Careless Love

They look like

miniature Xmas trees

growing carelessly

on the side of the road

their leaves plush

with pollen

Xmas trees for bees

I Do My Best Work in Bed

I do my best work in bed, she said.

I do my best work in bed.

When all is said and done,

I do my best work in bed.

Scurry beneath the covers,

pull the sheet up over my head.

I do my best work in bed, she said.

I do my best work in bed.

It’s where my magic garden is,

my fantastic flower bed

where poems and images blossom

& music plays in my head.

Some think better sitting up,

but I’m too easily misled.

I do my best work in bed, she said.

I do my best work in bed.

• pic by Pinterest
• * have you a special place where you find inspiration?

Stragglers

Don’t be in a hurry, the buds tell me.

Open when you’re ready.

What does it matter if others blossom

before you?

Remember the gulls

how they fly in loose formation over the sea

at sunset,

how there’d always be some bringing up the rear,

the stragglers.

It’s not a race as our Prime Minister said.

They get there in their own sweet time.

Like my teachers said of me, you may be slow, John,

but you get there in the end,

It’s okay to be a straggler.

Wilt

She’s not coming, mate.

Sure she is. If not today, then tomorrow.

Your flowers are beginning to wilt.

I can get new ones.

There’s a party under the bridge tonight. You coming?

You go. Have a good time. I’ll be here. You never know, she might ….

Nah, mate. She won’t. Don’t wilt, you hear. Just don’t wilt.

Heretical Beauty

No one in their right mind while wandering

lonely as a cloud would proclaim they had spied

a host of scrawny weeds upon the hillside

and break into a jig. Yet weeds have their worshipers.

You can scour the internet and dig up poems,

odes to weeds, panegyrics. They are the bones

of the earth. Wordsworth got in first, that’s all.

But his daffy little poem is not the last word.

The weeds will rise up, their heretical, skewed beauty,

tough as barbed-wire, will find its bards.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

It had been bugging me for months so I took a clipping down to the Garden Centre.

What’s it called? I asked. What’s its botanical name?

I didn’t much like the sound of it.

So I asked its common name.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the man said.

I very much liked the sound of that.

so I went home and dubbed it with my royal ruler.

Henceforth you shall be known as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, I announced with a clipped classy accent.

It sounded like a song.

Like something from ‘Revolver’.

Ghost Galahs

I want to photograph the galahs

clowning on the bare limbs

of the Norfolk pines

but the buggers won’t keep still

 

racing around like particles

inside a Hadron Collider.

Just as you line up a couple

They’d be elsewhere.

 

All I needed was a panoramic shot

But then they’d be off

Across the river, raucous as a footy crowd..

Better off snapping flowers,

blossoms.