Ephemeral, said the secretary of Barrow and District Writers Club
In 1988. In the upstairs room of the Traveller's Rest. It was the first time I'd ever read my poetry in public. Ephemeral, he said. Isn't it? Thank you, I said. Ephemeral! A mixture of ether, me and Arial! I was glowing with pride Until I got home to the dictionary. But my poetry has always been ephemeral. Here today and soon, thankfully, gone Like a Facebook post by the ever-blathering John Like life itself (a good trick every bad poet plays) The time soon gone, nothing ever stays Your friends will die, your enemies too I won't last long and neither will you And this poem and the 19 previous Will slip away and be forgotten the easiest (God what a poor rhyme but I'm not going to worry my head The secretary of the Barrow and District Writers Club Is thankfully dead).
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Lying is fantastic:
You can say you did things Without having to do them, You can say you didn't do things When in fact you did them. You can tell people you met Roger Moore At the airport when You never met Roger Moore At the airport. The only problem is that the next week When you actually do meet Roger Moore At the airport You're fucked. 'God, you look enormous!' I said
Thinking it's a thought best left in my head But beneath my nose my idiot flap was open And the smile beneath your beautiful nose (too little too late) Had frozen. The most magnificent
Meteor shower fired overhead While we lay safely Unconscious tucked up in bed Like the full eclipse we almost Saw through a battleship sky Or the conjunction of planets That always seems to pass us by Miracles are always happening But somewhere else Like beautiful poetry books Crouching unread on a shelf A series of nuclear explosions Ninety million miles away Is visible over the horizon At the beginning of every day Here it is a crime and a sin To even think of being bored Where the beauty of existence is happy to be ignored. Email sent
PayPal spent Pokemon went Google mapped Energy sapped Chat snapped Dream dreamed Vision streamed Existence memed Tweet tweeted Energy depleted Account deleted The chimney sweep is much in demand in August;
His wife seems increasingly irritated by my phone calls. I feel like reminding her that I intend to pay him, But I don't in case she speaks ill of me to him. I remember when he came last year he had a bad back. He was cheerful and his mate did all the work. They taped newspaper over the fireplace opening, Then used a vacuum cleaner to suck up the soot. I'm always afraid the chimney will catch on fire And we'll be burned to death in our beds, screaming. I tell the chimney sweep a watered down version To encourage him to clean the chimney extra well. But the chimney sweep tells me I'm being daft: 'You'd never burn to death,' he assures me, Rubbing his back and checking his messages. 'You'd already be dead of smoke inhalation.' I hate trucks that overtake trucks on the motorway
Bunging up the middle lane as a HGV inches, or Waddles past another HGV on the motorway Do I chance the fast lane or slow and wait as The truck slowly glacially overtakes the other truck On the motorway? I was thinking about this when one of the tires Of the truck overtaking the other truck blew On the motorway, exploded in a puff of brown smoke And the truck lurched into the fast lane And back into the middle lane and the tire Was in shreds And brakes were applied And we almost died But in the end, nothing happened Because I wasn't in the fast lane And we got home And I wrote my fourteenth poem And now I've mentioned that it's my fourteenth poem Some of you - not nastily, but understandably - Are wishing that I'd been overtaking The truck the was overtaking another truck On the motorway. It's a tradition in our family.
Dinner is not served until father is made to cry. Mother often resorts to violence. Nipping, toe squashing and, failing that, slamming paternal fingers in doors. The eldest daughter has read psychology and so employs hurtful comments inadequately masked as humour, "biting remarks" and outright profanity and insults. But when all else has failed and hunger scratches at the doors of their stomachs it is the youngest girl, his "Cordelia" who usually manages to "prepare the table". She tells father the saddest most pathetic stories about what they will all do and how happy they will all be after he is dead. No sooner does the weeping begin than the sound of soup being slurped drowns out the patriarchal blubbing. We left the city by the salt road
Singing "they built this city, built this city, Built this city on violence and slavery" Instead of rock and roll But you remind me that for the Romans Violence and slavery was rock and roll. So they did build this city on rock and roll! We left the city by the salt road. After I have a shower
I need a shower So I have another shower And as I'm having the shower I'm thinking Of how I'll die one day And one day everyone I know will also die And their children and then everyone Else will die And the universe will continue on Unless it dies Which is theoretically possible And by possible I mean probable And by probable I mean inevitable But sometime soon I don't know when but sometime soon I'll have to get out of the shower. Because someone else needs it. |
AuthorJohn Bleasdale is a writer. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Il Manifesto, as well as CineVue.Com and theStudioExec.com. He has also written a number of plays, screenplays and novels. Archives
March 2019
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