Moonlight

I don’t know why I’m scribbling to you.

It isn’t something that I choose to do.

My little poems write themselves that way

just as surely as night follows day. Hmm....

Although that last line wasn’t one I chose

(its awkward metre far more fit for prose),

it nonetheless conveys the basic fact

that though I’m rich in passion, poor in tact,

and my absurd declamatory style

will likely raise your hackles, not a smile,

I’m hopelessly dependent on my muse

so if you kick me, first step in my shoes.

At second glance, the metaphor’s not right

for though my darkness does follow your light,

what’s going on is not so black and white...

The Aniseed Ball Speaks

Some advice as you travel south:

pop me quickly into your mouth.

You’ll want to suck. It is so sweet.

Consider this a birthday treat.

A lovely game for just one player.

Your tongue reveals my every layer

but suck too long and then indeed

I may release a little seed.

Perhaps that is the sweetest part?

You find my core, my hidden heart.

Like that I’m finished, yes I’m done,

and you’re left smiling, feeling young.

090919

Where the Wild Things Were

 We would drive out

seven to a five seat car

sling sleeping bags on shoulders

bags of firelighters

cassettes and bongs

and wind our way

on the forgotten bridle path 

to Hangman’s Wood.

Couples took a two man tent.

Mark Mitchell, Brett Wells,

Nick Ferrin, Zac Hewlett

the two Dan Hills.

A shifting cast of guys and girlfriends.

Half boys, half men

sending excitable shouts

into warm nights

on the South Downs.

A fire would be built and lit

the bigger, the better.

Ground would be cleared

of sticks and stones.

Music would be argued over

debated, fought for, played.

Ozric Tentacles, The Orb,

The KLF, The Shamen,

The Prodigy?

Or how about The

Incredible String Band

Pink Floyd, Donovan?

Once everything was set

the music had been settled

we would all go

where the wild things are

imbibe huge

experimental doses

of psilocybin mushrooms

or LSD or ecstasy

or combinations of all of these.

Almost nobody ever drank booze.

Almost everybody smoked joints

continuously.

We were all convinced that

somehow

we would push ourselves

to the furthest extremes

of chemically assisted experience

and that this would

somehow

have highly beneficial

psychological outcomes.

I do not know now

at this remove

where we obtained that hypothesis.

Probably my dad

who was known to sigh moodily

complaining that,

‘You can’t get real acid these days, man

Not the real high Hoffman gear’

or some such thing.

One game we would play

as the overwhelming

avalanche of delirium

poured into our camp

was to pick a partner

stand either side of the fire

and stare each other in the face.

I do not know who

invented this game

but it was a perfect way

to share an intense encounter.

A deep, lasting and

intimate bond

was almost always made.

One particular night

I stood opposite Mark Mitchell

a burly black magician.

Covered in piercings

rings and pentagrams

and bearded since birth,

this avuncular Satanist

stood opposite me

across the huge fire

stoking fireflies

from the cauldron of its guts

with a timber wand.

The fizzing chemistry set

inside my skull

was dismantling the planet.

The night sky breathed

to suffocate the trees,

the oil-painted darkness

pressed up behind Mark

until, to me,

he was floating on an ocean

of obsidian marbles

and I was gazing at him from above.

He stoked the fire again

his huge searchlight eyes

illuminating everything

within me.

As he stoked

the entire global population

of monarch butterflies

flew up to be collected

by Mark’s swinging ponytail.

I suddenly became aware

that Mark and I were

somehow standing

not around a fire at all

but either side of a 

countless number of

furious Bengal tigers.

Their roars and growls crackled

frighteningly close

the heat of their bodies

burning my knees and shins.

Fear came over me

like an ocean wave

overcomes the swimmer

lifting my body

into rising panic

turning me over and over

pulling me down to

incoherent, directionless

darkness.

It is a fear so complete

it borders grief.

The fear of a child that he has

lost his mother

or of a mother hunting

for her child.

‘Come back, man’

Mark’s huge grin.

A silver sickle

cutting through the oil.

‘It’s okay, man. Stay in it’.

The body was blazing now.

I had chased away tigers.

I had dropped through

the bottom of the ocean

and found dry land.

And now as I found Mark’s eyes

his face became a series

of ever changing

liquefying masks

as though the whole of humanity

were appearing through Mark

to wish me well.

An old lady quickly became a priest

the wise Geronimo a dogman,

Jerry the mouse Monica Vitti

a waterfall of faces

that would never relent.

And so the night wore on

as we coupled and uncoupled

gazed into each other

loving and helping

determined to see

new things

find new things

in hallucinatory terror

and joy and love.

Things that we could keep forever.

Of course, that part was all a dream.

We were just boys

on a hillside

in Hangman’s Wood

just boys with chemicals

that are rightly restricted

trying to impress each other

trying to impress girls.

I know all of that.

Of course I do.

But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

A Dalliance Dangles

 Before you go, please give me one sweet kiss

I know you’re keen. I see it in your eyes.

You’re just the kind of girl I want to miss.

I’m married so I’m easy to dismiss

but you’re no fool so let’s not agonise.

Before you go, please give me one sweet kiss.

Embrace me so that I might reminisce.

I’ll feel no guilt. You’ll slowly realise

you’re just the kind of girl I want to miss.

You want me to consign to the abyss

a marriage that I’d never jeopardise.

Before you go, please give me one sweet kiss.

You’d rather have a night of torrid bliss

and avoid shame by telling yourself lies?

You’re just the kind of girl I want to miss.

Let’s swear we’ll never speak a word of this.

At least we can agree that compromise.

Before you go, please give me one sweet kiss.

You’re just the kind of girl I want to miss.

Unseen

 'The blessing of God upon grass is shades of green'

a lunatic wrote on the madhouse wall.

I suppose he was hunting for something unseen -

a neat deity to make sense of it all.

The unfelt hand that steers us, the unseen eye that sees,

the caress of the wind as it tickles the leaves,

and sends us off with purpose in our life -

to take a lover, a loan, a life, a break, a wife

and give us a sense that it was meant to be -

another twig the river carried to the sea.

Well, I guess I believe in something unseen too -

that somehow you’ve seen me and I’ve seen you,

that together we can tickle away our grief.

Tonight you are the wind and I’m the leaf.

A Sonnet For You

 Another sonnet leaps out of my pen

sounding like the ones that came before,

organising sounds in groups of ten,

never really knowing what they’re for.

No question that it’s you who writes them best -

Enjambment does not seem to work for me.

The syllables are often wrongly stressed.

For you, things seem to flow so naturally.

Originality should be my strength,

ripping up the rulebook as I go,

yet I fixate on meter and line length,

obsessively considering the flow.

Ugly bones will warp a sonnet’s crust.

X-ray this one. The skeleton’s robust.

Exchange

Bloodily, you push the

hooked thumb

deeper into your sternum

wincing with shallow breaths

remove a small piece

of your heart

throw it defiantly

against the wall

to slap and fall

cool quickly on the laminate.

I suck my teeth

and shrug

“Not bad”

hand you a small

white towel.

I roll my neck

take a few short breaths

insert the Stanley blade

quickly unzip

from navel to clavicle.

“Let me do it”

you say.

A step closer.

Your hands inside me

retrieving three feet

of intestine.

“Pretty good”.

“I hate you I love you”

“I hate you I love you too”

On the window pane

the sound

of a gentle rain.

The Lousy Sonnet

I wrote a lousy sonnet

and I hang my head in shame.
I don’t know what went wrong.
Perhaps the prompt’s to blame?

It concerned a master craftsman
who inspired a journeyman
but it turned out that his journey
didn’t really scan.

There was an almost-good bit
about two astronauts
who met in sexy space suits
and read each other’s thoughts

but the rest was mostly duff lines
on things that can’t be seen
and the whole thing ended badly
“on the threshold of a dream”.

It seemed fresh as it was written
but it curdled as I read.
but perhaps what I was saying
is better left unsaid?

The Birds

 Each night, he beds down in the fecund earth

while at the shore she tends her empty nest.

He sees she does not know what she is worth

and so puffs out his tiny crimson chest

to sing to her his plaintive little songs

(unmusical and often wrongly stressed)

for while he knows he’s just where he belongs,

by night he thinks of her and dares to dream

of how one day he’ll swim out with the swans

to join her in the middle of the stream

and for a moment he could take his share

of grace and, gracefully, they’d float downstream

and in that moment, love would trump despair

and, once they’d celebrated this rebirth,

they’d beat their wings and vanish into air.

Serendipity

We are two flatirons

proud against the belly of the sky

two whale songs

harmonising in the deep ocean

We are the burning building

and the sun that doesn’t care

two broken bicycles

being mended in the same shed

We are the spinning tops

not yet fallen

the lab rats who lived

We are dusk and dawn

staring each other up and down

the rival buskers 

competing for small change

We are two teenage lovers

entwined in bliss in the cheap cider night

two forgotten pocket watches

ticking out of time

We are two threadbare tires

being taken off a Rolls

two ghost towns

half eaten by the dust

We are two prayer flags, continents apart

fluttering the same stupid prayer

two white balloons

staring up at the mad moon

We are Jesus and Judas

and Judas and Jesus

two laughs echoing

down the same corridor

We are two old gods

too tired to make earthquakes

two fools for Christ

persecuted for talking crazywise

We are two hucksters

selling the Brooklyn Bridge to putzes

two lost sheep

heading for the same cliff edge

We are two poems

shuffled together like a deck of cards

two bullets meeting in Nomansland

as a truce is being called

two years in which

two lovers have not said i love you

two metres distance at all times

too late to be young again

too soon to be old

two graves yawning at our jokes

two hands clasped in love

as the future washes in

and we walk together

toward the endless adventure.

Ocklynge Cemetery

 They'd piled St Mary’s waist deep with their dead

so looked at last for somewhere else instead.

They found a field upon a downland lilt

and sowed their fathers even as they built.

Small men in counting houses held the lease

while burly fellows toiled on Ocklynge Piece.

The Coombe, the dene, the dovecote and the mill - 

each turned six feet, till each plot held its fill.

Fine elms were laid to map the paths ahead,

to shelter stones that shelter Eastbourne’s dead.

Now labour’s done, those trees are fully grown;

their marble’s turning black, their graves unmown

and sunbeams warm the whale-backed downland side

where children play and live and age and die.

The Experience of Losing

 Keep whispering, keep whispering.

Dinosaur ransack your kitchen -

you stand there in your telephone.

Morning slippers, slippery hands

always searching.

Standing on top of a dying past

on a carpet of mulched apples.

The light outside is pinking.

The light outside has its own prayers

these days.

His name has become embarrassing.

In every song you hear it sound.

Dog barks at bird beyond the wall -

your body clenches like a fist

around a razor blade.

Vagina blushed with naff emotion 

Fighting a fire with homemade lemonade

Ignoring the barbed wire postcards

gently cooling your own poison potions 

summoning your meteor.

The Flood

 You were born after the flood.

You have never smelled the blood

nor heard a mother’s anguished cries

nor watched the river waters rise

as blackened bodies, floating by,

were fished out, gasped at, recognised.

You would not understand that pain.

You were born after the rain.

You have only sort of felt

secondhand the hand that’s dealt

to foreign folks who baked your bread,

who washed your cars and now lie dead

unspooled on slimy river banks

or chewed up in the treads of tanks;

whose children in a flour sack

will not survive the next attack.

But history has its eyes on you.

You’ll pay the toll though you crept through

enjoying Europe’s postwar peace

not caring that this interstice

was momentary, fragile, new.

You just did what consumers do:

you just consumed and loafed and played.

But now the piper must be paid.

Your daughters will be raped and die

their babies pitched into a fire

then, undeterred, your splendid sons

will pledge revenge, acquire guns,

will tear down cities, kill and laugh;

they’ll crack the pretty world in half

until they meet their ounce of lead

and fall among the shameless dead,

and then their blank and hollow eyes

will gaze for days in dumb surprise

that this is what became of them -

these smart, sharp-handed sons of men - 

that this is all that they were for -

the mud-mouthed, busted toys of war.

You know it’s true. You smell the blood.

Your kids are bracing for a flood.

The Love Song of the Palace Hound

Beneath the jasmine vines he came each night

to stare into the surface of the pond

and howl into the water’s shifting light.

Perhaps tonight his lover would respond?

It’s said that every dog shall have his day.

To have one night had always been his wish.

Before you sympathise, I ought to say:

this foolish dog was smitten with a fish!

He’d seen her from high on the palace keep;

A golden mote that flashed bright as the sun.

Since then he didn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep.

He knew she was his Queen, his bitch, his One.

He never actually saw her pretty face.

Just tiny bubbles she left in her wake,

the arabesques her little fins would trace,

a star map of each movement she might make.

He gazed at these with magic in his eyes

and every time he saw them gave a bark.

Where you’d see nothing, he saw her replies;

a raging fire where there was no spark.

One honeysuckled night he thought he saw

a slender golden fin beckon to him

then, eagerly, he struck out from the shore

despite the fact he knew he could not swim.

That’s right. You’re right if you now fear the worst.

This romance has no happy epilogue.

His heart so full of love he thought he’d burst,

down into darkness sank the shaggy dog.

So ends The Love Song of the Palace Hound

who tried to kiss a koi and so was drowned.

This stupid tale might leave you wanting more.

Please understand it’s just a metaphor.

The Mirror Shows

 This poem is a mirror,

a true portrait of you.

Perhaps you don’t believe that?

I assure you that it’s true.

So read on and you’ll notice

with a look of sweet surprise

your reflection on its surface.

Your mouth, your nose. Your eyes.

Look deeper though and down there

you’ll see what’s underneath

the mask that you are wearing.

You’ll gasp in disbelief

to see the inner workings,

the things that make you tick.

It’ll make you gaze in wonder

if it doesn't make you sick.

Your pain, your guilt, your anger

and all of your despair,

the time you cheated on your wife

then asked her not to care.

The fear you have inside you

that you haven’t done enough.

The fifty years you’ve wasted

on doing selfish stuff.

The places you will never go,

the things that you won’t see.

The options that you never took.

The things you’ll never be.

The fear that God will judge you

for fearing He’s not there.

The fear your Daddy hates you

and Mummy doesn’t care.

The fear that life is pointless,

a meaningless crusade

to eat and reproduce

that leads but to the grave.

At the bottom of the mirror

you’ll see your future too.

A broken world in chaos

where there’s nothing you can do

but accept the mirror’s judgement

on decisions you have made,

on the people that you’ve hurt

and the weakness you’ve displayed.

Oh God, this is a nightmare

for I’m starting to see

that this poem is a mirror

so this portrait is of me.

The Rythmn Method

 My aunt Fanny (that’s a pseudonym)

has a wonderful, excellent musical quim.

It’s funny to think she was born that way;

normal except for an orchestral vajayjay.

The midwife first thought that maybe a drum

had somehow got lodged in the newborn's bum

but quickly she saw that it made better sense

that the child had been born with a dulcet tuppence.

Needless to say, her folks hit the roof

when her brothers poked fun at her melodious foof.

Over time, the whole family came to swear by

the pitch-perfect precision of young Fanny's hair pie.

Of course, it’s not really a great superpower

but it can’t hurt to sport a mellifluous flower

though her choirmaster thought it unorthodox

when Fanny sang out of her sweet-sounding box.

At parties we kids would play musical chairs

to the sound of Aunt Fanny's percussive downstairs.

Of course we kids were slow on the uptake

not sensing the sounds all came from her cupcake.

Even now, in old age, it disrupts her bingo

when spontaneous jazz blasts from her bajingo

and gynaecologists can start to feel hinky

when donning earmuffs to examine a minky.

Now when old Fanny walks, you don’t hear her feet.

You hear just a snatch in time to the beat.

If you hear a knock or a soft-sounding bang though,

it may just be Fanny’s sonic fandango.

She likely won't blush or even say ‘pardon'

Just ‘please excuse my loud lady garden’.

Yes, Aunt Fanny sure has a euphonious beaver.

Request a tune, you'll soon be a believer.

The Ocelot

 Last night I dreamt I loved an ocelot

fast-footed, fierce and fearful, eyes blazing

obsidian mirrors, an amazing

bobcat dressed in striped fire and polka dot.

She spoke to me in music and her voice

invoked the oldest magic of her kind;

to build her den in my subconscious mind.

I thrilled to know I had no other choice

for when she purred, I felt great hurricanes

restoring leaves to every winter tree

and I sensed something lost return to me.

Defencelessly, I let her fill my veins

and though her love is far less give than take,

I know at dawn I did not wish to wake.

Public Service Announcement

 Sorry guys but I have to say

your poetry’s not great today.

From a distance, it looked okay;

a closer look invoked dismay.

The passion clearly isn’t there.

It reads as though you want to share

the contents of your soul with flair

but when you look, the shelves are bare.

Instead, you posted utter shit

devoid of humour, sense or wit.

I’m not suggesting that you quit.

Just that you improve a bit.

So take a breath and take your time.

Just concentrate and you’ll be fine

if you construct them line by line.

(Not every poem has to rhyme.)

Then I suggest you count the words

and pick out half and flush those turds.

You know what? Fuck it, flush two thirds!

Apologies for those rude words

but if you don’t know how to edit

or perhaps you simply dread it,

can’t stand the work but want the credit,

you might be better off on Reddit.

I daresay this will be ignored.

You’ll just think that I’m snide and bored.

To you, I’ll be the mouse that roared;

your self-respect will be restored

but dude, this is your peer review

and hopefully I might break through.

There’s one poet here and here’s a clue:

if you ain’t me, then it ain’t you.

That’s all I have to say for now.

I’ve butchered this board’s sacred cow

where we pretend we’re all highbrow.

Now write a poem. You know how.

Yesterday’s Big News

 My fourteen year old daughter has been told

that she needs train-track braces on her teeth.

She seemed quite calm and wouldn’t be consoled

though I suspect there’s panic underneath.

“Oh Dad, two years is not such a long while”.

For now at least, it’s nice to see her smile.

Hide and Seek

 Two children playing hide and seek.

They don’t know what they’re searching for.

So much to say they dare not speak,

dare not pass through an open door.

We don’t know what we’re searching for

and yet we know what we have found.

We’re passing up an open door,

determined to go round and round

and yet we know what we have found.

It’s obvious and yet we still

insist on going round and round

as if the searching were the thrill.

It’s obvious and yet we’re still

two children playing hide and seek

as if the searching were the thrill.

I’ve much to say but dare not speak.

Primrose Hill

 I’d blacked your eye in Beaconsfield

but gradually we’d patched things up

refilled our empty loving cup

with cheap red wine.

That night, we lay on Primrose Hill.

Moon drunk, we’d fucked against a tree

and may have taken ecstasy

or done some speed

but in our nest of lager cans

we’d staked our spot and kept a watch

sustained by joints and hits of scotch

till morning came.

Apocalyptic London rose

from yellow fog, great slabs of grey,

and joggers met to greet the day,

the fucking fools.

That morning’s thirty years ago.

You loved me then and I loved you.

It wouldn’t last and we both knew

and didn’t care.

I look back now with darkened eyes

at how we spent those insane nights

of bruising love and crushing fights

and cherish them.

But now I’m a good family man

and dawn breaks as I write this line.

Listen to the blackbird calling time

on reverie.

Time Flies

 Billy with tight curls

cherub cheeks

knitted tank

running over The Debris

re-enacting El Alamein

with spud guns

running down the length

of Stebondale Street

your feet clattering 

past the empty docks

the gated Mudchute

in a lost London

where everyone was family.

Bill with a crystal set

memorising Goon routines

in your cramped back bedroom

recording reel-to-reel

Radio Luxembourg

‘208 - Your station of the stars’

hearing Acker Bilk

Humphrey Lyttleton

Chris Barber

for the first time

Bill Price for National Service

in a beautiful car

you couldn’t quite afford

the first of many

discovering your beard

women

a world beyond the world

where everyone was family

Uncle Bill to me

the globe trotting oil man

fresh from Angola

Canberra Trondheim

the Bayou

with crisp twenties

Christmas gifts

we couldn’t believe

Uncle Bill

gourmand and bon vivant

riding a cauldron of gumbo

with a ladle and

a tumbler of claret

Uncle Bill

connoisseur of pickled walnuts

owner of sunken boats

fat alley cat

laughing at the 

Singapore night

a hooker on your knee

Canadian Club poured free

making unreal friends

in a world where nobody

was family

Uncle Bill in Miami

living with Orpha

a brassy American widow

whose husband was killed

by the Mafia

living with

Joanne in Malmö

Cathy in Kuala Lumpur

any of the others

you never married

never had kids with

Bill again

once I was married myself

you had gravitated home

night watchman of

the new Canary Wharf

beard gone to white

drinking devoid of glamour

your favourite foods

beyond your spending limit

Billy back with his mum

broken Jag never running

memories start to fade

unworn Hawaiian shirts

unremarkable days

Old Bill trapped alone

in a cheerless flat in Hove

surrounded by trophies

body in revolt

your music becoming Trad

then Oldies

then just never played

Bill, Billy, Bill

my Uncle Bill

illegally

we tipped your ashes out

on the Mudchute

a bit too close to Asda

for my liking

and your little sister

my mother

spoke a few words

snatched by the breeze

carried

I know not where

I have your cookbooks

and the conch you heard the sea in

whenever you came home.

You were never William.

It wouldn’t have suited you anyway.

The Princess and the Pauper

 I’d seen her name in fancy magazines,

the princess I believed to be a queen,

and managed to invite her on a date.

She acquiesced by screaming, “Don’t be late!”

so I arrived at the appointed time,

dressed handsomely and smelling rather fine.

She turned up two weeks late but, being nice,

I made some small talk just to break her ice.

Just then, she pulled a knife quite suddenly

and, laughing, plunged the blade straight into me.

“Don’t bleed”, she smiled. “Observe the etiquette!”

“You’ll love me more if I play hard-to-get.”

With that, she cut my throat from ear to ear,

and chuckled, “Let’s do this again next year”.

Hell Hath No Fury

 If God was painting rainbows, he’d ask you

advice about the most resplendent hue

and Mother Nature, dreaming up a rose

would calibrate its fragrance with your nose

and all around us, people come and go

not one amongst them knowing what I know:

that no songbird can match your sweet love song 

and yet tonight, I see that something’s wrong.

A black cloud foments in your deepest blue

a lightning storm of crimson, driving you

away from beauty and towards despair.

You’re raging at a man who isn’t there.

My love, it is a shame you’re full of bile

for ugly doesn’t seem to suit your style.

Triolet

 All my life I’d dreamed in black and white

till I awoke to Technicolor you.

An exhumed corpse exposed to the sun’s light,

all my life I’d dreamed in black and white

and though the mud had dulled my appetite,

I hunger now for all your shades of blue.

All my life I’d dreamed in black and white

till I awoke to Technicolor you.

Untitled

Two peas trapped in the same pod

but they’re the last peas on Earth.

All around them: fucking beans.

That’s our metaphor.

The Swan’s Song

Someday the weeds will grow right where we stand.

This temple will be dust, we’ll be long gone.

Whoever’s left shall never understand

how love once flourished here and then moved on.

Two travellers - two swans with craning necks -

once drifted through in sweet coincidence,

indifferent to age and race and sex,

experiencing love in present tense.

For lovers do not live in yesterday,

when promises were made they could not keep

and time shall separate them come what may;

tomorrow shakes all dreamers from their sleep

and so tonight I pledge no future vow.

I’ll simply say I’m loving you right now.

A Taste of Honey

 We took turns to be weak and to be strong.

All summer long we played our game of words

and sang our songs as though nothing was wrong,

not knowing summer love is for the birds.

When winter came

we hibernated

and in our caves

we waited, weighted.

Now the sun returns and though its face is fine,

it will not warm us up if we’re alone

so now, my love, let’s pour ourselves a drink

and add a spoon of honey to each cup.

[I]

Note: Okay, maybe I’ve broken a rule of the dorsimbra through carelessness but I don’t want to fix it and I promise another.[/I]

Rewind

 Still trembling, I reach my fingertips

to lips projected on a silver screen.

A cut reveals your fine, athletic hips;

tight packages of nitroglycerin.

dreams to be re-dreamed

running the scene

over and over

in my mind

The clips I have are only seconds long

but I have watched them 50,000 times.

Your eyelids breathing on the screen. Once more,

still trembling, I reach my fingertips....

Why I Don’t Write About Roses

 I try to write of roses in the sun,

a few short lines to have a little fun,

a well turned little portrait of someone.

I just don’t seem to get those poems done.

A Limerick, a lark, a silly song;

it need not be too clever or too long

but even when the inspiration’s strong,

my rhyme scheme or my meter goes all wrong.

There’s lots of simple things I’d like to say:

perhaps a few remarks about my day.

The sun is shining but I can’t make hay

for you, dear one, are always in my way.

I think of you, then words begin to flow

so easily. I just need to let go

and, while we don’t let our emotion show,

I know you know I know you know I know.

It’s true I should not spend my afternoons

in sordid contemplation of pantoums

but the grace of God is measured in teaspoons

and the Devil’s playing all the jaunty tunes.