I Had Left the President Outside

I had left President Trump outside.

I don’t know what got into me

but one moment I was reading about him

in a New Yorker article a week before

his fall, and I remembered I had put the oven on

& forgot all about him. The ex-President

was having a hard enough time without being abandoned

on a plastic chair with a cold southerly sweeping in & being compared

to Nixon a week before his fall. How the mighty have fallen, Shelley

might have intoned so I did the decent thing and brought the magazine in

where conditions were more conducive to the ex-President. Besides,

with the hail beginning to clatter outside, I wanted to finish the article.

The Poem Outside my Window

There’s a beautiful poem outside my window

a shrub two and a half metres tall

with coquettish purple flowers

and a little frost of throats.

There are other colours too

lavender and white

a trinity of colours.

It has a botanical name, of course,

though I much prefer its common name:

Yesterday. Today and Tomorrow.

I’ve written about it before but not like this,

Yesterday was our 215 th day with no community transmissions.

Today we have 20.

Tomorrow?

We watch the News Bulletins, updates from the Chief Medical Officer,

Blooms of anxiety.

Viral blooms.

Yes! I Was There …

between 1.45 and 3.00 pm on Sunday

when I ducked in to get a pint of milk

but I only have to get tested if symptoms appear.

Now every cough

sneeze

run of the nose

headache

is freighted with significance

Torpedoes

I want to make a bee line for the shop —

there is panic buying again —

but my bowels won’t let me,

Please let me go, I say.

But my bowels are recalcitrant.

When they get in this mood there is nothing

you can do.

I threaten them with torpedoes,

my moondrop grapes

but they grip their fists even harder

against the attack.

So rather than sit and wait & twiddle my thumbs

I write this little poem.

My bowels immediately relent.

There are enough bad bowel poems out there

anyway.

Mine does not want to be added to the list.

My bowels heave a sigh of relief.

My Three Favourite Words

Someone once asked me what were my three favourite words? I had to think. There are 171,146 words in the English language so there’s a lot to choose from.

After many days, I came up with three words but they weren’t even English words. They were the names of places. Mogadishu, Timbuktu and Trincomalee. In recent times they have all been war-torn places so it wasn’t the places themselves that I loved but the sound of their names, Not the shape of the words but their sounds as I swilled them in my mouth: like the best cab sav or the best dark chocolate or better the cab sav washing down the dark chocolate. A rich, sensual taste. One that lingers.

Now there is another. A name just as magical. Talloola. It is a mythical place, a country town conjured by Carolyn Cordon, a friend of mine and a fellow blogger. Her cozy murder mysteries which she is writing now are set there. I can’t wait to read a draft

* what are some of your favourite words?

*pic courtesy of Wiki Commons

You Hear a Noise

You hear a noise. It’s past midnight.

So what do you do?

You hop up, turn on a few lights, tramp down the passageway. open and close cupboards, bang doors, make a lot of noise.

Then you stop and listen.

There it is again.

Those bloody mice, you say, though you’ve seen no evidence of any.

It’s nothing, you decide, nothing. House noises.

You head back to the bedroom, turn off the lights.

Someone taps you on the shoulder.

the Coffee Cup

1

my coffee cup

is

an atlas

of stains:

a dark blotch vast as Asia,

another,

a continent of khaki

shaped like Australia;

there’s a South America too

[but no North]

And around the rim

an aurora borealis of brown

when the sun

lights it up.

2

Clean it, a visitor declares.

Clean it? I say.

This miracle of incidental art?

This repository of rudimentary remarques?

It’d be tantamount to the Taliban

blowing up

the Buddhist statues

in Afghanistan!

No!

The Impossible Task

I gave it an impossible task

but it was my mind

what could it not do?

There was a song

we’re talking way back

I thought the early nineties

an oddball song

with a female lead

and a bouncy backing group.

Can you work it out?

No?

Nor could my mind.

It bugged me all day.

There were some nonsense lyrics

but the song was catchy.

Any idea yet?

Nor had I.

I took a Bex and had a lie down

then the initials KLM came into my head.

Hang on, I said, aren’t they the initials of a Dutch airline?

But I hopped up anyway and keyboarded it into my laptop.

Have you got it yet?

Well, what popped up were the initials KLF.

Now do you know?

Then the name of the female singer came up, then the band then the name of the song,

one of the most oddball songs ever to become a # 1 or 2 all over the world.

Go and check it out on YouTube.

I did and yes I did get up and dance

and I was taken back to MuMu Land with Tammy and the KLF

all over again.

• have you ever undertaken a search like this with so little information?

More Lamb than Hedgehog

My mentor told me how to write a poem about slippers. Make it easy, he said. comfortable and cozy, warm, no prickly bits. More lamb than hedgehog.

I had a girlfriend once who forbade me to wear slippers: ‘Next thing  I know”, she said, ‘You’ll be wearing a dressing gown, reading cozy murder mysteries and shuffling around the house like an old man.”

My dogs when they were puppies took a violent dislike to slippers, tearing them apart with a vitriolic zeal of which my girlfriend would have approved. For years I walked around the house in loafers until the puppies grew up and out of their habit.

Whenever I hear Bing Crosby sing White Christmas over the PA system in his hush puppy voice I think of slippers. Slippers are like bean bags for the feet.When you slump into them they have the feel of home.

Some Poems Start Out as Poems

Some poems start out as poems, homely descriptions

of slippers, for instance or berry bowls, toasters

but then over-reach, chasing chimeras, conundrums,

leading us down a rabbit hole of nonsense.

Others take the easier way, finding their inner teacher,

their gasbagging guru. Some poems start out as poems

but end up as pedagogy. You feel you’re in

the classroom again.