Adrift I.

Fourteen days adrift at sea.

Morale had ebbed as far.

Sun dried spittle on the lips

Which crimped like roads to Shangri-La.

Men sucked orange (flesh and pips)

And ground the rinds down for their tea:

“A treat,” they’d whisper, close to tears;

The waves below lapped hungrily.

More days passed, in their place fears

Took sailors in their grips;

Those fears hauled three men overboard

To glug a fate beyond their ship’s.

At length one sailor saw his sword

Not as a sword but as some shears

With which to trim a better meal than

Dregs and rinds and empty beers.

Man looked to man much less like man,

Much more a scrumptious hoard:

Offal, marrow, suckled meats —

Enough for fillets flat and broad.

Hayfever

June rolls around, and I hear them,

Coiling their canisters

In the meadows

And depressions

Left by picnic blankets.

They want to bung me up,

To pepper-spray me until

My eye-water leaves me

Smudged rugged.

They want me to slow choke,

And wake with a stale fur

Like lichen over

Teeth and tongue.

These are your flowers, you poets,

These Husseinist bioarms,

These roses and lilies,

Petunias and daffodils,

Ranked to smear summer

Across the unchallenged face.

A Better Name

What do you know?

My name.

Your name?

My name.

Do you suppose Eric

Is stamped on your soul

In indelible hand?

Or did Dickie and Sue

Pluck randomly from

A blue boys’ book of names?

The latter.

Is Eric then the germ

Of each thought, word and act

That Eric — yourself — enacts?

Unlikely.

Unlikely.

Maybe though I have a better name?

One that spoken explains my borders

And maps out my life to the last.

Without a doubt.

But tracing that name is like damming

Time’s meander:

Hopeless, hopeless,

But what else can you do?

YOOOOUUUU…

Excuse Soulja Boy,

He’s here every morning —

Here for the same reason as you,

Would you believe it?

Shrink wrapped voice:

Nice squeaky cling-film

Round the larynx.

A few escapee YOUS!

And CRANKS!

Maybe even an OH!

Very little past that.

But why are you so hushed?

Who’s netted your tongue,

Loosened your cords?

You don’t want to end up

Like him, do you?

No, I thought not.

So say Aaaaaaah,

And let’s see what we can do.

Nervosa

An–, GREEK: without.

–Orexis, GREEK: appetite.

It’s true enough.

I lost my hunger for just about everything:

Love, fun, people.

I hungered only for hunger,

And hunger meant control.

I probably would have dragged

My unfed muscles

Across a mile of

Shattered willow pattern crockery,

Just to hit a calorie deficit.

And what do we see,

Depicted in said fragments?

A father’s consternation, blue.

A sister’s muted concern, white.

Friends smashed, morals smashed,

My feet blooded, a celery heart in each hand.

II.

Writing on the topic proves challenging.

Not emotionally — I’m a certified sharer —

But pragmatically.

My brain’s changed;

I find it hard now to pull on that old suit —

It’s a tight fit.

The Master-Poet

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.

Imagine III.

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.

Imagine II.

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.

Imagine I.

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’s Jealousy

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.