[Some days when the world makes no sense, it’s perhaps inevitable that poetry doesn’t have to make sense in the conventional way. I don’t want to rationalise this. There is no point in making poetry fit expectations.]
POEM FOR TODAY
The rise of the oceans means rivers will have to fight to reach the sea.
The strength of the tide will pull them sideways, push them out of bed.
Sweet Thames run softly, wash through City Airport and Canning Town
over Camberwell, Bermondsey, Poplar and the Isle of Dogs…
Lambeth Palace will float north and sink in the Walthamstow wetlands.
Sweet Thames run backwards, break the walls of St Pauls,
rush through White City and Shepherds Bush and away on the M4
to meet the Severn, shoved north by the grip of the Bristol Channel.
The South will become an island as the Trent and the Tyne
swollen with snow, come pouring down from the North…
Our neighbour patrols his garden, his body tensed.
He’s on the lookout in case children on their noisy
haphazard happy way to school pass too close to his fence…
frost, fox prints in grass,
patches of mist, a gold sky
as the sun rises
(rises = kireji, ah but there should be no punctuation…
it’s not right, I tell you…Fail.)
hens talk to me as I put out food, I tell them
poetry is a half-built house, a house that will
never be built. what do your poems mean?
say the hens.
do my poems have to mean anything? I say.
food banks say they must ration supplies
because madness is gathering in the folds of the earth
the government declares lower rates of income tax
for all those whose names begin with X and end with Z
Lord as I grow old let me be suspicious
of people with leaflets
of people who have good news
who tell me I must use their app
who ring me from numbers I don’t recognise
The trouble with having friends is that they invite you
for coffee or to events or gatherings of one kind or another
A well-meaning radio presenter says the programme
will discuss loneliness among the elderly
My computer tells me
9 Driver Updates Identified
I suppose tomorrow did not turn out well
What if the all-clear never sounds
what then, are we stuck down here forever
back in the tube listening to crooners
who never find the end of the song
…a woman is jailed for seven years
for replacing labels on food in a supermarket
with anti-war messages
Hospitals become cemeteries
refugees run but the borders are closed
children are shot for throwing stones
decomposing bodies are hauled into mass graves
by prisoners in masks
premature babies are laid in rows on beds
because there is no electricity to power incubators
one doctor left
for how long?
Roads crack and crumble as magma rises
out of the souls of us all
we choke on the seething expanding multiplying wriggling earth
one moment I think I understand
the next I know I don’t
nobody who has seen it will forget
Any poets around here old-timer?
Well look on the wall son, I skin everything I kill
Amanda on the veranda remembers December when
she did a handstand on the bandstand… take it, then, take it…
that was designed to depress a resigned man
with a ban(dana) and a banana… now your turn, take it…
and a fig, a big fig, yes but I stress, a fig, and as some
said in the rickety Sixties, you dig?… oh, that’s crap. Fail.
Meanwhile bluetongue has been confirmed
in a sixth individual animal near Canterbury, Kent
in response to which the Temporary Control Zone
has been extended from the original ten kilometres.
Please check the interactive map for details.
Download the app now.
Two days eleven hours to the end of the auction
for the air space above a town house in Battersea, London,
starting price ten thousand pounds.
When I left home I knew I would never go back.
Finally, says the woman behind the wall,
I trapped the mouse in the pantry.
Washing up to be done. Unkindness, cruelty,
can’t think about it. Turn on This Morning
or whatever’s on the Comedy Channel.
What number is it? I don’t know, try 111.
Stationary traffic on the Cambridge Road.
In the gutter a purple hyacinth orchid
thrown away by a girl, so not the hyacinth girl.
Who was she anyway? I know they said, but
I can’t remember her name.
I dream of running out of time
of knowing I have a day left, perhaps two.
I don’t know what to do.
What will I do?
War debases us all.
An ordinary man steps on a mine.
Light rain. Drizzle. Mist. No wind.
The girl from round the corner
late again for school
tucks her shirt into her skirt
with one hand while holding
her phone in the other,
chatters about stuff that matters
The children walk by, the old folk walk by,
the in-between folk walk by.
The usual morning sirens out on the main road.
Buy direct for lower prices.
In town by the coffee shop a busker sings
There Is A Time For Every Purpose Under Heaven.
Seriously? I mean, is there?
And far out on the heavier sea
a cruise ship
begins to totter and roll
as the waves rise and rise and dip and dip…
if we’re lucky birds will sing in the dark
Bob Mee poetry and more 