Pods

An author's unacknowledged irony

Everybody's superior
To everybody
Til the tv celeb
Arrives

Ascendancy trades
Between floors
Between times
On one-way conveyances

Never down

But now
Clacking prams
And HIM

HIS people

Scrabbling to the rostrum
Low-heeled and gulping
Piped air
Confers all that HE
Intended

Vastness of place and
Order
The supremacy of Man

Something about the virute
Of humility

Satisfied?

The checkout attendant tightly scrunched the note she'd been handed then released it onto the counter.

There was a pause while she (and I) inspected the unsprung currency lying before us.

She lifted her eyes briefly to meet mine and then, satisfied?, completed the transaction.

Are you checking for counterfeits?

No, I don't know, the boss just tell me to.

But why? What are you checking for?

I don't know. If it's a hundred the boss ask.

Sorry, but what I mean is what is it you're aiming to find out by doing that?

I don't know.

But then there's no point in doing it, is there?, if you don't know what you're doing it for.

I know.

Bone Frame II

Bone Frame I

You can have all your power
If that's what you need;
I don't see the resemblances.

I've got all my power, yes,
Moulded in the melodrama of these
Miniature bedroom plasticines

'Your iconoclasm substitutes for
Orgasm,'
That is what you said.

And faithfully I was quoted
Out of pretext
Oh, let's just get our pants off!

Post-breakfast Footsteps

"I'm becoming a mug."
And so it seemed.
Each devotion, no matter how sweet,
Was ignored (like marmalade)
Or returned unreconstituted (like sour pulp).

"This silence is degrading."
And so it became.
My love, set forth for Infinity,
Rudely left unnamed in the echo
Of post-breakfast footsteps.

A Glass at Midnight

Time of the mongrel at my foot
Scraping for a coin that's born
In the carpet in a grave of hair.

Miles of the poles in the room's corners.
The eskimostars in an octagon. Worlds
Within this box.

I hold the cipher of the voided world,
Four fingers holding the sea in a glass,
Incumbent an arm on the ashtray table.

Time in the tughoot night stops
A religion that grows on the window.
I let the glass drop. A bridge falls.
Flatten the midnight on the fingered tightrope.
All the dumb days draw on.

Harold Pinter, 1951

Hand Tool

Kottke I

The virtuoso's Side One Suite

Inverts its name.
Such dexterity, such pluck
Easily assures this - and more;
It's almost a detraction.