Responding in kind to Mark Halliday

When Mark Halliday decided to become a poet

he should have given more consideration to the fact

that his name is not poetic, offers no immediate sense that

here we have a poet of degree, a poet of quality.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, strikes the poetic mind

from the outset: if Wordsworth hadn’t been called

Wordsworth he’d have had to change his name to

something more apt, like Lord Byron (whose name

always struck me as odd until I realised Lord wasn’t his

Christian name). Lord Byron immediately tells us that

here we have a poet willing to rage amongst the ladies,

to fight in real live battles with a sword, ˗ or maybe a gun

if he was lucky; to swim the Hellespont, or some equally

improbable water. (Though not to die of as miserable a

thing as a cold, and it wasn’t even caught in the

Hellespont.) Those are the sorts of things

aroused by the poetic name, Lord Byron: a true poet.

Robert Louis Stevenson, though he has the

advantage of a triple-barrelled cognomen, used the word

nice in one of his poems, so I discovered yesterday;

this rather undercuts his literary integrity.

Rudyard Kipling, on the other hand, could have

written what he liked (and used nice) and we would have

continued to read his poetry simply on the basis of his name.

See what I mean, Mark Halliday? The only

notorious thing your name reminds me of is Doc

Holliday, the whisky-slurping, gun-toting, gambling dentist (yes,

dentist!), the sidekick of Wyatt Earp ˗ another man who could

have taken up a career as a poet if he hadn’t had the poor

judgement to have several brothers who plainly desired more

strongly to appear in the Darwin Awards than to savour life,

marriage, family and a bunch of cattle on a largish ranch.

So before you decide to write any more poems, Mark ˗

if I can take advantage of our mutual poetic status ˗ I

suggest you consider rebranding yourself. Mark isn’t

too bad (Mark Antony springs to mind, a verbose man

capable of considerable blank verse) but Halliday is

too close to holiday, as in relaxed, I can’t be bothered,

I’m doing well just lying on the beach, speaking malarkey,

thanks very much. No one wants to read a poet whose

name bespeaks vacation, relaxation, can’t be botheredliness,

the mundane. Our immediate assumption, on seeing a

poem by Mark Halliday, is, well, he won’t have anything

to say ˗ just look at his name. It’ll be all malarkey

and wine biscuits, plain arrowroot, Graham crackers

(I included those since you’re a North American and

they’ll mean something to you even if they don’t mean

a thing to me, a person from the South Pacific,

where people go crackers, but don’t eat them with the

seeming obsessiveness of the average American).

See, this is what happens, Mark, when I read your

poetry and try to respond in kind. I find myself

meandering, unable to stick to the point, bringing in

beaches and Byron and a bunch of bogus baloney.

Instead of interaction between two poetic minds, it

becomes All Me, barely A Kind of Reply.

Written around August 2015

The sun has shifted

The sun has shifted

after Diana Der-Hovanessian*

When your father leaves,
no umbrella will protect you;
it rains day and night.

When your father leaves,
you find yourself walking in mud;
your mother despises your boots.

When your father leaves,
you try to excuse him,

hating his foibles, loathing his qualities.

When your father leaves,
no matter your age,

you must become Father.

When your father leaves,
the day’s filled with thunder,
the sun blacks out.

When your father leaves,
he eats up your childhood,
leaves you starving.

When your father leaves,
you beat the world with a club

and smash up the sun.

When your father leaves,
your sun shifts forever;
you stumble in your own shadow.

* Written around September 2015, as a result of reading Der-Hovanessian's poem. 

Banana

Banana

Inside the browned and mottled skin,

the banana’s creamy-white with the merest

hint of haematoma. The taste is still delight:

thick liquid in solid state; that neatly

round, boomerang shape, fitting the hand,

redolent of bawdiness; the skin so easily

squished beneath blank-faced comedians’

feet slipping in the street, slipping and

toppling in silent movie humour.

A yellow bucket left in the road

A yellow bucket left in the road, as if a

warden intended to preserve a parking space.

Not the yellow of dandelions, or daisies,

of daffodils, or buttercups. Not the

yellow, either, of some pale almost green

leaves on various bushes, related but not

alike. Not the colour of the large torch in the

hall, more like the Pak-n-Save plastic bag, though

without the bag’s flexibility, a bucket that

will survive innumerable droppings and

throwings, and will only succumb to

continual weathering, which will bring

cracks, and an eventual all-round

deterioration, at which point the

bucket will head for the tip via the

Envirowaste bin. In the meantime, the

daisies, and daffodils, and dandelions, and

buttercups will have long gone, being

much more environmentally-friendly,

biodegradable, and much more short-lived. 

A small dog considers being rubbed

Just in time for National Poetry Day, which is tomorrow, the 26th August, 2016. A poem written some while ago...

A small dog considers being rubbed

Oh, I can be rubbed until the

veritable cows come home,

those large dociles not of my

own ancestry.

I can lie on my back while you

massage my tummy

(infantile word)

as though I had no organs inside

excepting one organ, a

heart already pulsating

fast, pulsating

faster at every stroke of

your rough hand.

I can have my ears mangled and tangled

around my head as though my

brain barely knew anything beyond the

scratching and rubbing, though

if the need arose, alert

would be my first instinct ˗

if I could choose between

alert and rubbing.

I can have that monstrosity of a

tail, that appendage which is in

reality a curled sausage,

one found after being
left the pantry too long,

that hanger-on covered in

fine fur flailing, a

peacock’s tail, though of course it

lacks some degree of iridescence; I

can, as I say, have it flicked and

fluttered by you without

ignominy.

It is your touch I crave, not

respectability, not honour, not

pride in the self that I am through

God’s own design; I acquire such a

deep intensity through your touch that

all I am as Dog is affirmed.

Food I can fast from; walks can wait

(though not indefinitely);

sleep is pleasant but never the

ultimate necessity. There is only one

necessity: that when I sit snuggled beside you,

or lean my chin on your knee, or

push my head between your shins

like those aforesaid cows calmed before any

possible storm by heads enclosed in a

padded containment; or stand on your

lap, front paws on your chest where the

beat pulsates at a rate

slower, heavier, than mine,

snout to nose, greatly tempted to

lick you, the necessity is

only to be stroked.

Sweep my fur back to front,

I will love you.

Clean gunk around my eyes,

I’ll love you.

Thrust me in a bath and wash my bum,

I’ll love you.

Take me frantic to the Vet’s,

I will love you,

Unconditionally.

Perhaps that’s putting

something too

fine of a point on it:

I will love you

if you rub me. 

The reference to the dog pushing his head between my shins and its connections to cows comes from Temple Grandin's research into cattle behaviour, where cows were made less stressed by being put into a device called a squeeze chute. At least that's how I remember it from the movie where Grandin used a smaller version of this to calm herself during anxiety attacks.