It's all Greek to me

"It is all Greek to me"
It's all Greek to me, I mean the latest updates on the company, the future,
the pricing policy, costings, curves, yields, forecast, the very fate
of the office stapler.
It's all Greek to me, I mean the incessant information on the mobile,
the OK?, Where are you? What do you mean? You are definitely late,
the offence, the reply.
It's all Greek to me, I mean the bundle of feathers, the left earring,
the gold crucifix which is not, and between the lines of the Byzantine
pronouncements of the Pope, the free newspapers with dog poop scoops,
shite absolutely, the orifice, the supply.
It's all Greek to me, I am afraid.

a poem inspired by a 12 kr cup of coffee

A Poem inspired by having a 12 kr coffee while reading David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants 1986 Coffee, yeah, the brown stuff that after drinking one, realises its not quite enough, then one gets to thinking about poetry and the heart beat, tum, tum, tim, oh yeah coffee, sound of the tanoy: intercity to, platform number blah blah, is it Purgatory? This state of wanting to write in a station restaurant without a motive, just writing, shooting the breeze with A4 photocopy paper on a Formica table with nothing except a David Mamet book, and the connection, the retraction of what was written, Plotinus never went through his stuff twice, and I can fully appreciate this as it gets me off the hook, leave the poem on the edge.. of the table, Dansk radio in the ear piece, Kim Larsen old frog mouth, Big Fat Whitesnake, golden oldies, what's the goal, where is the depth, the metre, does it come upon you later, touch you on the shoulder when least expecting it, when you are reading in the free newspaper, metro express, a supernova exploded last September, how come no one ever told me about it? I mean who wants to know about the neighbour in the refrigerator, the mowed down kids in Sierra Leone, the the the, who wants to know, when a fucking supernova exploded out there, a few thousand light years I guess, like the Old Believers who still have to hear of Lenin, maybe we'll catch up, and it all kind of puts us, humanity, into shards of insignificance, then you recuperate from the shock of this astrophysical death, With a sip of coffee, now resisting, as you must keep it, it's an art, being able to have one cup of coffee in a city when everyone wants your table, so how does it go, the song of life, nothing like, remotely, a little piece of remembrance, back into the recess of your reading, in Hereford Art College of all places, where D.M. Thomas of White Hotel fame read Pushkin, you dust off the names dropping onto the cafe floor, Onegin walks out in disgust, so does Lorca, Cervantes, and Coombes in his literary criticism told you not to borrow from the thirties, none of those pylons and forced associations, but Auden god damn him was at Colwall, wrote of Malvern, And you wanted to see through with back of MAD magazine x-ray vision glasses King Arthur, and he, told you, no further, it was all done before, you roll up those metaphors and stuff them in the coffee, and failed your O level literature as a consequence.

rain

rain
oh yes rain
more rain
and no surprise rain
then what's this rain
and just when you think it is over rain
and like the doping scandals in the bike race rain
a few car bombs go off in iraq and sixty dead and rain
an earth tremor with a warning of a tsunami and there could be more rain
the simpsons movie is out and brad simpsons prediction a comet will hit earth and rain
rain

Hogarth's Dog

This gentle pug did cock-a-leg

over cruelty and beauty, and in reversal

of the print, made left a right,

and right a left, it's tight-butted position,

it's face full with fond lippery, teases out

through analyses cynical

the spoils of senseless slaughter,

Here now hangs a criminal

Here now hangs a whore

Here now hangs an animal

instructions for sentimenality

come with the Thomas Crashaw

watery eyes, then he this pug,

like his fore-fathers, ugly as hell,

did cock-a-leg upon the creaky

architecture of this future

seen through an allusion

to canine muse, sneakily inserting an enema,

for thosewho care less for poetic drama

:thus beauty and cruelty in the final

analysis lined up in against

each other on the ten o'clock news.

hippolytus

Hippolytus

Fay's behind the barwhile Goody-two-shoes

is shooting pool --it didn't seem

farback when Hippolytus

was in school now he has grown up into a handsome hunk.

Aphrodite is singing a soul number,

while in the corner, Artemis a Country and Western

preacher, tells him to save his virginity for a rainy

day --and it is a matter

of course that the Goddess Aphrodite should lose her

temper, call it divine jealousy.

Fay's husband, Theseus, is rather too

conveniently away on business --so out of sight, out of mind, Fay's

got it bad, got it hot, she wants to go all the way and her confidante

an old barmaid says well what's wrong, it's not as if it is incest,

besides in the nineteen nineties, who cares? People wouldn't blink

an eyelid if you jumped your step-kid.

So, she argues in a drunken slur,why not tell him?

Fay might be all hot and bothered, but she has her pride

and her dignity it wouldn't do for the barmaid to spread it around that Fay

is after Hippolytus's virginity.

But she did, and from then on life was ablur.

Goody-two-shoes was astonished,

and was on the way to confron this step-mum

was it true that she wanted to f**k her handsome hunk of a son?

Before he

could get

there, she had hung herself from the pub's chandelier,

Theseus came back

just in

time to see her on the sofa, a note in the hand, an incriminating piece

of evidence, of course he wasn't to know that his son had promised not to

tell,

he cursed him, swore at him, kicked him to hell, and Goody-two-shoes

took off on his motor-bike but didn't get far because he was under the

influence of alcohol ,

Poseidon beer,

Theseus arrived in the nick of time

at the hospital

and found Artemis alongside his dying son

she told him that

there

had been no affair he had jumped to the wrong conclusion and Aphrodite had

known all along what had happened an allusion to the tragedy had been in her

song.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The Snows of Kilimanjaro
hmm, in a way,
you'd expect the snows to melt
in the calculations of the gin and tonic
mentality,
they like their glaciers to glide into
oblivion
watching it on discovery television
statistically the jury is out
and the sun seems to be radiating
another line of inquiry
science sleuthes slide into
perjury, and the outpecked
populace believe the tale
on account of the motor car
and creature comforts of the past,
how long do we swallow the
numbers of one more chart
will show how the ice melts
into turning a blind eye to
the satellite pictures of a handshake
under the table.

Go to comment

Got to comment on something worthwhile
trawl through the news and nothing
comes to the fore except a fire hydrant
and katherine hepburn bringing up
the simile like its the law in a
burmese drawl, you ain't allowed
to park your democracy here and if
you do, and the water forces
the allusion - when i just want to..,
I just go and crawl in the television
and say can we turn over to the late night
movie with all the charm of cary grant.