Category: Poetry
coming of age in Oxford
February gives way to March slinking off with stale memories of childhood fun, schoolboy ambitions, hope-fuelled dreams adulthood lurks at the door, poised to engulf me, I am destitute of place and property. Nobel Prize winners, future presidents, will relieve themselves easing their bowels, underground in St Giles’ where I curl, foetal-balled, on condensation cubicle tiles beyond
» Read moreKoumpounophobia
O, my Emperor
The original Bengali version, written by Tagore. In English O, my Emperor! How divinely dressed have you come in the realm of my heart, to beat. Millions of Moons and Suns shamefully bow to you, in willing defeat. All pride shatter into pieces, they collapse merrily on the ground, my whole body and mind dances, plays like a Veena*, without
» Read moreSitting in a Twinkling Shack
I’m sitting in a twinkling shack or palace, call it what you will. Porcelain angels glint and crack on the windowsill. She stirs my tea, she jams my toast, she scrubs my plate until it bends. I mustn’t help my shuffling host, as that offends. So I just wait and sit and stare, waited on and hypnotised.
» Read moreThe junk society
Leave me in peace from all this morbid stress, where competition has been made the law of laws encouraging all and everyone to beat each other in the universal junk production where the only thing that counts is quantity so that the worst can only win by stifling all the lesser quantities; wherefore we have this junk society, this
» Read moreVulnerability
No one can escape it, it is always there, a lurking ugly thing, that keeps reminding you of its existence, threatening invariably your life and whole existence: Who shall find it out? When will the whistle blow? There is no one without that secret that will certainly undo him, and that is the only thing to reasonably be afraid
» Read morehip hooray for lockdown
our days are now nameless days our days are now aimless days we have been gifted to share the timeless life enjoyed by sucklings, ferals and fishes tuning our minds to receive erased transcendental truths we are not human ciphers born to dance to chimes of bells workplace hooters, clocks, whistles, calendars’ conformities we are gardeners,
» Read moreTo a Bagel
Little puffy girdling bagel, all lonesome in your see-through cradle, what shall I smear across your navel, peanut butter? Some jam scooped up in a sturdy ladle the size of a putter? You’re incomplete and yet you fill me fuller than a hotel bill, far more than any wafer will. On the table, jam, in haste, begins to
» Read morea path well trod (venus in a red dress pt2)
the broken cello sprawled on a pile of flea market debris caught Angela’s eye as she rummaged for carrots and cabbage for soup its neck was snapped she soon fixed that with Christmas wrapping sellotape and sat on her sunset balcony miming – it had no strings – to a Brahms quartet on the wireless set money was short, the
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