Boring chores

 Sweeping floors,

Closing doors

Smearing ointment on sores

Cleaning the machine

That’s supposed to stop snores.

Boring chores

That I deplore

And then deplore again,

Down to my very core

That’s how much I deplore

Boring chores

Because they are boring

But there’s no ignoring

Boring chores

And I could make them

Even more boring

By making a chore

Of keeping a list

Of chores that I’d done

And those that I’d missed

But that would have

The tedious potential

Of driving me

Completely mental

Since that list

Would continue

As long as I exist

And continue on

Some more

There can be no end

To boring chores

bright white angel

 On the hill outside the surgery,

A man walks by,

Holding a child’s hand in one hand,

And a lead attached to a small dog,

That resembles an animated bathmat,

In the other.

The child is eating something,

But drops a part of this food

Onto the pavement.

The dog wants to eat

The fallen food.

The man prevents this

By tugging the dog’s lead.

Then the three of them move on.

The fallen food remains lying

On a grey paving slab until,

 A herring gull flying by, spies it.

Circles to make sure it’s safe,

Descends like a bright white angel,

Lands,

Seizes the food in its sharp yellow beak,

And, almost immediately flies off again,

Swallowing the food.

Satisfied that the pavement is now cleansed,

I enter the surgery

To give blood.

Gishgalloping codswallopers,

 Gishgalloping codswallopers,

And disparaging apparatchiks,

Bullshit spraying placemen,

Confabulating conspiracists,

Concoctors of word-salad camouflage,

Chefs of illusion, sauciers of  poison,

Hypocritical polecat polemicists,

Ideological concoctors fooling yourselves with

Nonsenses that you intend others to lap up.

Puffers of spurious smokescreens,

Priests of the closed and comatose mind,

Offerers of false comfort,

Constructors of straw effigies.

Carboot sellers of second hand moral panics,

Singers of mendacious elegies

Sometimes there seems to be no one else than you,

But none of this is new,

Lies are as old as Adam,and older.

Baboons lie to lions

And terns feign broken wings to conceal their nests

Even flies lie, pretending to be bees.

So why is the current torrent of untruth

So distressing?

Could it be that I have fallen for my own lies

About my honesty?

the anticharismatic 2

 Hello, I am a slug, and I’m crawling out tonight,

Leaving a trail of slime because I’m going to unite

With the headlouse, the woodlouse, the weevil and the rat,

And also join up with several other species that

Are anti-charismatic, in the public eye,

But this is an injustice which we seek to rectify.

 

None of us look striking posing on mountainsides,

Migrating across savannahs, or singing in the sky,

We don’t dive or leap majestically out of the ocean.

Fine artists don’t paint us to symbolise emotions,

Or patriotism, freedom and other noble notions.

We don’t roam in rainforests or on tundras,

We were stowaways on the ark.

Where we live is called infested

Never made a national park.

No one will cross the world to see us,

But to hear a gorilla fart,

They’ll fly all the way to Africa in a polluting jet plane.

The gorilla farts, they gasp in glee,

And then fly back again.

We won’t sell you anything

With cute faces or appealing eyes

The means of our own deaths are what we advertise,

Since a picture of a cockroach sells tons of insecticide.

We are vermin, pests, pariahs, carrion eating parasites,

But when it all ends, we’ll cut you down to size,

Because the corpse of one lion will feed a thousand flies.

 

 

©PR Murry

VORTEX

Hypnotised, watching the water swirl.

A lovely vortex forms above a plughole,

Bits of detritus begin to rotate,

Fragments of things that didn’t get ate.

There’s a currant in the current,

Along with other clutter washed off plates.

Trapped and twirled by gravity

Into a deep dark cavity,

Into the black hole beneath the kitchen sink;

Spun round, sucked down, gone in a blink;

Down through the pies and drains

And it’s never coming back again.

Or is it?

I have a suspicious misunderstanding

Of all this physics.

The planet I live on is rotating in space;

For all I know, it’s changing its place;

It might be one fragment in a massive whirlpool,

Irresistibly pulled into a cosmic plughole.

 

 

 

 

MY NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

 Once I could walk to Darwin’s cathedral,

Which was not my father’s house,

But was nearby.

My aunt aught me to pray

After my mother died,

Which was some solace

Or comfort then.

Yet my wishes, whatever they were,

Remained ungranted.

Ancient words learned by rote,

And misunderstood,

Did not fill any void;

But inside Darwin’s cathedral

I could sometimes walk alone

Along the echoing galleries,

Where the skeletons were displayed.

So, similarities were shown to me

I could see that a fin or

A flipper, a wing or a hand or claw

Were the same beneath skin,

Scales, feathers or fur.

Unlike the words of forgotten prayers,

That has stayed with me

All my life.

Sunlight Laundry

 Aged seventy-three,

I now can see

That the muse inspiring my poetry

Has always been laundry.

Ever since my first paid job

In a building named ‘Sunlight’

In Sands End

Beside the Thames

Where vans brought

Dirty sheets from Chelsea hotels

That I loaded

Into vast rotating iron cylinders

And unloaded the laundered result.

Unless the vast rotating iron cylinders

Went wrong and produced

A massive knot of wet linen,

That needed to be pried apart

With crowbars.

Ahh, those weren’t the days!

Now I just blunder around my bathroom,

Like a dalek without a death ray

Picking up little bits of laundry

With a plastic claw.