No trumpets play,
‘Just the same musak as yesterday,
Sounds down supermarket aisles
Where rictus smiles
Tally the cost
Of loves bought and lost,
And there is no sun
Behind the frost,
Merely a kind of fun,
Wherein shopper and purveyor are soon done.
The morning after the night before
Alice closed a door.
“Drink me” the potion said.
She drank without emotion
And now a possibility is dead.
On dark nights the fawn
does the wolf engulf
In such exquisite delights
But come the dawn
Both wolf and fawn
Are left,
Bereft
Listening to silence’s interminable yawn
“Say,
Come the 1st of May,
Will you stay?
Shall we make romance
Our goal
As we dance around the Maypole?
And demonstrate to God above
Our abiding love?”
“My darling I will stay,
Come the 1st of May.
But you must pay
For my new dress
So as to impress.
Each girl
As I around the Maypole twirl.
Why dearest one, your face shows such distress …”.
Desire broaches,
While sense reproaches.
To go down that well worn path
And laugh
With Kath
Or Lou
Would, its true
Be easy as the wine that flows,
And the hole-in-the wall
From whence, man knows
All
Passing pleasures fall
The Romans threw
Christians to the lions.
True
This we no longer do,
For modern man is civilised.
Yet, it is no surprise
That there is now reality TV
Where we
Watch with glee
As the inadequate, Sad
Or quite frankly bad
Are flayed alive.
We viewers pretend not to derive
Any satisfaction
From the interaction
Of a host who weeps crocodile tears
As the audience in turn sneers
And jeers.
So we self righteously shake our head
At the living dead.
Today society is humane
For the gladiators now remain
To be pointed at in the street,
For they are no lions to eat
Them whole.
Merely their soul
Is by the entertainment industry taken,
Leaving them forsaken.
But some do tell,
There is no soul to sell
“At least he wasn’t rough” she thinks,
And drinks
To forget
Her regret.
In the evening drear,
He recollects a timid deer.
Swallow after swallow of beer
Fails to hide
The hollowness inside.
“Never again”
The girl says,
But when he calls
She falls
For he who pays often finds
That money binds together ,
Birds of diverse feather.
I am pleased to announce that I shall be appearing on Vancouver Co-op Radio (http://www.coopradio.org/), on Thursday 4 May, to talk about my soon to be released collection of poetry, “My Old Clock I Wind and Other Poems”.
My interview will also include me reading a selection of my poetry. To listen please tune in at 1:10 pm Vancouver time (9:10 pm UK time).
For my previous interview on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s The World Poetry Reading Series, please visit http://worldpoetry.ca/?p=11413.
My thanks to Ariadne Sawyer of the World Poetry Reading Series for enabling my appearance.
Kevin
The attraction
Of an abstraction
Holds the reader’s attention.
There would be dissention
Where I to show my muse,
Soaked in booze,
And guzzling pub grub,
And her shoes
All covered in mud.
I think
My readers would
Say “You do your muse confuse
With a girl sozzled in drink”,
Then, continuing with a wink,
“Morris has lost his marbels, poor old chap,
What a sad mishap!.
Or perchance he has taken too much wine
And thinks a girl divine
Who (one must confess)
Has no idea how to dress)!
Shall I break the spell
And tell
The truth about my Muse
Or would she her mystery lose?
I do maintain
That the abstraction
Of an attraction
Should continue to reign
The crowd cheered
As the stones flew,
While a few
Among them feared
(for they knew
It was true),
That the thrown
Stone
Does not discriminate against any particular bone.
