I know the universe works mentally…
I know everything.
Later still,
He came upon a revelation.
We all see it differently.
A summer’s breeze
Is nothing is
One soprano in an Aeolian choir is
God’s breath is
A brotherly flux in air pressure is
Feeling balmy on the skin after
All day sending emails.
More though,
The mind is as malleable as code:
You can edit, you can edit, you can edit.
He realised later that God was not one
For guarantees.
And if not He, then who?
Misery clinched the crannies,
Constant as thought.
He was a wind-up lantern in semi-solid fog;
He scarcely saw his hands as they worried the crank.
As a child, God made him a solemn promise:
Life would be good.
Not in so many words,
But in overstuffed stockings and doting grandparents;
In Milka after school and waterslides in France;
In a vat of cascading Lego bricks
And a familiar hand to flick the bedside lamp;
In imagination– yes, imagination most of all.
The sun did not rise today —
No —
He pounced unannounced,
Shouldering his jealousy
Into the unguarded Earth.
He’d seen, you see,
How she seldom shied
From the lips of the breeze;
H’d noted too
The chiselled moon,
And how he’d come early,
Adorning the blue.
So as long as he might,
He kept his lover in sight,
Stifling her surface
With a cloying love bright.
Her grass he yellowed,
And my skin pinks,
Blushing until, reluctant,
He sinks.
She wanted so bad to be edgy,
To square her rounded mould:
“Adidas for Joules, vaping for baking,”
Was a mantra she to herself told.
Each day in her cap a new feather
(She donned a fresh peak from Ellesse):
MD, EDM, and avid Corbynism
Were the limes from which she squeezed zest.
But one balmy afternoon whilst reading–
That Postmodern bulwark, Infinite Jest–
Her eyelids drooped, her head soon followed,
Until her chin found respite on her breast.
She awoke — oh horror! — to a shapely
Metamorphosis, a most peculiar bodily lesion!
Where once limbs and curves, now
Twelve vertices: enough for a dodecahedron.
Upstairs, I hear it through the walls
A monologue, it seems
Hers pitched so high
That is spears the muffle
His —
I assume it’s a his —
Too low to detect, like a whalegram.
You can hear tears in her throat
But not the words.
Sad, heart, fucking.
Somebody has done this,
Definitely a body;
Only personable cruelty can elicit
Such pinpoint hate,
Not malchance,
Nor thorny fate.
Like ermine in the summertime,
I’ll need you
Six months ago.
Could you open the door for me, please?
No, no, no, you’ll never advance like that:
Tailing with a “please”, like a servile rat.
And that ambiguous opener, the tip-toeing “Could”;
Let them know its non-optional, a must, more even than a “should”.
To do this, we bolt the imperative to the verb:
“Open the door”, at volume, so as to ensure that they’ve heard.
And for godsakes dispense with that awful “for me”;
Allow the cretin to retain some sense of their autonomy–
In fact, let them trust that they’re worth something to you:
A fronted adverbial — “kindly” — will do.
But why are we turning door knobs at all?
I’ll make a conservative sum to rile your gall:
Three seconds to open, a hundred times a day,
Thirty minutes a week, two hours per pay;
In a calendar year you’ve lost a whole day’s labour–
Ergonomically speaking, it leaves a grim flavour.
I’d direct you to this electric model — how its glass does so glisten —
And this way, you won’t ever even need a colleague’s assistance.
If God was anywhere,
He’d be crashing on your couch.
Is there a crueller sport
Than skimming stones?
I implore you to opine otherwise.
Just look:
A child of nine,
Face screwed in earnest,
Scouring stones, weighting stones,
Appraising stones like a student
Before the avocado basket.
Not flat enough here,
Not round enough there,
Disfigured, unshapely, aeronautically impaired.
But then:
A truffle in the rough!
A wonderstone! Smoothed and plumped
By God’s own hands.
Yet the child admires no more than a moment,
Encircles twixt thumb and index
The stone,
And adds imperfect technique to a perfect tool.
Six skims? Seven? “I counted eight!” they cry,
Having jettisoned perfection to prop up the lie.
Shorter Poems 