Friday, September 16, 2011

The Concrete Lampost

One tooth protrudes 
From my lower jaw
And there’s no evolutionary reason
For it to be for.
It does not enable me to
Spear or shred
Some special food
And I am not a unicorn
Nor no narwhal neither
So my tooth does not protrude
For sexual display or foreplay.

What it is is
A small yellow ivory monument to mischance.

One day,
Maybe about
My thousandth one alive
I walked along
Looking about
At the brave new world
When a great big concrete lamppost
Leapt up through the pavement
I looked to one side
And it sneaked up
In front of me.

SMACK
My consciousness was impacted
By its very first fact.

The moral of this sorry tale
Is to crawl slowly and slimily
Like a snail
Don’t strut or run
Like an ape or an antelope
Or you will get smashed in the face
By a concrete lamppost
Like a hammer hitting a melon
Or a heavy goods vehicle
Running over a lemon.

THE DRAINING BOARD

I used to fly,
High above the world,
And float free of time,
Like some starwinged eagle;
But I was just
An ape opening an atlas
To see
Maps of the tides of history.
Tribes and empires;
Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Alans
And Picts depicted
And printed on paper plans
Denoted and defined
By differing cross hatchings.
On each new page
A new era

Now I don’t even have
To open a book.
Whilst I wait for my tea kettle to boil,
I look
At the bloblules and globules
At the rivulets and dribulets
Of water in the indentations
Of a kitchen sink draining board.
Gravity and history make them coalesce and flow
Like tribes and empires,

One among many
May suddenly gain momentum
And surges on
A rampant conquering superblob
Absorbing all others
In its path,
Until it mostly careers
Headfirst down the plughole
Leaving scattered remanents behind
Like a kingdom
That once was
And now is gone.

I pour water
And some spills
Onto the draining board
So history starts up
All over again.