incline your face, your stretched-out mouth again
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love
The Lady Thatcher
an introduction
by Charles Prickens
The Lady Thatcher was a squint-eyed, skull-headed personage of five-and-seventy years, with a hairstyle reminiscent of two over-amorous Chihuahuas on the brink of Beachy Head.
Her wrinkled neck had the appearance of the long-discarded skin of a desert snake and, on frequent occasions, she had the unnerving talent for resembling nothing as much as a parrot whose singular posthumous achievement is to be the recipient of a long series of electric shocks to coax it into some kind of spasmodic action.
Indeed, Lady Thatcher’s ghoulish countenance was rendered all the more hideous by her arched and narrow nose that swiped at the air like a rusty blade; her tight mouth was stretched meanly on her sunken face like a skipping-rope that had been pulled tightly enough to strangle.
Thatcher’s askew and bulbous eyes had once been aflame with megalomania - yet now they merely fulminated with scorching bitterness and Scotch whiskey. In Lady Thatcher’s old age, a lust for attention and fearful respect had given way to a craving for liqueur. She often sat alone now, in her crumpled blue suit on a park bench in Finchley with her boney, talon-like fingers gripped white-knuckled around a bottle of Glenfiddich exhumed from her late husband’s cocktail cabinet.
Occasionally, Lady Thatcher would rouse herself from her alcohol-befuddled reverie and stagger, tripping over the timeworn dorothy-bag that swung from her saggy-skinned wrist, uptown to a half-empty hall where other old ladies, in identical blue suits, sat on plastic chairs waving Union flags and clapping a bald little man standing up on a platform making incomprehensible speeches.
Once, Lady Thatcher, fortified by a generous imbibing of the Famous Grouse, managed to totter half-blind up to this stage to force her way to speak at the podium. Pushing the bald little orator aside, Lady Thatcher opened her cave of a mouth and intoned alternately a deathmarch monotone and the demented cackling of a burning witch; her wit, such as it was, comprised all the sagacity of an ageing pugilist at a post-fight press-conference:
"Blessed are the meek, for they have inherited my Party....rejoice!, rejoice!.....for where there is cash, then may there be questions, where there is darkness, may there be Michael Howard and where there are shares, may there be Jeffrey Archer....hic haec hoc....the lady’s not for spurning.....oh I do like to be beside the seaside....my old man said follow the van and don’t dilly-dally on the way...... have a banana......wibble..... have you seen yer mutha baby, standin’ in da shadow......."
Yet, midway through her vacuous ramblings on the state of Europe, Britain’s role in NATO and the glory of tobacco advertising, Lady Thatcher was seen to slump, face-down and completely passed-out on top of her makeshift pulpit, snoring stentoriously into the microphone to a ripple of applause, flag-waving and strains of Land of Hope and Glory.
Ox-bow lake, calf bestraddled,
evidencing juncus, nardus, festuca,
red and turgid rivulets.
Bogflood.
You were the fort of pine for the Burkes
in Grace's castle, embayed,
when La Rata Encoronada ran aground,
that September.
Wahlenbergia hederacea,
Salix atrocinerea,
these exotic strands bent to river oblivion
are de Leiva's men,
camped in the Doona wood
awaiting the Santa Ana
and passage to an Antrim drowning
Away from Lucan's cull.
The woods are down, the plains are flooded,
La Rata is seen at low tide
In shifting sand
Two hundred yards out now
and the blackred ditches here
bleed young men hacked before shipsail
by Bingham's sword
(ambitious courtly steel
For Faery Queene Cynthia,
Custodian of souls).
Bogflood, tideblood.
All about Jack Daly's grazing lands.
And the waters past Blackrock
swirl, deadglutted to the North.
Explanatory note to the previous poem: in September 1588 a vessel of the Spanish Armada, La Rata Encoronada, ran aground on Fahy Bay, Ballycroy, Co. Mayo, on the midwest coast of Ireland, with a crew of nearly 500, led by D. Alonso De Leiva. They camped in and around Fahy Castle, the site being inhabited by the prestigious Irish Burkes and known as the famous domain of Grace O' Malley (Grainuaile), the now legendary pirate queen. The area was, then, lushly fortified with arboreal growth.
Richard Bingham of Lucan, Mayo, an aristocrat of Queen Elizabeth I's realm (and ancestor of the infamous alleged murderer Richard Bingham, Lord Lucan of the last century), set out to kill as many of this crew as he could in order to win his monarch's favour. Many Spanish sailors escaped his attack and with De Leiva boarded another Armada vessel, the Santa Ana that had been brought upcoast from another bay. However, after several weeks at sea along the treacherous northwestern and northern coast of Ireland between September and October 1588, the ship broke up off the coast of Antrim and the sailors were drowned.
Ballycroy is my Dad's village and his old farmhouse overlooks Doona and Fahy Bay, the latter being the now rather boggy site of Grace's castle (on lands associated in local lore with the late Jack Daly of the village). The castle is a ruin exposed to the elements since the last of the area's trees were cut down and rendered prone to flooding.
Oh: did I say the spot is an area of the most outstanding natural beauty? I can never sing those lines in a certain song, "I wish I'd seen the place/ But no-one's ever taken me." I HAVE seen the place. That's it.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots The Lady Thatcher
an introduction
by Charles Prickens
The Lady Thatcher was a squint-eyed, skull-headed personage of five-and-seventy years, with a hairstyle reminiscent of two over-amorous Chihuahuas on the brink of Beachy Head.
Her wrinkled neck had the appearance of the long-discarded skin of a desert snake and, on frequent occasions, she had the unnerving talent for resembling nothing as much as a parrot whose singular posthumous achievement is to be the recipient of a long series of electric shocks to coax it into some kind of spasmodic action.
Indeed, Lady Thatcher’s ghoulish countenance was rendered all the more hideous by her arched and narrow nose that swiped at the air like a rusty blade; her tight mouth was stretched meanly on her sunken face like a skipping-rope that had been pulled tightly enough to strangle.
Thatcher’s askew and bulbous eyes had once been aflame with megalomania - yet now they merely fulminated with scorching bitterness and Scotch whiskey. In Lady Thatcher’s old age, a lust for attention and fearful respect had given way to a craving for liqueur. She often sat alone now, in her crumpled blue suit on a park bench in Finchley with her boney, talon-like fingers gripped white-knuckled around a bottle of Glenfiddich exhumed from her late husband’s cocktail cabinet.
Occasionally, Lady Thatcher would rouse herself from her alcohol-befuddled reverie and stagger, tripping over the timeworn dorothy-bag that swung from her saggy-skinned wrist, uptown to a half-empty hall where other old ladies, in identical blue suits, sat on plastic chairs waving Union flags and clapping a bald little man standing up on a platform making incomprehensible speeches.
Once, Lady Thatcher, fortified by a generous imbibing of the Famous Grouse, managed to totter half-blind up to this stage to force her way to speak at the podium. Pushing the bald little orator aside, Lady Thatcher opened her cave of a mouth and intoned alternately a deathmarch monotone and the demented cackling of a burning witch; her wit, such as it was, comprised all the sagacity of an ageing pugilist at a post-fight press-conference:
"Blessed are the meek, for they have inherited my Party....rejoice!, rejoice!.....for where there is cash, then may there be questions, where there is darkness, may there be Michael Howard and where there are shares, may there be Jeffrey Archer....hic haec hoc....the lady’s not for spurning.....oh I do like to be beside the seaside....my old man said follow the van and don’t dilly-dally on the way...... have a banana......wibble..... have you seen yer mutha baby, standin’ in da shadow......."
Yet, midway through her vacuous ramblings on the state of Europe, Britain’s role in NATO and the glory of tobacco advertising, Lady Thatcher was seen to slump, face-down and completely passed-out on top of her makeshift pulpit, snoring stentoriously into the microphone to a ripple of applause, flag-waving and strains of Land of Hope and Glory.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots incline your face, your stretched-out mouth again
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love
that has to be one of the most touching things i have had the pleasure to read.
and as for lady thatcher, i haven't had such a gracious giggle in too many days to count.
i'd love to see dubya as subject of your keen eye.
"Rummy say Mars is dat big red thing in de sky
If it got ice undergroun' it got water
if it got water if it got life
If it got life it prolly got insects
Dead 'uns
an' dead insects rottin' unnergroun'?...
ah say dead insects
rottin' unnergroun'
dey make
OIIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!
Hallefakkinloooooooyahhhh!
Dass right, oil, fukkas!
So I ask Rummy
Dey got a dictator up there?
Sheeet, he got dubya emdees?
We gotta liberate dah microbes
Free dah fakkin' Martians y'all
Grantchester Orchard gardens
are known to encourage hardons
in vicars at tea, sharing table
with widows called Doris or Mabel
who wear No.5 and low cleavage
and pant with breastacular heavage:
The vicars get primed to deliver
hearing slaps on the thighs of the river
and the summer has clergymen scorch-ed
with lust, here at Grantchester Orchard!
Talking of obscurantist bawdiness, and going back to "Measure For Measure", by Shakespeare, 1604, I'm reminded of Pompey Bum's unique euphemism for the act of lurrrrve that still tickles my proverbials. He called it "Groping for trout in a peculiar river."
Achilles gave Hector to Priam:
Noel gives the vocals to Liam.
The country gives tax to the city.
Give Brown your job, if you want pity
In losing, for Bush, your approval.
Don't wait till they force your removal.
The beggarman does a St Vitas dance at the seawall, asking me to look out, to visualise the source of the screaming he hears. But there's only silence. No forms. Slateness. I say I note what looks like a drowning arm in the sea. It can't be a trick of the light. There isn't a sun. He nods. Chuckles. Says it's probably his master. He asks me if the sea's churning fast. He wants it to be violent. I can't differentiate anything in the dimness. I say there's a tornado. He sings a tune. No words. Just vowel sounds. The tune is Hickory Dickory Dock. The light dies finally in his voice. But there's this awful hope, in his weeping. We stay here. We can't go back. I have a duty to tell him how the grey ends.
Often thought about you, mate, the way you
said, that Sunday afternoon, I should come 'round
with my guitar, on Tuesday. You said you
Had pickups for it. I'd just to bring 'round
a beer, you said. That would be enough
and you'd be pleased to fix the geeetar, free.
Well, Tuesday came. For sure, I'd bring enough
for drinking, and some money for you. Free?
No, you would be replenished for your work.
I got to yours at three. The cop gave out
the information. You'd planned it to work.
Noose strung from the hook. You'd jumped far out
And kicked the chair away. You asked me 'round
that day. So, why then? You had asked me 'round.
Well, there was a note my mate, call him C__ for he really lived, left under his swinging feet for the guy who'd taken over his Sunday afternoon blues session and who'd pushed him out systematically and ruthlessly. I choose not to see it. But I knew what he'd want me to sing for him, putting the words to a song.
Usually I write spontaneously here, but I'm going to include what I wrote at the time, channeling C__ against this other guy's greed. At the next Sunday after C__'s death, his wake, HIS blues jam, I sang this song onstage, with C__'s voice, with his soul, and on his black telecaster, directing in this other 'businessman's' face the message that the man who was really 'dead' was HIM, the guy "still there", the tone-deaf moneyman, and not C__, the musician, whose heart burned on:
Sunday Man, how goes your plan?
You said you were usurper, but in truth I stepped aside.
How's your fun, now? Guess who won?
When you recover from your stupor
You'll have nothing of your pride.
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight:
But I know you're dead.
Sunday Man: Did you hear the one
About silence, cunning, exile
and the way to win a war?
So, has it been in the space between
my cameo appearances,
the Joy you'd thought in store?
When you took on the stage, did you feel loved?
Did you see the ghosts out in the wings?
Did you think that you once had the crowd moved?
Or were they moved by other things?
(Instrumental break)
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight
But I know you're deaddeaddead.
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
Yes, you know you fail at all that you try to do
Sunday Man
Sunday Man.....
C__ would have sung that to the man. He passed six years ago today but his presence is alive and angry.
Georgey Boy, you're James the First,
And The Patriot Act's your Basilikon Doron
to an heir who'll die before accession,
a would-be Henry the Ninth.
The second son of the war will get your gift
and call out that he's the elect of God
above the Commons. And he'll be routed.
Who knows who'll rule then. People of the land?
Men in leather coats. In time, they'll fall, too,
or just grow tired of killing to bureaucracy.
Then your dynasty will be restored,
The patriots modified.
(Ah, they'll call that the Age of Reason!)
But seriously,
All I know is,
that right now
dissenters are having to equivocate
to protect the holy in safe houses.
Yes, that's enough of prophecies.
Parallels suffice to tell a tale.
So, in sum, then: the point. The point, by gum.
James the First was ruler by default
when the old line seemed to die of apathy.
And he liked to speechify about the divine right of kings
(kings crowned neither by secession nor consensus),
But he really tore the blanket of his rhetoric,
decrying tyrannical usurpers in foreign lands.
So Georgie,
Let's have this Doron, then,
this Pax in proposal,
Tomorrow's pretzel-wrapper.
I'm almost starting to look forward,
Intransitively.
are you?
Six thirty nine, and this forum's so quiet.
There's only little old me,
Left to write doggerel, trying to tie it
with rhymes that work well and agree
with basic aesthetics. Isn't it hushed
on this forum? It's Saturday night!
I could write something slowly, or something that's rushed:
Turn out wonders, or turn out pure shite.
I'll turn out the latter!
In ways, it's much better!
HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeeet stays zee same size! Eeeet just deesappears...eeento ee drain....
KASPAR: And zis drain ees very very small....
HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeet eeezz outside!!!
KASPAR: Yesss. And zee toilet eeez beeeger than the outside of zee house.
HERR HAUSER: How zee fuck ees zee outside of zee house smaller than eeenside zee toilet, Kaspar?
KASPAR: Because venn I am eenside, I turn all around me, and I only see ziss building.... everywhere. But venn I go outside, I valk around zee outside of zee house, and turn around, and I can see lots of theeengs. So, zee eeenside of zee house eees beeeger zan outside, and zee peee eeenside must get smaller when eeet eees outside. Eeeeet eees log-ic-al. Peee shreeeenks outside.
HERR HAUSER: Errr... no... Kaspar, I theeenk ziss is going to take a leetle beet of work, just yet.
Pat curls, foetal, on the wet bench.
Rainsoaked, he shivers in his pinstriped suit,
The one he wore when he left Mary,
and he splays the broad red hand
that held the shovel every day for thirty years
over his unshaven face, blacking out the sun.
The sounds of footsteps echo from concrete to steel to wood,
Through his shivering back. The knock of heels
Becomes the boreen trot of Mother's mare
to Corrigan's well, he nine years old, lazy flies
buzzing heavily about the animal's rump
and thudding into his own face. Plodding on the grassy track,
hearing two empty buckets of tin, tied both ends
on a rope across the creature's back slapping her flanks in rhythm,
His eyes flit from the small fence, the main route in,
to a short cut across the bog, head-posied,
Butterfly blazing. Beautiful in a sungleam.
He leads the animal on, hurrying in a happy canter,
humming half broken airs of nameless reels,
wild and laughing at his brilliant idea
To find the spring without the path.
A scream. Nostrils flare. Whinnying snorts and mudsplattering thuds.
A leg caught, deep in wire. Brown eyes askant, teeth bared; A tearing,
a rearing. Buckets hurled, crashing into a ditch.
Pat looking around in the bog for Corrigan himself,
sees heedlessly himself a lifetime ahead,
An image conjured in firing iris:
Going to Holyhead on the ferry with his uncle
and arriving by train to a London fog,
(a city of shiny routes to glory and tripwires),
and seeing "No Irish" in the windows
of suburban guesthouses, along entire streets
When he and Uncle are weary and need to rest
before scouring sites in the morning for ganging work.
He might view a life to come:
Knowing the five o' clock start in the lamplit chill,
Cooking bacon off the shovel for breakfast,
Learning to live in a curving spine, a breaking mind.
Neither Irish nor English anymore: a pair of hands,
a grunt, a spit of cliched insults to the new lad with the barrow,
A barrow he'd himself overstacked with hardcore
for the boy to slip on the plank
running the way up the skip,
as punishment for earnestness
and an aversion to shortcuts.
Losing his work through the gambling,
spending the newfound long days with
Mary in Anne's pub, puking the Guinness pure
come evening with no food in the belly,
Going hard on the bench with the cider
with poor dead O' Ryan:
his heart became his lacerated mare.
He splays his hand over his face, blacking out the sun
But hearing his life in the step of passing shoes,
A step that stops then starts and dies away,
A step he should know still
as Mary's.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots incline your face, your stretched-out mouth again
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love
Don't ask me why, but I am more moved by frogs on drains than anything else tonight....
A big bulbous throat, blub-bubbling air
Fingers sheathed, glazing in rubbery green
hind legs paired, heart shaped in arching; a stare
of lidless black eyes that a long tongue licks clean:
It's the frogster.
Until it jumped up, I had thought it a leaf.
It's the frogster.
It sat on the gutter then popped underneath.
Hey there frogster!
Tell me this fact as you vacate the scene:
Tell me frogster!
How'd you keep out of view when you're ugly as sin?
Only jokin' tharr,
Beautiful froggy.
Yoooo loveable creatureeeee yoooooooooo.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Well, there was a note my mate, call him C__ for he really lived, left under his swinging feet for the guy who'd taken over his Sunday afternoon blues session and who'd pushed him out systematically and ruthlessly. I choose not to see it. But I knew what he'd want me to sing for him, putting the words to a song.
Usually I write spontaneously here, but I'm going to include what I wrote at the time, channeling C__ against this other guy's greed. At the next Sunday after C__'s death, his wake, HIS blues jam, I sang this song onstage, with C__'s voice, with his soul, and on his black telecaster, directing in this other 'businessman's' face the message that the man who was really 'dead' was HIM, the guy "still there", the tone-deaf moneyman, and not C__, the musician, whose heart burned on:
Sunday Man, how goes your plan?
You said you were usurper, but in truth I stepped aside.
How's your fun, now? Guess who won?
When you recover from your stupor
You'll have nothing of your pride.
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight:
But I know you're dead.
Sunday Man: Did you hear the one
About silence, cunning, exile
and the way to win a war?
So, has it been in the space between
my cameo appearances,
the Joy you'd thought in store?
When you took on the stage, did you feel loved?
Did you see the ghosts out in the wings?
Did you think that you once had the crowd moved?
Or were they moved by other things?
(Instrumental break)
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight
But I know you're deaddeaddead.
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
Yes, you know you fail at all that you try to do
Sunday Man
Sunday Man.....
C__ would have sung that to the man. He passed six years ago today but his presence is alive and angry.
FC, you are a genious!!!
i would love to HEAR you sometime..
like yer music..
coz yer words are awsume
~~dont mind yer make up, just make up yer mind~~
~~its better to be hated for who you are than be loved for who you are not~~
Comments
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love
an introduction
by Charles Prickens
The Lady Thatcher was a squint-eyed, skull-headed personage of five-and-seventy years, with a hairstyle reminiscent of two over-amorous Chihuahuas on the brink of Beachy Head.
Her wrinkled neck had the appearance of the long-discarded skin of a desert snake and, on frequent occasions, she had the unnerving talent for resembling nothing as much as a parrot whose singular posthumous achievement is to be the recipient of a long series of electric shocks to coax it into some kind of spasmodic action.
Indeed, Lady Thatcher’s ghoulish countenance was rendered all the more hideous by her arched and narrow nose that swiped at the air like a rusty blade; her tight mouth was stretched meanly on her sunken face like a skipping-rope that had been pulled tightly enough to strangle.
Thatcher’s askew and bulbous eyes had once been aflame with megalomania - yet now they merely fulminated with scorching bitterness and Scotch whiskey. In Lady Thatcher’s old age, a lust for attention and fearful respect had given way to a craving for liqueur. She often sat alone now, in her crumpled blue suit on a park bench in Finchley with her boney, talon-like fingers gripped white-knuckled around a bottle of Glenfiddich exhumed from her late husband’s cocktail cabinet.
Occasionally, Lady Thatcher would rouse herself from her alcohol-befuddled reverie and stagger, tripping over the timeworn dorothy-bag that swung from her saggy-skinned wrist, uptown to a half-empty hall where other old ladies, in identical blue suits, sat on plastic chairs waving Union flags and clapping a bald little man standing up on a platform making incomprehensible speeches.
Once, Lady Thatcher, fortified by a generous imbibing of the Famous Grouse, managed to totter half-blind up to this stage to force her way to speak at the podium. Pushing the bald little orator aside, Lady Thatcher opened her cave of a mouth and intoned alternately a deathmarch monotone and the demented cackling of a burning witch; her wit, such as it was, comprised all the sagacity of an ageing pugilist at a post-fight press-conference:
"Blessed are the meek, for they have inherited my Party....rejoice!, rejoice!.....for where there is cash, then may there be questions, where there is darkness, may there be Michael Howard and where there are shares, may there be Jeffrey Archer....hic haec hoc....the lady’s not for spurning.....oh I do like to be beside the seaside....my old man said follow the van and don’t dilly-dally on the way...... have a banana......wibble..... have you seen yer mutha baby, standin’ in da shadow......."
Yet, midway through her vacuous ramblings on the state of Europe, Britain’s role in NATO and the glory of tobacco advertising, Lady Thatcher was seen to slump, face-down and completely passed-out on top of her makeshift pulpit, snoring stentoriously into the microphone to a ripple of applause, flag-waving and strains of Land of Hope and Glory.
(etc etc)
evidencing juncus, nardus, festuca,
red and turgid rivulets.
Bogflood.
You were the fort of pine for the Burkes
in Grace's castle, embayed,
when La Rata Encoronada ran aground,
that September.
Wahlenbergia hederacea,
Salix atrocinerea,
these exotic strands bent to river oblivion
are de Leiva's men,
camped in the Doona wood
awaiting the Santa Ana
and passage to an Antrim drowning
Away from Lucan's cull.
The woods are down, the plains are flooded,
La Rata is seen at low tide
In shifting sand
Two hundred yards out now
and the blackred ditches here
bleed young men hacked before shipsail
by Bingham's sword
(ambitious courtly steel
For Faery Queene Cynthia,
Custodian of souls).
Bogflood, tideblood.
All about Jack Daly's grazing lands.
And the waters past Blackrock
swirl, deadglutted to the North.
Fahy. It means "a playing field."
Richard Bingham of Lucan, Mayo, an aristocrat of Queen Elizabeth I's realm (and ancestor of the infamous alleged murderer Richard Bingham, Lord Lucan of the last century), set out to kill as many of this crew as he could in order to win his monarch's favour. Many Spanish sailors escaped his attack and with De Leiva boarded another Armada vessel, the Santa Ana that had been brought upcoast from another bay. However, after several weeks at sea along the treacherous northwestern and northern coast of Ireland between September and October 1588, the ship broke up off the coast of Antrim and the sailors were drowned.
Ballycroy is my Dad's village and his old farmhouse overlooks Doona and Fahy Bay, the latter being the now rather boggy site of Grace's castle (on lands associated in local lore with the late Jack Daly of the village). The castle is a ruin exposed to the elements since the last of the area's trees were cut down and rendered prone to flooding.
lmfao
especially the part about her neck...
There are species of prehistoric tree in the Amazon that are smoother.
that has to be one of the most touching things i have had the pleasure to read.
and as for lady thatcher, i haven't had such a gracious giggle in too many days to count.
i'd love to see dubya as subject of your keen eye.
if word gets out though, you just stick with me. i won't let em hurt you.
If it got ice undergroun' it got water
if it got water if it got life
If it got life it prolly got insects
Dead 'uns
an' dead insects rottin' unnergroun'?...
ah say dead insects
rottin' unnergroun'
dey make
OIIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!
Hallefakkinloooooooyahhhh!
Dass right, oil, fukkas!
So I ask Rummy
Dey got a dictator up there?
Sheeet, he got dubya emdees?
We gotta liberate dah microbes
Free dah fakkin' Martians y'all
GET DAH FAKKIN' OIIIIILLL!!!!!!
See, I always told ya
Don' misunderestimate me"
WE PRAY FOR WAR
are known to encourage hardons
in vicars at tea, sharing table
with widows called Doris or Mabel
who wear No.5 and low cleavage
and pant with breastacular heavage:
The vicars get primed to deliver
hearing slaps on the thighs of the river
and the summer has clergymen scorch-ed
with lust, here at Grantchester Orchard!
There's no riposte to that kind of imagination.
The first words I spoke were to it:
"Keep digging."
The first potatoes I ever drilled
Were better than mountains or the stuff of Homer:
I could eat these epic histories.
But they weren't in Shranamonragh
or some such heaven: behind the Abbey Stadium, only.
An allotment they wanted for football ground.
My diasporic heart
Skein-tangles the romance. Kipling's twain, or thereabouts
are the forty acres waiting, or the Cambridge cloister.
Ah, the original story was my vignette.
They stuck a silver shovel in my mouth:
I walk down the high street with spudpatch knees.
Noel gives the vocals to Liam.
The country gives tax to the city.
Give Brown your job, if you want pity
In losing, for Bush, your approval.
Don't wait till they force your removal.
said, that Sunday afternoon, I should come 'round
with my guitar, on Tuesday. You said you
Had pickups for it. I'd just to bring 'round
a beer, you said. That would be enough
and you'd be pleased to fix the geeetar, free.
Well, Tuesday came. For sure, I'd bring enough
for drinking, and some money for you. Free?
No, you would be replenished for your work.
I got to yours at three. The cop gave out
the information. You'd planned it to work.
Noose strung from the hook. You'd jumped far out
And kicked the chair away. You asked me 'round
that day. So, why then? You had asked me 'round.
Usually I write spontaneously here, but I'm going to include what I wrote at the time, channeling C__ against this other guy's greed. At the next Sunday after C__'s death, his wake, HIS blues jam, I sang this song onstage, with C__'s voice, with his soul, and on his black telecaster, directing in this other 'businessman's' face the message that the man who was really 'dead' was HIM, the guy "still there", the tone-deaf moneyman, and not C__, the musician, whose heart burned on:
Sunday Man, how goes your plan?
You said you were usurper, but in truth I stepped aside.
How's your fun, now? Guess who won?
When you recover from your stupor
You'll have nothing of your pride.
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight:
But I know you're dead.
Sunday Man: Did you hear the one
About silence, cunning, exile
and the way to win a war?
So, has it been in the space between
my cameo appearances,
the Joy you'd thought in store?
When you took on the stage, did you feel loved?
Did you see the ghosts out in the wings?
Did you think that you once had the crowd moved?
Or were they moved by other things?
(Instrumental break)
You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight
But I know you're deaddeaddead.
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
Yes, you know you fail at all that you try to do
Sunday Man
Sunday Man.....
C__ would have sung that to the man. He passed six years ago today but his presence is alive and angry.
And The Patriot Act's your Basilikon Doron
to an heir who'll die before accession,
a would-be Henry the Ninth.
The second son of the war will get your gift
and call out that he's the elect of God
above the Commons. And he'll be routed.
Who knows who'll rule then. People of the land?
Men in leather coats. In time, they'll fall, too,
or just grow tired of killing to bureaucracy.
Then your dynasty will be restored,
The patriots modified.
(Ah, they'll call that the Age of Reason!)
But seriously,
All I know is,
that right now
dissenters are having to equivocate
to protect the holy in safe houses.
Yes, that's enough of prophecies.
Parallels suffice to tell a tale.
So, in sum, then: the point. The point, by gum.
James the First was ruler by default
when the old line seemed to die of apathy.
And he liked to speechify about the divine right of kings
(kings crowned neither by secession nor consensus),
But he really tore the blanket of his rhetoric,
decrying tyrannical usurpers in foreign lands.
So Georgie,
Let's have this Doron, then,
this Pax in proposal,
Tomorrow's pretzel-wrapper.
I'm almost starting to look forward,
Intransitively.
are you?
There's only little old me,
Left to write doggerel, trying to tie it
with rhymes that work well and agree
with basic aesthetics. Isn't it hushed
on this forum? It's Saturday night!
I could write something slowly, or something that's rushed:
Turn out wonders, or turn out pure shite.
I'll turn out the latter!
In ways, it's much better!
(pause)
KASPAR: Venn..I..pee.....and venn I pull zee flush..... zee pee...zatt I can see.... goes away...
HERR BRAUMER: Yessssss, Kaspar.... eento zee drain... outside...
KASPAR: Soooo.... eeet must grow smaller....
because...
I cannot see eeet....
HERR BRAUMER: No, Kaspar... eeet disappears....
KASPAR: Yessss... eeet must... get....smaller.....
HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeeet stays zee same size! Eeeet just deesappears...eeento ee drain....
KASPAR: And zis drain ees very very small....
HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeet eeezz outside!!!
KASPAR: Yesss. And zee toilet eeez beeeger than the outside of zee house.
HERR HAUSER: How zee fuck ees zee outside of zee house smaller than eeenside zee toilet, Kaspar?
KASPAR: Because venn I am eenside, I turn all around me, and I only see ziss building.... everywhere. But venn I go outside, I valk around zee outside of zee house, and turn around, and I can see lots of theeengs. So, zee eeenside of zee house eees beeeger zan outside, and zee peee eeenside must get smaller when eeet eees outside. Eeeeet eees log-ic-al. Peee shreeeenks outside.
HERR HAUSER: Errr... no... Kaspar, I theeenk ziss is going to take a leetle beet of work, just yet.
KASPAR: Oh.
stereotype, wilting at the door,
Mariana-like, wishing her man
Would head back smiling, uniformed, from war.
She won't pull down her shades: she wants the light
To enter through her window, though he's dead.
Because he's gone, she chose to wear her bright
sun-yellow blouse today, the one he often said
he liked the best on her. She steps outside
upon the porch. She knows deep in her heart
it isn't foolishness to think the wide
Beam of golden heat his soul in part,
Holding her once more. Crude sentiment
Is not for her, but here, out from the shade,
the summer sun suggests a firmament
Of Afterness, and promises remade.
Rainsoaked, he shivers in his pinstriped suit,
The one he wore when he left Mary,
and he splays the broad red hand
that held the shovel every day for thirty years
over his unshaven face, blacking out the sun.
The sounds of footsteps echo from concrete to steel to wood,
Through his shivering back. The knock of heels
Becomes the boreen trot of Mother's mare
to Corrigan's well, he nine years old, lazy flies
buzzing heavily about the animal's rump
and thudding into his own face. Plodding on the grassy track,
hearing two empty buckets of tin, tied both ends
on a rope across the creature's back slapping her flanks in rhythm,
His eyes flit from the small fence, the main route in,
to a short cut across the bog, head-posied,
Butterfly blazing. Beautiful in a sungleam.
He leads the animal on, hurrying in a happy canter,
humming half broken airs of nameless reels,
wild and laughing at his brilliant idea
To find the spring without the path.
A scream. Nostrils flare. Whinnying snorts and mudsplattering thuds.
A leg caught, deep in wire. Brown eyes askant, teeth bared; A tearing,
a rearing. Buckets hurled, crashing into a ditch.
Pat looking around in the bog for Corrigan himself,
sees heedlessly himself a lifetime ahead,
An image conjured in firing iris:
Going to Holyhead on the ferry with his uncle
and arriving by train to a London fog,
(a city of shiny routes to glory and tripwires),
and seeing "No Irish" in the windows
of suburban guesthouses, along entire streets
When he and Uncle are weary and need to rest
before scouring sites in the morning for ganging work.
He might view a life to come:
Knowing the five o' clock start in the lamplit chill,
Cooking bacon off the shovel for breakfast,
Learning to live in a curving spine, a breaking mind.
Neither Irish nor English anymore: a pair of hands,
a grunt, a spit of cliched insults to the new lad with the barrow,
A barrow he'd himself overstacked with hardcore
for the boy to slip on the plank
running the way up the skip,
as punishment for earnestness
and an aversion to shortcuts.
Losing his work through the gambling,
spending the newfound long days with
Mary in Anne's pub, puking the Guinness pure
come evening with no food in the belly,
Going hard on the bench with the cider
with poor dead O' Ryan:
his heart became his lacerated mare.
He splays his hand over his face, blacking out the sun
But hearing his life in the step of passing shoes,
A step that stops then starts and dies away,
A step he should know still
as Mary's.
just caught this one...
i like it
A big bulbous throat, blub-bubbling air
Fingers sheathed, glazing in rubbery green
hind legs paired, heart shaped in arching; a stare
of lidless black eyes that a long tongue licks clean:
It's the frogster.
Until it jumped up, I had thought it a leaf.
It's the frogster.
It sat on the gutter then popped underneath.
Hey there frogster!
Tell me this fact as you vacate the scene:
Tell me frogster!
How'd you keep out of view when you're ugly as sin?
Only jokin' tharr,
Beautiful froggy.
Yoooo loveable creatureeeee yoooooooooo.
FC, you are a genious!!!
i would love to HEAR you sometime..
like yer music..
coz yer words are awsume
~~its better to be hated for who you are than be loved for who you are not~~
F.ZAPPA