GUT FEELING ON THE DUCK THEORY OF EVOLUTION
In the beginning there was silence
Slow symmetry break-dancing in the bleakness
Time’s arrows curving beyond comprehension
Soon, the dance of geometry commenced;
Atom, electron, proton, neutron,
Wave upon wave
Spin particle, spin!
Then into the melting pot
The first sounds of all our futures;
Quark, quark, quark, quark, quark, quark…
NEW WAVES
To hear someone say;
I worked my fingers to the bone
So someone sharper could take my home,
Raises few eyebrows these days
Work isn’t the toad
Work is the poor man’s load
Piled up all his life ahead
Never relenting until he’s finally dead
You could of course ignore it;
No mortgage, no gadgets that comfort
No requirement to pay-as-you-earn it;
A kind of existence
ODE TO A SHOPPING TROLLEY
Oh beautiful chromed perambulator
You of the sleek wheels
And wayward inclinations
Carrier of booze and babies
And, occasionally, goods and chattels,
You were a lovely mover once
Look at you now;
Silt to your midriff
Capsized for eternity
Gathering flotsam and jetsam
For a stinking old stream;
Fit for nothing but stopping gaps
THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
Old women with polished perms on fat heads
Men tinkering with diseased cars
Dogs taking their owners to the park –
Where they converse with their friends
And crap indiscriminately.
The Postman, the Milkman and the Gasman,
Two door-to-door leaflet saleswomen
A stray cat or two
And twenty five chimney-stack pigeons.
Then there are all those aerials-
Like one-legged storks-
Looking down on the patched-up pavements.
Where have all the front gates
Absconded to, I wonder?
Frightened away by all the leering
FOR SALE signs
Constantly peering over their shoulders?
I guess that must be it.
IRON AGE
Phoenix rises
Cobbled together
By a compendium of pyrites
Forged to link all destinies
Shaped to gird our worlds
And outreach Babylonia
Igneous intrusion
Metamorphic rock
Freed from your sedimentary bed
White heat in the crucible
Running now
Red ingots of desire
Ladled to all requirements
Manacled by steel
This shining age
Rusts towards a new millennium
CIVIL SERVANTS SHOULD NOT LEAK
He said it, my God he said it!
Brazen-faced, to the watching nation
‘They should not leak’, he said
‘After all, they are servants of the Crown’.
Leaking in public? How revolting!
And where would it begin?
A seepage from the ears perhaps?
Or a welling-up from beneath
All those virginal starched collars?
Or would it occur in the nether regions?
Visible only as a steady trickle
Down around the ankles.
A telephoned enquiry brought no joy;
‘I can assure you, Sir, we have
No leaking Civil Servants here
Why don’t you try MI 5’
DAFFODILS
I saw Christ nailed to a tree
In an East London churchyard
Weather-beaten from looking,
While the adjacent graveyard
Played host to a thousand
Sloping stone soldiers.
There, daffodils bunched together
And it made me wonder
Why the graveyard should display
Such a profusion of yellow
When the churchyard itself
Was barren of colour
OLD MATTRESSES
They have raised a highway
Across our valley
And landscaped it
With blocks of windowed concrete.
Beneath, the river strangles itself
With shopping trolleys
And bits of old bicycles
Worn-out mattresses
And smashed-up pallets are everywhere
While a bloated condom
Flutters by on a piece of driftwood.
Painted hoarding-women
With rotating eyes
Compete for attention
With pram-pushing young love,
Their stilettos tap-dancing the hard shoulder
On a clear day
Juggernauts gleam in the sun
And rolled-up tabloids
Tell tall tales about Royalty
Or football….and Sex
LONDON HIGH-RISE
The graffiti spreads like muck along the walkways
In the lifts and on the stairs;
BOLLOCKS TO THE POLL TAX
TANYA SUCKS and CORINNE FUCKS
The stench of urine everywhere
This calcified menagerie
Bakes hearts as hard as concrete
Solidifies old attitudes, buries hope
Deifies ignominy
Here, echoes of hollow laughter
Ghost through the floors
Children play high-rise hopscotch
And stilettos click rhythmically
Along tuneless corridors
Another circus of misfits
Adrift in the maze
Cocooned in captivity
In this graceless legacy
Of the stack-em-high days
to read extracts from any of my books click on my Amazon page; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
…is more shitty poetry. So says Charlotte Cuevas on her online blog. Or doesn’t need. (she was being sarcastic) Charlotte is a napowrimo knocker, who feels that this month of unfettered poetry offerings brings out the worst in people. Poetry-wise anyhow.
“And we especially need more shitty poetry that conforms to predetermined themes and forms- daily prompts which relieve us from the bothersome task of coming up with something on our own.
“Write a persona poem from the viewpoint of the first thing you see when you look away from the computer screen.”
“Grab a blind person and write a sestina using the first six words they point to in the newspaper.”
I’m sorry, are we poets or are we vending machines? What the hell kind of poet prides themselves on “Hey, pick any random form and subject and I’ll make a poem out of it in 20 minutes or less or your money back.”
There’s more in the same vein, but to be honest I don’t give a shit anymore!
SHITTY POEM
Perhaps we were less deceived
Than first we believed
In nineteen-sixty-three.
Legs, The Beatles, moon-talk
And JFK going down that
Long slide to eternity.
Later, there was Dylan
Vietnam killing
And Mini’s both
Mechanical and mercurial
While all the time
We were shooting a line
That was both entertaining
And entrepreneurial
This wasn’t the way we were;
A generation of graven anonymities
Their money-God waxing
While free-thinkers wane.
Well are you shot of it, pal:
Nothing, like something,
Is happening again.
My Writing Life 