All My Christmases

Today on my front doorstep a bundle,

tied in coloured string, wrapped in cellophane,

5 New Yorkers, a Paris Review and

two School Magazines with my poems in,

the Covid backlog I thought would never come.

It felt like all my Xmases had come at once,

enough binge reading to last me till the Big Day.

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.

This is For You, she said

Maybe because I was slipping away into the comfortable, undemanding

arms of magazines, she gave me a brand new bookmark from ifaw.

Now all you have to do is find a book to put it in, she said.

It’s like someone buys you a pair of slippers for your birthday,

you’ve got to get a dressing gown to go with them, and then a box of cigars

and a bottle of tawny port like an English gentleman to get you through

the evening and a cozy murder mystery to curl up with before the fire

& suddenly I knew what type of novel I wanted.

• what book have you got .lined up to read?
• do you smoke cigars, drink tawny port and curl up before the fire of a winter evening?

Collateral Damage from Reading

 

You tell yrself

You’ve got to stop reading when you’re feeding yr face

That coffee, wine and honey leave stains

On the crisp, pristine pages but then you think, nah !

They’re the stains of life like grease marks

From yr fingers,

The collateral damage from reading;

Rain spots too when magazine’s are left outside,

Creases from the wind speed reading again

As though the story you found a bore was a real page turner;

Sometimes too blood stains from a nose bleed;

Marks like footprints in the sand saying

That someone’s been there

And, yes, had a good time.

 

 

Surfing the Zeitgeist

 

I was the flavour of the month

For twelve years

Then suddenly I wasn’t;

You either surf the zeitgeist

Or you don’t