Theatre-Piece


Poems 1991-2


Duncan McGibbon
Theatre Piece


Term

1. Chorus 1
2. Soliloquy 1
3. Love -Mimes 1
4. Soliloquy 2
5. Love-Mimes 2
6. Soliloquy 3
7. Tableau Vivant: Advent
8. Soliloquy 4
9. Tableau Vivant:Gaudete
10. Love-Mimes 3
11. Soliloquy 5
12. Priapal 1

Summer Break

13. Soliloquy 6
14. Chorus 2
15. Soliloquy 7
16. A Rubyiat for my Parents
17. Soliloquy 8
18. Priapal 2
19. Soliloquy 9
20. Love-Mimes 4
21. Soliloquy 10
22.Chorus 3
23. Soliloquy 11
24.Chorus 4
25.Soliloquy 12
26.Tableau Vivant:Fete de L’Assomption
27.Soliloquy 13

Showtime

28. Love-Mimes 5
29. Soliloquy 14
30. Chorus 5
31. Soliloquy 15.
32. Tableau Vivant:Our Lady’s Birthday.
33. Soliloquy 16
34. Final Chorus


TERM
Chorus 1: Of Parental Party Politics

His children dress and undress
for charades at neighbour’s parties.
Little Denches and Gielguds, out to impress,
in greasepaint that drools with Smarties.

Witches and gremlins, decked for the best
in cast-offs and wedding-dress gauze.
Togas that double up, done in swift zest,
a waist is a neckline knowing no pause.

Columbine and Scaramouche
play music with panache
shrill whistles a la bouche.
Recorders and tin cymbals clash.

Songs are practiced and destroyed
to fanfare in the acrobats.
Mimes and mimicry from an android,
wind-up infantas and emperor-rats.

Monster faces in orange paint
pallid lilacs, wet stage-blood.
The cut-paper dragons are quaint
He gives then a hug They think him a dud.

They leave for the stage, torn crepe flowers
crushed in their rooms, and floodlight the hall,
prima donnas of the boiled sweet shower,
while television laughter drowns out all.

Kids gone, he muses on the self
that made shift for Feste
that adulthood denies: the elf,
the princess still at large, beyond their sell-by day.

Soliloquy 1

Why do I, sad-hearted,
rest only at the refuse-hour,
under the power of animal sleep?
The hooded world is still,
this carcass- self
along with it.
Toil has taken its toll.
I am like Jerome
under canvas in Nazareth
or studied in his study
on canvas in Rome,
with a skull on his desk
in memory of mortality.

In mine the acuter memento
of children.
Remember to make a living,
you must live.
Love Mimes 1

I shall not touch you,
toccata of skin.
I shall not hold you,
tapistry of hair.
I shall not kiss you,
mouthpiece of breath.

In a time of silence,
in a time of stillness
in a time of cold,

I hold your loss.


Soliloquy 2

The old world
rediscovered by the new.
We are so used to ageing habitats,
we forget how this hovel
became our house.
Bless this interglacial,
Casa Quaternaria!
And the children,
those key Cro-Magnon
invaders
whom only
Neanderthal bluff keep down.

Beetle-browed, slow,
I guess at extinction
my wits cannot plan,
while new voices whoop
in unknown languages:
cave-paintings,
wet on the kitchen wall.

Love-Mimes 2

Lover in the night
you turn into the dark
to blind my urge’s sight.
Lover at dawn,
you turn into the light
to cast a shadow on my heart.

Soliloquy 3

I pile leaves
in the incinerator.
Autumn’s gravity
has given the garden
a sober concern.
Smoke hangs in the
bitter, After-Pentecost air.
I spill spent mast,
leathery and webbed
into the unseen
power of the flames.

While my children
dance and mime
around me.
The ins and outs
of gathering leaves
are just a dance
of earth sprites
in a Restoration
Masque of Death.
The year is an eaten meal.
that goes down
in a sudden brilliance
of tongues, blazing
the taste of new sounds
into speech.

Tableau Vivant: Advent

In an afternoon of muffled treads.
The linen mists
uncover silence.
My daughter,
white with reflections
from the ice outside,
writes Christmas lists
for friends she pictures,
bouncing about
on the trampoline
of her absent - minded smile.

Soliloquy 4

Always that shifty holding back,
“Ye have the dour on you”
a friend once said about me,
who had the knack
for a tactful phrase, though knew
enough about my scruffy
blue-baby past.
“Bad at sums.Gets huffy”
ranted the reports that last
despite the effort to renew.
To cross the gap, the grasp
is more difficult to hack
than than waiting on the on the sea
to repeat its contours back .

I think of the child who didn’t think it odd
to comment of another. “He can draw God.”

and want the same to draw one for me.
Tableau Vivant, Gaudete Sunday.

No fairy light
upon the top.
Do not believe
the midday truth,
that casts no shadow.

Light wholly from above
reveals no source.

Into the dark
truth traces
back its beam
to reach its seed,

as an infant’s hand
finds in her mother’s finger
an exacter hold.

Love Mimes 3

In lethargy after a row,
I repeated the words of our vow.
You listened unmoved to our past
that once held our loves fast.
The dead have more dignity
than the unloved in their pity.
They are only themselves who thirst
to be true to what they promised first


Soliloquy 5

Outside an Easter moon
flares above the garden
like a prison arc-lamp.
I spent the day riddling
a former dweller’s relics
from the soil. Lead paint,
glass, old fire-place tiles,
a cauldron buried by
this Tommy-eared gunner
my predecessor.
They all lie so deep
in the drawers of our dream,
our vernacular cast-offs,
gullible litter of the days
we cannot part from.
I think of a friend who died,
a man who dreamed,
and never came to see us.
I mark religion essays.
page after page
to pay the hours’ mortgage.
Through the pen
and through the trowel
we riddle the new :
I think of a lost face
and lift it from oblivion
and mark his smile.

Priapal 1

Aristotle long ago
decided it was so.
Boldness does not go
with the categoric“man”
Whether or not it can
it’s time my hair re-grew.
Don’t think it blue
to plant some privy crop
upon my public top.


Summer Break
Soliloquy 6

That the cloud bank over the carriageways,
thick as shadows, or as dust, covered
the South East over all the turn-offs
is more or less just a way that says
how we are not ourselves.

To be so, so much a right of way
across our Century, uncovers naturally:
being a wanting for the unnatured in our affairs
only naturally, as Friesian herds huddle today
for shelter under the leaves, in the rain-softened woods,
dark as moss in which water sparkles like ice.

Yet juntas have created a vogue
for taking the words from gravestones
and the rusting handcuffs
from the tell-tale corpse to prorogue
the stink of text-book judgement.

It is an inquistiveness for the unmade,
for what doesn't add up in our diaries,
or castles marked on ordinance survey maps.
Broken, old, unyielding those metaphors so laid

with fear pass by: Leeds, Hever, Allington,
Chartwell enduring precipitate invasion
from this cloudburst. Their order baffled
by tunnel execavations, lowering the baton
of undefined dread.

You drive our Citroen with an attentive hand.
Like classic, outmoded lines, we outlive
old tides for our departure from the land
while our backseat brood chant shrill invective.

Chorus 2, of Politically Apathetic Poets

A country bored with democracy
is a dangerous place
for Tory control freaks.
Though life is easy enough
for the superstitious left.
Tabloid star-charts substitute for
the dangers of repression.
There the only revolution is in the stars.
Yet the real ones,
those nebular creations,
change every day, like safe houses
for political agitators.
Like women, the stars
photograph badly,
for they were created to move,
not be fixed in the Ptolomaic grid
as Cleopatra in a still from
the Tragedie of Liz n’ Richard
Take Canis, Pope’s dog
barking mad, sick or dead.
Whatever breaks
out of that giant inside
is only a thin pencil of light.
Inside is such a Rilkean giant,
competing with a mass of angry light
from warehouses, flood-lit goods yards,
runways and security beams
that light the furnace of the liberal market.
That makes it difficult to go on
without sins against profit.
We do not survive our goodness:
the hourly stress of unambition:
the desperate refusal of suicide,
of drug-related common sense,
stress-induced generosity,
depressive courage,
the breakdown against despair,
the burnout that forbids aggression.
and other plagues of human nature
caving in on the sheer callousness
of equilibrium.
Injustice often has the better poets.
Yevtoshenko wrote better for the K. G. B.
Pound was better than Pudney,
Pendercki than Panufnic.
Listen it’s about talent,
not goodness.
Or the Keats’s Main Sequence
love flare, that drifting, stellar,
peeping- Tom corpse.
Plath and Sexton died of worse tyranny
than Tsvetayeva, or Mandelstamm.
Death is not a style, but a rhetoric
when freedom turns despot.

We do not struggle with words.
We struggle with love
and words fail only our lies.
Meanwhile the smoke rises
from a little warmth
fanned into profit
and it is a question,
Left or Right,
of reaching the window first.


Soliloquy 7

The Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer
own all that is left of it: the Franceof British childhood,
magical land of the ‘O’Level, Dien Bien Phu,
Sartre at Les Deux Magots and the Sorbonne peur.
that kept a generation at its reflexive dreams.

Mute canals reflect pollarded elms,
while high rusted school gates
stew unhappy boarders.
White bloused orphans in realms
of chastened peace read Rostand
while, imposters from a counterweight
we rattle over the time-stilled land.

Indoors, whiskered musicians play sad quintets,
while common weeds, the abundant, blooming harebell,
willowherb and convulvulus spread in sets
untouched since Le Congres D’Aix-la-Chapelle.
A shelter to Maquis and Prussians alike,
sold out to immobilier villages and Mirage jets.

A Rubyiat For My Parents

For forty years you were as one.
Yours was the Ark, as son succeeded son.
A fight for freedom inspired your love.
At home it was love, not medals, shone.

No wilderness, no flood, no circling dove
made up your joy. Two threads one pattern wove.
Temptations were few as Dad’s devil interview
revealed Lucifer’s complex was Him above.

From the lectern you counselled our crew
on Piaget, Celtic and faults in IQ,
While mothered at home, a sister we won
and it was love that led us as we grew.


Soliloquy 8

At night Delvaux’s painted mother sleepwalks
gravid with vulnerable nutrition.
From the Bois de Vincennes
the old circus lions watch trains
unload, bulls for the abbatoirs.
In the entrepots the bales of cannabis
are bundled for burning .
In the hypermarkets under lights
of delicate gold, the red grapes glow.
and the jars of honey sweat.
Old foxglove leaves stiffened in the frost
will be burnt on the enbankments.
In post humanity, the railway will direct itself.
along the alluvial winter of the Seine.
The timetables are set by God.
Trains pass each other by and
little Monsieur Dumeznil
will be presumed by no thinking mind
to set out for town again.

With the moonlight aping the lamps
by tenements and the golden age of well-placed villas.
Empty coaches will follow at regular intervals,
Journeys will lead to furious places of non-existent war.


Priapal 2

I don’t need you to guard
my wine that’s stiff
and the trellis that’s so hard,
or we’ll have a tiff.
It’s my zest,
you little pup,
that you watch best.
so keep it up,

You maybe
the hard-on God
but that odd
bit of tree

your idol’s carved from
might end up in the fire,
if I can’t come
and you feel my ire.

Soliloquy 9

Larbaud’s train de luxe is sliding through Europe.
Everyone has been edited elegantly
in the Gallimard Halogen glare.
Like an footnote to a bland obituary, immortal hope
races us through pages of indexed towns.

The narrative finds us in our train-voiture
I shield my sleeping, swaying son
on the top couchette, while below
a mother and daughter still unsure
whisper the percussions of their journey.
with a family of circus clowns.

A dusty town, narrowed by a river,
It is Tournon and, Mallarmé,
you slip through the door,

“My wife, expecting our first, slept in that way.
I was an underpaid provincial teacher.
She wondered at my dreaming,
yet it was I who gave her God no say.”

The train lurches on past monuments to German wars,
while he looks at me in deadnight freedom.
and burns the pages of his missal at a secret altar
to a dead sister in a pre-industrial Edom.
I tremble at his self-centredeness of sight
to turn the Catholic singularity at its breaking point
into a boudoir frozen in a dread pogrom of the soul,
more sinister to the curse of his secular Bossuet.

“My wife put out the lights on surpliced ecstasy
and shut the door on similes of voids
leaving me, the schoolmaster, writing late
by the brimming lamp, in mimicry
of locked existence, a heap of cold monstrances,
thuribles, relics: each with a faded price tag.
First communion veils tossed without clemency
onto piles of supernaturals, emptied and frozen
with no holy pictures reattached.”

He leaves me, smiles at his reflected fame,
quotes from Hamlet, to joke about his state.

My children begin to wake, and to acclaim
the bewildered landscape, huge chateaux,
rear up like redundant systems of a theory:
there a high garden and a lake in its frame.

As morning comes. The “I” lies back
trying to picture Languedoc,
made into a Parc Nationale de Dieu
by the Rhône mist. The land’s slack
is a Catholic ode in the grand old style.
The “me” resists the praise of a thuggish God
and his shyster word in funerary black,

the inverted faith of my own dismay.
A torrent of rite has been turned over.
while Avignon lies under a seven o’clock sun.
A long, red wall hides it from display.

Love Mimes 4

So, this was the climax.
You, reluctant, in my arms:
me, exultant, free of the tax
on guiltiness that harms.
You in ecstasy, your coldness, lax,
while we warm in foreign climes
expatriate to Puritan crimes.


Soliloquy 10

After those shadows of orthodox fear,
I leave the reservations of the ghost.
The long low platform,silver and white
in the early sunlight. People and quite clear,
the young, in luminous reds and blues,
lean or sit against walls.The town is bright
with rooftops strewn like a pack of card,s
edging the brimming sea and the sky so near.
A girl with a typique shrug of a delicate shoulder
reajusts the halter of her top without a touch,
like a white moth on a brown bere.
She waves goodbye to the boyfriend
who maybe regrets the parting with that skin
and hair and makes his smile sincere.
While Valery refuels the demi-urge
and fills the spaces of an empty God.
The conscience that will not interfere
with anti-consciousness.
The places and these people, exist
as alien materials to re-invent the drear,
last identity:all pure metaphysics,
not word need be real, except what we twist
and hammer from this given-ness to steer
our senses. The spring’s head is dry,
despite the sense you try to make,
A river is a road of pebbles.Its bank is sheer,
the trees parted ironically,
each on either side of emptiness.

Chorus 3,of Blakean Currency Speculators

Then came the clerks of treachery,
the solicitors of betrayal
with slobbering jaws
and grey, restless eyes
to sell the British graveyards
to the Erms of time.
Heseltine in fetters grown
from his own heart,
knows they will reverse
the judgement on the dead.
Thatcher, daughter of the light,
would not attend him.
She had sensed his dark spirit
and weak resolve.
Enraged, he had sought her in the
places of illumination
which cast his vile shadow
on the ground of purity.
Thatcher sat, her face to the sun.
Her body glowed white
with a fierce flare, which
Heseltine could not reach,
nor could he see her beauty
lest his eyes burned to the core.
He wass delayed in his workshop
and would not sign over the Westland
dead to the managers of the aeons.
He had a final grave dug deep
by Thatcher’s curbed
and broken brothers.
Open, dark and still, it would
support the endless sleep,
of the Sons of Disraeli away from
the Erms’ mandibles of greed
and the armour of their avarice.
Yet he hungers to kill her light
by which the raiders navigate.
Heseltine waits by the places
of desolation, the theatres
of death and captivity.
Now, Major, with a radiant
smile and happiness in his eyes
announces the mercy of the elders
at the exchange rate of being.
The Erms have a right
to ravage time, as it was they
invested in the cosmological
ravines where time’s flow reversed.

Enraged, Heseltine, speeds in flames
to the final horizon and meets
with the elders, as evil has a say
in universal destiny.
The evil-one takes out the Book
of Neo Liberal Conscience
to show how all will stand
condemned among its pages. Only the
extinction of the poor will cancel it.
The entity of guilt itself
will destroy the frame of vision.
All elementals face the void.
His massive brow is wrinkled.
His hair, dire and furrowed.
Thatcher must die for impiety and justly,
or Heseltine will expose the illusion
of being and bring down the universe.
Both protagonists are confined in the
temple vaults that darken being.
The elders know that even the raiders
are illumined in Thatcher constant light.
Is Major a traitor with the clerks?
The elders debate with lesser entities,
While in the hangar of darkness
lewd shapes celebrate their malice,
And Heseltine observes them, debased
with dread, having seen the last grave filled
with ash and clinker and having heard
the howls of steel feet moving in
to claim the victory in a harsh new wilderness.
Yet as the last vile demon sleeps
the fire of right has not gone out.
Major, taking Thatcher’s ashes, shoots away
with a new and powerful aura,
which Heseltine sees and curses
his gentle light by which the Erms
already ravage the sleep of human dead.

Soliloquy 11

The town takes us in to listen to English exiles
now the driving rain engorges the gutters.
The little grey lizards skulk under old lead pipes.
Rain is the grief of the South, unexcluded by open space.
that throbs with falling water like a field of glass corn.

To beg the culture from such a town is like
prising a wounded bird from a dog’s mouth.
Its English voices talk of dead writers
visit its shelved conflicts or creep
from its houses framed for spies.
The sight of hundred year plane trees
as dense as roofless pillars
left standing by untranslatable cultures
tells me their massive avenues
have refuted time, but not the rain
that shelters neither history nor families.
With sodden leaves high and twisted
they are remote, not even living,
but sound stoneware drums,
pumelled by the rattle of shower drops.
until a concierge, her lunch disturbed,
opened her doors to surprise our shelter.


Chorus 4,of Cataloguing Librarians

The ‘A’ bombs mushroomed at his birth.
B sixty twos brought him down to earth.
CS gas brought friends suffocation.
but Wilson’s ‘D’ notice barred publication.
News of the ‘E’wings caused him no concern,
The Ascent of F6 another text to learn,
pin-up girls in G-strings his only newsread.
To injustice in ‘H’ blocks he paid no heed
His IQ by teachers was judged fit to serve.
He invented the J cloth, despite his reserve.
He read only Kafka and saw himself as K.
and the L shaped room taught him to lay
He took the M4 daily in a Fiat saloon
with an N registration not a day too soon,
while his O level children swatted Auden by pat,
then a P 60 thudded dull down on the mat.
Belief in hope was blocked by Bultmann’s Q
Dad’s photo of R101, summated his view.
The ‘S’ bend flushed away life’s joy.
At the ‘T’ junction he injured a boy
and made a ‘U’ turn hit and run.
The trauma of Mum’s V bomb left him undone.
as did the ‘W’ formation of fighters in Burma,
An X- ray showed up a hostile murmur.
His Y fronts hid the scar, or so he said,
for later he died on his own Z bed.


Soliloquy 12

We must have looked like tourists to the girl
relaxed in cut down shorts.,who kept the gate.
She misunderstood our reluctance. Too late
to hide our awkwardness. She didn’t see
our wary, footsore need to stimulate
the children and our quitting of the sea.
to make an exploration of the town.
She shrugged as if we didn’t care for poetry,
tossed back her hair to read her book again.
We left, with happier kids, Vauban’s crown
Your face, my lover comes to me, when
you opened a window to let in Collioure.
I saw your puzzlement that out of men
I knew this one, yet was unsure
to see him pinned down. What did we look for?

No poet should be on show. I feel again the allure
of the sea-glossed sand, your legs upon the shore
and your brow, sun-tawny as the earth.
Such vision is the show. Life can draw
in sand the outline of a man whose worth
is washed away by waves that wash away ourselves
Let the fortress be his place of birth
and the girl his iron angel who delves
deep that we should hear our bad egos rasp
in chained emotion and see the helves
of faithless feelings in our coward grasp.
and sends us off, for none should penetrate
another’s depths except to liberate.

Again the place could hide a shuttered spring
a cloister by the sea where your walled garden
is hovered over by some naked loving
that’s always blind, vanished in a stone margin.
Nearby a seat of stone marble
stands moistened, overgrown with cyclamen.
On the white walls lizards gambol
with the young autumn sun and stirring wind.
Maybe she says , a rustling, surpliced angel,
“Why not see your souls?”We’d follow gladdened
where the moon has just appeared on waves.
Yet we will not go there, to be maddened
by another life that makes us slaves.

Better to remember we never met, my friend,
Your words and mine are what we live for
each saves a freshness that curiosity would end.
I know I knew your words and sowed their core.

Tableau Vivant: Fete de L’Assomption

The children sit in the church aisles
as deaf to La Liturgie Francaise
as they are to home English.
The Assumption requires us
to go twice in one week.
The sun shines outside
and my daughter has made
its cobblestones
her distant sanctuary.

Soliloquy 13

Driving through Roussillon,
after the gaudy autoroutes hoarding,
petrol pumps, junk food and rubbish
ventes divers and mega-marchées.
to be one with the reddened terrain,
an alluvium of soil from broken schists
the rose-red ancient fire of metamorphic Europe.
The rows of vines are bunched around their fruit
while giant grasses and imported cacti
dance surreally upon the huts where
a people, grown wild, have hidden
in terraces of land cut through by torrents
that witness winter floods.
The roads split from city to town,
from town to canton, from canton
to our village and the unblessed, narrow house
where Bishops tithed in comfort.
I unpack frozen hearts
from the Cabestany Mammouth.


SHOWTIME


Love –Mime 5

Last night the house was left in a mess.
You would say it was me of course.
and I would have agreed had it been less
of a sweltering day, or less hoarse
my voice and my marking less thick.
You left a metaphor, I would say
for our lives to which we stick,
filled with the clutter of the day.
for our lumber is our very self.
not a symbol for some argument.
that sits upon an upper shelf.
Why insist on thanks! Metaphor’s not meant
to be reshelved so neatly with the Delph.


Soliloquy 14

“You must take the train to Valvins again.
only this time, go alone; you cannot afford
any other way. Do not go by sleight, when
before you were a student among the Sorbinnistes,
a clever gang who lived on Ingarden and licensed theft
That was not sixty eight, pas encore la haine Parisienne.

Barrowmen looked the other way then,
as the élite slummed to the trust
of confident, future power.
There is no place to turn in a fossil seam
no matter how formal your existence.
You are inactivity itself.
Memory blurs the power of wholeness.
Have you still the sharpness of a fraud
that gave you simple hope?

Now you must walk my embankment at night.
The gate is where the ivy grows over
the gun acanthus capitals
on the old railway station.
Dogs will bark from the suburbs.
Lights with chalk-yellow flares
will quickly pinpoint each landmark
of your journey, giving it a senseless danger
To get out of the city you must make
it longer. Invite angry looks.
You’re trouble, out to wreck stable assets.

Where Freycinet’s steel leaves the scrub
you are on your own among
sycamores, holly bushes, oaks and pines.
You must go where the river bends and twines
cross the old stone bridge before
the Fifth and Seventh Panzers destroy it,
or trust the temporary one that took
Patton’s supplies on to Bastogne.
Even in December scramble down the bank,
soft with cold mud, the smell of rich earth, grass, nettles
and take to the riverside
to two thin pillars and the narrow brick gateway
with its plain white capitals,
the wrought iron gate,
the simple yard
heaped with last autumn’s leaves,
while across the river the forest drifts green.
On one side my study à la japonais
and next door the Café des Rosiers
where my daughter, Geneviève
danced as Columbine, See her at the gateway,
Hérodiade, serious, mince,
with her dark dress and umbrella.
She joined me in Paris. It was influenza took her.
I stand in Sicily not far from where I once stood
with Monet and Satie.
Now understand ,new songs are made of awe,
remembered injustice
and the rescue of the doomed.”


Chorus 5, School Production

Want to watch our number?
Sir, why don’t you stay?
I start with a kind of rumba
while the others move away.

Then we lie down flat
and do a reggae turn
to “why this and why that?”
then leap and return.

When we come apart,
Michelle does her act
‘cos she’s very smart,
while we’re back to backed.

Don’ yer think it’s worth a try?
the “why this and why that?”
Then we do a little cry
at “why this and why that?”

’Cos no-one wants to tell us
why this and why that.
Its really very serious,
what it’s getting at.

Soliloquy 15


The darkness can be a better fit
for the eye, relaxing into a pitch
away from the weariness of light.
As a body floats unsurely in water
though free of its weight,
so night fires a reflex of fear
back to the mind, despite that soothing
dark that fills our ambience.
Sight haunts its lost weight
though free of perception.

In St Genlis once we stepped into
the primal cave of a Romanesque church
This was midday, under a pointed sun,
and yet we blundered into total dark
in a nether place, out of which loomed
a waxwork 'mistris' of the suffering virgin,
or Christ laid in a glasswork tomb would arise
frightening my daughter to the door.
I brought my feet to the tiny vestry
where a single window elicited a light,
simply to define a darkness,
as disappointment reveals unknown
desire, unheard of aims, yet soon
without the light, my eyes
became acclimatised to the inner gloom
and gradually I learned to forget
the disguise of my own darkness
turning our backs on meagre openings
work routes, habitualfailings, exhaustions
and uncanny limitations that hold us back
from seeing light upon seeing dark.

Tableau Vivant: Our Lady’s Birthday

My children leave for school,
carrying Summer trophies.
Showtime, not memory’s the rule
not wine’s geography,
but cliché’d cares we note
that as aprents we dote.


Soliloquy 16

Perhaps you’ve seen them, the scruffy churches
with unlit porches which assume you’re a thief,
repentant, or not, as you waft past the money boxes.
Pamphlets, dog-eared hymnbooks, newsletters,
almsgivings and minutes of strange groups,
that make you back off and get out to the street.
Here, all journeys seem to end, the steadied breath,
the tie adjusted and the wait. We can only travel
once, for once arrived, a trip repeated
becomes routine, a sand glass of reached distances.
Some only come for weddings, baptisms and funerals
to think high thoughts opportunely, shake hands,
remember names and catch the next train home.
Those who stay have a misfit look about them.
Some stay to remember parents, wives or husbands
or the strange grief of unexpected deaths.
Some on their own might push further in
and open heavy doors, half wanting them locked
and might go in to remember themselves.
Each visit is a stop-over in an awkward place.
Minutes so carefully saved curl and wither
in the dull waste of beeswax and smoke.
We pray for a purpose and think it unanswered
or pray on purpose for an answer unheard.
and as a silence grows, shift shoes as if
to find a depth or shift away from thought at all.


Chorus 6, Final, of Literary Agents

What would you do if in a derelict house he picked out,
painstakingly, a stupid waltz by Strauss on the piano ?
What are you doing anyway listening to this ? Haven't you got something else to do ? What would you do if in a deserted city he relayed a tape of some touching climax in Sibelius or Bruckner, so slowly the sound might seem to fester.
What are you doing anyway listening to this? Haven't you found somewhere else to live? What would you do if from an empty planet he broadcast a pub song so fast its falsetto pitch drove the last amateur footy to their death in a friendly?
What are you doing anyway, listening to this? Haven't you found some other life to live? What would you do if in a shot universe, he sent a radio wave of soapsud jingles into deepest space? What are you doing anyway, listening to this,?

My prayers are more crazy than any of these antics. Haven't you found someone else to sing your songs?

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Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.11.2010

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