One Thousand And One Nights

When once more it was the nth night,
The incomparable Shahrazad continued (that she might
Live.)  She told of a Baghdad porter, fine foods,
Beauties; three half-blind dervishes, each
With a story: first, fifty steps down from a tomb,
Charred, sinful siblings; second, eye-
brow talk, death from a pomegranate fruit;
Third, a magnetic mountain, a ram-skin suit,
The forbidden last door.  A grateful fly-
ing snake doles out to treacherous sisters their doom
As black bitches; at the caliph’s command, the creat-
ures are reverted, and with neat marriages, the fun concludes.
Whether of love or sadness, mercy, rage or fail,
Our lives are all a tale within a tale within a tale.

(28.2.26) v 1.2

To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker)

Like a faithful dog tied up outside a shop,
Flecker’s quatrains wait across the cent-
uries for an unborn, laggard millennial to drop
by.  Burnished transport arches bent 
Over oceans, high drone squadrons, out-
Burj-ing skyscrapers in a new Sam-
arkand, James cares not for - no doubt.
But alongside such obvious projected analogue glam-
our, a bit has flipped that changes everything.  Books
DRM’d to files, future-inscrutable (it’s hard
To read a floppy even now), and it looks
As if literature could be sloppified to death.  Marred
By this thoughtless tech, who then can know it?
Will anyone be able to say: “he was a poet”?

(22.2.26) v 1.1

The Annex

Behind the bookcase, in a precocious Tardis, eight
People hid.  Who were they? Beleaguered Jews,
Forbidden to ride the trams, helped at great
Risk, boosted by the BBC one o’clock news.
You escaped by delving deeper, gladly forsook
That mere space for a patch of blue sky.
Noting, Proust-like, every moment’s tic,
Now joyous, now tedious, fierce you would brook
Exactly zero lack of frankness, pry-
ing into yourself, never missing a trick.
Two years later, not yet sweet sixteen,
The SS entrained you eastwards, the wrong liberation.
A bald and scabified body then, you could have been
Old today but for time’s cruel annexation.

(15.2.26) v 1.2

On Stupidity

Why am I so demonstrably stupid? To wit:
Of the myriad Middle Welsh words I once
Learned, I remember only “arglwydd” – a pit-
iful reward for serried hours of study.  Dunc-
ified by time, I muddle now through new
Topics, build on dodgy cerebral sand,
And hope for amelioration – although a slew
Of disproven past optimisms stand
As merciless slapdown to that.  If only we
Could slip into wanted knowledge as a pelagic fish
Glides frictionlessly into the deepest sea;
Lordy – what a colossal mistake would be this wish.
Every “aargh” from stubbing your mental toe
On the rocks of incompetence brings wonders to re-know.

(1.2.26) v 1.1