Duckworth Lewis

As contraception
the Duckworth Lewis Method
sucks,
because rain rarely
(if ever)
stops play.



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Thursday Next on Friday

Friday reading the latest Thursday Next,
lost in a hollow world
of puns and peril, robotic butlers and
championship croquet.
Years since last Thursday Next, yet
age has not wearied her,
and the years condense into waiting
till next Sunday to finish this Thursday Next.

What's life for?

For dancing. For piling stones on one another.
For discovering how utterly coffee and cucumber
Do not belong together. For punning and pruning.
For fighting tyrants and cheering heroes.
For children's laborious scales and
Virtuosos' flying fingers. For Romeo and Juliet
And David and Jonathan and Dawn and Jennifer.
For living.


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Biggles in Stoke Park

wide green spaces suit
a brown and white spaniel on
a grey winter's day

Notre Dame de Lorette

A factory farm of crosses in a field,
row after row after row, presided over
by twin sentinels – a white stone basilica,
and a 50 metre lighthouse tower. Nearby
in a whitewashed shed, a little worse for wear,
25 quaint boxes – dioramas, with
25 quaint goggle eyepieces: what the battler saw.

He saw massacred fields, all grass gone,
a mash of mud and stones and stumps.
He saw bodies: one posed peacefully,
on his back, dead eyes seeming to gaze upwards,
others twisted unnaturally, legs bending wrong
at the knee. He saw open air dormitories
of the dead, side by side in rows.

He saw the living, playing cards, sheltered
by six foot of earth, waiting on the turn
of a card. He saw unshakable comrades
hauling their friends through mud, not caring
for shells or snipers' bullets.
He saw hell, the end of things.

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Critical Thinking

It is critical to think, but
Is it critical to think about thinking?
Is it crass to be critical of Critical Thinking?

My daughter is forced to follow a course
A crass course in critiquing sources.
A slippery slope to a hasty conclusion.
She hates it, therefore the course is a farce.
What flaw was that? False cause? Who cares.

Tu quoque, Brute.


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Requiem for Superman

Laid out on a slab a size too large,
looking a shade too camp in ripped blue tights,
the fallen hero fails to meet our gaze.

He once stood proud, the mighty arms
folded across his chest. Now stripped of might
his crossed arms limply hide the blazoned vest.

Batman's props were car and belt, bat this, bat that,
and Wonder Woman had her whip to fright
the truth from villains. Kal-el needed none. 

The ice-fresh breath, the burning gaze, are gone.
The shrunken, wrinkled frame a bitter sight.
Our guardian no more punching through the air.

We trudge up stairs towards a poorer world.
The last one stops and sighs and hits the light,
switching the crypt to darkness. We go out

leaving truth, justice, the American way
lying abandoned in the crypt tonight.





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Lucy’s car

Lucy's car is bright and shiny,
Lucy's car is nearly new.
Lucy's says her car's a stallion
Fast and wild and powerful too.

Jack's poor car is not so sporty.
Jack's poor car is much more old.
Lucy's car has got the garage,
Jack's poor car's out in the cold

Lucy needs to tame her stallion,
Get her driving skills across.
Show the Mazda who's the master,
Show the sports car who's the boss.

Lucy loves her little sports car,
Lucy thinks it's oh so cool.
But she can't just drive all day long —
Lucy needs to go to school.



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Homophones 3: moccasin

Anger's no laughing matter:
The soul's nitroglycerin blows up,
Out of all proportion, a fancied hurt.
Neither should lust be mocked:
The loin-stirring carry on
That's not all Sid and Babs,
Can brighten a dull day,
Or shrivel a selfish heart.
And never mock a moccasin:
Fear its venomed fangs
And silent strike.

John Donne's Word

Could there be such a word?
To make impossible; to create
An unachievability,
To unrealisabilify a state,
To make it so it cannot be:
To impossibilitate.



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Sagbut

The lowly kern with his hooked lance
unseats the knight and makes him pay,
But that sagbut is not the sort
A minstrel man might play;

The bold brass sound that issued forth
From long or shortened bore
Though long before Glenn Miller's birth
would swell and slide and soar.

But is that what a sagbut is,
Or is it something humbler,
A slackening of the nether parts
Of some poor aged bumbler?

How sad to never fill those jeans
So pertly or so tightly,
But if the butt begins to sag,
The end in sight's unsightly.




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Via negativa

Not a crutch for sickly souls,
nor a guaranteed happy ending.
Not a judge demanding satisfaction,
nor yet an undemanding comforter.
Not the way out of moral mazes,
or a substitute for thought;
no enemy to evolution,
nor a simple end to doubt.
No dispenser of easy cures, and
no respecter of fierce belief.
No bottled genie, granting wishes,
and no partisan of just one tribe.
No speaker of magic, infallible words,
no symbol of ultimate human concern.
No respecter of kings or depiser of tramps,
not choosing tramps over bugs, bugs over dust.
Not what I think I want, and not
what I think I may ever know.



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Homophones 2: g(u)ilt

a thin layer of bright
remorse, laid over a
leaden human condition.


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Homophones 1: killergram

A kilogramme of plutonium
Could be a mega killergram.
A kilogramme of iron on
A wooden hammer shaft could be
A gangster's evil killergram.
A kilogramme of newsprint
Filled with rumours and wild lies
To drive a soul past durance
Could be a tabloid killergram.
A nanogramme of hatred
In an influential cranium
Could be lethal as plutonium,
Could destroy an equilibrium:
A deadly statesman's killergram.



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Tim Burton Landscape

stunted trees with arthritic fingers
grope upwards
a hell hound snarls
from an unfeeling sky

cracked

paving stones stretch towards

a gothic castle.

the moon grins above



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The killergram

The original kilogramme,
Beneath its nested bell jars,
A little way from Paris,
Perhaps is shrinking, slightly,
Though how to tell is problematic —
Since it can only be measured
Relative to itself, and by definition
Is the kilogramme.
But if the kilogramme changes,
By a platinum/iridium molecule or two,
Then the Newton, Joule, and Watt,
The Ampere and the Volt would vary too.
And so as far as SI's stability's concerned,
The kilogramme would be the killergram.


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Stoneface Society

In a lunchtime schoolroom,
Twenty children sit, or slouch,
Choosing to pass the time
With long dead stars of silver screen.

They watch enchanted, glee rising
Unbidden, unstoppable to their lips
As Stan winches Ollie up impossibly,
With rope and block and tackle,
Then much more probably lets him fall.

Or gradually they fall beneath the spell
Of gentle Monsieur Hulot, step by bouncing step,
A giant human chicken, with chaos in his wake
Charming his way through seaside France.

Or best of all, they watch amazed,
The great Stoneface himself,
With stunt after breathtaking stunt
Confronting the world and all its traps.
His stoic, unflappable gaze remains
As houses fall, storms rage and villains shoot;
Leaping from carriage to carriage,
Falling down chutes, or up through windows,
Diving through a pedlar's belly, or
Walking from the stalls into a film.


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The young carer

Father is far off, in mood, often
In miles. Grumblings
And threats of cutting off money
Are his family contributions.
Mother can't take it, can't cope,
Can't help. Fearful, confused,
Paralysed by grieving, not hungry
Herself, she doesn't see
Her children's hunger.
So the boy, already burdened with work,
Making friends, and new school life,
Must cook his sister's meals,
Put her to bed, reassure her anxious young soul,
While no-one comforts his.



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