HOW TO MEASURE RAIN

Walking through an ancient woodland

Wildflower meadows glinting through the trees

Man and nature working together

The whistle of unseen songbirds drifting on the breeze.

**

Watery flatlands and Roman dykes

Juxtaposed with hydro-electric pumps

Stratiform precipitation falling from nimbostratus

Condensing into water droplets that look like rainy lumps.

**

Grey unchanging weather that doesn’t go anywhere fast

Two woodpeckers on a grass verge looking for ants

A kingfisher unzips the air

And a shrew lies dead by the river banks.

**

Worms brought to the surface by tapping rain

A sparrowhawk hunched in a leafless ash tree

While above a coven of goldfinches cause a riot – again.

An April walk through the sunshine and showers

Huge, creamy candles of horse chestnuts hang down

Still locked inside ripening green flowers

**

This is farmed arable land

But laymen have long lost interest

Where food come from anymore

Apart from what’s written on the packet inside the supermarket door

The rain falls on everything

Both the living and the dead

Walking has deepened my feeling for outside

This is my week of getting wet.

 

 

 

This poem was written in 1917 by Yeats to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the Easter Rising. I don’t think he would be too impressed if he could see the state of affairs 99 years on

 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

SEVENTY

Seventy is a horrible number

I would rather be cutting lumber

On the miserable Humber

On the coldest day in March

Or better still

Chewing the bark

From a storm-felled Larch.

 

ROCK OF AGES

Old rock stars don’t die of old age

They slide away slowly from that ivory stage

Of fame and recognition

There’s only one pre-condition;

That you don’t die with your boots on

And you always look like

You have a raging hard-on

 

HEMINGWAY’S HEAD

 

You know, I always thought Hemingway

He had a Romanian head on him.

Well, it had that bloated look to it,

And Romanian heads always

Look a bit soggy, I think;

And Hemingway had that in spades.

‘Course it might also be the drink

He never could pass a bar, could he?

Or it might be that time he landed on his head

In those two helicopter crashes he had

One after the other, the same day I think.

Split his skull open, they say

Exposed his innards to those African parasites;

Who knows what damage they did?

Rampaging around his grey matter.

Times like that tend to make you feel

That life’s a real bitch.

He never said much about it afterwards

Though that twinkle in his eye

Began to look more and more like a twitch.

 

 

TAKE NOTHING BUT THE PICTURES
Our minds are all we have
They are all we have ever had
Be they good or bad
As my thoughts wander towards my life
I feel an energy deep inside
A life-force gathering momentum
Like an onrushing, incoming tide.
There’s a power that will not be denied
And a direction I feel I must go
And it doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things
If the momentum is fast or slow
For no matter how small something may seem
To others it may be a huge overpowering dream
Whose connection is infinite.
Happiness cannot be taught
Nor love bought
So if you must go
Take nothing but the pictures in your mind
And leave nothing but your footprints behind

 

HOCKNEY
High in the Hollywood hills
In the shadows of Sunset Boulevard
Hockney is dabbling again.
A copy of Mulholland Drive rests against the studio wall;
Outside, the land drops away;
A jungle of exotic palms and ferns
With a swimming pool at the bottom
Not much used anymore.
He doesn’t go out much these days, he says;
‘I go to the dentist , the doctor, the bookstore
And the marijuana store
And that’s about it.
I’m much too deaf to go out
I don’t really have a social life
Because socialising is talking and listening
And I can’t really listen any more’.
Okay David,
But really, the marijuana store!
I wonder if it’s the one on Venice beach
Where the aged musculatorians of Muscle beach
Tramp with regularity to the nearby marijuana clinic
To see the marijuana doctors,
In their neat green cross uniforms,
Who will prescribe some medical marijuana
For forty bucks
Or thereabouts
To anybody who needs it.
When I’m working again I feel thirty,
And when I smoke I feel like Picasso, he says
Yeah, David, okay                                                                                                                                            But that’s just the fucking weed, man!

 

NIGHT LIGHT

A car pulls up to a red light
The owner has a feared animal look
Something screeches
For fourteen days now
The tiger has prowled
A gruesome half torso
Floats in a pool of blood
Somewhere close is an imp of the perverse
Buying a return ticket but not going anywhere.
He looks at his alarm clock
Blood red in the four a.m. nearly light
The hands are rotating backwards
Backwards
While all around him the candy-stripes flap in the breeze