I tire of this and that
and go attired in flat
old Dunlops loping right
across the moon at night
to knock up Desiree
who’s out of lingerie
and she says into books
rekindling iPad Nooks
with classic acid prose
that could be verse suppose
she drops her closing lines
and gets sent to the mines.
She reads a little Proust,
I say Marcel’s a hoot.
I put on Paul the Beetle
in hopes his songs will wheedle
a paragraph or two
of future déjà vue.
His gasconade, his stock in trade,
pretending catachresis
is what he meant in lines he’s rent
asunder in his thesis,
makes Schnidly head of his Sixth Form’s
poetic blunders study
where his mix of misty metaphors
has drove his tutor nutty.
He lets the runner in his ode
fly to the Finnish line
to stub his toe on Maginot
and tentatively entwine
his privates with his general quarters
whilst striking up the band
which gets him reprimanded
by a mandrill Genghis Kahn.
Schnidly is three wines into Monday
when elevenses are served
and he’s sure the Candy Stripers
on his ward think he is perved.
He enrols in near-rhyme sonnets
cause he’s been banned from dizains
and he craves Alsatian curry
when he gazes at Great Danes
like his Hamlet who’s been hamstrung
by Schnidly’s lame production
of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy.
He has brought the Bard destruction.
‘I am old,’ said the Durac, ‘and riddled with charm,
so I live all alone in The South.’
The Slynog replied, with a sound like it cried
though it moved not a part of its mouth,
‘You are eusocial, Eugene, eugenically broke;
you give over too early to wrath.
You keep seeking the reeking unriddling of All
though you look for it only in Math.’
‘Am I truly eusocial?’ the Durac essayed.
It pleasured him slightly to toy
with the sensible Slynog whose ‘sensitive’ seethed
under bedclothes of logic to buoy
up a billow of bubbles of misapplied thought.
‘I’d have thought that a taut skein of cells
in the skin or the blood were eusocial while I,
like an unaxoned neuron or bells
unadorned by book, candle or swung-about cat,
am waiting alone though we meet.’
The Slynog, who nurtured its own hermit past
with plunges through bloodstreams to eat,
said the Durac was right, and remarked that the light
was marvelous this time of the day.
Then they parted imparted with illusions they’d shared
a moment. Each went on its way.
A one dimensional line evolves its point
to two, a pair that like dilemma horns
go separate ways before one can anoint
either horn as better. Both are thorns
that trouble staunch denial, as they’re bound
to do, uniting, by their binding, lots
of intervening space the dye has cast
a pall upon. The space itself is sound,
although unasked for by the man God wots.
The man sees both points threatening the past
existence he’s been used to all these years.
The line the points draw leads him into fears.
What is this dye that our traveller wants to stow
(reversing “wots”) away so that its hue
can’t cry explosively and splash and glow
so brightly that it forces him to view
some to-him-unfamiliar forms of life?
What is the point escaping from the din
to which he is accustomed? Just a dot?
A dot of dotage, small in size but rife
for an expansive future, brings a grin
to Wot’s not-yet old face. He says he’ll rot
rat cheer and thanks the points not very much
for spreading out to where they’re hard to touch.
He is old as the hills, he’s fanatically bent
although the world’s gone queer,
on becoming an ancient who some might think wise;
his failure here is clear.
His doctor’s retired and his priest has expired
and gone to Who knows where.
He spends all his mornings on diets and prayer
and his afternoons on beer.
His grandchildren helped him creep out for some sun.
He found their attention dear.
They left him outside and the winter was long
but it’s spring and he’s still here.
seeks cars in toilet
barks, ‘buick, buick, buick!’
holding onto bowl
‘It is time we stopped taking walks together. Follow.’
The jackdaw knows we’re watched and is ashamed.
‘I don’t expect you’ll fly like show-off swallows,
but if we stay aground like this folks think I’m maimed.’
‘It is sad’, he adds, ‘that only in reflections,
like this one, can you reach the chimney tops.
If you’d better coordinate your genuflections
or hold you mouth right when you practice hops
we’d be the bee’s knees. Walk right on the edge
like I am, and, when I do, try to soar.’
Intent, I move from Hatch almost to Fledge
but chicken out, unfeathered, one time more.
‘There are few bipeds I’ve met with who are ground-leashed.
Are you an ostrich? You will get me ostracised’,
says the jackdaw sotto voce, adding, ‘Sheesh!’
I am fed up being walked and criticised
and I hope he’ll leave. He demonstrates a takeoff,
wings pitched to rise, and I call out, ‘Farewell’
but he pretends that I yelled ‘stroganoff ‘
and answers, ‘Where’s the beef?’ – he’s smart as hell
but a travesty as friend. He eyes a boat
and asks would I require a flying bridge
or an aeroplane to get across this moat.
I tell him blackbird pie is in the fridge,
and he says he’s et already and he alters
position getting set to cross the street.
‘Is walking something else at which you falter?’
says the jackdaw. ‘Now I’ll show you something neat.’
And he does. He crosses his path then takes mine.
When Jackdaw walks he walks with fire and flair.
‘Try this’, he says in parting. He’s so fine,
both feet at once stride neatly on thin air.
Earth Tourist 