I wrote a poem once about a bath.
How you emerge from one
‘rosy-skinned and luminous as if
Fresh from a voyage’.
I had a sleep like that last night and wrote this poem.
Happy Haiku
You’re a writer.
You wake up with something to say.
Already you feel the wind beneath your wings.
You hop into your little plane
And putter up into the sky
Where you write your happy haiku
Before the breeze blows it away.
Shelby was disgusted.
She would sleep that night in the refrigerator.
She admired its stern solidity.
At least the mice couldn’t get to her.
And if she felt like a midnight snack, she wouldn’t have far to go.
She hopped in.
It wasn’t long before her teeth began chattering. That would keep her awake. Give her away if he was still in the house.
So she bit down on a leg of lamb.
That seemed to work.
She drifted off dreaming of sheep in thick woolen jumpers serially hurdling fences.
No one writes poems about telephone booths anymore
So I thought I would write one,
about the time I drove down
A series of side roads to avoid a booze bus,
when I almost ran into one.
It was so nostalgic.
It was the sort of booth that Clark Kent would dash into
to change into superman.
I opened the door and went inside.
It stank of stale urine and cigarette smoke.
The paintwork was peeling. There were no phone books
Only numbers,
‘if you’re after a good time call …’, that sort of thing
and anti-gay graffiti.
It looked like
the last telephone booth on the planet before mobile phones
took over.
I closed the door, climbed into my car and drove off,
Heavy as a telephone booth,
into the arms of the booze bus.
The challenge was to write a short poem about a domestic chore in a positive, uplifting way. I chose doing the washing:
Purr
The sheets on the line
Rub against
The warmth of the sun.
You can almost
Hear them purr.
I wish I could pop it in a bottle
This morning’s high clear chortle
And unstopper it when I’m low.
Such unhindered melodies
Hint of secret ecstasies
That we barely come to know.
Will you turn off the f#@#ing faucet? Holly hollers. A hippo could drown in here.
But you’re not a real hippo.
A girl can dream, can’t she?
But you’re made of stone!
That’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Coming from a puppet made of wood who thinks its a boy!!
I love to feel the cold, he says. The cold keeps you sharp, alert. You don’t fall asleep at the wheel when you feel the cold. Your nerve ends ping. The world sparks. There’s no sloth, no lethargy in the cold. Only pure need which is why I’m out here now loping along beneath a lycanthropic moon.
I’m on a bus, he said. It’s like that bus in ‘Speed’. It can never stop. It can’t slow down. It can’t pick up passengers. It tears through the countryside in a purple blur. You don’t get a chance to take it in. There’s no such thing as a ‘breather’. There are no rest stops. The driver never sleeps. You’re more hostage than passenger. I’m on a bus, he said. And the bus is me.
The bus shelter at the end of our street grinds its teeth at night.
Sometimes I sit with it, hold its hand, listen to its tale
of drunks and suicides,
of lycanthropes baying at the full moon,
of lonesome Lotharios weeping in their fists
I talk to it too about my problems
Of the jig-saw days when pieces don’t fit
Of the times when your heart races
Like a wildebeest on the veldt
But latches onto nothing.
After a while we both settle
and I head off home
beneath a lopsided moon.
I tried writing a poem once about a running joke. It was just ahead of me as the best poems are. I sprang off my writer’s block and ran after it with my butterfly net and my blue bucket of hope; but I was out of condition and this one really had legs. It waved back to me as it disappeared in a cloud of dust over a nearby hill.
John Malone 