched

the desire is forever unsatiable.

John Keats (ii)

When I came across your name John Keats

I felt I had come across the very streets

of my birthright, for we were born in Hampstead

and I was be-stirred by your verse

like you to George Chapman, I did traverse

the Ages, from the Internet to the Sonnet

I apprended in the tight form a geometry

of wit and sunlight, which had replaced

the bright babble and baubles of my comics

yet only at this instance do I apprehend

truly the beauty of your cosmos and geography

which attracts my senses and my intellect

a pity I cannot tell and I cannot recollect

a teacher who encouraged in me a taste

for this armchair and yet perilous travel

into the lands of the Mind and Feeling

fed by rivers of Greek and Roman Mythology

John Keats (i)

John Keats

John I have you now in pocket poets

the poems carefully selected and ransacked

by the editors and readers over the years

like the elaborate tombs of the pharoahs

they have been inside and have commented

taken away the best comparisons, the best images

stolen the best interpretations, cited the best pages

leaving very little for me, except for your poetry!

for here commentary and criticism used in analogy

with the tomb raiders, obviously breaks down

So I will construct another entrance, another pathway

into your heart, one at which those damn

know alls will tremble, and definitely hesitate

Rome

dear whatsyour face, i am moved to write
about the fall of cleopatra, who got it on the t***
(crossed out) breast after tony went all funny
and did himself in theway of the fackin nobility,
now we hereare really thinkin, now the fan will hit
the sh*te, I got that wrong, but you know
what I mean, so the geezer tops himself
and then the prat Octavian wants the toddler,
Caesarion, Caesar something, here we go,
they love choppin and fackin each otherto bits,
only natural for the upper classyet, ere wots strange,
they all talk like they were breast fed by Lily Allen,
and soI am here in rome, waiting for the next
installment of the empire of the rear end
I shall be fed to the lions, if you reply
later than next year, when Pete Doherty
will be crowned the emperor of Snorts.

Letter on the News of the Double Whammy

Sir, there are rumblings abroad that females
will be soon allowed to disseminate in corridors
of power, their dirty linen called, poetry
Well, this is truly a disgrace to the officeand the Crown,
that something with uhscan be chosen after a thousand years
or more of complete and utter domination
by the Stronger sex, whatever will happen
next? God forbid that they shall be in the boardrooms,
They should have always been chainedto the kitchen sink, and made to do all chores
from cleaning toilet to cooking the sunday roast
Now if the damn things will be ranting their poems
so we can read them from the coast of Cornwall
up to the Tweed, I tell you, it is the Decline and Fall
of lifeas we know it in jolly old England!
Major Birtwhistle-Jones, Milldew Cottage, Sussex.

shakespeare poem

Bill me mate, I saw, and I might be wrong,
some kind of similitude at foot of the apple and pears,
I thought for a mo, it was the spitting image of you goin' for a song,
Something photocopied at quickImage, one of those affairs,
But no me mate, it seems to be right kosher, not a load of Cobbelers,
I mean I took a photo and then magnified your right eye
I mean the putative one, and it came up like a bed of roses,
then I tried taking one from the folio, one from the Chandos
and blew them up 130 times together, and there on the knob,
It was like looking at triplets after I started dressin in the garb
of the time, you know stripping the puritan and pasting fancy
Elizabethan, then I thought to myself, it is bit of a racket
So I took a gander at some other old rubbish hanging about
in the attic, as one does, and I could not believe my mince pies
it was like you had near gone caused a one poet population
explosion, I saw you bleedin everywhere, and the very ticket
to get me off the unemployment, now Bill I'd like information,
It is a bit personal, and I do not really want to ask about it,
But, I have a vague feeling there is something really wrong,
Because didn't we know you as "One-eyed" Bill, ever since
Ben took your eye out over that Dark Lady, Sonnet?

letter

dear som
that is sir or madam
must keep it short and simple
tds
these days that is
o
hand sweet
it has cumno it has come
it has cumno it has definitely
cumno it has come
on my attention
no to
to my attention
that the invoice
number
has too
many digits
two two three
is naughty
it should be
just two
a couple
of numbers
and if
you could
replyasssoon
asposs
I wldbe grateful
dead
don't
murder
medire
wolfsorreethe
textis garbage
kanyou
plsfwdyour
downloadto
therelevantparty
I bestowmy
everlastinggratitude
at the cornedfeet of
yourpersonMr. A Jones
Invoiceredirectiondepartment.AL:

Farewell Knives

on the bus, know nobody, then come
to stranger, stand in his face, some
thing to do, provoke him, standing
in his place, and he will as they always
do, react, a blink, a toggle of the hand,
a frown, and I get out my stanley,which is short
and so, my, so handy,then slash him good, along the arteries,
in blood rage, and I calmly walk outas if nothing ever happened,
no damage to my reputation, caught on CCTV

on the bus, minding my own business
thinking about my girlfriend and the night
we shall spend together, after working hard
then he comes and stands up to my place
I am holding the strap, he just has no heart
or emotion, like something made of steel
then the slashing, the pain, the bleeding
the thoughts of him, then her, then darkness
Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut
But how was I to know at that very stage
He could take my life, ever so easily?

on the bus, the Magnetman comes along,
pulling out from the passengers all metal
objects, the knives and guns fly in the air
to his body where they disintegrate at point
shattering into shards of elements infinitesimal,
all are in a state of shock, feeling violated
that their possessions should be removed
as if he was a one man visitation zone
I feel inadequate without my piece of steel
says the boy, and another echoes with sh*t
you cannot take away our right to shoot and knife
at will, cos, John Stuart Mills says it is our
liberty to express our dissatisfaction with society

Farewell Nicholas

they fished you out of obscurity, making your life
but a tabloid tragedy, a I told you so tale of mother
does herself in, then son follows suit, the domino
effect of gutter press causality, and yet you lived Nicholas
another life than poetry, you were known to Sylvia
and Ted as a baby then child, the brother of Frieda
but everything you did, everywhere you chose to go,
i would be rewritten for copy, as if you had no life
except for hermetically sealed metaphors dragged
from the poetry gutted and salted, served with butter
as kipper for breakfast of hound who hunts you in death
seeking cheap comparisons that obscure the baby
which gurgled and babbled in the arms of parents
who so happened to have been poets not scientists
then you depressed and sad for whatever reason
decide to take your life, then your suicide is recited
in the literary circles as the fashion of the season
like purple is in, and yellow out, you are parasited
by intellectuals and numbskulls, well I for one will
say here, in this space, they can all go to hell
for Nicholas, we should say if anything, all in silence
let the Sea and its contents you loved, swash over
the similarities, and leave only You, in beautiful peace.
Farewell

Farewell My Icecaps

often when I venture into the cyber space
I am entranced by the green-blue of your expanse
by the beauty of the freshness that reminds one
of a kiss between two lovers in winter, the soft
and cold, the feeling and, then the fear of losing,
of living that moment, love like an ice in a glass
is a fragile thing, and you my friends are a million
times more exposed, I see the penguins and polarbears,
at opposite ends, but at the same lively purpose
living, surving among your icy habitat, then I think on,
how 220 square kilometers of you will in leprous
eat will take you away from me and all nature

Zodiac of Wit

So you expect that I will respect

the laws of the universe and in this verse

succumb to the gravitational force of noninvention

but hey

I am like the guy who refuses to press

the light

at the pedestrian

crossing

I

GO!

J.G. Ballard RIP

The handbrake is finally released, the darknesses yield
To the supernormal light of silver shadowed howard
Hughian Las vegas , where paul delvaux nudes with massive fruit
Bowls welcome, the visitor to the infinite showing of yves decline
Rhapsody in orange, the doctor beckons behind the complexes
To the boy turned by fate into a george melly similitude,
Whats going on governor? What indeed? The eyes probe
The reasoning and technology of the moment, forlorn
He looks to the apple-pie sky, and sees scooting across the heaven
A mitsubishi agm, zeroing down on his stolen identity
It was me, the English kid in Manchuria, the bleak and blatant
Fallout, an ever present dissatisfaction with the cup of cha smugness
Brutalised by juxtapositioning history with the cheap bar in Santa
Whatever, deserted by the acrophobic, the heights reached by chilly
Realism, the doctor inspects one of the personalities, closer than
It is altogether necessary, the pilot in the cockpit, waves, crash
In the surreal unity of life, the car, a blue cadillac comes to a halt.

Thomas Paine

The son a staymaker, citizen stuck fast, to Howard and Anthony,

Footed by socialism, despised by the Revolutions,Promoted as Quaker,

the oats sowed by rationalism Til the Pain, becomes Paine, and Thomas,

becomes Tom, The nomenclature bridged by historical chumminess,

The X on the door and illness, saved the founding father from the People

who like the English, and the Americans wanted him dead, his books of Rights

and Deism got him into trouble, into the kind of international infamy one connects

with Osama Bin Laden and his sort, Now in Twitterford, the good folks in the hands

of the BBC can blab about this or that, their stories and recollections having little

or naught to do with what Thomas stood forPromoting only excess of communication,

the mob mass where values are weighed by looks, and deleted by buttons.

W.S. Merwin

You got to owe it to the clock, the poems are sold
by the old foot in the door trick, you drop by with a tree
and you tell the reader, why it is just a plain beech
So they take no notice, not knowing it is in a myth
or something, and when the aforementioned writer
swings by again, it is a word, and to tell the truth
it is just a simple one, nothing above your head
in the lexicon of the ordinary, one could quite easily
be taken in, with this pious knock on the door, search
for nothing except you find in the house, a chipped
cup, the pattern, however on inspection gets the eye
to look a little bit closer, then he comes along again
in his modest way, tells you, it just might be spiritual
Just when you are savouring this little homily
He speaks Spanish, Lord he's speaking in Tongues!
Now you had thought in this collected identity
where writer and reader became one, you'd escape
However, you know it makes sense, W.S. Merwin
and his poetry is up there on the fine oak shelf.

Ivor Gurney

"Ivor gurney"
We'll meet somewhere, maybe it'll be on the Malvern hills,

With full of view of Dymock, which shaded by the clouds

Like a dunnock in the hedge, hides its brown in green frills

The village, of Robert, Edward, and Wilfred, their words

Will greet sometime, the visitors hunting down the Great War

In among the pack, there will be one to point out Lascelles

and John are missing, bleating out the omission, by the hour

By reverse telescope, not on the walk, they'll have Ivor Gurney

Playing with nature and music, a session of the last journey

we make, as our minds and bodies wander into the sunset

orchestrated by assonance, for Thomas who died at Arras

DW & Oxford

What happened with the boat? Now Chaucer that saucy
medievalist, was as we know practically a rapist, and
before you take off your coat to defend him, well John Donne
was a really Papist by heart, then turned Anglican persuasion,
you getting the drift, we can go down the line of all those poets,
and they would all profess to crimes unimaginable, but the irony is,
they are all on the curriculum, somewhere in the english speaking world,
byron and wordsworth have it off with half and whole sisters, poets
like bonobos male, have a liking for sex, one way, two ways or a trois de
menace, so you see Derek, placed in the identification parade, you would pass
for a vestal nun in comparison, however, wall cocked, in the terra cotta of the porcelained morality on the mantlepiece, the fragility of outrage and susspicion, is enough to garner the posy of opposition, so flower,you smell like poison ivy to them, just one sniff of harrassment, meant you will in stocks face the apples and oranges of criticism from posthumanist angels, gendered to executeyour career in its late budding, snipping off your poetic prowess in the belief that those hands would terra incognita seekin hours of academia, when those hitherto common urges have like many things already been domesticated by delphicprophecies precscribed by getting past it, old codgerdom,so me man, you missed the boat, your hopes are wreckedby the misumderstanding of a poet, so they abuse a name.

I would like to execute an expletive

I would like to execute an expletive

if only it could reach those I want to impeach

those I implore their hands no more

should wander in coffers and do squander

the wealth of the poor who they hold in no store

they by the right of the vote, see the greenlight to dote

love and attention on second cottage for their old age

through extension of the duty by which they have inattention

they work their way through their surgery with great urgency

making sure that they diddle lots while Nero plays the fiddle

the city of London burns, and it is of none their sh*tty concerns

the crisis is but the icing on the cake which they give pleasing

the electorate with promise of you never had it so good lies

now they deserve to dangle by a swear word or two, leave

this poem, on the floormat, light it, and let them feel the odium

of the populace by which they did wrong, and which they must face

soon, deselect their consciences and let them now correct

the expense democracy has borne, a shame for their idiocy.

Clio the Old Story.

Cavemen with bushy beards hunt through curriculum

For the sexist and racist stereotypes, their clubs phallic

Boudicia with large boobs, introduces our Britannia

But conquered by civilisation, the unwashed now bathe

Of course, then long-haired Saxons with overdone teutonic

Looks, farm peacefully, sowing seeds of nationalism, tithe

A concept of property, farmed for what it's worth in lessons

Dates and facts stand as obelisks, the Charlton Heston tablets

We must swallow and follow, 1066 harry got it in the eye

1805 Nelson kissed Hardy, in 1874 the Factory Act, impressions

Of datalogists, then the illustrated hung drawn and quartered

Introduces royal snuff, not tobacco that was brought by Raleigh

Oxygen discovered by Priestley, oh yeah kiss their tiny butts,

These exercises in colonialism, were repackaged for the Empire

Where the fuzzy-wuzzy was not entitled to their own history

It had to be predigested for them, into a mushy pea sandwich

Of propaganda for the Rajah and Massah, divide the liberty

We have, they have not, access to the orifice of Clio

She opens herself up, a Chelsea Girl, the teachers bitch

She does tricks like have the Kings and Queens of England

Die on the throne rather than the toilet, or delete the working class.

Clio's Brother

two anonymous young women with shaven

heads, their neighbours, family, and friends

follow them, it has a market or festival feeling

everyone enjoying the event, all with craven

hearts, no one dares to question the ends

the camera just goes on clicking or reeling

in dutifulness hung now in a local museum

they remain anonymous to protect their family

from what, shame, that they were picked up

onto serve as scapegoats, oh what a bastard

is history, to illegitimatise and to stigmatise

the victims, let him name names of those

who mocked and hurt, who goosestepped

to the tune of the Wolf, let him tell the truth

for once, and then once that is done with

All can have their identity back, and the date

gedenken by the forgotten, the statistics buried

Experimental Aubades

Ah sed
U
butt
away
damned
effinso and so
dawn you know
i did not
mean it
like you
it was not
kevin
effin with
mind
our future
ring, it's
next to dash
in the box
now our
gets better
shut it
u don't know
nothing

Aubades i

At crack of dawn we dance upon the grave
of the celebrity of whom's life we write a biography
mowing around the plot, the lawn of literary slave
hacking the flowers and the work like chopping off spires
that touched the ivory tower sky, now beclouded by
the memory of the victim, unnamed, a fifteen year old,
who may or may not been subject to force, the fires
of passion, burn, in the life writer's veins, as the rave
reviews are in the grasp, if only to raid the old body
of dignity and pride, to make public a would be crime
so to puff the life, embloaten the critic, yet you know,
the love hate relationship of the writer and the written
lasts as long as the vampire in the coffin lid open
then like Faust, the deal is done, and the moment gone
Since as the light of day reveals the deed of expedience
Which makes from hearsay a common inheritance.

Aubades ii

the sun seemed tethered by night

the sun seem tethered by night as it uneasily made daylight

the two on the bench facing the fjord looked across to the island

where a cow was birthing, the sound carried through their sleep

now the argument about children had a focus for resentment"

bloody cow" she said, the conception of which was it was now

or never, he rathered it would wait, as the gulls in the lathered

shorewake swept by, he thought the two could manage nicely

but she was upset, it was coming to a conclusion as the moon set

behind the rays of the sun, its disc shape phasing, then gone

they sat as a fisher boat puttered across, their relationship fluttered

from being on hold, from finished, he made one final effort

then she got up, hurt that he could not commit his life to hers

so it was the sun brought the dawn of what had been unsaid.

Aubades iii

At dawn

at dawn in the fleeting moment of orange and red

he remembers her as she used to be back then

as the curtains opened, her smile a breakfast of love

and the sound of the milk van on its daily round

he could see her eyes, wide and full of life

now as they part, her strolling behind the chair

he on the other side of the road locked in shyness

he hoped, and he bit his tongue, she would disappear

now that she has left him in both body and mind

he sees the sun rise, and knows what it is this

day, one of reflection, of forgetting he was there.

Under the Rock

Under the rock you would find no doubt

Entire civilizations, a hidden doubloon

As the sea swished and slushed between

The cavities, where shellfish resolute

Stuck to their sessile life, and wellingtoned

Boy lost in the world of salty adventure

Waded and leapt the Longhoughton rocks

As gulls jeered and careered above, school

Out, Alice Cooper raging in ears, in cup of shell,

Under the rock you would find no doubt

Here salvation, a plop of the cheeky blenny

Whilst the eel coiled and slipped in crevices

Where the stick and prodding fingers of the boy

Could not reach, tiny crabs and other invertebrate

Would scamper to join the myriad of refugees

All cloaked in the mud and brown of flight

Gone was mathematics and the threat of chemistry

Only the scent and tickle of marine life, of the real

Under the rock you would find no doubt

Your revelations, the books of life and love writ

In the goings on of the unsual and the colouful

You would chase them, hunt them down, significance

Found in the wet throbbing being in your hands

The eyes and mouth like Christ on the cross

For some animals are like some kind of blasphemy

But for the boy, as he always tenderly replaced them

They were his friends, he felt this was his kingdom.

Rock i

Rock is Peter, and by him we have the window

To Europe, the bronze rider and the horse,

Looking upon the Baltic Sea, the Tsar and Pushkin,

Hole in one, bingo!, an association terminating

In stone, for there we must go, an introduction

To the geology of semantics, meaning petrified

In puns, rocking the poem to sleep, lulling the lullaby,

Which we could all forgo, so, the depth,

The hardcore of language, the abyss of definition,

Mere technics or what? T.S. Eliot is brought

In as a midfield player, through him, Dante, Milton

And Shakespeare, the fluvial of the irretrivial

Scored the surface, Pound the unsound marked

The optics, those interfering colours of the canon,

Kicked sense into the Elizabethan, a rough diamond,

Rocked the metric system, brought in Chinese

To glaze the sonnet, thus limed the traditional

Thus the church bells ring on the Rossi-Forel

Scale, seven, the thirst for Christ slaked

Out in the seismic, oh the infidel will quake

In his words, shoot!, the period. of red sandstone

Menstruates, bleeding through the petrine poetics

Shifting the uncomfortable taboo, lets go on

The sense is typically, lagoonal, blue and black,

Rolling stoned, albumnite, bruised by boulders

Of unabashed rhetoric, piled upon piles,

Haemorrhoidal, swollen aperture opening to Hell.

Rock ii

From hell, well now make room for Leopold Bloom

Who sat and squat in the outside lavvy, does think

Upon Molly, larval eruptions come to mind, behind

The rock, waste, the orange red tiles, wallpaper

Peeling, modernism is morganite,a jewel of Fregean logic,

A fracture of suffocation, buried in a heap of anxiety Of influence,

Hubble scoped the past and future

Starry-eyed, the spectroscopy of the alien,

Thus it in a quantum joke, leaps to a conclusion,

The fault-line read, way ahead of the mordant comedy

That rubs the literature the wrong way, taking the shine

Off the romantic and the god awful, neoclassic

You thrash away in the toilet still, something kidney

Shaped looms, Hawaii , then the lovely topography

Of good old molly, in the rubble of your getting the gist,

The petrine poetic takes an ugly and sinester twist

Turns the urine into gold, ask any street alchemist

For this the empire is destroyed, and graphites cousin

Stuffed in plural, into the pocket of the thief – winner

Takes all, the best friend, is Anita, loose the way did we?

The bronze horseman is brassed off, the semantics

Of geology, multi-layered, Leo is a ploy, the truth paste.

Rock iii

name dropped in quartz, the light

caught at angles, the pulse beats

at the rate of one famous person

per line, the fame mined and vicarious

seams open to engulf the individual

poet in the crystallography of celebrity

,the property of self imponderable,

the results form a neat trapezohedron

upon which the "act" swings

Peter the Great, the rock, petrine

silliness at the behest of the form.

Rock Iv

The specific gravity of what

you mean to me is buried in

semantics, layer upon layer

the earth in contraction

pushes and shoves, the mother

labouring to give birth to new

landscapes, upon which matted

we begin, in bubbles of boredom

across the breakfast table, the mesa

or plateau in the textbook geomorphed

into Ikea conformity, the natives

circle the condiments hollering for

all they are darned worth, then a blanket

of salt on sunny side up, the solar

system egged unwillingly into 9-5

would it be better that the rock in which

we are fossilized as the husband and wife

could shatter, freeing our essences

instead of the life-death of the mortgage

that pensioned off our rebellion,

the painting of us in bed, smoking a joint

and making love, now ambered into routine.

Punctuation

comma,
it would be a longer pause

if one "m" was missing

on holiday so to speak

then if mother was away

we could go to the lake
full stop
stop, no stop. if you have heard

this before,stop, yes stop.afraid

I can't stop.......................................
semi-colon

the natives with ;

aim to please

they fire off a .

and hope it comes back ,

but one never knows

what goes on in the rough

sort of dazed by an idea

and need to shepherd

it

if

there are more than a mouthful

then a barricade; will hem them in
must -

I have butterflies in my stomach

I have butterflies in my stomach
they are there with other proverbs
and sayings, with the gift horse
neighing I told you so, and shank'spony,
the hobbling feet, the chick
that was abandoned by the eggs,
the whale that swallowed my mind
and the bestiary of insects buzzing
busily through my innards like similes
are wont to do, now these butterflies
are sickening to perceive, wobbling
against the lining, like bacon rind
tickling the gut, gut to gut, and with maggot
eyes which look out at the others whirling
around my being, the earwigs running
through eightenth century puns, clipped
by the end of the poem, i throw up ati
nterview, all of these creatures darwin
never allowed, they involved only Art
the science kept in the closet, in denial
the limpet stuck fast to the project
and there! the butterflies are now freed.

We are Butterflies

we flap our fragile wings in face of adversities

from the time we come out of the comfort of womb

we are butterflies

our colourful and bright dreams in childhood

primariestake us, as we munch the rugs, and through the room

we are butterflies

we open our fledgling fans, to say how big is the world

and the teacher gives us the moon, the sun, the universities

we are butterflies

we work our way through the office, flying through cyber space

from one hour to the next, pollinating our pensions

we are butterflies

and then the collector pins us in the back with conformities

we flitter a bit, then end up, bent back double on cabbage

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

VI
The rich feast of metaphor and similes muted by the malice
Of whether to take is theft, or whether it is ok under the surplice
Of praise, grubbing about in sweets offered, like the crumpet
That is easy, and with s, more expensive, sing if you know the tune
Lie on your back and take it whole, or die, in the expectation
As the letters spell out the old dears coming down the apples and pears
Oh angels speak louder than cherubs, but the devil has your tongues
Then to say, Will Smith willed into existence, takes up the slack
Like Bambi he skates on the postmodern and the inference
Charming, snakes the end of the first half, as the steam whistles.

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

V

But by now, you know, or damn should, the old ropes

A member of the corvidae, strikes up an attitude

Which by some design lies across the wife and the husband

Feathers the nest, and death is nursed, like the open mouth

Til the season changes to the favoured, the richard the third

Weather, of discontent, laboured into four lines, then the cut

We must now plummet, a few vernes, in league with the tombs

The waters rush cold over the skeletons, you ask to much of me

Drunk like a college, sounds like madonna, and jacks the lad

A regular ragbag of verbatim thoughts, plundered by the butterfly

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

IV
I am Paul Celans fugue, I am the ague of Agamemnon

Then from this, the fly swans over pillows of flowers

Where nestles the agrarian, milking the romantics

Without a by or leave, without a ghosts chance

The Egyptian is allegorized into a battlefield

Of nursery rhymes and alphabets, runed into private

Jokes between ted and sylvia, in sylvan dell of plentitude

The next leaf, 41, for some editions, timbers into tropes

But by now, you know, or damn should, the old ropes

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

III

Oh ducky, what happens after me dear, to the mocked

And afflicted char ladies, who wife the researches

Into the size of individuals, the thick and the thin,

In the slaughterhouse of marriage and the mantelpiece

Tired, but still going strong, the butter-fly, combs

The rocks of the digestive system and the inner psyche

Sipping the nectar of the necropolis, then thriving

Like paddockstools, sucking nourishment from shite

Capping lewis with daughters and poisoning the future

What I really want is a spice girl to come out and declare

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

II

The marble animal and man, the dangling sex

Now a pretext to haw at the thorn, and fable

Lawrence, as the vulva opens in fruitiness

To the natural wag of the salty language

Then to alight on the degree zero, on the title

To make a landing on the chest of a lover

Oh, lo, Oh lo, Oh lo, harbours the repetition

Of patterned consonants hard like fishermans hands

There is silence screaming to a point of no return

As the winter ice cracks open on a birthday cake

The bellow of a breeze, bulls the butterfly to bronze

A queen decorates the night with a misused K

Sir, dear, the latter, interred in the repository

For history, bridging the classic with the academic

Butterfly over the Colossus (1960)

For Sylvia Plath in Memory

I
It is a foible of mine to mine the past
A butterfly of inestimable dimensions

Like a prop in godzilla, shadows the gardens

It is like one of those fellas that go from poem

To poem, imbibing all manner of puns

Touching the poetic with the forensic gloves

So as not too leave too many obvious clues

Dissecting the night workers boredom

As they watch the meter clocking away

Then, unlikely as it is, with an insect like this,

A fragile, feeble thing, decides to pig out

On the gristle of childhood and religion

The powder falls, fairy like into the eyes

Smite not the mite, for the father is the mother

Then in the sublime, from the height of Gilpin

It flutters over the anglo-saxon alliterations

Not sure if it is countable or uncountable

For Billy Mills the Poet and Blog Master

For Billy Mills the Blog Master Extraordinaire

the white expanse of the comments box,

invites the poet to give up coffee and think about

the virgin territory of whiteness, the white noise of winter,snow flakes

that aspirated by an almost silent breeze

layered on thick like Aunt Mari's knitted jumpers,

a softness of a washing powder advertisement for whites,

then the knight, Sir Gawain, through proselike poetry, on steed,

pushes through Northern hardened vowels, with language that

precedes by centuries Ted Hughes, and anticipated Hopkins

before, the hawk from the top of pine, screams down,

to the readers wanting something, the resolution, sharper,

the cones in finer pixels, the government of writing about seasons,

is left to whimsey, like the flakes falling, and the snowman looks on,

blind, yet all seeing, a carrot smells Christmas several days off,

the snowdrops pushing through spring, now the significance of winter

is lost to the polar bears as the icefloe like the softies incorporated

in coffees melts too quickly, the greenland sharks pick up the tab,

while we muggins, you and I, think about a snowy image in a edward

-scissorhands movie, or the James Stewart classic, xmas, a convenient

deux ex machine for laissez faire politics, they cut up the bear and

the stuffing goes to some government sponsored biology cum oil lab,

The Thomas Pynchon theme, plays hide-and-seek,will you be snow-balled,

or iced, as the comments box fills up with print, carrying you away from

the conifers,towards something dreamt up in five minutes, a start........

Winter Series

Winter
Winter like duck-down poured over a window
The tiny flakes accumulate, each representing
Hope, maybe, possibly, if only, crystals of anxiety
Cold, structured, patterns of rules and a law
The state like winter is to nature, is to artifice
both decorate the landscape with whiteness,
Footprints march up and down the snow
Impressing with each footfall the strictness
Of policies, the blue light with Doppler effect
A symbol of empowerment, an arrested shadow
Turns blue then red, a conifer labouring with ice
Tinkling with naivety, loses some like teeth,
The blizzard bleaches the horizon and the view
Of gardens with children playing with their toys,
Summers of happiness, now white, the death
Of contrast and colour comes suddenly like an X.

winter poem series

Winter

the last minute washing stiff as frozen fish

the tarmac with mirrors like in Snow White

the breath of people waiting like power stations

the ice on the windscreen like the cocaine in movies

the snow much reduced by thaw, stays put

the small lake more a pond like an old silver coin

the gull on the chimney, like a traffic policeman conducts

the children negotating the slipperiness of Winter

the holiday brochure with the sunshine and golden beach

the penance of cyclist caught by the wind uphill

the memory of the snow drift and the crisp feeling of cold

the rain that regrettably announces already the Spring

winter poem series

Winter Poem

An abandoned railway track dips

into a snow coated patch of ice,

everything, the rusty cans,

plastic bottles, the brown grass,

the parts of bikes, all imprisoned

in a way in a flattened snow globe

the objects catch me in a trance

as I think and associate, the colours

and shapes, crystalized, I want to shake

this world, but cannot get a purchase

on what it could mean, just garbage

or do they mean something more

then I see in among the frozen bits

a face, Rasputin, struggling to live

his ghost inhabits the icy collage

the Revolution has come and gone

submarines, rust buckets, spew

their long-life innards of radioactive

power, the Prince has long died

all beads and baubles now decorate'

the future, like those on a Fabergé

egg, which opposes the very first image

that of the ruins caught in a snow globe.

Winter Poem series

A Female Blackbird

A female blackbird, frozen bundle of feathers

looks at me, I think what if I were to rescue

her, take her up in my arms and nurse her

I walk forward a dozen or so steps, trouble

would she respond? does she even need me?

the squat concrete apartment building set

her in contrast, she looked compact and cute,

then the scientist in me, thought well Nature's

going to deal with her, I mean my intervention

in her fate, might well upset the Apple Cart

to mix metaphors badly, and I quickened my pace

still thinking, should I the sentimentalist I am

go back, it was not too late, I could feed her

and provide warmth, but what would happen

if she were to die in my care, responsibility

is a big thing for us, sadly I wrote a poem

to give her, all I could do, a short immortality.

Winter Poems (New)

It is not very original is it, I mean Winter is all around us at the moment. But I thought I would like to do a series of new poems in various forms connected with winter and its (discontents). I did write earlier several poems. One of these was

In Memory of Hedwig Lachmann ( Stephen Pain 2000)

The carNavigator

Says this way

Go and stop

Long and hope

Winter Aches and takes

Away the day

Driving and living

Is this the right

Turning

The flashing light

Indicates

The face of Immigrants

And the snow

Is now

Red

Stop

And

yesterday

there were more“rabbits”

killed on the

road

stop

the reports

from reuters

confirm

stop and

upon a patch of Ice

civilization slips

as the

carNavigator

experiences

blips like

stop

austria

Hedwig Lachmann was a fascinating person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig_Lachmann

I had her collected poems once - they had belonged to the late W.G. Sebold. I fumbled my way through her poems, trying to make head and tail out of the German. I think I was left with an impression of what was going on, and that was enough to feel she was quite a writer.

"Snapshot of Lake Eden (Jan. 1952)"

and young rauschenberg

did fall on his slippery ass

now picture that

did not

do anything of the sort

you see, he was upset, tried to drown

himself

ly-ci-das

and the prophet

stood by

see

that's

Nietzsche on the berg,

he'd call to his tutor

on the black mountain top,

snowy

as

now picture this

John Candy, late, giant

with a smile halfway between

Charles Laughton

and a cherub,

saw the drowning, near, Bob

bob up and down

in bed with him

in an endo-crin-al

fan-tas-y

this unnatural hemisphere

of his

eclipsed all reason,

so off he goes!

Charles Olsen

in the opposite

direction, scared of

himself

ly-ci-das

and the young rauschenberg

now picture that

Poems written earlier

Rain in Hiroshige Lines

rain in hiroshige lines,

perpendicular to the high school girls

with umbrellas and mobiles

and high boots smoking

cool cigarettes defying

all known laws of physics

while riding their bicycles.

Liturgical Architecture

car park architecture

is fit for prayer when

there is no where else to go.

First published online at

http://www.poetsoflondon.com/stephenpain.htm

Getting the hang of Blogging

Bear with me please! I am a newcomer. Just literally woken up to the medium of blogging. I shall use this space to elaborate my thoughts on poetics and other matters of interest to me - and hopefully others. I have been in the business of thinking about and writing about poetry for eons, though I would not for one moment see my self as belonging to the "Old Geezer" category of poets. No, I am no Mr. Burns (of Simpsons). I did however once participate in the annual Robbie Burns poetry competition and got an honourable place - I believe I even had an invitation up to Scotland to read it on Burns' Night. But unfortunately, never made it up there. The poem was entitled "Creation" and it was all to do with how the world could fit into a seagull's egg - or something of that ilk. I liked bird watching from my school days, especially seabirds like the fulmar which I consider to be one of the more beautiful birds.