I fractured my funny bone
on the bedpost overnight
got into a squabble with myself:
you’re wrong.
No, I’m right !
when a CRAAACK
splintered my sleep
and a SCREEEEAM
split the night
I fractured my funny bone
on the bedpost overnight.
Now I can’t pull a pun,
or even crack a joke
or wink a double entendre
I’m a sad sort of bloke.
All the Well Ordered Books.
All the well ordered books
behave themselves just like chooks
leaping down with squawk and cluck
and soon begin to run amuck
scrambling around from door to door
for crumbs of knowledge upon the floor
Les in Real Life,
The book of Les’ s poetry just fell off the desk
onto the polished wood floor.
At 783 pages it created quite a bang.
The millipede on the wall twitched.
The fluff sausage dogs in the corner jumped.
Les in real life was as hefty as his ‘Collected’.
He wrote poems celebrating the fat, his tribe,
including Quintets For Robert Morley,
the bushy-browed, triple-chinned English actor.
with the plummy voice.
There’s nothing plummy about our Les’s poetry.
It is wide of girth as Les himself, capacious,
containing jokes, puns, outlandish rhymes,
skew whiff metaphors., and clever insights.
It is written in Aussie English.
I bent down, picked dear old Les off the floor.
No need to go to gym tomorrow
lugging Les around.,
Timing is Everything.
It’s like stand-up.
The audience is a bowl
of expectations.
Can you pull it off
this time?
Now you’ve taken your meds.
You stand tall,
clutch the old mike.
Come on, baby, you say.
Don’t die on me now.
Then weeeeeeeeeeee
out it comes
in one joyful, exuberant stream
like a stallion.
What a performance.
You will sleep well tonight.
You prophesy
there’s a flood coming
so I make a run for it
dash inside
flip the lid —
there’s only a trickle.
You fickle !
We are sitting across from each other
trying not to stare
looking down at our phones.
There are some paintings on the wall
but no one is looking at them.
Perhaps they are the sort of paintings
that are not meant to be looked at
but are there to establish a presence,
maintain a mood.
Then I notice the paintings,
half figurative, half abstract
in faded denim blue
with black, springy squiggles
like a cat’s whiskers
are not signed.
Perhaps the painter was half abstracted
when he painted them
& simply forgot.
Surly.
Bono looks surly.
Putting him beside a book called ‘Euphoria’
did it.
Bono feels anything but.
Euphoric, that is.
He’s been languishing on the Express Shelf
for three weeks
while books all around him have been flying
off the shelf.
‘Pissed’ is closer to the mark
as in ‘Pissed off’.
Bono is not used to this sort of treatment.
I would take him home myself
but I already have.
If the book was as lean and finely crafted
as a U2 song
it’d be different.
But it is as bloated as a Pynchon novel.
‘Ditherers’
There’s a place at the slow end of town
where the fussy and fastidious
can’t-make-up-their- minds go.
It’s called ‘Ditherers’, a little hither
of Yon.
It’s where you mull over the menu
menacingly slow.
And dishes are consumed at a pace
only snails know.
Where anecdotes meander for miles
while the night nods off
and the moon hangs low,
There’s a diner called ‘Ditherers’
where minds to and fro.
But What If I ….
I don’t think I can run anymore.
What?
I run out of puff. I can walk fast though. Does that count?
But you’re a running joke. Can’t you push yourself?
But what if I damage my hamstring?
Then you’ll become a lame joke. Get it?
Hey, I’m the one supposed to be cracking the jokes here.
Then run, for god-sakes, run.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
You could have knocked me over with an albatross
when I heard that four off-kilter waltzes I was listening to
were by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Hang on, I thought,
my favourite Romantic poet [ sorry Wordsworth] whom
I studied at Uni, who wrote one of the great lyric narratives
of all time, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was also
a classical composer? How did this just become known?
Did he moonlight as a musician, did he snuggle up
to the great composers of his time? But then the announcer,
as if reading my mind, clarified that the composer was
Samual Coleridge Taylor whom his mother named after
the great poet. After I calmed my farm, I settled back
and listened to more of Samuel C.
John Malone 