Good Old Judas

Good Old Judas

Hiving off in the middle of supper

Barely noticed, like a minor player

Creeping along the back of the stage,

Drawing the attention of only the most

Observant members of the audience.

Looking back the disciples should have seen the signs,

But they were already having their world

Turned upside down by most of what Jesus said. 

Keeping an eye on the odd behaviour of

Number Twelve was low on the agenda.

And then he turns up in the garden –

Good old Judas! – leading a rabble,

Soldiers, servants, a few ruffians

In for the fun, and, as if to

Show he’s AOK, he gives that

Famous kiss, and sends two lives

On the road to destruction.

The disciples had been suspicious of

Him pilfering the purse. They noted his

Antagonism to a particular Mary. So they

Shouldn’t have been surprised to

Hear a bit of jingling in his pocket, except that

There was rather more jingling than they might have

Expected. 

None of them saw him again.  He

Went off with the rest of the crowd,

Turned his coat completely inside out and

Lost the point of all his Master said. 

Good old Judas:

Burnt his boats, lost the plot,

Took a rope and wound up dead.

First draft written while on holiday in Moeraki January, 2004 - previously published on Authspot

Haiku (hi to you too!)

Empty stretch of beach
sun on my left; sea-breeze right
freed-from-his-leash dog.

Villanelle based on a line read somewhere

Still playing with the Villanelle - a tricky form that makes you work hard....

Villanelle based on a line read somewhere

By nature I am loathe to speak

Yet here I stand before a crowd:

Some common steroids produce a freak.

My words I know seem largely weak;

But yet, I need to say out loud

(Though always still I’m loathe to speak)

That using drugs for body tweaks

(However downstream well-endowed)

Means steroids, later, produce a freak.

You athletes know I don’t speak Greek,

Your heads before my words are bowed,

(By nature meek, I’m loathe to speak.)

Your future’s shot, your outlook’s bleak,

Though prior to your fall you’re proud:

Some common steroids will produce a freak.

The wages of your drugs you’ll wreak,

Old age will see your body cowed.

By nature I am loathe to speak:

Some common steroids produce a freak.

Rhyming with Cigars

Back at the end of 2011, I put this poem on my other blog.  I'm not quite sure why it wound up there, but for the sake of consistency, I'm now including it amongst the poems on this blog, which is focused on poetry....

Rhyming with Cigars

I'm not a man who frequents bars;
Or thinks it cool to down large jars
Of beer; I've never ever tried cigars;
I don't get sweaty seeing big, fast cars,
And consequently have no scars
From crashing and then seeing stars.
What, you ask, do I live on Mars?
Not at all, I've watched the movie, Lars
And the Real Girl, grammar I can parse,
I know the name of the Curé of Ars,
(John Vianney), know that Fars
Is a province in Iran, formerly called Pars,
Can differentiate Picassos and Renoirs,
However, I've never finger-picked guitars
In bazaars frequented by Russian Czars.

Proctalgia fugax

I'm not usually given to writing poems about physical ailments, but while the topic in this poem is, in reality, quite unpleasant, it also has its humorous side. 

Proctalgia fugax

The condition known as

Proctalgia fugax

is like squatting on a bed of tacks,

or rather, one gigantic tack.

PF attacks a person’s back -

specifically the canal

that’s inner anal - by

cramping up some muscle, which

don’t make one feel swell, or well. 

Proctalgia fugax waits till night-time to

perform, waits till you’re relaxed and

fast asleep, then wakes you with a

pain that racks, and taxes your

ability to calm remain, stops you

dozing, insists from resting

you desist, says, get up now if you

know what’s good for you!

Proctalgia fugax isn’t good for you.

You’ll come to no harm, but there’s

no kind of balm that will ease the pain

as it increases to the max.

Forget defecting to the loo, or

defecating in it; PF doesn’t

signal imminent evacuation –

except from bed, of course.

Sometimes walking helps, though

you’re not required to leave the

house; some recommend

sitting, but on a tennis ball,

putting pressure on the perineum -

I don’t think that’d help at all;

or taking paracetamol by two, but

PF, say the experts helpful,

once waxed will wane before the

tablets ease the pain.  Some in

hot water sit, some ice apply–

neither of these sound nice

to me, and who wants in the

freezer ice to find, or boil up

water, in the dark of the night?

Women can ignore this next:

for men PF can rise when you’ve had

sex - post coitus it will let you sleep

awhile – then waking you in pain,

adds insult to injury, now

stands the slack and rested member

up once more, ready to bounce

back, then stacks woe on woe,

puts you under attack both front and back.

Proctalgia fugax sometimes

comes by day, whether at work

or play: transmitting a fax, or

shovelling the road, taking

dictation or hauling a load,

riding a bike, aquajogging,

feeding the ducks - or snogging.  

But night-time’s its favourite,

making the most of its doubling-up

impact to tumble you out of the

sack, with its pain in the

crack giving you flak.

Eventually, backstage,

things begin to assuage:

you return to your bed, but you’re

restless and hot, and like any

lurgy that lurks you are

cautious of aftershock,

your partner disturbing,

who tosses and turns till you

stomp out of bed and go sleep on the

couch.  PF’s not an ‘ouch’, it’s never an

‘oooh.’  Colonoscopy’s closer or

that horn of a rhino you saw in the

zoo, goring you. That might be

hyperbole, but you’d

exaggerate too if Proctalgia

fugax happened to you. 

Proctalgia fugax is a severe, cramp-like pain, deep in the anal canal. It usually lasts for a few seconds or minutes, but can sometimes last for up to half an hour. Between attacks there is no pain at all. Most sufferers have only 5 or 6 attacks a year. You may feel a need to defecate urgently, but nothing happens. It may even make you feel dizzy, or give you a headache. It occurs in both men and women. The pain often wakes sufferers at night, and men may have an erection at the same time. Some men experience it after sex. It is a mysterious condition; no one knows what causes it, but it is probably a spasm of the rectal or pelvic floor muscles and does not mean that you have anything seriously wrong. There are various methods of relieving the pain.

The shoe

The end of year busyness caught up on this blog, and it's been semi-abandoned for the last few months.  The busyness meant that poems in the pipeline had to wait to be reviewed and redrafted and so on.  Here's one that's finally made it through the system...

The shoe

Finally -

the shoe that has lain for a 

year on the footpath, has gone,

the shoe that months ago was the

focus of an inquisition of the

boy who had carelessly

left it lying on the asphalt.

The shoe that

caused lying:

I don’t know where it’s

gone!  I didn’t lose it,

it just...vanished.

The shoe that brought

angst to the pocket of the

mother, and angst to the

ear clipped by the father.

The shoe that may or

may not have been

flung over a telephone wire,

that may or may not have

dropped out of a backpack.

The single shoe that was

late for its appointment

with its sole mate, that was

last reported Missing in Action.

The shoe that untimely

caused its mate to pass its

use-by-date.

The shoe that while

lying became an

artefact, progressively

hidden beneath the

local trees’ detritus. 

The shoe that lay

believing it was part of the

homeless community,

sleeping out at nights, its

laces trailing beneath its

bedclothes of last week’s

blossoms and some tree’s

seedlings.

The shoe that was

available to the

first one-footed

person of smaller stature

who happened to hop along.

The shoe that was

left behind for any

person who owned a

bereft and mateless single

shoe that was the equivalent

left, or right.

Eye Contact Collage

Eye contact collage

Agony Aunt: Otherwise, feeling is inferred, or expressed nonverbally, through eye contact, or an encouraging smile.

Conductor: Making awkward eye contact with musicians while you’re conducting.

Psychologist: They avoid eye contact, or sometimes become tearful and obstinate.

Student: Eye contact with teacher during test. They think I'm cheating.

Rap Artist: Maintaining uncomfy extended eye contact witchu

Comedian: I'm joining this group: Anonymous Alcoholics. We meet at the bar at Applebees and never make eye contact.

Feminist: On National No Bra Day do your best to maintain eye contact with grandmothers.

Author: Yet somehow he seemed to maintain eye contact with me, as though he knew I needed to submit to his personality, as though he sensed I was less easy meat than my brother...

Poet: ...who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi or make eye contact.

Embarrassed: Making eye contact with someone while eating a banana is seriously the most awkward thing.

Someone at one with Nature: Such discipline carries over in the humdrum of daily existence, in walks at the park, in unexpected moments of eye contact between friends and strangers.

Strange person: I need to stop making eye contact with stray animals. I've never even had a serious boyfriend & already my heart has been broken too many times.

Tips for Guys: When she is talking to you don't look around or at your phone...listen to her, make eye contact. Show her you care.

London Underground fake notice: "No eye contact. Penalty £200"

Acknowledgements to the people who tweeted some of these lines, many of which are also found elsewhere on the Net. 

Icarusk

I intended this piece for the monthly Flash Frontier blog, where the theme for October was 'flight'.  However, I was only a month too late - somehow my brain had got itself into the notion that you could enter something due for the 1st of October in the middle of that month....

So, rather than lose the piece, which I enjoyed writing, I'm including it here.  There's an earlier flash fiction piece on this blog too, here. 

Icarusk

I used to pronounce Icarus as Icarusk, the last syllable sounding like that twice-baked bread we gave babies to keep them content, the sticky, gooey mess spreading across the baby’s face. 

I don’t know if Icarus’ mum ever gave him the mythological equivalent of rusks. Those rusks have been lost in the myths of time – as has Icarus’ mum.

She told her inventive husband, Daedalus, and her antic son, Icarus, to ‘take off those silly wax and feathers monstrosities and come in and have your dinner.’  They ignored her. She watched her headstrong son, after initially following in his father’s line of flight, flap up towards the sun, melt his wings and drop into the sea.  

Drowned. 

She stood at the top of the cliff, arms crossed, lips tight, head shaking.  Muttered, ‘Typical bloody teenager.’

Went back inside the house, ate her evening meal (put the leftovers in the cool store for the next day) took up her knitting, made woolly vests and sox for Iapyx’s baby.  Just look at him, sucking his mythological rusk. 

Iapyx is a good stay-at-home boy.  Okay, he didn’t get a sea named after him, but a live boy and a live grandchild are better than a flying fool of a son.

Her flying husband, however, seems to have got stuck on the other side of the Icarian Sea.

When she told him to stop mucking about with the wax and feathers she didn’t mean he should never come home again. 


I was going to include a picture chosen from one of the many famous depictions of Icarus falling but there are more than I can count (in a hurry, anyway); the subject has been painted by dozens of artists, including many contemporary ones.  Plainly it's a subject that speaks strongly to artists....

Three Evernote pieces

Lines chosen randomly from my clippings files on Evernote.  Only one of these lines comes from something I originally wrote, but like the rest, it has a rhythm that remained undiscovered until combined with these other lines.  No two lines come from the same article, and where lines appear to run on, this is just something that happened during the sorting process.  

Three Evernote pieces

1.       

a blur of toxic, squirming bullshit

a lengthy pizzicato section that's all at odds 

a once-prized jewel in the crown that’s been mangled

many unannotated games and a record of his playing

a writer's style is determined by one sentence

any hole you dig is the hole you'll have to climb out of

help the plot function and jazz it up a bit

recruit words like postillion or tardigrades to get an idea across

2.

take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness

thrash out problems and hunt for oversights 

we fail more than once in spite of experience or skill

the initial deluge of messages was evenly divided

lean forward and dunk a biscuit in them 

life can be sublime amid the charitable endeavours 

my attention deficit disorder medicates itself

no nation can succeed without at least one thriving urban anchor 

old-school publishing houses will almost certainly endure 

oblivious to the hype machine and the cycle of endless promo, 

seemingly pdfs are supposed to be indexed

3.

crucifixion seems like a losing strategy

it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize

isn’t quite ubiquitous yet but there are plenty of browsers

the ones lost are known in our church families

upon truth, and not in the quicksand of opinion

the painful demonstration of truth in the midst of untruth

those bald facts are five years of internecine warfare

the hammer of war drums beating in a jungle

prefiguring its devolution into bobby-socks

teach them about gravity without getting mean-spirited about it

the greatest result of this geographical proximity 

slumped earthward, believing his inheritance had gone up in acrid smoke a blur 

Three Older Poems

Three poems that have been around for a good while: the first two date back two or three decades; the last is a little younger. 

1. 

Dali-Magritte - poem written on the back of my will

 If you have ears…then listen.

There was a cat in the corner:
I know - I saw its tail twitch.

A mouse slid across the floor:

don't tell me it's only leaf shadows
flaying at windows.

Three dogs sit outside the café
drinking lattes -
I don't care if you can't see them.

A horse marches into the traffic:
why shouldn't drivers blare their horns?

Hermaphrodite elephants
impregnate each other,
struggling worms under the soil -
have you no ears?

If bottom-dwelling slugs
walked, or shrugged their shoulders,
men would cry out:
"Mountains fall on us!"
You walk as though the
moon never woke.

I know some person

dreams my dreams -
am I not in them?
will he wake?

2. 

We need poems when we...

see
a blind man point his white stick at a magazine stand,
an old lady walk against the lights while five cars grumble;

hear
the mention of worms in the ears of fish,
an empty building's bellow when a hammer drops four floors;

find
a week-dead fish in the refrigerator,
a hessian-skirted church tower,
a dead tree in a public square's brick planter;

understand
an icecream in the mind of a child,
sharp-cornered knee-height coffee tables,
two minds at one table unaware,
space between a pillar and a window where no child can squeeze;

discover
an untouched swinging lightbulb-cord,
toilets beneath the street down bleach-cleaned steps,
a boy concealed in clothes three sizes too big;

realise
literacy is for the spiritually-impaired.

learn our inability to walk in another man's shoes,
taste another man's wife's cooking,
wait for a blind date who doesn't show,
thrust too many oranges into a paper bag,
know the inability of the human hand to encompass a banana,
wear black clothes without a funeral,
find concrete block motels with orange plastic cups and tasselled bedspreads.

3. 

Lying still

Lying still,

winding down from making love,

I heard the room - for the first time - 

singing.

And realised it was not

cold, insensate,

knew it knew me

knew me naked,                                                                     

in intimacy:

in getting up and dressing,

ferreting in the dark for underpants,

slipping trousers on,

undressing, lying down,

swapping shoes for slippers,

lying buff in summer,

in winter pyjama-ed.

All walls have ears, eyes –

this room smells me, is tender towards

me, feels me in itself where

love is most hard to make

and simplest. 

Opening a morning window

it sings me to the world. 

Gresham Church

Gresham Church – reminder from a photograph

So thick-sturdy is the tower that a thousand years from its building

I could pluck a stone from its thousand stones without it crumbling.

The church attached belongs to a much later time, while the

porch and the chancel have much in common with each other,

and they plainly aren’t kin to the church, which is not, as is

common in these parts, built of pebbles from Sheringham beach.

The church proper is something that’s replaced a forebear – who knows when? 

The porch and the chancel are pebbled with beach stones, as though the

waves had washed up against the building and left their mark in a

stonewall offensive; the stones in the tower are altogether different:

dragged perhaps to the site by the Normans, in carts, and then formed into a

round tower, rounder somehow in diameter at the bottom than at the

top.  And of course on the top is that typical castle turret – you expect

flags to be flying, or archers hiding in waiting (though they’d have to be

dwarves to hide up there).  The roof of the church is slate, while the

chancel is tile.  God alone knows what’s on the roof of the tower.

The stones in the tower aren’t round; they’re rough stones somehow

formed to roundness.  The stones on the porch and the chancel are

roundly round, as the pebbles from Sheringham always are:

big, fat, hard under the feet pebbles, that chock and chuckle against each

other when the waves come and try, day by day, to shift them.  Only a

storm such as old fishermen know will shift them; the young men have only

heard of such storms, have only seen in the Museum the lifeguard boats that

risked every fisherman’s life for the sake of one single fisherman.  The tower is

far from the pebbles, the stones, the beach, the fishermen, the

rescues.  Such storms as it’s known it’s survived for a thousand years while its

brethren, the porch and the chancel and the newish church have been added and

contracted and remodeled and removed and are even now in yet another process of

renovation.   What has stood a thousand years deserves such generous attention,

even when the congregation, or the parish, or the diocese, or the whole of the

Anglican world can’t afford it, paying as it is for a thousand other such

churches, each with changes and improvements and histories of a dozen

different ages soaked into their walls.  Out in the green sward – what else can it be

called? – are gravestones, some managing to keep their hold on the vertical, but only

just; some precarious at an angle that threatens toppling at any moment, though toppling

isn’t what these stones do in public; some flattened by time, and becoming

themselves buried beneath the grass, until it becomes a regular nightmare for the

mower to mow his way safely amongst them.  Once it was a concern that a grave might be

disturbed.  Now the only disturbance is a fine wind cutting through the ancient trees, a

once-in-a-blue-moon stone falling from its place in the tower, a gravestone flatlining, and

some new person, newly dead, fitting themselves in amongst those who have long since

sighed their last sigh. Barbara, Edna, Geofrey George – Gresham is your earthly home,

though a place much more homely is yours in some measure eternal that
can’t be fathomed this side of the midwinter, bright, and piercing sky. 

My wife in front of Gresham Church in 2007.  Her parents, George and Edna, have been buried there for some years, and in 2012, the ashes of the younger of her two older sisters were interred there. Various other Goodson ancestors are also buried in this churchyard.

Zwischenmensch

'To be a Zwischenmensch is to feel at home everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.' Chaim Potok

I’m between persons just now.

I’m a Zwischenmensch.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m

between or betwixt; I’m just

swishing that way and this, which is

why I mention it. 

I’m a between-person, a

Zwischenmensch.  I don’t know if

I belong there or here, if I’m part of

that culture or this, hot or cool or

not so much of any school. Still, I

have to mention it. 

To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m

being between or between a being, or

even if I’ve been between;

Zwischenmensch gets you like that. 

It leaves you kind of

flat, as if that was your natural

state, which is why I mention it.

Not to be or to be: like

Hamlet I don’t really have a choice. 

Dazwischen und wischen, I’m wishing

I could be fishing in a place no one

knows; trailing, like the line, my

toes in the water, a fine occupation for

one of my kind, a Fischermensch between

fishes, swishing this way and that.

I have to mention it.  

Evernote Collage 2

It's intrigued me for a while how putting two unrelated lines together can result in there seeming to be something more behind the words than their original meaning.  In the light of this, I've just edited (rather than written) a number of lines extracted from various articles on my Evernote file.  The editing aspect consisted of picking up the various lines in the first place, sorting them into some sort of order, and (occasionally) making them run a little more smoothly.  Other than that, each line (not each couplet) is as it was in the original article.  Each line now joins another to form - well, you can decide what they form....and do all the lines running together form a whole?


Evernote Collage 2*

Your face has become deranged trying to adjust,

you may not falsify your contact information

women are so distracted by their competitive sparring -

without that belief the world doesn't make sense

with the faintly wary, studied self-control of a hard man,

we have four churches in considerable strife

using a combination of both types of system

they can be accessed securely when you’re offline

their reputations seem unharmed, thanks to friends in high places

taking the taproot history of the period seriously

so perhaps there is no first encounter:

so much for being the party of grass-roots activism

sleeping well doesn't always lead to your best work:

she feels it undercuts the line about parents being kidnapped

planting their brand in the ever-expanding suburbs

people love seeing their words repeated and passed on

a passionate memoir of colonial India:

my father and I were separated from the time I was three

a link between Christian sacrifice and the wrestler’s endurance -

keep your eye on this one!

I have also assisted a number of blind and visually impaired persons -

if anybody knows the original document in which he said this

handguns are forbidden absolutely -

he knows to whom he is speaking

I felt I was being showered by light - some golden, overpowering light:

the faster-than-light drama is far from over

far above, the slack dry sponges
expose the impact of discrimination on Muslims

being neither conservative or anarchist,

blacklist certain words or ban offensive users.

*The previous collage of Evernote lines appears on this blog under the title Zen Poem.

LIfe

Childhood took ten minutes

stretched maybe to a quarter hour;

being a teenager, for what it was worth,

was over in five.

Waiting for my wife to

turn up in my life was

a bit of a haul:

all of thirty seconds.

We had children,

one two three four five

in a flash: grown, gone.

I lie dying.

I wonder.

How come life took

less than half an hour?  

Nestbeschmutzer

The following is a piece of nonsense mixing English and German, the result of Leif Hendrik of Nordic Mountain suggesting to me that I write something on the German word Nestbeschmutzer.  (This was after he'd read my previous piece of English/German nonsense: Backpfeifengesicht.)  Lief had written: How about 'Nestbeschmutzer', which means 'nestbefouler', used among the Germans to describe someone who is his own worst enemy. It's a great term which can be applied to so many situations in life.
 

Nestbeschmutzer

Schmoozing is an art I don’t indulge in:

wheeling-dealing’s not my scene,

persuading those who need persuading,

grovelling over dinner tables -

none of this appeals to me, because I’ve

nothing schmoozable to offer. 

I’m schmoozeless, even in the bedroom,

where such an art might make a difference;

though schmoozeless means I won’t besmirch

the friendship closest to mein Herz, will

keep it smirchless and quite Herzstück,

will avoid the Nestbeschmutzer

syndrome, the befouling of the nest where,

my own worst enemy I’d be.  And when

nest-befouling children leave the nest (en-

forcing empty-nested syndrome) they’ll

leave, I hope, bewegliches Eigentum

still in place, and all the endless/endlos

tidying-up behind them will cease to be. 

No longer each and every item a

movable feast of where the heck did

that go? And who moved that?

If something moves now, I know it’ll

be the fault of my own worst enemy:

that nestbefowling traitor, Me.

---

The phrase bewegliches Eigentum can mean goods and chattels, moveable property.