BLOCKHEAD

'No-one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money'

                                                             Samuel Johnson

OK so I'm a blockhead.

Proper poetry

If there isn't any rhyme or at least repeating rhythm

it's just pretentious shredded prose and not a proper poem.

FREE DELIVERY TV AD

It isn't exactly Newspeak

(1984 and all that)

but it may attempt to disguise the fact

that the item's delivery cost is probably

included in the price already.

Shall we just call it Adspeak ?

DIMENSIONAL

Only humans are three dimensional;

other creatures have just the one

living in the present only

without the past and future to come.

Isaac Newton at the disco

While unlucky unlovelies grieve together

and clumsy clowns act fools for some attention;

while undulating women play at sirens,

stirring the limpid air with waving arms,

. . . I seem to have been . . . playing on the sea-shore

. . . now and then finding . . . a prettier shell than ordinary

PRECARIOUS

Strawed, half full and perched on the corner

of a table bearing assorted jumble

of hats and coats and even handbags,

it needed only the slightest fumble

of passing drunks to be knocked off,

fall on the floor and instantly crumble

to glassy fragments. The disco crowd

included some men in the interval mumble

strutting and grappling right beside it.

If any of them chanced to stumble

against the table, it must fall off.

And yet it survived until the humble

bar girl took it away as dead -

the lucky tumbler that didn't tumble.

I went to brush away down on the wall

a piece of debris, I don't know what -

some bit of fabric, some wool ball

but before I could touch it I suddenly got

a shock when a largish spider appeared

beside the thing as  if out of nowhere.

Now I quite like spiders; they're not to be feared

though I know they give some folks a scare

so I didn't do it any harm at all

and assume it just went back to its nest.

But now I also protect that web ball

and in that corner give the vacuum a rest.