A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

feargale

June

Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass seas,
And bobbing poppies flare like Elmo's light,
While siren-like the pollen-stained bees
Drone in the clover depths. And up the height
The cuckoo's voice is hoarse and broke with joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make raid,
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer's boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shade
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
That snares your little ear, for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south,
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses spilt on youth's red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

- Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917)

Professor Moriarty

Pegasus

Patrick Kavanagh

My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs.
I offered him to the Church--the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs.
One said: 'Let him remain unbid
In the wind and rain and hunger
Of sin and we will get him--
With the winkers thrown in--for nothing.'

Then the men of State looked at
What I'd brought for sale.
One minister, wondering if
Another horse-body would fit the tail
That he'd kept for sentiment-
The relic of his own soul--
Said, 'I will graze him in lieu of his labour.'
I lent him for a week or more
And he came back a hurdle of bones,
Starved, overworked, in despair.
I nursed him on the roadside grass
To shape him for another fair.

I lowered my price. I stood him where
The broken-winded, spavined stand
And crooked shopkeepers said that he
Might do a season on the land--
But not for high-paid work in towns.
He'd do a tinker, possibly.
I begged, 'O make some offer now,
A soul is a poor man's tragedy.
He'll draw your dungiest cart,' I said,
'Show you short cuts to Mass,
Teach weather lore, at night collect
Bad debts from poor men's grass.'
And they would not.

Where the
Tinkers quarrel I went down
With my horse, my soul.
I cried, 'Who will bid me half a crown?'
From their rowdy bargaining
Not one turned. 'Soul,' I prayed,
'I have hawked you through the world
Of Church and State and meanest trade.
But this evening, halter off,
Never again will it go on.
On the south side of ditches
There is grazing of the sun.
No more haggling with the world....'

As I said these words he grew
Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him
Every land my imagination knew.

Lady Chatterton

Send Off

Half an hour before my flight was called
he walked across the airport bar towards me
carrying what was left of our future
together: two drinks on a tray.

Fleur Adcock



Loss

The day he moved out was terrible –
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.

Wendy Cope

donegal_man

Amusement Park

We went to an amusement park,
my family and I.
We rode on rides so scary,
I expected I would die.

We rode a roller coaster
called The Homicidal Comet.
It had so many loop-de-loops
it nearly made us vomit.
We rode The Crazed Tornado,
and it jerked us hard and quick.
If it were any longer,
we would certainly be sick.

We rode The Psycho Octopus,
which packed a nasty punch.
I think we’re pretty lucky
that we didn’t lose our lunch.


Kenn Nesbitt

Professor Moriarty

Epitaph for a Darling Lady

Dorothy Parker

All her hours were yellow sands,
Blown in foolish whorls and tassels;
Slipping warmly through her hands;
Patted into little castles.

Shiny day on shiny day
Tumbled in a rainbow clutter,
As she flipped them all away,
Sent them spinning down the gutter.

Leave for her a red young rose,
Go your way, and save your pity;
She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty.

donegal_man

The Chaucer Pubbe Gagge



Three fellowes wenten into a pubbe,
And gleefullye their handes did rubbe,
In expectatione of revelrie,
For 'twas the houre that is happye.
Greate botelles of wine did they quaffe,
And hadde a reallye good laffe.
'Til drunkennesse held fulle dominione,
For 'twas two for the price of one.
Yet after wine and meade and sac,
Man must have a massive snacke,
Great pasties from Cornwalle!
Scottishe eggs round like a balle!
Great hammes, quaile, ducke and geese!
They suck'd the bones and drank the grease!
(One fellowe stood all pale and wanne,
For he was vegetarianne)
Yet man knoweth that gluttonie,
Stoketh the fyre of lecherie,
Upon three young wenches rounde and slye,
The fellowes cast a wanton eye.
One did approach, with drunkenne winke:
"'Ello darlin', you fancy a drink?",
Soon they caught them on their knee,
'Twas like some grislye puppettrie!
Such was the lewdness and debaucherie -
'Twas like a sketche by Dick Emery!
(Except that Dick Emery is not yet borne -
So such comparisonne may not be drawne).
But then the fellowes began to pale,
For quaile are not the friende of ale!
And in their bellyes much confusione!
From their throats vile extrusione!
Stinking foule corruptionne!
Came spewinge forth from droolinge lippes,
The fetide stenche did fille the pubbe,
'Twas the very arse of Beelzebubbe!
Thrown they were, from the Horne And Trumpette,
In the street, no coyne, no strumpette.
Homeward bounde, must quicklie go,
To that ende - a donkey stole!
Their handes all with vomit greased,
The donkey was not pleased,
And threw them into a ditche of ****e!
They all agreed: "What a brillant night!"


Bill Bailey

DunnoKidz

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed (Sonnet XLIII) Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
and in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Lady Chatterton

Telephone Home

I hear your voice saying Hello in that guarded way
you have, as if you fear bad news, imagine you
standing in our dark hall, waiting, as my silver coin
jams in the slot and frantic bleeps repeat themselves
along the line until your end goes slack. The wet platform
stretches away from me towards the South and home.

I try again, dial the nine numbers you wrote once
on a postcard. The stranger waiting outside stares
through the glass that isn’t there, a sad portrait
someone abandoned. I close my eyes…. Hello?......see myself
later this evening, two hundred miles and two hours nearer
where I want to be. I love you. This is me speaking.

Carol Ann Duffy

This poem is a little dated in so far as phone boxes are almost a thing of the past now but .... we still have to battle poor mobile/broadband coverage at times when trying to make contact with home......

Professor Moriarty

High and Low

James H. Cousins

He stumbled home from Clifden fair
With drunken song and cheeks aglow
Yet there was something in his air
That spoke of kingship long ago.

I sighed, and inly cried
With grief
That one so high should fall so low.

But he snatched a flower and sniffed its scent
And held it to the sunset sky
Some old sweet rapture through him went
And kindled in his bloodshot eye.

I turned, and inly burned
With joy
That one so low should rise so high.

Lady Chatterton

Happy Birthday, W.B. Yeats.


A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats

(13/06/1865 - 28/01/1939)

Professor Moriarty

Mirror in February

Thomas Kinsella

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed -- my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy --
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

DunnoKidz

The Poor Ghost

Christina Rossetti

"Oh whence do you come, my dear friend, to me,
With your golden hair all fallen below your knee,
And your face as white as snowdrops on the lea,
And your voice as hollow as the hollow sea?"
"From the other world I come back to you,
My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew.
You know the old, whilst I know the new:
But tomorrow you shall know this too."

"Oh not tomorrow into the dark, I pray;
Oh not tomorrow, too soon to go away:
Here I feel warm and well-content and gay:
Give me another year, another day."

"Am I so changed in a day and a night
That mine own only love shrinks from me with fright,
Is fain to turn away to left or right
And cover up his eyes from the sight?"

"Indeed I loved you, my chosen friend,
I loved you for life, but life has an end;
Thro' sickness I was ready to tend:
But death mars all, which we cannot mend.

"Indeed I loved you; I love you yet
If you will stay where your bed is set,
Where I have planted a violet
Which the wind waves, which the dew makes wet."

"Life is gone, then love too is gone,
It was a reed that I leant upon:
Never doubt 1 will leave you alone
And not wake you rattling bone with bone.

"I go home alone to my bed,
Dug deep at the foot and deep at the head,
Roofed in with a load of lead,
Warm enough for the forgotten dead.

"But why did your tears soak thro' the clay,
And why did your sobs wake me where I lay?
I was away, far enough away:
Let me sleep now till the Judgment Day."

Professor Moriarty

Someone

Dennis O'Driscoll

someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie
eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea
scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last
shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass
someone today is leaving home on business
saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortege
someone is paring his nails for the last time, a precious moment
someone’s waist will not be marked with elastic in the future
someone is putting out milk bottles for a day that will not come
someone’s fresh breath is about to be taken clean away
someone is writing a cheque that will be rejected as ‘drawer deceased’
someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar
someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast
someone is making rash promises to friends
someone’s coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined
who feels this morning quite as well as ever
someone if asked would find nothing remarkable in today’s date
perfume and goodbyes her final will and testament
someone today is seeing the world for the last time
as innocently as he had seen it first

This is perhaps Rimbaud's most boisterous and swaggering poem, it was written soon after Rimbaud first moved to Paris, and here, Rimbaud imagines a blacksmith meeting Louis XVI in the Tuileries Palace during the French Revolution. I first read this poem in school, and although it can be criticised for its youthful bombast, I have loved it for many years for its energy and idealism.

His hand on a gigantic hammer, terrifying
In size and drunkenness, vast-browed, laughing
Like a bronze trumpet, his whole mouth displayed,
Devouring the fat man, now, with his wild gaze,
The Blacksmith spoke with Louis, with the king,
The People there, all around him, cavorting,
Trailing their dirty coats down gilded panels.
But the dear king, belly upright, was pallid,
Pale as the victim led to the guillotine,
Submissive like a dog, cowed by the scene,
Since that wide-shouldered forge-black soul
Spoke of things past and other things so droll,
He had him by the short hairs, just like that!

‘Now, Sir, you know how we’d sing tra-la-la,
And drive the ox down other people’s furrows:
The Canon spun paternosters in the shadows
On rosaries bright with golden coins adorned,
Some Lord, astride, passed blowing on his horn,
One with the noose, another with whip-blows
Lashed us on. – Dazed like the eyes of cows,
Our eyes no longer wept; on and on we went,
And when we’d ploughed a whole continent,
When we had left behind in that black soil
A little of our own flesh…to reward our toil:
They’d set alight our hovels in the night;
Our little ones made burnt cakes alright.

…Oh, I’m not complaining! All my follies,
They’re between us. I’ll let you contradict.
But, isn’t it fine to see, in the month of June,
The enormous hay-wains entering the barns?
To smell the odour of burgeoning things,
The orchards in fine rain, the oats reddening?
To see wheat, wheat, ears filled with grain,
To think it promises us good bread again?...
Oh! You’d go to the forge, be more cheerful,
Sing and hammer joyfully at the anvil,
If you were sure to gain a little in the end –
Being, in fact, a man – of what God intends!
– But there it is, always the same old story!...

But now I know! I don’t credit it any more,
Owning two strong hands, a head, a hammer,
That a man in a cloak, wearing a dagger
Can say: go and sow my land, there, fellow;
Or that another, if maybe war should follow,
Can take my son like that, from where I’m living!
– Suppose I were a man, and you a king,
You’d say: I will it!... – What stupidity.
You think your splendid barn pleases me,
Your gilded servants, your thousand rogues,
Your fancy bastards, peacocks in a row:
Filling your nest with our daughters’ odour,
Warrants to the Bastille for us, moreover
That we should say: fine: make the poor poorer!
We’ll give you our last sous to gild the Louvre!
While you get drunk and enjoy the feast,
– And they all laugh, riding our backs beneath!

No. Those puerilities were our fathers!
The People is no one’s whore now, three steps further
And then, we razed your Bastille to the ground.
That monster sweated blood from every mound,
Was an abomination, that Bastille standing,
With leprous walls its every story yielding,
And, we forever held fast in its shadow!
– Citizen! That was the past, its sorrow,
That broke, and died, when we stormed the tower!
We had something in our hearts like true ardour.
We had clutched our children to our breast.
And like chargers, snorting at the contest,
We went, proud and strong, beating here inside…
We marched in the sun – like this – heads high
Into Paris! They greeted us in our ragged clothes.
At last! We felt ourselves Men! We were sallow,
Sire, drunk, and pallid with terrifying hopes:
And there, in front of those black prison slopes,
Waving our bugles and our sprigs of oak,
Pikes in our fists; did we feel hatred, no!
– We felt such strength we wanted to be gentle! ...

And since that day, we have proved elementals!
A mass of workers sprang up in the street,
And, cursed, are gone, a swelling crowd replete
With ghostly shades, to haunt the rich man’s gate.
I, I run with them, and set informers straight:
I scour Paris, dark-faced, wild, hammer on shoulder,
Sweeping something droll out of every corner,
And, if you smile at me, then I’ll do for you!
– Well, count on it: all this is going to cost you
And your men in black, culling our requests
To bat them about on their racquets all in jest,
And whisper, the rascals, softly: “Oh, what sots!”
To cook up laws, and stick up little pots,
Filled with cute pink decrees, and sugar pills,
Cutting us down to size, to amuse themselves,
Then they hold their noses when we pass by,
– Our kind representatives who hate the sty! –
Fearful of nothing, nothing, but bayonets….
That’s fine. Enough of snuff and lorgnettes!
We’ve had our fill, here, of those dull heads
And bellies of gods. Ah! That’s the bread
You serve us, bourgeoisie, while we rage here,
While we shatter the sceptre and the crozier!...’

He takes his arm, tears back the velvet curtain
And shows the vast courtyards beneath them,
Where the mob swarms, and seethes, where rise,
Out of the frightful mob those storm-filled cries,
Howling as bitches howl, or like the sea,
With their knotted stakes, their pikes of steel,
With the clamour of their market-halls and slums,
A ragged mass of blood-stained caps, and drums:
The Man, through the open window, shows all
To the pale sweating king, reeling, about to fall,
Sick at the sight of it!
‘Those are the Scum, Sire.
Licking the walls, seething, rising higher:
– But then they’ve not eaten, Sire, these beggars!
I’m a blacksmith: my wife, madwoman, is there!
She thinks she’ll get bread at the Tuileries!
– They’ll have none of us in the bakeries.
I’ve three youngsters. I’m scum, too – I know
Old women weeping under their bonnets so
Because they’ve taken a daughter or a son:
One man was in the Bastille – oh, they’re scum –
Another the galleys: both honest citizens.
Freed, they’re treated like dogs, these men:
Insulted! Then, they have something here
That hurts them, see! It’s terrible, it’s clear
They feel broken, feel themselves damned,
There, screaming beneath you where you stand!
Scum. – Down there girls, infamous, shriek,
Because – well, you knew girls were weak –
Gentlemen of the court – gave all you sought –
You’d spit on their souls, as if they were naught!
Now, your pretty ones are there. They’re scum.

Oh, all the Wretched, whose backs, in the fierce sun
Burn, and yet they still work on and on,
Feeling their heads burst with their exertion,
Hats off, you bourgeoisie! Those are Men.
We are the Workers, Sire! Workers! And then
We’re for the great new age, of knowledge, light,
When Man will forge from morning to night,
Pursuing great effects, chasing great causes,
When he will tame things, slowly victorious,
And like a horse, mount the mighty All!
Oh! Splendour of the forges! And no more
Evil, then! – What’s unknown, its terror maybe
We’ll know! – Hammer in hand, let’s sieve freely
All that we know: then, Brothers, we’ll go on!
Sometimes we dream that dream’s vast emotion
Of the simple ardent life, where you revile
All evil, working beneath the august smile,
Of a woman you love with love’s nobility:
And all day long you labour on proudly,
Hearing the clarion call of duty sounding!
And you feel so happy; and nothing, nothing,
Oh, above all, no-one makes you kneel!
Over the fireplace, there, you’d have a rifle…

Oh! But the air is filled with the scent of battle.
What did I say? I too am one of the rascals!
And there are still sharks and informers.
But we are free! With our moments of terror
When we feel we are great, so great! Just now
I was talking of peaceful work, of how…
Look at that sky! – Too small for us, you see,
If we feared the heat, we’d live on our knees!
Look at that sky! – I’ll return to the crowd,
To the vast fearful mob who cry aloud
And roll your cannon through the cobbles’ sty;
– Oh! We will wash them clean when we die!
– And if, against our cries and our vengeance,
The claws of old gilded kings, all over France,
Urge on their regiments in full battle-dress,
Well then, you lot? **** to those dogs, no less!’

– He shoulders his hammer once more.
The crowd
Feels soul-drunk close to that man, and now
Through the great courtyard, all those rooms,
Where Paris pants and the voices boom,
A shudder shakes the immense populace.
Then, with his broad hand, its grimy grace
Gilded, while the pot-bellied king sweats,
The Blacksmith set his red cap on that head!

marienbad

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

This is perhaps Rimbaud's most boisterous and swaggering poem, it was written soon after Rimbaud first moved to Paris, and here, Rimbaud imagines a blacksmith meeting Louis XVI in the Tuileries Palace during the French Revolution. I first read this poem in school, and although it can be criticised for its youthful bombast, I have loved it for many years for its energy and idealism.

Marvellous , thank you very much . I 'd forgotten just how good he was , thanks for bringing it back .

Professor Moriarty

Virtue is its Own Reward

Margaret Fishback

I wish my frank and open face
Held just one tiny little trace
Of something that approaches guile.

I'd like an enigmatic smile
And heavy-lidded eyes instead
Of just a regulation head.

Lady Chatterton

Text

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy

Professor Moriarty

The Lie

Don Paterson


As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door.

Professor Moriarty

On The Death Of Anne Brontë

Charlotte Brontë


There's little joy in life for me,
And little terror in the grave ;
I've lived the parting hour to see
Of one I would have died to save.

Calmly to watch the failing breath,
Wishing each sigh might be the last ;
Longing to see the shade of death
O'er those belovèd features cast.

The cloud, the stillness that must part
The darling of my life from me ;
And then to thank God from my heart,
To thank Him well and fervently ;

Although I knew that we had lost
The hope and glory of our life ;
And now, benighted, tempest-tossed,
Must bear alone the weary strife.

Dave!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BuiwZhAz4k

The Show (1918)
Wilfred Owen

My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs
Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.

By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped
Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom’s last dregs these long-strewn creatures crept,
And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openings
As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,
Brown strings, towards strings of grey, with bristling spines,
All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were grey, of more abundant spawns,
Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten.
I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,
I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

Professor Moriarty

Base Details

Siegfried Sassoon


If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say — "I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed.

Dave!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH5gMIExn4U

Provide, Provide

Robert Frost

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

donegal_man

Just for the day that's in it

The History Lesson

A Dutchman called Prince William,
and an Englishman - King James,
fell out and started feuding,
and called each other names.

'Twas for the throne of England,
but for reasons not quite clear,
they came across to Ireland,
to do their fighting here.

They had Sarsfield, they had Schomberg,
they had horse and foot and guns,
and they landed up at Carrick,
with a thousand Lambeg drums . . .

They had lots of Dutch and Frenchmen,
and battalions and platoons,
of Russians and of Prussians,
and Bulgarian dragoons,

And they politely asked the Irish
if they'd kindly like to join.
and the whole affair was settled,
at the Battle of the Boyne.

Then William went to London,
and James went off to France,
and the whole Kibosh left Ireland,
without a backward glance.

And the poor abandoned Irish,
said "goodbye" to King and Prince,
and went on with the Fighting,
and we've been at it ever since.

J Maurice Mullan

feargale

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967 )

Dave!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLuTiITZykg

Professor Moriarty

Out of Some Other Paradise

Alex Dimitrov


And people walked out of churches and bars,
cafés and apartments, cities, towns, photographs,
someone's Friday night party,
someone they once knew or slept with.
They walked out of meetings and dinners,
out of lives, on each other, on love
and rarely on time.
Some walked out of dark places,
slow places, strange places, places
they wouldn't go back to, places they never did find.
Then did. And walked out again
for the third, fourth, fifth time perhaps.
People walked out through doors
and through letters, through looks across rooms,
gifts that gave nothing of what they withheld,
what they couldn't give back. Then others
just walked out on everything. That was that.
What can be said about what we do to each other.
What street, I don't remember,
on the way to someone's going-away,
I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence,
snow: your new evening clothes.

feargale

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

- John Masefield (1878-1967)

Professor Moriarty

Alone With Everybody

Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

What The Living Do


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.


Marie Howe.

Professor Moriarty

No Music

John Montague


I'll tell you a sore truth, little understood
It's harder to leave, than to be left:
To stay, to leave, both sting wrong.

You will always have me to blame,
Can dream we might have sailed on;
From absence's rib, a warm fiction.

To tear up old love by the roots,
To trample on past affections:
There is no music for so harsh a song.