Tree poem, feedback welcomed

I suppose I could make it rhyme more. Just a first draft though.
From my blog http://wretchedcycloneofbones.blogspot.com

Tree poem

Let's hear it for trees!
Most die as seeds,
or shoots eaten by sheep,
to then wait there, patiently
up to 900 years.
They don't take a year off to go backpacking
They don't move house every few months
saying they can't stand the way those Dutch Elms
steal all the sunlight
and wouldn't the riverbank be a much nicer
place to bring up our saplings?
They don't squirm at the prospect of pollarding -
limbs hacked off and stuck in a truck,
oozing sap – half as much as we do
at the prospect of say, redundancy.
If they get chopped down they don't fight back
All they make is wood and conkers
and they're happy with that.
All they eat is dirt.
They don't complain in the rain, all that can hurt
is a chainsaw or hurricane; all they do as they die
is creakily sigh.

They're quite happy to go fuck themselves.
Apart from a few weeks of coming petals,
tens of years of boredom and patience spent
as sensorily deprived as hostages – but
you'd never hear them on Leafbook bitching
about losing their chlorophyll each year
or 'I'm so old, I must sway a bit more,
get rid of some of these rings.'
The cold, the wet, the dry, the heat
they endure. Now make like a tree
and TTFU.

Bully's special prize (or, why Bullseye really got cancelled) (Poem, feedback invited)

Bully's special prize
(or, why Bullseye really got cancelled)

At first, they hardly noticed the slips,
like when Jim asked one couple if they often went to church,
the producer snapping 'we'll edit that out.'
Or when they hit 'Faces' asking them, in banter,
if they thought the Turin shroud was real.
Maybe it was like speaking in tongues, 'cos
in the green room, Bowen denied all knowledge, but
''Stay out of the black and into the red,
you get nothing in this game for two in an extra-marital bed"
was what slipped out, the producer sweated
'we'll edit in last week's audio and the cameras on the audience.'
By the last round, when they revealed the prizes on the board,
it went: 'Iiiin one!' - “The Father”
'Iiiin two!' - “Son”
'Iiiin three!' - “and Holy Ghost!”
when it was plainly a crystal drinks decanter.
When Jim asked the winners if they wanted to gamble,
he said “You've got the time it took our Lord Christ to resurrect
to decide.” But what took the biscuit was when
“Let's take a look at what you could've won”,
and instead of a caravan or a speedboat, the board
revolved to reveal the very Kingdom of Heaven,
with angels, doves, clouds, Bernini sunlight, St Peter,
a caravan and a speedboat and a tankard,
glory shining all around Bully as a seraphim,
bellowing his beefy clarion down a heavenly golden horn.

Only then did the Producer take off his cans, put his head
in his hands and said 'No, this whole episode is going to be unusable.'

http://www.ukgameshows.com/p/images/5/50/Bullseye_bullies.jpg




(NB: Jim Bowen once described Bullseye as "the second-best darts-based game show on television". There were no others.)




This one is about how I started feeling religious while in hospital and almost almost on the point of death, but how it doesn't really fit in with my self-image and career choices. In this poem, Jim Bowen is my objective correlative.

Feedback welcome.

On a day when it rains so hard you can't do anything (poem/mood piece in progress)

I want to hear the whining of rusty fans and the grinding of a ship's hull reverberating through the factory. That's my idea of a holiday.

I need a peeling dancehall in the cordoned-off season, seabirds nesting in the flying buttresses. The salt in the air preserves nothing. It's like Doom Jazz.

I want the sleet to slip into bed. I need the world to be the room my head is. I want the shattered attic to look out on an overgrown garden and a sodden cardboard stage.

I hold the broken cistern and nineties porn fading on the walls, I want mere corrugation. I need to be the quietest applause in the audience. The middle sister, the stillborn mouse, the pirouetting spider-husk. I could stop all this now with a coffee or snack but I won't. I'm not emptiest yet. I'm just dusk.

All your ex-girlfriends as Soviet statue park (poem, w.i.p.)

All your ex-girlfriends as Soviet statue park

The first has been decapitated. Her severe eyes, colour gone,
could stare out seas or deserts, but instead gaze over a sliproad
to the retail park. This one's legs, which your current squeeze
poses inbetween for a digital photo, not a polaroid,
are still shapely despite the mould. That one's almost still whole,
I think she holds a discus, or is it chips? She's too far away. That one,
the short one, her pointing wrist now buried in the ground holds up
just her head and torso, like a paraplegic breakdancer. The one with a bob
hefts a thick book, and longingly surveys a flat on the run-down blocks.
Drizzle hunts your eye from some far-up granite rill.
The martial one looks up and out for planes, will never meet your gaze,
and the one you always overlook is just an unsmiling bust. It's ironic,
what you now have to pay to see what was once immanent.
Your current's in the gift shop so your artistic eye can't size her up.
Suns set. Atoms swap. Whichever hands hewed these megaliths
from the porphyry, pumice, basalt, held too much memory of lust.



Slightly based on George Szirtes' Busby Berkely in the Soviet Union, and not actually based on any specific ex-grrrrrlfiends at all, no, not one bit so don't go looking. Feedback welcome, comrades.

Poem: The Ages of Print

Tomorrow's chip wrapping is the first to go
yesterday's dead already coddle my roe.

Then there's the leaflets for food so fast
The green bin has gobbled them before they've hit the mat.

Porn, crumpled under holly – abandoned pups, dirty eggs laid dead of night,
cunts torn out, blacked out or worse, moustached and goggled. Scorched minge; glorious half-life.

Next, those that last through being overlooked.
Christian comic books. The Women's Library's unfiled tracts.

Annuals which hibernated teenage years to adulthood's irony.
Hardbacks cannot be chucked. Illustrated Treasure Islands

heft the same taboo as Reader's Digests, damming up the chazzers.
Signed Histories of the English Speaking Peoples, yellowing

duodecimally in fire-alarmed cellars. Ciphers as yet unconjectured.
Value these: Dead Sea Scroll, Euromillions winner, love letter.

Now, we place this poem. Bonfire, museum. I trust your soft clean hands.



----

I wanted to write something about all this printed material we're surrounded by, how we sort it, and maybe what it feels about itself without knowing it. I'm quite happy to have written a poem that's not facetious. But genuinely, let me know what you think.

(Diplomatic immunity) There's fucking in the dorm

and you can screw in your earplugs, but you can't turn off
your curiosity. He imagines the French girl murmuring
'Yes, circumvent my Maginot line, steal through my
Ardennes,' and as the German pistons in, recalls the
Spanish girl gyrating her drunken arse near his face
as he pretended to snore, heart palpitating, how he'd had
to wait till she and her friends had all collapsed, sleeping
the wedding cake reek of Amaretto, before stealing to the showers
to crank it out just to grab five hours before the morning train.
'I'm too old for this shit, Riggs' he quotes to himself, thinks
'as these kids won't have even heard of Lethal Weapon, so
that quote is its own proof. I am here for the renaissance,
but they are closer to their birth than I am to my puberty;
my death may be nearer still.' He topples an empty
Liebfraumilch on his way to the bogs.

Some kind of Voyage up my own Arsehole

Leap! raw red piles like a bouncy castle threshold
There the sweetcorn of self-doubt
A trapped bolus of indecision (like a Haywain)
The black scabs of burst hubris,
Five undigested meals cooked by dead girlfriends.
a Hungry Hungry Hippos ball
sprouts of despair
fat fat fat &c.
Lampreys and tapeworms tying themselves in slimy sexy knots.
Dante and Beatrice, both voiced by David Jason.
Duct tape all up one side
An appendix with its own appendix (?)
Pancreatic lipase dunked
in a bit of yellow feather.
Moonraker panel,
a different obscure reference.
Bit that looks like lichen,
like compost, like Quaid,
lego man's hand,
caving in bit,
dense black bits,
A key.