Month: April 2014

To Cut A Lung Story Short

Day One

Oh how I gag
For a drag
On your fag
But a smoke
Of your ciggie
Would make me
Feel dizzy.

To bacco
Or not to bacco
That is the question.

Day Two

Oh how I hanker
After cancer
Of the lung
Or the tongue.
It’s not joke
I’d die
For a smoke.

Day Three

Today
When I survey
The state of disarray
In my ashtray,
The stubbed-out butts
Of a hundred Silk Cuts,
I feel revulsion
Towards my compulsion.

I hope that one night
I’ll take fright
At the sight
Of a Marlboro Light
And the mere mention
Of a Benson
Or a Camel
Will give me the hump
And I will no longer trammel
My respiratory system
And girls would not recoil
When I kissed ’em.

But until the day arrives
When I finally pack them in
I’ll continue to drop my donation
In the Cancer Research tin.

And if you want to know
What the moral of this song is
It’s that he whose lungs last
Lives longest.

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An Italian Poem in Four Cantos (with @unalalala)

i.

O tony meo caravaggio
Il hobbiti bilbo baggio
Heretoyou joe dimaggio
Di canio mucho waggio.

ii.

Volare Subo
Santa ho ho ho ho
Nel Blue di Lee Ryanair
Felice di Lionel Blair.

iii.

La belle Una Stubbio
Flicki-kicki subbuteo
Lei è well beautio
Charade di muteo.

iv.

Duncan di banna tynè
La meadon da da dee dee da
Il Theo pa phetis no no no
No no no nee no.

Love, literally

The first time I remember seeing you
Was when you fell off the scaffolding
And into the wet cement below.
You left quite an impression.

Later we met at Literary Sculpture class,
Where we would fashion the great writers
Out of wicker. Me: Joyce. You: Twain.
You really made your mark.

We only kissed once but I recall that
Fateful, blustery day as if it were yesterday
(Which it was, give or take a year or two).
I was blown away.

Compilation Cassette

It was about three weeks after we met
That I began work on that compilation cassette.
Each track the result of a deliberation worthy
Of the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints,
Subject to a process of veneration and beatification
Before acceptance into the cassette tape canon.
It’s a miracle it got made at all.

I can’t remember now which songs made the cut.
There would have been no Country & Western,
(There was never any Country & Western)
But they would have shown me to be
Discerning yet eclectic, both acoustic and electric,
Vaguely exotic, mildly erotic, quintessentially quixotic
And other things I was not.

I don’t know whether you ever played my cassette.
By the time I had posted it through your letter-box,
You had already started going out with Colin Hancox.
He was good at rugby.

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The Boogie Monster

You were always blaming things on the boogie.

The time you stayed out in the sun too long
And your speckles turned to freckles: the boogie.

The evening you admired the light of a full moon
Only to trip and fracture your hip: the boogie.

Even those times which once seemed good
Became named, shamed and blamed on the boogie.

I quite liked the boogie.
I didn’t know why you had such a problem with it.