The scowl of your elevated Cornish brow
as you lean over the hard won typewriter
and understanding so much of the world
yet deferring
in part
to the men in your life,
that is how I always imagine you
Daphne,
A murderess I cling to
with hands gripped tight,
white knuckled and surrendering
my masculinity, a joke in your
once noble Gallic background,
this I gleaned from you,
I am poor
a servant in your house,
They only tell you
when they hear
that you are dead,
just how much they love you.
The outpouring of grief on the streets,
The middle class avenues filled
with popular opinion and anguish
and in the houses of the fashionable
you get the sympathetic nod becoming of their understanding
and they hear the wails from the true believers;
they are unified when you die,
when the starlet fails to shine early one morning
or when the hero packs away his whip
one last time
She had no heroes,
no room in her life
for such romantic thought
or strength of feminine culture.
No heroes, not any more.
She swore off them, respect
whittled away
chip by whittled chip
and now the only hero
in her life
is the one who lives
in an imagined world
where She sleeps, catatonic
and death like; the hero arrives
faceless but frees her from her cell, her prison, her solitary
confinement.
There is no room for heroes,
for She will not relinquish the key.
I AM NOT A ZIMMER FRAME
OR A LEANING POST…
Breathe easy, calm the old spirits and wheel
gently away and leave the person
so in love with my handlebars
that they could not stop fondling them,
caressing with deepening fingers
or leaning so heavily upon them
that like an irate
and unwanted suitor
I was getting more aware of their
jiggling up and down and heavy handed
strokes as each moment passed.
It’s not that hard at the end of the day
Nature reclaimed her
and now the window is no more,
a raging sky and sea
meet in the middle
and blur without the sense of Azure;
we live in the window frame
now and forever
as piece by piece,
the world crumbles
into the sea.
Ian D. Hall
Misused, good old Robert Browning,
I had long forgotten his Pippa Passes
and this charming year of spring
as the cowl and the twat fight over centuries
old words before vulgar Americanism
gave rise to the populist non thinker
and easily offended.
Good ol’ Robert Browning, nobody
would dare call him a twit
except some repeated self serving survivor,
the Gobermouch, the misused Nun
who used to bellow my breath away
but now I see for the fool
and has no use for the jammiest bits of jam.
He takes photographs
of places
that I will never see,
he takes photographs
of doors that are crumbling,
its paint flaking off and carried
on the wind
to land on gravel paths and trampled upon
underfoot.
The masonry is cracking
and graffiti winds its way,
spray paint adoringly
in nature’s colours,
along to a point where it hides
the webs of cracked glass
and the solitary red van outside
It is the easy target,
not bullet proof
because we are the ones that carry
around our lives in your hands
and as you consider mass extermination
of the disabled, mass pariah
on a stake, a struck match
that flickers with the rhetoric
that comes out of your mouth, you
want us dead, the shame of memory, the cull
in place that says we cannot live,
despite it actually being the fault of
Government, of life, of life,
what life, you are
the ones who are sick, the cull
My choice of clothes
is mine, I shall not
wear a suit,
suffer a tie around
my ageing neck,
I might stretch
to a cravat, but then
that would be ironic,
me to a tee, I would rather
be damned for wearing
a ballgown
than endure the ridicule
of looking like a soggy stuffed up
potato, full of misplaced
pride, no starch, no starch
at all, not stiff,
put me in a costume, let me be
in fancy dress, clown that I am
You were young and beautiful,
the long red hair, dyed
but not vibrant, not outlandish
or gaudy, just beautiful
which matched your eyes
in a playful, yet stern like feature, a Cleopatra
as she maintained order and brought
generals and leaders to their quivering knees;
you were beautiful and for a while
I was lost in your young eyes
dancing in alert fashion
on the way to Waterloo.
It was only as I went to leave
the bus that I noticed the old man,