The wind resembles treacle if I please,
Lyle’s Golden Syrup trickled over scones
I’d reach would we fly lower. Can we, wind?
The wind prances, less an answer than a portent
of a coming voyage neither of us knows
a jot about and swirls us up through clouds
‘I am old,’ cries the baby, whose parents hear ‘coo,’
the sense of the sentence obscured
by their child’s lacking teeth and a language they know,
and they cuddle it till it forgets.
‘Though I’m young,’ says the baby, ‘I quickly forget
what the meaning of life is, so I
can enjoy discovering it over again.’
‘When he cries,’ think his parents, ‘he’s wet.’
When I concentrate I can remember being old.
Ninety-seven years, one-eyed and seven feet
Haha above the gym floor on a beam.
And scared. It was the first month of the Younging.
I like to write in o.m.g. italics
with a font not seen since seventeen-sixteen.
It makes reviewers of my prose suppose
I’m original, or tetched, or must have been
in my merry minutes writing, running hose,
and shaping paragraphs to form a calyx
whose sense if any is sensory not flat
and factual. I am not ‘into’ that,
preferring quote-mark irony to ironing
and to too-perfect rhyme. I end up whining.
What her child says in her dream hurts her so much
that, in her dream, she runs to another room
where she tries to breathe or, if she can, stop breathing.
She had tried so very hard when they were small
to be there for them, sacrificing all
sorts of things she had not really wanted
to give each child precisely what she’d read
they needed or, authorities wrote, desired.
To hear this then! She wakes and sits up, stunned
at knowing, for the first time in her life,
that in dream and life she’d not been really hurt.
Eurasia is an island of such grand impressive size
we say it’s not an island. But it is.
If you’re not there, and want to be,
somewhere you have to cross some sea
so QED the OED decrees Eurasia too must be
as insular as Maui, Crete, and Capri
unless we trash consistency
and rule exceptions set us free
of meaning anything when we
presume to name what we discern
and what we don’t. We never learn.
Weepy’s good. It is.
Cries rinse regrets away
and drown them in the sound
of Chuck’s ‘Deep Feeling’ blues
while friends from school days play
with might-have-been’s and wont-be’s
until the landlord’s cry
of ‘Time’ wakes them to lives
they really had and have
and the blues are only blues
and no need to be sad.
Chuck Berry playing his ‘Deep Feeling’ can be heard here:
And here, perhaps even more appropriately for this poem, is the same song with a video of old 45-rpm record playing tinnily and with scratches:
Which questions are appropriate? Nearly none.
To ask and answer questions brings unrest,
negation and embarrassment. Am I right?
You may well know an answer. Maybe not,
but either way there’s sure to be some swot
who will answer betterquickerfaster or at least
in a way that draws the attention of that beast
social scientists call Discussion. Here it comes.
Earth Tourist 