Guest of Honour

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He’s the only stranger here among his family.
He is strangely silent all the time he talks.
The mirrored walls reflect his animation
and he sees that, though he swears he’s sitting still
as the rubber flowers on the hotel’s tables.
A wall of sound wafts by him but he fails
to capture joy or meaning from remarks
of kindness addressed to him. Disappearing
into his cell phone’s menu like it matters
he swipes and taps and wishes he could cry
at reflections from its screen of an old man
so lonely he updates his own Sent Mail.

A Goddess Awakens

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The sun shown in the heavens.
The moon shined boats at sea.
The slow glow maiden Amalot
Two-Handle slept till three
then Everywhere condensed into
the point she knew as Here
and the Wisdom-Tooth man Getafix
pulled her a pint of beer.
Their breakfast was a fleet of trout
she flummoxed with a net
and flipped on shore then in a pan
while Wisdom-Tooth Man set
a table where mad hatters served
as party favours for
the guests he said were coming soon.
She watched amazed he’d pour
a Stetson full of beer into
tall schooners meant for port.
He told her it was what he’d seen
the Windsors do at court.
This mollified the maiden and
the idea made her smile
as she cut him into chunks she chucked
to her pet crocodile.

Not Much Speak Of

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Two languages, two accents, neither mine.
I can do them both, not adequately but so
you’d recognize their traces in my whine
and bark and stops for glottal. Travels sow
the seeds for weedy puns and frontiers grow
so porous that they’re more honoured in the breach
than in the competence I nearly reach.
Occasioning confusion, stares and glee,
I am grateful that despite my slanted speech
the natives here, and there, are kind to me.

Glimpse of Emotion

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I dreamed I was on a mountain,
not the top but a south-side cove
where a deer had grazed till a bear walked through
and disappeared in haze.

I wake in a land that is totally flat
out to the horizon’s curve.
The seagulls scream and the jackdaws speak
and the willows grow new limbs.

There are no snakes here, nor a need for screens.
It is civilised it seems.
The bear I dreamed of has grown up
and long ago it died.

Taking the Fifth

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The ancient man whose one athletic bound
plonked him on the girder looking downed
and outed shouted to the crowd below
that he was God or would be could he grow
the powers needed, grow into the role.
‘Until that time,’ he cried, ‘I’ll be a troll.’
He jumped from the girder bannistering the bridge
to a depth at which the natural laws abridge
leaving him no soul, just the elements essential:
the classic four you know, and the quintessential
fifth essence we discovered in a ridge
of his jaw now relic in our church’s fridge.

Languish Gas for April Fool

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What through the language glass, the laughing gas of worlds
or that of them, or it, our eyes report,
through the media of phonemes we have learned
at our mothers’ knees, or not, you may retort,
to our minds makes up the matter we can know.
That first sentence, diagrammed on grammar trees
of plastic can be useful scratching fleas.
It has perhaps semantic depth as well
and buckets of pretentiousness to swell
a research grant to help a grantee muddle
the waters further so we’ll need a buddy
system to ensure should one get drowned
the other will get published or renowned,
states mutually exclusive as you know
must be the case. Move on to April 2.

Revolution

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The wind rescinds the harsh rule of the regent.
It blows his fleet of fierce ships aground.
The revolution spreads out like detergent
on an oil slick. It’s the biggest stain around.

The people on the even streets are insurgent;
they put the odd street people to the sword
which sounds that bit more classical than ‘murder’
but hurts as much. Such power has a word

that a haberdasher – good teeth, wavy hair
and a voice like John Wayne – commands the news.
Each day he smiles on television beaming
misinformation that the strife is over

until it is. Then, at the crowd’s suggestion,
he moves into the palace, and parades
on feast days, and survivors open shops
and all is as before. It never stops.