WE’LL GO NO MORE A-ROVING by Lord Byron
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
DAWNING
‘Silly old fool’, someone
Shouts in your wake
And in the brilliantly-lit
Cube of time ‘old’ is dangled
Before your eyes
And won’t go away
She called you old! And
In the instant it takes you
To turn around and see
The solitary young woman
Bend down to retrieve her parcel
It dawns on you that you are
Nearer the end than the beginning
Much nearer
It comes, not creeping in the dark,
But galloping unstoppably
Over the horizon
And you never see it
Silly old fool
DO I GIVE A FUCK?
There he was,
As I bit into my Big Mac,
Throwing shapes;
At whom I am not too sure,
Maybe at himself
Or the devil he clearly had in his pocket;
Because he was dancing on dandelions,
Hopping on hot grilles,,
Twisting, grimacing,
Playing to some mad gallery in his head,
Laughing at a joke somebody was playing,
Or maybe he was just out of his
Dope-fucked mind.
Either way it didn’t matter;
I just wished he would let me
Eat my fucking burger in peace.
LEANING TO THE LEFT
Ah yes
Leaning to the left
Seems to be all the rage these days
Maybe it’s just a phase
You know
Like leaning to the right
Which, as everybody now knows,
Was just a pile of shite.
Leaning one way or th’other
Won’t necessarily please your mother
‘Stand up straight!’
Seemed to have been her message
Whenever I wavered from the straight and narrow
‘How many leaned to either side
On that long, laboured march from Jarrow?’
TWINKLE,TWINKLE LITTLE STAR
A star may look like heaven
From afar
But in reality
It is hell in a jar;
Not a small gold object that twinkles
But a furnace of endless fire
A million miles from being
An object of desire
ROBOTS ARE ASSHOLES
Robots are assholes
They hardly ever do what you want them to
And they fall over frequently
Often before you can shout ‘boo!’.
We now have technological asshole-arity
That theological point in time
When our robots are becoming bigger dicks than we are;
And all because we have successfully programmed one
To learn the exact pattern
Of dickishness required to ruin
The mental and emotional well-being of a rat.
A rat! Well, shoot me if I don’t eat my hat!
Robots are assholes
But humans are bigger
When they all lumber down that Yellow Brick Road
Who will ever know which one is Tigger?
THE WILD WEST
The Wild West has migrated east
The Middle East near and far
Where the horse has been superseded
By the pick-up, the land cruiser and the car
They race across vast deserts firing bullets in the air
If there’s a name on any bullet
Well, no one seems to care
Shooting up the town was once the pastime of the bad guys
Now it is blowing up the houses
And killing little girls and boys.
The bombs rain down on everyone and everything
Where once it was just arrows
Fired by some pesky redskin.
Looking down the barrel of a gun
Can be intimidating
When it’s eighteen foot long
There are no six-guns or shotguns any more
But rocket launchers, machine guns
And others of such enormous bore
Playing cowboys and Indians was once a pleasant game
But when your opponent must be beheaded
Then it isn’t quite the same.
Nikolay Gumilev 1886 – 1921, was an influential Russian poet, literary critic, traveler, and military officer. He was arrested on allegation of participation in a monarchist conspiracy known as “Petrograd military organization”, and executed by firing squad in 1921. The case was officially declared as “completely fabricated” and all victims rehabilitated by Russian authorities only in 1992.
THE SIXTH SENSE by Nikolay Gumilev
Fine is the wine that is in love with us, The goodly bread we wait for from the oven, And woman whom we have possessed, at last, After we've suffered under yoke her own. But what to do if a red sunset freezes Above a sky that's drowning in cold, Where there is silence and unearthly peace, What can one do with the immortal ode? You can't eat it, or drink, or even kiss ... The moment fled, and next one now hovers, And we wring hands, but yet once more miss - We are condemned to miss and miss it over. Just as a boy, forgetting games and friends, Sometimes beholds the girls bath in a river And, knowing nothing of the loving trends, Is yet tormented by a hidden fever; As once in time on overgrowing banks The moisten creature holed in despair Of self impotence, feeling on its back Wings - still unformed and very feeble pair, - So century after century - when, O Christ? Under the knife of liberal arts and nature The flesh breaks down and the spirit cries As they bear organs of the sixth sensation.
DID ROY ROGERS EVER READ THE ILIAD?
If I had a classical education
I could talk about the Greek Classics
Read the Iliad, and recognise dactylic hexameter:
I would know of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles
Understand about the Odyssey, Homer, Diomedes, Poseidon
And other such matters –
Like who the fuck Perseus was?
But I don’t;
Instead of Greek Mythology
I read about Roy Rogers, Buck Jones, Johnny Mack Brown
And how Billy The Kid was left-handed;
About the gunfight at the OK Corral,
And who shot Jesse James in the back;
About The Lone Ranger and Tonto
And other important stuff like that;
Kemo Sabe?
I wonder if Roy Rogers ever read The Iliad?
MONOLOGUE
This is not an art society
This is a money society
A pleasure society
With most in an amorphous state
Demanding forms for themselves.
Where is the curer of souls;
He who gives advice to the lovelorn
As well as the thief and the life-taker?
There are no real answers;
So what do you do?
Perhaps the black youth had the answer
Waving a train timetable at me as I passed him by;
He had missed his stop and was shouting
‘You gonna’ help me out? Have you got a dollar’?
‘That depends’, I mouthed silently
‘On whether you have a gun or not’.
Luckily for me he didn’t.
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