Author Archives: Alan Reynolds

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About Alan Reynolds

Poet born and raised in North Carolina and now after a sojourn in England a long-time resident of the Netherlands. More than 4,000 poems, many published in US and UK literary magazines and on CD and in books.

Getting On

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He was tired of being old. He chose a body
from the vivarium of the opulent hotel.
He watched the steps. Staff priests removed its soul.
Technologists blanked its memory. He moved in.

He is twenty-eight again! For the fifteenth time.
The fit young brain rejuvenates his mind.
He gifts the brain the wisdom he’s accrued.

The motion sickness made by melding minds
attracts the front-desk staff. A bellhop aids
his sprightly ill-coordinated walk
to pay his bill, and exit through the door
that says Exit, but should say Vivarium.

It’s a Beach at Midnight

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Imagining calories count less in the dark,
he snacks throughout the night continually.
He wiggle-walks across the sand to park
his BMI’s (yes, plural) by the sea.
He would splash in, were fear of pleurisy
less in his thoughts. A box of doughnuts jam
the milkshakes in the thermos near the ham
beneath the turkey biscuits in his hamper.
I am, he thinks, the people that I am.
I shall leave it to these thin sand fleas to scamper.

Water Bearers Bringing Gin

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It was Spring, a time that Grungy Dinah pined
for love. Spring sprang sap-hazardly. Dawns lengthened.
Eves shortened. Adams appled. Fauns were fined
when caught flagrante delicto. Their lusts strengthened

poor Grungy Dinah’s dreaming that her own fate
involved one couple’s coupling, wherein she
was the female actor (actress?), and the ‘he’
was whichever ‘who’ three gins proclaimed her mate.

Not ‘whom?’ she pondered. Days and fortnights passed.
The winds of grammar wound their winding sheets
around her nouns and pronouns. Sap was sassed
till Spring wound down in Gunga Din defeats.

Non-Question Springs Anew

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The question whether poetry still matters
is jejune this April as it ever may
become or was. Illogic in it shatters
all hope of answer. Fitful fey things pay
silly devils to say there’ll be hail to play
with in the desert, before poetry
begins (or stops) to matter to the free
and gloriously inequitable curse
of prose that’s lifted high enough to be
poetic tropes. It could always be verse.

Florida Fighting Conch

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I look at the shell, and let my preconceptions
replace themselves with others. There’s no way
I can see the shell for simply what it is.

I regard the shell and try to squelch my thinking.
As far as I succeed, it disappears.
I cannot find it. I stay unaware

of what I think I’m seeing when I see.
What does the shelled ghost of the fighting conch
think of when it tries also to see me?

Whence Goeth Thy Barque, Man’s Faithful Friend?

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‘Here’s a silver lining for you, when your faithful Fido dies:
you can ring us to come by and share your grief.
We’ll remove his corpse so quickly that you won’t be plagued by flies.
We will say a prayer if wanted, one that’s brief,
and remove Fido for burial, to your relief.’
(Once in our plant, he’s our raw material to render
with stewpot, saw, and industrial-grade blender.
Farewell, dear Pet! His soul flies to its maker,
leaving nothing of the canine’s bark or gender
in the meatballs we sell on.) Your Undertaker.

(reflecting on news story Spanish pets could be in meatballs)

Spring Flight of Escherichia coli O157:H7

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‘Forgive me, for I know whom I unglue.
Scrod in Boston, gulled in London Colney.
The weight of troths plied knowingly untrue
stunt me while coughing, pulled through Horton’s colon
with broths he scarfed that glowed with snail-trail dew.
Scrod, again in Boston, on the train,
rate tape wrapped around the captain’s head.
Chips in Chipping Norton. Late-night curry
of Alsatian, sating after-hours drinkers.
Press-ganged pralines ending up as clinkers.’

(translated from the original New Bacterium as dictated by Escherichia coli O157:H7)

Going: Up Market

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The affluent upper-middle-class imagines,
because they work hard, and are educated
as well or better than the super-rich,
that the two groups share a worldview. They are right:
‘deserving what one gets,’ and vice versa.

The upper-middle-class is disappearing,
(with the middle-middles and the lower-middles),
while imagining that the super-rich will notice,
and extend a helping hand to them. They’re wrong.
The rich clump them in the group they call subversives.