A Blooming Thorn

Where are my flowers?
Where are the roses? The peonies? The daffodils?
Where are all the niceties of life which you so passionately embellished?
All you offer is a sweet kernel of a poem, a half nurtured rendition of love.
And your meagre explanation -an arrow to the butt of my heart-
that it will grow in an anthologies garden,
a little thumbed plot in the middle of a book,
sadly, it must be said, this does not our relationship make...

We haven't made love for a week!
Other people make love every night!
Why don't we make love every night?
Why do I get the feeling that I'm a door and you the bolt?
My feelings are open and you hold yours back!
So what are you going to do about it?
Its late. Put down your pen and snuff out the light.
Have you bolted the door? Fed the cat?
Are you sure? Check the door again.
And what did you mean, when you said,

        'Even the blind will see them.
         The diligent trace of a finger
         moving over the soft wind of a page
         to reel back, for a wary moment,
        on the first prick of a scorn.'

Ha, ha! I get it. You write of me.
I am the thorn, the hole in the bucket.
But I see no sense in your work!
It does not mow the lawn of modern literature;
it does not paint a fence, a- bold - white - picket fence
around the structured grounds of your poem;
it entices the sundry reader, that casual slipper of an arcane society,
to trample on your well manicured lawn;
it's neither a wild orchid to the trailered lapel of critics,
nor is it a vivid carnation to the buttonhole of a passing mind.

Don't look so glum! You can write again_ perhaps next week.
Is the window open? Are you sure? Check it!
And did I tell you Mrs Morrovitch has a new suite?
And did I tell you *D.F.S. has a sale? 
...I'm tired, the heady stream of the day has been
a flash flood to my head_,
so leave your verse, its budding rhyme,
in the notebooks shallow fields,
and by the way_, we need to be there for nine.


* DFS is a major store in the UK for suites and room accessories.


Confucius say

Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Unless, of course, there's a lawyer involved
and then it becomes a Chinese meal:
sweet for some, sour for others.


The Planetarium.
Of gravity and other things

Bubbles rise!
And so does smoke!

We congregated in the science room.
A gathering of infants.
Young minds waiting to be expanded.

The science man spoke with big words:
inertia, relativity, Einstein.
He seemed not to know what it was
only how it operates!
As it had yet to be proved, he said,
beyond mathematical doubt.

Even so, he filled our minds
with the heaviest of explanations
about gravity and other things,
how to earth all things come, whether an apple,
a meteor,  an object tossed from the hand;
and he demonstrated with marbles.

He mentioned a resistance to it all,
a growing velocity that can be calculated,
and I asked him, 'these upsurges,
these none believers to the gravity thing,
did they use computers or an abacus?'

He was not amused, his face contorted
as if weighed by infantile views.


Recipe for war

Take one middle range country,
preferably hot,
and marinate in oil for a million years.
 
As for spice: add a despot.

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