FUNNY THAT!

he was
knocked out
by the Wagner

it had fallen from
the first floor but he had
never liked Wagner

his body fell
in the shape
of a broken *******

funny that
blood ebbed
into the snow

below his head
like a badly drawn
map of Ceylon

she had been throwing
her boyfriend's belongings
...out...out...out!

clothes
Wagner
an etc. of her anger

the Wagner
was barely
scratched

but
the phonograph
was completely kaput

there was more blood
than
damage done

the enraged young lady
went on to meet and marry
a postman who adored Cesar Frank

no one knows or cares
what happen to the chap who
owned the discarded possessions

the poor passer-by-in-time
recovered and went on to
write poetry though

he had never written poetry before
funny
that

He never tired
of telling of
his great escape when drunk

indeed
he had been
very drunk that day

didn't know
what
happened to him

it never ceased
to annoy him when
he wasn't believed


"Yeah yeah...sure sure!"
after that
he never liked music

*

The phonograph missed up by an inch otherwise he would have been dead but the Wagner record skimmed him just at the hairline so producing an inordinate amount of blood before settling on a bank of snow without even a scratch.

I had asked her how she had met her husband and she started telling me this tale and I thought she had married the guy she nearly clobbered but not a bit of it!  She had got rid of " 'orrible boyfriend"  and all his things through the window and the passerby was just collateral damage. She disliked Wagner and " 'orrible boyfriend" and the neighbour on the top floor came down to see if she was ok and that was that. Out with the old and ring on the finger for the new. She had heard him play Frank's Symphony in D minor in that long snowy month. So you could say she chucked Wagner for Frank.

The passerby boy was just unlucky is all and in time came to write a poem about it. Whenever he got drunk he would recall it all. They all knew it  happened as there were actually eyewitnesses to the event but they would pretend to not believe him which drove him mad and to another drink.

Funny. That!

HIS PRAYER

Good Friday he'd always
take Christ down
from His cross

talk to him
as if Christ
was his little child

put Him near the fire
****** His crown of thorns
watch it burn amongst the coals

then he held
the Christ
near to him

croon lullabies
cuddle the tired body
watch over His sleep

Christ as dear to him
as his own child
dreaming upstairs

no Rosaries for him
loving Him for real
this the only prayer he knows

*

An old gent I used to look after from the auld sod. He lived his religion in his mind and loved Christ as if he had met him in the world of today...somebody to care for...to love. This is how he prayed...not one for rosaries on bended knee or church but prayer in his actions and how he treated people in his own life. "Be a Christ!" he would always say..."Do the things a Christ would!"

CREATING THE WORLD

the sky was walking
around the world
the land trying to keep up

the weather can not
make its up its mind
what to be

"Whatever!"
the weather
thinks to itself

the sky was keeping
its clouds in order
whilst managing a sunset

the land was out of breath
becoming only a shadow
of its former self

the sky and the land
now the same dark
until the moon is turned on


*

Waking with my little one she suddenly came out with the fact that 'the sky was walking around the world' and so the rest of the words made themselves up on the spot. A poet should always carry his three year old for inspiration....she always seeing the world in her own image. Tilly creating the world.

I WISH YOU WERE OLD AND WEATHERED

I wish that
you were old
and weathered

that wrinkles
irrigated
your face

that your hair
was a halo of white
that your bones ached

that you complained
with coughs and curses
about your great old age

rather than
Death held you
young & forever

locked
in the center
of his ageless eye

*

This is my sister Junie...the most gentle of souls...she'd stroll into your mind as if she was lifting a latch and walking right in. A fairytale in herself.

CARDINAL BALUE'S CAGE

I have fallen out of myself
like a naked soul embarrassed to be seen
without a body

I seem to no longer exist
just thoughts flying about
without a human to nest in

I don't know if I mean
anything anymore
the world is losing its grip on me

I am down
to the dregs of myself
half a human being if you know what I mean

the world has become so
2-D to me
& I a one-dimensional being

oh how I long for to be
3-D
when the world was in love with me

I feel like Cardinal Balue
imprisoned in a cage for 6 years
by Louis the something or other

*

Ahhh grief...that invisible unseen woe that no man may know unless he also in the depths of it. I am not talking about the suit and trappings of it but as to how it manifests itself behind the eyes of the person enduring it. Grief is the presence of absence or the absence of a presence. It is like living under a bell jar with the oxygen running out. Only when one throws one's thoughts against the glass and sees them slither down the glass in words or just hang there does grief achieve a brief visibility. Or throwing thought against some invisible force field that has entrapped one's being and see the such thoughts spark into words and fry against this unseen. This only holds for the once that one tries this and is at once different yet again when words are brought to bear...these pathetic words illuminate my father's death and yet fail to grasp the nature of the pain

Louis XI (3 July 1423 – 30 August 1483), called the Prudent (French: le Prudent) His taste for intrigue and his intense diplomatic activity earned him the nicknames the Cunning (Middle French: le rusé) and the Universal Spider (Middle French: l'universelle aragne ), as his enemies accused him of spinning webs of plots and conspiracies.

The great wooden cage in which Cardinal La Balue expiated his treason to Louis XI. The Bishop of Lerdun, who was the inventor of the horrible contrivance, suffered a like fate, and the people, who had but little sympathy with either of these worthies, used to sing:

" Monsieur La Balue A perdu la vile, De ses evesches;

Monsieur de Verdun N'en a plus pas un, Tous sont despesches."

For three years he remained caged, unable to stand, sit, or lie. Louis XI. used to visit him occasionally, and with his favourite, Olivier, would stand and jeer at the prisoner through a hole in the door.

Considered as a State prison of the period, the Castle of Loches was quite a model establishment. Just within the entrance was an even more terrible cage, where Philippe de Comines, the great historian of Louis XI., spent eight months, unable to turn round, but contriving, nevertheless, to write a great deal of the wonderful Memoirs which have rendered him so famous.

The baseless story of his detention in an iron cage originated in Italy in the sixteenth century apparently but I used the story of it as shorthand for "fallen out of the world."

He was supposed to not to be able to stand up or turn around and Louis would come and mock him. Gone into myth and legend now but apparently he was kept in luxury but the horrible story is too good/bad to resist.

"IF YOU TICKLE US. . ."

moon intently
listens
to the open air

production of
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
- in Venice

this delicious summer’s night
(hemmed in by houses)
where we discover that

“The quality of mercy
is not
strained...”

as a couple upstairs
come home and proceed to make
long loud passionate lust

“...it droppeth like.. “
another couple scream and fight
as windows smash and plates crash

“... the gentle rain from Heaven...”
“Agghhh! ”
“Cazzo in culo! ”

and throws his clothes out
the now broken window
“...upon the earth below...”

as a gondola ghosts by in mist
with an atrocious tourist version of
“O Sole Mio! ”

as another window
lights up
and a telly bellows

a dubbed in gangster shoot out.
“Aggggh!
"Fongool”

we are enthralled
(delighted and enraptured)
not only with

the splendour that is
Shakespeare
but also

the real life drama
of this gentle
Italian night

and of how
we got
our “pound of flesh."

STRAP HANGING

Yikes! Von Eycks's
The Arnolfini Marriage
gets on the tube.

Circle Line....either it or
someone very like Vladimir Putin
and Vladimir Putin in drag

at the next stop
Grant's American Gothic
jumps through the door

just as it closes
they strap hang
looking every inch of themselves

paint dripping from a graze
above an eyebrow
it's very unnerving

sharing a carriage
with great works of art
come alive

I really want to see
who gets on next
Van Gogh without an ear

but this is my stop
and work beckons
I get off but

nobody gets on
not even
a quick sketch

I mind
"...the Gap!"
almost trip over myself

the Arnolfini Marriage
and American Gothic
are discussing do they need

a ticket and what is money
they stare at me as if
"We know where you live sunny Jim!"

"Don't you dare tell!"
they yell
silently

the Putin look-alike
draws a finger
across a throat

the American Gothic
draws a zipper across a mouth
I give a frightened nod

the doors close
and somewhere
in a gallery

their empty frames
stare at
the dumbfounded tourists