Tag: free verse

Not given to imagination

Mummy, I’m not afraid to die.
Why do you talk of dying
and you so young
do you want a lollipop?

No, but I shall be with Peter and June.

Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night.
Darling, I’ve no time now. Tell me again later.

No, Mummy, you must listen.
I dreamt I went to school
and there was no school there.
Something black had come down all over it.
You mustn’t have chips for supper for a bit.

The next day off to school went her daughter
as happy as ever.
In the communal grave she was buried
with Peter on one side
and June on the other.

(From an account of 10-year-old Eryl Mai’s premonition of the 1966 Aberfan avalanche disaster)

A year ago last September

A YEAR AGO LAST SEPTEMBER TWO ladies with a child
were travelling on the Hudson River cars,
one of whom offered a seat to a middle aged gentleman
with light whiskers or goatee

slightly gray, who kindly pointed out to her
the red leaved trees
and said he had a number of them on his place
and made himself otherwise agreeable;

and when she was leaving him
(ten miles this side of where he stopped)
gave her a parting embrace, which she has never
been able to forget.

(A personal ad from the New York Herald, 25 January 1862)

A brutal nadir

I took my seat
at the microfilm reader
and began to scroll
slowly
through the archives.

For the first hundred years,
as far as I could tell,
all that happened in America
was that various people
named Nathaniel
had purchased land
near rivers.

I scrolled faster,
finally reaching an account
of an early Colonial-era shaming.

On July 15, 1742,
a woman named Abigail,
her husband at sea,
had been found
“naked in bed
with one John Russell.”

They were to be
“whipped at the public post
20 stripes each.”

Abigail
was appealing the ruling,
but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid.
She was begging the judge
to be whipped early,
before the town awoke.

From How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. Submitted by Daniel Galef.

Jeep for sale

Calls only, I don’t do mores code
I don’t text
be a man and call me.

No title no title no title
don ask

yes it is a 1986
so yes
it may have some rust
if that bugs dont buy it
that how It is

no you may not come work on it
if you buy it take it home do what you want
may run May not,
i don’t know

Will not drive jeep to your place
no joy rides
no cash no test drive

Trades welcome
need to be man stuff
no toy race cars,
or over price atvs,
or rolls of used carpet
or doll houses
no junk

Jeep not for a teenage girl’s first jeep,
jeep built to be driven by a man

offers ok.

(From Craigslist sales posts, Charlotte, NC. Submitted by Carlos Pelay)

Fossil

In this quiet inlet,
some eddy has collected
and drowned at the bottom
of the mire, now turned into marl,
enormous heaps of shells
of every shape and size.
It is a molluscs’ burying ground
with hills for tumuli.

I dig up oysters a cubit long
and weighing five or six pounds a piece.
One could shovel up in the immense pile,
Scallops, Cones, Cylheridae,
Mactridae, Murices,
Turretellidae, Mitridae
and others too numerous,
too innumerable to mention

You stand stupefied before the vital ardour
of the days of old, which was able
to supply such a pile of relics
in a mere nook of earth.

(Jean-Henri Fabre on fossils in The Faber Book of Science. Submitted by Taidgh Lynch)

Tell him we love him

He has just gone in.
I am on a chair just outside.
The nurse promised to hold his hand.

They do it in the theatre
but I expect he will be sedated.
Others coming out have been.

Done. Full sedation.
I am with him in recovery.
He is snoring.

In the waiting area.
They will give him tea and toast.
He is a bit unsteady at the moment.

Everything ok.

(Texts from a hospital waiting room. Submitted by Angi Holden)

auto-destructive art

Man In Regent Street
is auto-destructive.
Rockets, nuclear weapons,
are auto-destructive.
Auto-destructive art.

The drop
drop
dropping

of HH bombs.

Not interested in ruins, (the picturesque)

Auto-destructive art
re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling to which individuals and masses are subjected.
Auto-destructive art
demonstrates man’s power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.
Auto-destructive art
mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture – polishing to destruction point.
Auto-destructive art
is the transformation of technology into public art.

The immense productive capacity, the chaos of
capitalism and of
Soviet communism,
the co-existence of surplus and starvation;

the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons – more than enough to destroy technological societies;

the d i s i n t e g r a t i v e effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the
person,…

Auto-destructive art
is art
which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction
within a period of time not to exceed twenty years.

Other forms of
auto-destructive art
involve manual manipulation.

There are forms of auto-destructive art where
the artist
has a tight control over the nature and timing of
the
disintegrative
process,

and there are other forms where the artist’s control is slight.

Materials and techniques used in creating
auto-destructive art
include:

Acid, Adhesives,
Ballistics,
Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics,
Drop,
Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis,
Feed-Back,
Glass,
Heat, Human Energy,
Ice,
Jet,
Light, Load,
Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture,
Natural Forces, Nuclear Energy,
Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure,
Radiation,
Sand, Solar Energy, Sound, Steam, Stress,
Terra-cotta,
Vibration,
Water, Welding, Wire, Wood.

(From Gustav Metzler selections. Submitted by David Verghese)

The very last of something

Sudan doesn’t know how precious he is,
his eye a sad black dot in his wrinkled face
his head a marvellous thing, a majestic rectangle
of strong bone and leathery flesh,
a head that expresses pure strength.
How terrible that such a mighty head
can be so vulnerable, lowered melancholically
beneath the sinister sky, as if weighed down by fate.
This is the noble head of an old warrior,
armour battered, appetite for struggle fading.

(From A picture of loneliness: you are looking at the last male northern white rhino. Submitted by Angi Holden)

The Laughter-Lover

Why weren’t you lying down heads-up?
The best and most famous doctors in the city ordered me to sleep like this.

How do you know he’s not coming in by the other gate?
When he arrives back, will you tell him that I stopped by?

Time, my good man, to mix me some dark wine.
I’m not thirsty.
Do me the favor while I’m still alive.
How long were their necks, that they could drink from something so deep!
Have my dinner-clothes sent here.
Since you’re under an oath, here’s the fifty thousand. But throw in for free a small casket, in case I need it for my son.

Now you’re mad that you found me screwing your mother for the first time ever!
So is she your daughter?
(You have no clue who your real father is.)
First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine:
Father, you eat the children; I’ll take mother.
(It’s polite to call her Ma’am.)
She was a fighter.
What made you do it?

The time will come when I’ll build a threshing-floor so big that I won’t be able to see you and you won’t be able to see me.
I got something I wasn’t bargaining for:
Me, now that I’m alone –
Thanks to buddies like you!
(Look after them well.)
There are a few fire-logs still left. If you want to stop suffering, get yourself cremated on them.
Because you love me.

But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?
(If he had lived, he would have been all of those things!
If he were guilty of all that, he should have been cremated while still alive.)
What’s your rate for the night?
You can choose. But we don’t have a crumb.
Do you want me to get healthy and be forced to pay the doctor?
Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!

(Punchlines from the Philogelos, the earliest known joke book. Submitted by Daniel Galef)