Poem

Rosevear – marriage veil
Gould – boulder earrings
Sheridan – horse mat
Blackler – cobbler
Hawker – impersonator
Gouldthorpe – fashionable trouser
Green – coroner’s ladle
Davis – shaggy dog
Ireson – green valley
Chong – ornate house boat
Hughes – lethal cough
Ford – expensive butler
Oneill – horse and cart
Godfrey – undercooked chicken
Gledhill – epaulets

Friday

Friday is a farce.

I travel in at the usual time, on the lumbering bus, but the morning’s mostly spent making tea or blowing my nose, and then it’s an early lunch. I put my umbrella over my shoulder and march down like a matchstick man to the nearest boozer. It’s all brown panels and busty barmaids inside, and a strange air flows in the rooms, an air of relief and happiness because it’s Friday, and yet below, lurking like a creature from the deep, I sense a foreboding feeling of inevitability that the weekend won’t last forever.

Next week we’ll be doing this sad little dance again, again and again in fact, until we die. Still, the looming white breasts of the barmaids (always in the same tired dresses) pour forth the frothy golden beer and it’s easy to forget about anything past today.

Back at my desk, I arrange the leaves on my plate carefully, and adorn here and there with cherry tomatoes, those little marvels of bursting red flavour.

The rest of the afternoon is a write-off and then we’re back down into the stinking dungeon that transports us to-and-fro off into our warm little living rooms, or like me, back into another den with the swirling brown panels and huge white breasts.  

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’ll bury my face into my soft white pillows.

More Poetic Slang

Saunderson – runny eggs

 

Jones – prescription dentures

 

Wilcox – eyepatch

 

Elsey – moisturiser

 

Proudfoot – hardcover books

 

Blows – processed meat

 

Norbury – alcoholic’s nose

 

Baker – unfaltering character

 

Austin – expensive walking stick

 

Crumplin – bandages

 

Beryl – belt

Another Word Poem

Beswick – bald patch

Potter – woven purse or wallet

Alderman – statuesque administrator

Pepper – bespoke container

Hodgkinson – auditorium 

Sherrington – fine liquors

Fahy – hay bale

Humphreys – chin strap

McGarvey – bespeckled teacher of French

Magic!

 

I was dripping in cheap cologne

The camel I had ridden home

Was armed to the teeth with bagels

And we were able to weather the storms

And make it home in time for the harvesting

Of the corn and bath time, too.

We’d had quite a laugh

We’d travelled across deserts and

Under blue moons and steep grass

And if I ever see another camel

Or eat another bagel

It’ll be too soon,

Too bloody soon.

Don’t Hold Back

I like a bit of chaos, drama. I think we should all strive to have a lot of drama in our lives. Out of drama and chaos great creativity is born, plus it helps to make you feel alive.

You should always be listening to music, preferably on headphones with very loud volume, while doing two or three other tasks at the same time, to increase levels of pressure, tension and disorientation.

There is a kind of calm that comes with the chaos, somehow. When I’m on the tube, packed to the brim in the morning rush hour, I’m alone with my thoughts even though lyric-heavy or very fast music is blasting in my ears and I’m surrounded by the million faces of fellow commuters.

When life gets stagnant, when we’re finally sat at our desks after all the fanfare of the rush, and the monotony of our work sets in, this is when we’re most unhappy. As we know, we weren’t meant to leave sedentary lives. I get around this by walking the four miles home every night of the week, come rain or shine.

I used to shy away from confrontation but now I’m more inclined to actively seek it, as a way of squeezing out some drama from an otherwise dull and dreary day.

Bob Dylan has just been given the highest award in France, the Légion d’honneur, in recognition of his “chaotic life and lyrics of an exceptional artist who is recognised in his own country and throughout the world as a major singer and a great poet”.

I say it’s right we should celebrate Dylan’s chaotic life and recognise that without it his creativity wouldn’t have been either as abundant or as profound, stemming as it has done from great drama and chaotic experience, which reflects a life well lived in to the essence of existence in the world.

Institutions

Our lives are preordained by controlling forces a lot of us don’t even question.
We go from one institution to another: school, university, work, old people’s homes.
The only differences I can tell so far between the educational institutions I’ve gone through and my workplace is that I get paid now whereas someone had to pay for me to go to schools.
Apart from that there’s not much difference.
I don’t particularly want to be at work as I didn’t particularly want to be at school. I don’t make much effort at work and I never did at school either.
The difference is that I am questioning the need to be here, at work. Obviously the need is money, and only money.
It still feels like school. Even the professional, mature and composed woman who sits near my desk reminds me of the prim and proper type of schoolgirl, a try hard with all her pens and paper laid out perfectly, aiming for top marks.
There are also the geeks, bullies and idiots. I don’t see myself as part of these groups and I didn’t at school either.
The only thing I’m glad about in respect to work is that at least I’m not really ‘anything’. I’m not a solicitor or a trainee, I’m not an engineer, I’m not a doctor, I’m not anything. I’m free and defying the institutionalisation that sets upon us as soon as we’re old enough to work.
But how long can I hold out? One day the money I earn will not be enough, and maybe I’ll need to become ‘something’.
It all depends on one’s willingness to compromise on one’s values and ideals.
One thing I can safely say about all my heroes is that they definitely did not compromise. I think it’s the choice between doing something great or just becoming part of the institution. It’s the choice between the freedom of Life or being a cog in the grinding wheel of Death.
To compromise is cowardice.

P.S. I Hate You

Spreading bullshit should be everyone’s priority.

So here’s a poem:

Byrne – Burn

Cornelius – Bunions

Hill – Grassy

Sumby – Horrible stump

Stott – Ugly spinster

Amos – Classical style, Italian

Bessler – Wig

Martin – Mon père

Millett – Hay

 

The Sacred City

Oh! what a colourful market. Such trinkets and wares you’ve never seen.

Snake charmers wobble about in their turbans, seemingly possessed by the snakes that come wobbling and swaying like drunken walking sticks out of their big woven baskets.

Men who eat the hearts of lambs to gain their courage bleat and grunt and shuffle about on all fours under the bright rugs that cover the stalls. Their dirty hands reach up occasionally and snag your clothing. The shy tourist doesn’t quite know what to make of this ludicrous spectacle, but the local old women are well accustomed to the grabbing hands of the naked bleaters and thrust their canes under the stalls, vigorously through the rugs and don’t even hear the shrieks and whimpers that come back from under the rugs.  

Great barrel-chested men with all sorts of ornamental facial hair sell weapons from the farthest reaches of the continent. Imported, old-fashioned pistols and native swords, many with huge curved blades and golden handles. They apparently don’t need a permit to sell such deathly instruments and the tourist would do well to stay away from these stalls, for passing merchants are prone to challenge you to a duel so as to be given a discount on anything they wish to buy. And if challenged, you would be wise to accept, and I hope you are well prepared.

Big fountains fill the main squares, fountains without running water. The sovereignty seem to have forgotten their cultural duties, and the once proud fountains, which depict ancient heroes in death throes and were once a main attraction for tourists, stand neglected and dirty, with stagnant green water frothing at the rims of the huge cracked bowls.    

The locals are neither proud of their town or willing to relinquish it to foreigners or foreign languages, and the tourist will find him or herself feeling at times quite unwelcome in this sacred city. Never fear, however, for when feelings of isolation pang at your heart, the tourist can always return to the port, where the shrewder in the government’s administration have organised a promenade where tourists can mingle, and eat together in sanitised restaurants and enjoy museums, jaunts out to sea, and even flavour some local delights. But beware yet, for the tourist companies can never completely keep away the shady characters and skeletal beggars that come down from the little alleys of the dark heart of town, and bother the civilised.

The Hunt for the Long-Breasted Beaver Turtle

My boots were full of sea water. Obviously I’d chosen the wrong footwear for the hike down from my modest jeep to the soft white sand of the shoreline. I was there on precious work though and no amount of warm water in my boots, water full of darting little silver fish, would deter me from carrying it out.

I was there to find the reclusive indigenous Long-Breasted Beaver Turtle, named after the lengthy nature of its bosom and its predilection for collecting wood (for which no convincing scientific hypothesis can account, though I have my own ideas).

I was glad to rid myself of those waterlogged boots and unsheathe myself of my overalls and slip into my swimming gear, which included goggles, oxygen tank and harpoon gun, for self-defence or to capture live specimens.

As on most of my expeditions and experiments I have no team behind me. I prefer to go it alone, man pitched precariously against nature in a battle of strength, courage and wits. I dove like a bullet into the shallows, parting the waters with my hands and was immersed in that silky, warm exotic sea, full of life and colours.

The colours of the reef struck me immediately, bright oranges like the surface-rock of Mars, pinks like the skin of flying elephants, deep greens like condensed forests of Christmas trees. The bright naked sun burned shapes through the surface of the water and made everything under the surface ripple with wet light and look like the skin of a fish.

After my initial adoration’s, which I was well accustomed to experiencing and even accounted for in my tight schedule, I made my way out to sea further, where the reef ended and the water went suddenly deeper and darker.

Here there were strange, moon-like rocks that grew like towers out of the dark depths. They just skimmed the surface of the water and like hidden predators lay ready to pounce on anything that came too close. This had recently been the fate of a tourist yacht and the vessel lay still tangled up in those deadly spires, sailcloth ripped and tatters and splintered wood in every direction.

The hull lay somewhere deeper; the biggest treasure trove of fine wood, and it was here where I felt sure I would find the species of turtle.

I headed down into the bluish darkness and felt the water get cooler, and left behind the rapid life that shot around in every direction in the shallower depths. Here only lowly plankton were illuminated in my headlamp.

I found the remains of the hull lodged in between where three of the rugged rock towers met, as if it were a tiger hiding in the boughs of a jungle tree.

I turned off the headlamp and set my visor to night vision, so as not to upset the famously light-sensitive turtles.  

I swam as gently as I could into the hull, everything the same shade of light turquoise to my eyes, my black wetsuit helping me slink in like an oil spill into the water.

At what first I thought was a bit of timber came floating down and obscured my vision, before I looked and saw – it was the decayed remains of one of the tourists. His head was gone though the camera which would have hung around it remained, having snagged on a shirt button, and floated out in front of the missing head, waiting for a picture that would never be taken.

Sharks! I thought, and for the first time I felt some fear at to what may happen to me alone in this underwater dungeon of broken boat. I pulled the harpoon gun around my front and readied my finger on the trigger.

But it was then, when I was frightened of seeing the diver’s mortal enemy, when I saw what I had been searching for: a beautiful specimen – a female Long-breasted Beaver Turtle was moving towards the cracked ceiling of the hull. She was dragging a lovely long wooden staff upwards towards a hole in the ceiling, obviously about to exit the hull with her prize. (And now I shall take this chance to espouse my own theorem as to why this species gathers wood – I believe they collect it to build underwater nests, much in the same manner as birds. In these nests they take refuge from the world above water, and also I hypothesise it is where they lay their eggs and nurture their young).

I had a moment to take in the beauty and majesty of this strange beast – its underbelly spotted with blue stains, its strangely elongated and curved beak, and its long, long bosom. 

No sooner had I admired all of this and was preparing to take out my tranquiliser dart, when out through the crack in the ceiling came flying a miraculous Silver Tongue Shark. The shark saw me immediately and our eyes met for an instant, and I felt the horrible blackness and emptiness in those eyes, and he darted like a bolt of lightning at my turtle.

It was too quick, and by the time I had fired my trusty harpoon into the neck of this devilish beast, the shark had already seized the turtle in its lamp-like jaws and the turtle’s purple blood was clouding up the rushing water.

Once the harpoon had struck the shark let go and retreated, moving clumsily, painfully back through the little hole, and was gone.

I took the turtle, a famously shy species but too shocked and wounded to move from me, under my arm and swam like a whale in full mating flight back to the shoreline, not looking back for fear of meeting those two empty eyes again, coming like a knife out of the darkness.

I reached the reef again unscathed, though my female companion was mortally wounded and had lost much blood. She died on the white sand, moments after I had struggled with her out of the water and laid her down to revive her with a concoction of medicines from my belt.  

It was too late – she was gone. I had failed to save the animal, though I felt now surer of my hypothesis concerning the species, and had now seen that sharks posed a real threat to them even more than the destruction of their habitat.

The preserved body of the turtle hangs in my library, along with all the other breasted animals, and is surely the one and last example I’ll ever set my eyes upon, God save them.