The first blank fired toppled Igor from his rhino.
Not that it could have hit him but because
His steed stopped short from panic making him go
Airborne with lousy luck into the jaws
Of the castle moat’s dire guardian, the dogo.
A second blank detonated, making the dog pause
Its mastication of felled Igor’s limbs.
We watched in wonder how fast Igor swims.
2021 April Poem-A-Day Challenge — 5 April
The future in spite of pessimists is bright.
The plagues and inequalities will stop.
In two thousand twenty-two we’ll see the light.
At no cost to us we will come out on top.
The Unicorn Resurgent will delight
the Earth and put an end to agitprop.
We will live forever richly and in bliss
And laugh at those who took our fate amiss.
2021 April Poem-A-Day Challenge — 2 April
‘Perdix flew wing on our fishing expedition.’
My song’s first line makes Daedalus cry ‘Halt!’
He fears, and rightly so, instant perdition
were the world to learn that it was through his fault
that his nephew died. He stifles each rendition
of lyrics mentioning Perdix or how he bought
the farm while flying vertically straight down
(which is why partridges fly close now to the ground).
Blonde Ulla’s left her heart in Kristiansund
with school photographs in Helen’s husband’s file
under a lock he clipped one evening when she’d swooned.
She’s left the harbour lights that glare for miles
at the cheeky deep-sea vessels that they’ve mooned
since oil was found offshore. Her mother smiles
when she reads Ulla’s letters from a part
of Europe far away. Poor Ulla’s heart.
Ulla’s other parts take her to the Costa Blanca
and are themselves too much, her rivals pout.
Her brain is sharper than a custom Tonka
toy car with fins flint-sharp enough to rout
competitors. And, socially, to plonk a
leg near hers makes other girls lose out.
They’ve been men who loved her till death did them part.
There are men and women left who want her heart.
Blonde Ulla works the coast line from Valencia
to Alicante, helping automate
shoe factories and banks, intelligentsia,
and anything with cash. Her systems rate
with world leaders who experience agnosia
to all else when she speaks, and she is great
at language, and assisting in downsizing,
and, being heartless helps, ‘reorganising.’
This week finds Ulla at her own convention,
one she’s dreamed up, promoted, and now chairs.
Its theme is expert systems for prevention
of further global warming. Miguel stares
when she (he’d thought her mindless) says, ‘Encryption
of our source code guarantees, for those who dare,
they’ll own the only axe that saves the wood,
and do extremely well from doing good.’
Miguel (his English mother calls him Michael)
stares on as Ulla finishes. His trance
continues until Whap! he sees the mike’ll
give him a way to meet her. ‘Grab the chance,’
his heart berates his head, ‘Quick, on your cycle.
Think up a line to make her want to dance,
then pedal like a shaman to her side
and set your grin on Honest/Open/Wide.’
‘Your majesty,’ young brain-stunned Micky mumbles,
then, growing up, speaks on in dulcet tones,
‘Ms. Chair, excuse me, but the share price tumbles
at times like this. I feel it in my bones
that your mike’s bugged, and when the crumpet crumbles…
Excuse me, I mean criminals wire phones.
Don’t say another secret! Take the stairs
up to the ballroom, join the Astaires.’
Ulla watches Micky while she’s thinking
every Windows conference has its mouse.
But, as she notes the way his ego’s shrinking,
her inner id speaks up: ‘Don’t be a louse.
Perhaps he’s an investor, one for drinking
with and learning secrets from. Your house
of hard and software would be so much rubble
if you didn’t mix its brick with field-trial stubble.’
Miguel, who’s rich because he’s good at getting
the message while he cannot understand
the language, grins as he picks up the letting
go, the coming down, of Ulla’s band
of usually-up defences. ‘I’m forgetting
my manners and convention. Is your husband
not here? You’re single?’ He’s on cruise control
as he leads her softly to the spiked punch bowl.
Ulla, while she is not one to wallow
with anybody, customer or not,
has perfect legs that secretly are hollow.
They let her drink opponents on their twat
s. ‘You’re on, amigo. There is no Valhalla
for Vikings if they die not drinking rot.’
She drains a pint and with no backward glance
lets Micky catch her up. They start to dance…
She feels that sex, like film, the church, and fiction,
depends on skills suspending disbelief,
and she fantasises love should guide one’s friction.
Were her partner not in love, he’d be a thief
who would not miss her heart. She loves his diction
but dreams of tangos. Dancing was the chief
reason that she let him in her bower
before they’d known each other for an hour.
She wakes, amazed to see him watch her eyes
as were she sheeted, or he sought a sign.
She showers, strides the terrace while she dries.
‘If I weren’t Viking I’d not blame the wine.
I’d think his sounds not whistling snores but sighs.’
Miguel regards her, thinking she’s divine.
He sees her as an angel from above
and falls, his first time ever, into love.
The poor people sleep for hours in the rain.
Why? Because they are homeless, and it is raining.
To the senators in the gold towers, it seems plain
that, since the poor’s sleeping takes less energy than complaining,
they can say that the poor are lazy, to explain
why they, the senators, are right remaining
high, and dry, and feted all the more
while the sleeping people slide towards Death’s cold door.
On the edge of the pasture nearest Twisted River
in his trailer on its settling cinder blocks
the man confuses his faith with his liver
when he speaks French. He wrings and hangs his socks
above his cot. He pretends he would forgive her
if she’d come back. The wind of winter rocks
him not to sleep but every other way.
‘But loose,’ he says. He lives another day.
‘It’s too early,’ says the jackdaw. ‘I’m not an owl 🦉’
He speaks on our private channel. ‘It’s the hour,’
he adds, ‘for roosting. Down there stray cats 🐱 yowl.
With my flock I’m safe here in the Great Church tower
and I plan to stay that way. No need to fly afoul
of whatever waits in darkness to devour
us avians who are taught to do what’s right.
Goodnight again. I’ll call you at first light.’
The fish caught seconds earlier, not dead
but less than happy in the summer air,
lies pressed upon the bank’s long grass and reed
until his captor cuts the hook with care
and tells onlookers while a fish may bleed
it can’t feel pain. Like it, onlookers stare
until it leaps. Then, noticing it’s free,
the fish regains the stream, the lake, the sea.
We too played fishers when our world was young,
and hooked whatever bit, and profited
for many noons, and now that shadows long
themselves for cover, we call salmon squid
and quid for quo stands for our marching song.
When you asked me did I love you, then I did,
and we, proud we had legs, took evening walks
investing energy in whispered talks.
What hooked us and we looked upon as love
while reeling, each of us, the other in,
was evolution, golden treasure trove
of progress down from mindless bug to sin
and up from there to faith in an Above
elusive as it’s precious. Don’t begin.
We’ve heard each other out too many times
and know what happens when one of us climbs
beyond our station. Our red-marrow bones
lack the air fillings of the natural flier.
We sink, in spite of aspiration, home
into the river. What was our desire
gels into habit, and inside our room
we throw each other’s papers in the fire
we hope will keep the creeping cold outside
with the dark we sense approaching our blind side.
The salmon who escapes the dam, the bear,
and anglers paying through the nose to kill,
spawns far upstream, at home for its last hour.
Depleted, safe, successful for a spell,
it glories in the sunset of its power
before the scavengers eat its free will
and its predestination, and its flesh.
So little of us passes through the mesh
of the nets that are our destiny, our death.
Descended from the fish who chanced on lungs,
we each, more relative each passing breath,
say absolute good-byes. As sapient beings
we think we know that absolute’s the dearth
of love and living, a sinking pond rock’s rings
that can’t feel pain. I hurt as I break free,
and follow you in stream, and lake, and sea.
Earth Tourist 