St. Valentine
you are dear to me;
your day is the fourteenth day
of February;
you speak of love,
with cards, choccie hearts, and beauteous flowers;
yet, when all those are gone
there are still lots of hours
upon your day…
when we can talk
and just hold hands –
because it’s special being with someone
who understands.
Upon a canvas
to behold
is a Cornish Pasty,
ancient, old;
full of promise
that never came.
My family left Cornwall, heading East,
in search of wisdom, or a wise man, at the least;
after many years they realised the truth:
that there b’aint be wisdom in a single tooth;
they searched on high
and they searched down low,
all across the foreign land
they were fain to go;
until at the last, he who spoke for them said:
I want to taste once more the pasty
and die in a Cornish bed.
What can a Haiku do
when it’s a syllable too long
on all three of its lines?
I popped into IDEA
the other day;
looking for a flat-pack poem –
not too heavy, not too light –
that I could comfortably carry away.
I finally found one
that I thought would do,
carried it to the checkout,
Checkout No. 2;
purchased that poem,
and transported it home.
It was when I tried
to put it together
that it all turned out wrong;
I couldn’t make head nor tail of the instructions for my ‘Platt-Pack Dikt’,
and before too long
I was scratching my head;
but I wouldn’t be licked;
you see, I didn’t have enough words
and some were underlined red;
there seemed too many verbs,
and a spare letter zed;
then I found all the adjectives
some of which filled me with dread;
only fitted by using a hammer
on their countersunk thread.
Eventually, I had put it all together,
five minutes before I would have reached the end of my tether;
it didn’t look ‘quite’ like the picture;
and it sways in the breeze,
but, it’s a permanent fixture
for a decade or two,
as it’s all held together
by my use of some ‘very’ strong glue
I don’t have letters after my name,
nor bailiffs after my goods and chattels;
I am solely to blame
for any skirmishes and battles
that I have entered into
with the dubious intention
of staking my claim
to the wealth of a nation;
and I have ‘never’ liaised with the Devil;
though, to give him his due,
he has ‘never’ ‘ever’ asked me to.
I don’t receive many letters
with my name emblazoned
upon the envelope;
I live in hope,
not literally, but laterally,
and how long is a piece of rope?
What is there left when all soap is gone?
Why do rhetorical questions matter so little to me;
the former? The latter?
the letter of the law is unsure upon this point,
and, so, I anoint myself with the moisture of sweat,
or, better yet,
a lack of physical and mental debt.
We are ‘all’ living in a material world,
and I am a material;
well, maybe knot.
My D.I.G.N.I.T.Y.
becomes less ev’ry day.
PS Good Luck with the above.
I must go down to the words today,
the lonely words in the wood;
the ones that just aren’t used enough;
and not because
they are no good;
but, because they are so shy;
and no one goes to visit them,
and if someone does, they cry.
The words all hide
amongst the trees,
they keep themselves unspoken;
solitude is the thing they crave,
a silence likened to the grave,
or a morning quite unbroken.
I must just go,
to see they’re safe,
check they haven’t wilted;
for they had worth
in better days
before their use was stilted.
I must go down to the words today,
the lonely words in the wood.
