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.