Another entry that is from the pen of another person. This will be the third recently but they have all, for their own reasons, been irresistible.
This one, completely out of character for me, is a poem.
I confess to a liking for certain poems - mostly parodies, or spites, for example:
Ring-a-ring o’geranium
A pocket full of uranium
Hiro-Shima
All fall down
To ‘sillies’ like:
I wish I was a little grub with whiskers ‘round my tummy’
I’d climb into a honeypot and make my tummy gummy.
Very old-fashioned sort of poetic tastes.
This is a real poem:
The Gathering
You know when the world grinds its iron glove
and the chipped teeth of the town shine along the rivulets
beside those corny mansions you mentioned
and everyone piles into
their minds for a while, behaving.
Where the cats wallop through the buckets
of streets and dogs unfold tongues
into displays of dusk
and you can see thin suns mainly
sinking with decisions over prisons.
It’s where the grey fields of our torn insane are withered
in white. It’s where the trains come
flaming through under the brassieres
of old offices and Jupiter swings through
its rusty ear, bangled, burgled.
We can meet there, you and I, to smoke
our taken thoughts in the cupboards of the evening.
There will be opera and stars.
No one will cough or throw bolts
along the canal. Knives will be wet with meat, alone.
Cuddled in the briars we can mope among plastic sheets
shimmering with hairdos like a canteen.
Everyone will come. The vicar
will shake out gunmetal gowns
beside a small lake of trolleys. You will be missed.
Here’s the odd thing about this.
I absolutely do not understand it. Not a bit.
And yet.
I am compelled to read it again.
Why?
I like it. I don’t know why. It is like a Picasso. I have no idea what it is supposed to be and yet there is pleasure in it. Higgledy–piggledy word pictures.
Just like the last entry it pleases me because it was written properly in a man-like manner by a man. It is not flowery, it is not delicate and lacey and yet there is a charm to it in a masculine way.
It supports my supposition in a previous ‘Blog’.
I am happy.
Thank you for letting me reproduce it.
Courtesy of Salt Publishing.
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