‘And what are five miles from a station in these days of bicycles?’
-E.M. Forster, A Room With A View
Nothing cracks the rigid heart up
more easily than a microchip
in the cucumber sandwiches
and a lick of dubstep can really ruin
a lawn party in a Merchant Ivory flick.
My mother was sure Ratzinger
resigned the papacy because they were making him
update his Twitter feed too often.
Some of the saddest moments of Bonaparte’s life
came while reading
Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Time itself is an adjustment.
Do you know, for instance,
Katharine Hepburn, on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer,
refused to believe there was such a thing
as a homosexual?
Mankiewicz, born to Jewish immigrants,
must have learned diplomacy early on.
His line:
Belief isn’t necessary
if you can act like you believe.
This— here—
is the sharp edge of nostalgia.
The cowpuncher pining for a white Alabama.
How the man who broke his wife’s jaw longs
for his wife to come home.
It’s hard to pity them, I know.
But if compassion’s worth anything
we ought at least to try.
The light has upped a notch.
Their rigid hearts
repine like window-blinds.
These days of bicycles have made
no new truths
but they say that things are clearer now.
By what’s reflected up from water,
in the caverned underside of leaves,
we see Freddy Honeychurch and Mr. Emerson jumping
pale and bare-arsed into The Sacred Lake;
the Reverend Mr. Beebe
circling their young,
wet bodies like a paunchy moon.
Oct 22, 2019
Oct 22, 2019 at 1:38 PM UTC
‘And what are five miles from a station in these days of bicycles?’
-E.M. Forster, A Room With A View
Nothing cracks the rigid heart up
more easily than a microchip
in the cucumber sandwiches
and a lick of dubstep can really ruin
a lawn party in a Merchant Ivory flick.
My mother was sure Ratzinger
resigned the papacy because they were making him
update his Twitter feed too often.
Some of the saddest moments of Bonaparte’s life
came while reading
Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Time itself is an adjustment.
Do you know, for instance,
Katharine Hepburn, on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer,
refused to believe there was such a thing
as a homosexual?
Mankiewicz, born to Jewish immigrants,
must have learned diplomacy early on.
His line:
Belief isn’t necessary
if you can act like you believe.
This— here—
is the sharp edge of nostalgia.
The cowpuncher pining for a white Alabama.
How the man who broke his wife’s jaw longs
for his wife to come home.
It’s hard to pity them, I know.
But if compassion’s worth anything
we ought at least to try.
The light has upped a notch.
Their rigid hearts
repine like window-blinds.
These days of bicycles have made
no new truths
but they say that things are clearer now.
By what’s reflected up from water,
in the caverned underside of leaves,
we see Freddy Honeychurch and Mr. Emerson jumping
pale and bare-arsed into The Sacred Lake;
the Reverend Mr. Beebe
circling their young,
wet bodies like a paunchy moon.
B.T. Joy is a British poet and short fiction writer living in Glasgow. He has also lived in London, Aberdeen and Heilongjiang, Northern China. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies and podcasts worldwide including poetry in Yuan Yang, The Meadow, Toasted Cheese, Numinous: Spiritual Poetry, Presence, Paper Wasp, Bottle Rockets, Mu, Frogpond and The Newtowner, among many others. His debut collection of poetry, Teaching Neruda, was released in 2015 by Popcorn Press and his 2016 collection Body of Poetry is also available through Amazon. He can be reached through his website: http://btj0005uk.wix.com/btjoypoet