Four poems I was to read at a reading that was unfortunately cancelled. No sense in wasting verse, so, to the blog with it!
Thieves of Boredom
Thieves of Boredom! No, Not the Neighbourhood Roughs,
Not a Preferential Teenager, Plastered,
Aren't On the Run From The Cops...
Thieves of Boredom! Those, Friends,
Dire, French, Tasty, Pricking, Not Yet Overdone!
Thieves of What? Thieves of Recipes,
Thieves of Receipts, Contents, and Orderlies.
Spare A Moment! for them
Miserable! In Straights! Unfamiliar with SCIENCE!
Illiterate in Kennings Modern, Kennings of This Day and Age!
Spare a Moment for Them! Poor Thieves! Poor Scoundrels!
Is Boredom a Lost Art? The Free Press Asks! Ponto, Fetch the Paper Here!
Let Us Demand! Say the Art School Dropouts...
Are They Meek! Are They Sorry! Are They To Be forgiven!
~~~~~~~~~This Reader Thinks Not:
"To Whom It May concern,
This Very Morning, my Boredom was filched
plucked, capered off with, in a word, STOLEN.
Off the Kitchen Counter,
Out the Window
Down the Alley,
Into the Sweet Crisp Mother-EXPLETIVE air!
Just like THAT. How do you like it!
What am I supposed to do NOW?"
A Puppet's Plaint
a puppet play muggy to recall
(as with all good muggings of sensation)
but it started on a closed, sheltered vista
where a tree (handsome enough) lectured on pine needles
no good with masks
but the story was simple
woman desires to deadly serious effect
and some Nine Hells become casually manifest
in her face and her local dance
(dance a loose term for this ritualized jogging)
blues musicians (it had to be them)
whistled us off, meanwhile
into the roofbeams, sanded for depth.
The Ancient Loose Style
Centuries ago, this play was written
Called "out with the old..."
I am unsure who wrote it
But a monumental family
Must be responsible.
(The ancient loose style, they say
Was more irregular in China
Whereas the modern way
S'got rules. Or better,
The rules don't write themselves.)
Decades ago, a poet decided
"I'm done with this bunk."
It is said he was derided
By the folk, for his motto:
"Out with the old; and in the with the old."
Walt Whitman in Egypt
Walt Whitman in Egypt! This is the worst spin-off ever.
Chants Democratic in the land of High Priests,
Polytheism, Cat Lovers, Fool, Arab Cinema, Om Kalthoum and unmentioned,
The dynasties of asiatic autocracy?
How did I end up here? Did I follow Tin Tin?
Why do they chant my name? Who still bothers
Advice from an American spirit, a Democratic spirit?
Do they want to hear it? Whether they want to or not
I suppose I have to sing it. But it's been a while...Let the rough get used to Facebook and Twitter...
Ok here goes, in 140 character bursts! The spirit of a civil war, healthy,
Signs of life growing in an eternal desert...I, Walt Whitman, of Cairo the son,
With millions who shout, it's been done, but never here,
I too am ridden down by camels and horses,
That's a new one. I don't want to miss your Pyramids, your Sphinx, Suez,
But they're closed until you break with antiquity!
So shatter a few museum pieces, American archaeologists might get upset
But they don't realize, as I do, that democracy shatters, has its terrible twos, that they themselves loved to break things once...
And when, in generations, they see this shattered Dynastic sculpture
They will herald it as a revolutionary masterpiece.
You Arabs, servants to your one guide, and his prophet, and him only,
Weird as it may seem to us both, I, an American, am with you when you snap off the tether.
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