40 years after she bored me to death with a 3 hour talk of her goldfish....I thought it was time to get my own back and I marshalled the words and sent them into battle.

CARASSIUS AURATUS


Someone was talking a whole load of carp....this is moi trying not to **** 'em!

***

N.B.

No bores were harmed in the making of this poem

***

We had got her a tiny porcelain chamber *** in the throes of her early toilet training and she was always very proud of her motions. She once proudly marched in on Mum's ladies who were lunching and displayed her most recent efforts in her hand as if they were art. The ladies were suitably horrified.

Uncle Arnold always wore a bowler even when indoors! It only left his head in a state of great inebriation and rolled away from his horizontal head. During one of his bouts with the demon drink Tilly discovered it and turned it into...half a football....its regular use of a hat and....well....when a Tilly's got to go....a Tilly's got to go.

In her eyes it had now become a ***** and so...was treated as such. Oh how we laughed! All except Uncle Arnold who never wore it or any other hat again except for a knotted handkerchief  on the beach as he used to get bad sunburn on his bald spot.

Tilly loved her little Victorian chamber *** and when not using it for the purposes intended would make it into a jacuzzi for her dollies.

Her phrase for going to the loo was the title of the poem... TILLY GOING A LITTLE *****!

We all had to echo her toodeloo as she toddled off  and skipped to the loo where with great gusto she performed  her basic functions like a great performance artist creating a masterpiece.

***

Aunt Grizelda would often recite Amy Lowell's poem and would use this phrase when she wanted to curse without cursing. If you heard this Lowell  line then you knew she was mad! An old old man with the silverest of hair told me about his aunt 'cos he saw I was reading about the Imagists on a train heading into the long long ago.

I would have loved to have encountered her.

This is the end of the first movement of her STRAVINSKY'S THREE PIECES

"Bang! Bump! Tong!
Petticoats,
Stockings,
Sabots,
Delirium flapping its thigh-bones;
Red, blue, yellow,
Drunkenness steaming in colours;
Red, yellow, blue,
Colours and flesh weaving together,
In and out, with the dance,
Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together.
Pigs' cries white and tenuous,
White and painful,
White and --
Bump!
Tong!"

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean
But I shall be good health to you nonetheless
And filter and fibre your blood.”

― Walt Whitman

I used to look after this chap who loved Coward as much as I and we would sing all the songs together as I cleaned him up or fed him. He showed me his Dad's diary and the last entry was basically this...so I thought it deserved not to fade away so I wanted to bring him back to a life in words!

***




Ahhh it's such an elemental memory for me...I can at a second's notice step back into it in an instant. I'd bawl my eyes out....the words....the melody....everything was real to me.




Couldn't possibly forget these songs and the singer...they stained my soul. She used to sing them very quietly and so soft and tender....even today they haven't been surpassed...they used to **** me. And when she got to the bit where "...he takes a strange ******* his knee and he tells her things that he once told me..." it was all much too much! I thought they were exquisite!




Her voice and that moment tied to her apron strings lives forever in my mind. It is a little jewel of time that has never diminished ever. I was too young to understand the brandy factor and could never understand how other people's cake and almond icing just couldn't get next or near to my sister's!

Had a big auld tooth wrenched from my mouth at a young age and it went to my head. My sister had been frying sausages and I awoke in deep fever and delirium and wafted by the smell I arrived at the top of the stairs and proceeded to fall down them with a clatter and a crash thinking I could walk on thin air or the magic carpet ride of the smell of the sausages. Amazingly I arrived at the bottom with nary a broken bone but a sore bottom and to be cradled by my sister's arms and the lovely song of her calling my name over and over so that I became entranced by my own name in the music of her voice. The world was melting and everything existed in slow motion and I was there and not there in the moment that was slipping away from me even as I lived it. All I had to hold on to was my big sister's love and to me it was the most beautiful beautiful thing in the world.

REALITY'S UNRAVELLER


Charles Luxmoore on Gerard Manley Hopkins...

"...a fearless climber of trees, and would go up very high in the lofty elm tree, standing in our garden...to the the alarm of un-lookers like myself."


I on the other hand climbed trees to escape the world of my young sister's death...here at this great height I could be both in and out of the world...longing to be someone else...somewhere else....anywhere else...anyone else...even a bird if that could be...the map of the world spread below me...high above this bitter grief. I would "vanish" into bay windows and sit for hours whilst aunts and uncle stood a few feet from me and wondered where "the boy has gone" and call my name that didn't seem to be me anymore. I remember sitting between two silver milk churns down in Cork and everyone unseeing of me as if my grief had made me invisible. I was "Of reality the rarest-veined unraveller..."

***

The Habit of Perfection


ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:         5
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:         10
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust         15
So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend
Upon the stir and keep of pride,
What relish shall the censers send
Along the sanctuary side!         20

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride         25
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-coloured clothes provide
Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

As a kid I was astonished at JEAN COCTEAU's Orpheus where mirrors could be entered into and were a lane to the land of the dead...the images still zing around in my bloodstream...still astonishing me. One of my major influences in my poetry....this was a flickering poetry in motion.