Collection 10: Just Messing About

Bottom, A New Orpheus, The Clown

Bottom

I hope that others look on me as deep,

Witty, perhaps, serene and debonair:

But I’m known by the company I keep

And I’ve got you behind me everywhere.

Others I try to approach with dignity

To give a good impression to their mind:

I turn to go, another view of me

Presents – yours is the face I leave behind.

My softest paper shows consideration,

I faithfully transport you to the loo:

Why must you interrupt my conversation

And air what hardly passes for your view?

Prelates and professors, potentates,

Please don’t look down on me for my poor bottom:

Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and William Gates,

And Taylor Swift - you all know you’ve got ‘em.

Almighty Lord, that has made all things well,

You know the secrets that we try to hide.

You know it’s bad for us when egos swell:

You gave us bottoms to bring down our pride.

A New Orpheus

The Muse is a flighty bird and proud

Who stays half hidden in her high cloud,

Will not flit down and talk to those

Who would be poets in jagged prose

And splintered lines of different sizes.

They always lack her sweet surprises,

For poetry, they say, can’t be

When God is dead, man lost – i.e.

In an age like ours. Those folks with brains

Too big to see their own chilblains

At freezing altitudes of thought

She plain dislikes, and says they ought

To learn truths they’re not looking for

In paradox and metaphor

That hint of greater relationships…

And yet she leaves in dull eclipse

Good Christian me, who would set right

Her tricky principles of flight.

She laughs at my poetic dreams

Instructing her in earnest schemes

Of fifteen couplets, more or less –

Is pleased with this one’s pointlessness.

She seldom comes to the married, who

Have wives to please and work to do,

Except, homecoming, now, again,

In snatches to the jumbling brain,

In the packed Underground: yet hurled

Up to the light of the upper world,

Our Orpheus finds his gems quite gone,

But hears her laugh from Helicon…

The Clown

If I must inhabit

Venus’ happy court

I would be her jester,

Make her joys my sport.

I’d threaten all the lovebirds

To turn them into pie,

Arraign the silly butterflies

For thinking they could fly.

“Nymph? She’s just a peasant,

Her swain is just a churl.”

I’d mock the moonstruck gallant

And his maudlin girl.

With sweet acerbic jibing

I’d follow them all day.

Though they’d just say I’m teasing

I’d ease my tears away.

They’d be too busy loving

To give much mind to me

And I’d forget in laughter

The pain they never see.