rat pack made benign
alcoholism graceful
as seen on tv
always glass in hand
many talented crooners
ready quips and laughs
golden voices
left alone in limousines
once brightened our lives
maybe also theirs
anyone listening
might have thought back then
The below-horizon sun redlines the clouds,
accelerates their thinning till all’s clear.
The day makes light of darkness and its shrouds
and with silhouette and sound the birds appear.
Grey herons lift from graveyard nests and plane
above the houses cruising to the sites
they will fish today. From trees blackbirds explain
in glorious song their territorial rights.
A mallard beats a rival with his beak,
re-joins his pretty partner and they fly,
they and the rival. Jackdaws light and seek
what darkness hid, and find it now the sky
is filled with sun and sound. Old church bells ring
in another summer day this magic Spring.
When ‘why’ deserts me and now rye’s anathema
and wordplay fails to keep emotions out
I grow sombre, still, elated. I am a jumble.
My memories fill and empty what was me
– or ‘I’ – I still search language for a clue
to what it’s all about – until, relaxing,
I join enjoyed memories and flow.
Our decades on the throne give us perspective.
We do not listen to the folk we greet.
If they have titles, they are derived from some selective
amusement. We and they both know it’s meet
that they bow somewhat profusely while we gaze
at the wall behind them. Each must know his place
as we know ours. Until the end of days
we will reign sublimely, chosen by the grace
of God, our only peer, He’s claimed to us.
Things change and princes marry, die, divorce
not always in that order and the fuss
of ministers and budgets is a course
to run, say some unhindered by a throne
and wishing till they’re ill they had our own.
Reduced the only way he’s been for years,
that is to say he is reduced to tears,
the would-be writer reads an Amis book
unwillingly to end, this book which took
him by the throat and shook him for his heart
and, had he had one, would have made him part
with it and life. Such brilliance set in word
has lifted him and though he finds absurd
the fact a book can act to stir his blood
from encroaching stasis he admits the flood
of thought and non-thought it has set loose will
bear evidence he is at times still real.
He lies if you can call it that on stones
below the rapids that he ran last night
on a dare no-one remembers when police
conduct polite enquiries. How he stares.
Let us go then you and I
to a place where wild woodpeckers fly
beneath a pallid piebald sky
and I – ashamed that I live still –
revise each Wednesday my own will
while you – pert, tall and right now shrill –
emit grace notes that rise and float
outside across our castle’s moat
into a book Lord Byron wrote
or would have, had not Neptune felled
him swimming in the Dardanelles,
or Hellespont. All’s gone. Just as well.
Oncoming night assembles stars
that light our paths. Look, there goes Mars:
sword, sandals, sneer and scenic scars
identify him as the sod
who starts the wars we fight for God
and Country when, succinctly shod,
we march off singing, smiling, chanting
or – if we’re returning – ranting.
The gods adore our gallivanting.
They think we are when panting cute
and we’re of all the things they shoot
their favourites cause like them we loot
and lust, and languish, all the while
imagining we’ve wit and style.
We muddle on. It makes them smile.
If you are fishing with some skill and luck and passion
and your hook is in a water where they’re fish
and your lore’s sufficient that you don’t go splashing
or fall asleep or get stung so you pitch
your tackle in the water there are times
you will catch a bass, or root, or trout, or boot.
They can all be eaten fried or poached with limes
if you wash them down with magnums of chilled brut.
Earth Tourist 