Friday 29 May 2015

Oh Words...

Oh words how you have been abused
By people who are not amused
To find that you are small and plain
When they are trying to explain
Their own significance at length.


They do not see that there is strength
In shortness  or in essence.
They'd rather reach their own senescence
Going on.  And on.  And when
They reach the end 
They needs must then begin again,
Though not in Anglo Saxon.


The dialectical exchange 
Between two sides they must arrange,
In language, latin based and long,
And needs must shake up common sense,
Which, being common, must be wrong.

Monday 18 May 2015

The Middle Aged Man In Lycra Song.

I'm married to a middle aged man in Lycra,
Although he doesn't wear it  much around the house
As it's really not so fetching,
In a man who's quite knock kneed,
Though from a distance it's dramatic,
And looks wonderful at speed.
For it's shiny blue and stretching
Every which way that it can,
And it tends to get all static,
(Though not like a caravan)
Nor yet is he acrobatic
But it makes a crackling sound,
When his stuff he is a strutting
Which is something that I've found
Can be really quite off putting
So I don't know where I am,
As he rubs it up against my Harris tweed.

Friday 15 May 2015

No Fire

The long, thin ante room which faces west,
Is light in early evening and the paint
Of chalky pink absorbs the brightness, invests
It with a softer tone, showing restraint,
Teaching refinement to brilliant day.
There is no fireplace and so we sit
Around a little heater while we play
Each upon our own mobile device, it
Seems a friendly sort of silence but now
We never really have enough to say
And I'm so often writing, wondering how
To make my thoughts fit rules of form, I stray
Into a world of dreams and disappear
If someone speaks I listen but don't hear.

Monday 4 May 2015

Mistress Masham's

Last night I dreamt I went to that old place again.
It's rooms are vast and never ending and outside
The fields of rolling, golden crops are rippling. When
I stand beside a sagging sash in some high attic looking out,
I know the not so deep, mysterious thing, implied
By all these empty rooms and dust. Yet brooking
Every argument my brain in sleep can make and then
Inspired to further avarice I lust by day and search the country wide,
For run down manor houses in their sad decay.
Because I really do not want to know, the truth my mind
Seeks sideways on to show, I only wish to look and find
And then to go, to this recurring paradise. I'll ride
Through endless, shabby eighteenth century rooms
On rollerskates, waking each one from its long repose
And see the tangled gardens down below,
And feel the hot wind of high summer blow
And smell the ripening wheat and climbing rose,
As through the grey-green corridors I glide.