Oh, tell us!
Won’t you tell us?
The master-poet smiled.
The smile meant no.
He adjourned to the coast to die.
From a clifftop verandah he peered down
At the swash, hoping for a glimpse of Venus,
Birthing on the waves.
He didn’t see her,
And so he lay down to die.
Crowds bubbled to hear The Simile:
Students, professors, aficionados,
Past lovers, fellow poets,
Those who knew the master-poet
As a sardonic cad.
Ahem.
I’m like the tooth fairy,
In that I’m secretly your Dad.
There are just so many of them
And they all have ideas.
Do you know how I’ve scraped and trawled
For a tuft
A tuft
That hasn’t been trodden, retrodden,
Rucked over by sixteen-pairs of aluminium studded boots?
But now I think I’ve got it —
Just in time, too.
And I tell you:
One unplucked wisp of green
Is worth a mudded life
In sullied nails.
Some readers prefer their
Verse with gilding,
Others gelded,
Others spilt crudely
Like that thing that Shell did.
I just want mine
Bittersweet
(Like the The Verve song)
And to go the extra —
If not mile —
Then furlong.
The thing we must say first is that it’s blue;
Next I’d venture comment upon its size;
I fear to the ocean I’d bring nothing new
Without espousing some appalling lies.
But I’ve reasoned that lies can be for good,
And can, perhaps, point to our higher truths;
Those equestrian types would have me rude
If I dissembled not my hate of hooves.
And in this case my verbal reticence,
My sneaky sealing of opinion’s doors,
Shows that I’m conflict-shy (at the expense
Of my contempt for those who would talk horse).
So when I call the tide land’s fading kiss,
Just know there’s nothing in my verse amiss.
Keep your Facebook-tier truisms
And cringe inducing ‘poems’;
My fear is once I’m dead that
You’ll engrave on my stone:
here lies Ruaridh
he touched life’s
depths
he should remember
going forward
to come back up for breath.
***
My poems are strawberry handkerchiefs
(That means their proof is ocular);
But instapoets are fake deep
Like backwards binoculars.
Every night a different thought:
I ought to write them down.
But to my consternation
I frown, like a clown
Unlaughed, and lose all
Motivation to arrange.
Shorter Poems 