From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian. The SMB was a project, finished in 2017, to write 155 sonnets, i.e. one more than the 154 attributed to Shakespeare.
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Sonnet 24
Our ferry from Issambres crossed the bay -
all Blofeld yachts with helicopter pads -
to exquisitely cheesy St Tropez,
where Russian billionaires humoured the fads
of girls approximately half their age.
Along the jetty, fauvist headache art
enticed the frozen-blooded copraphage.
The harbour smelt quite pungently of farts.
Not caring what the Salafists might preach
or who, just promenading, might be killed:
a lively market in the shade of trees.
A cemetery slumbered on the beach.
Upon the brown pine needle-coated hill,
the monument to Saint-Exupéry.
Published in Zoetic Press, NonBinary Review #16, 2018.
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Sonnet 53
When in despond I grind my jaws and crunch
the keyboard’s grinning rows of rotten teeth,
my wandering mind wonders what is for lunch,
and hates itself for being its own time’s thief;
wishing for focus and initiative,
it finds elusive others’ get-and-go
- the grafter’s craft, craftsman’s prerogative -
aspires to their estate, but falls below.
Then rogue conceit haply amuses me,
so that, as if some privy sluice, once blocked,
now gushes forth in rude fecundity,
the words, within whatever recess locked,
burst from their sour confinement sore enraged
to stain with viciousness the virgin page.
Published by Clementine Unbound 2019.
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Sonnet 56
The editor considers Pope passé,
but is quite partial to a shopping list.
“Stick to Sauternes, Prosecco’s far too gassy.”
She grips my elbow with a tiny fist.
“The fashion’s not for polished, mannered wit.
The ossuary’s sediments of slime -
think Heaney, Hughes, subjective feel. Think shit
and squirt it out, jarringly, and unrhymed.”
She leaves me worrying about my voice:
a cleverclogs in thrall to formalism,
a meter maid, cuckold of my own choice,
vas deferens for watery old jism.
I thank the oracle for her advice,
and help myself to orange juice and ice.
Published in (i) Clementine Unbound 2019, (ii) The Hypertexts 2020.
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Sonnet 59
No barbarous australopithecine
shall squirt his jet on your concavity,
in which there lurks no turquoise rusk of pine,
for you’re ephemeral and really witty,
white porcelain’s perfection, of pissoir
apotheosis. Zamfir’s curdling pipes
cloak no unseemly sounds. Instead, a choir
of Dadaists pompously talking tripe.
For you’re ephemeral - I mentioned this -
you were effaced in 1917,
thrown out by Stieglitz, sacrificed as trash.
And yet, of all the pots Mott made for piss,
your fame endures: a shiny pot and clean,
fit for a Platonist to have a slash.
Published in The Hypertexts 2020
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Sonnet 69
When I stare grudging at this screen of mine,
then slowly fill it with my old man’s scrawl,
change font from Papyrus to Palatine,
upload my bilious and sneering drawl,
the angel on my shoulder bids me stay
my hand, not dip my feathered plume in stink,
forgive the dank, soiled actualité,
o’erlook fatuity and foisted fink.
And thus, though vendredi be frittered out
and Baron Samedi rape again the clock,
my freshened pen acts palimpsest to doubt,
that ice be broken, genius unblocked,
and Indian Summer with his rays console
the dampened animus its thwarted goal.
Published in The Hypertexts 2020.
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Sonnet 74
Whan that Novembre wyth hys soddynge leaves
of Yndyc Summer hys layt standde hath drownn’d,
and raynnes yternal blyte ye mowldy glebe
and clerkes skulck yn thayr cells yn studye brownne;
whan erly nyt and drearye mornyngge greyye
array ye darklyngge slummes yn damppe drabbenesse,
and laytest tydyngges fromme ye U.S.A.
extyngwyssh’d havve alle howpe and happynesse,
than longen knayves to gowe onne herowynne.
Nowwe sleezye marchaunts bearyngge Chyna Wyte,
and hypsters wyth a thyngge for Bombayye jynne
and Wyte Ace drynkers, these forsaykyngge Spryte,
converge lyk starvyngge dogges onne queynt Stowkes Crofft,
and daunce Saynt Vytus jyv wyth armes alofft.
Sonnet 74 was a commended entry in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition in February 2016, and was also published in The Hypertexts in 2020.
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Sonnet 75
Leigh Delamere, you should have written verse:
a minor, whimsical, Pre-Raphaelite,
or modernist perhaps, but not too terse,
although stooping betimes into the trite.
Now come we in our cars to chew your stodge,
buy petrol - ludicrously over-priced -
take part in orgies in your Travelodge,
and moan about your toilets not being nice.
Leigh Delamere, I’ve been your Porlock too.
I’ve visited your stately pleasure dome
skidmarked your nylon sheets and blocked your loos,
stolen your towels and buggered off back home.
For these foul desecrations, let this be,
Leigh Delamere, my true apology.
Published in The Hypertexts, 2020.
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Sonnet 89
I passed her on the footbridge (underneath,
the cars rushing pell-mell to Hades’ mouth).
Backwards flowed time then as I scoped her face:
lineaments of smack; thin, whorish, thief
up for the morning from the blighted south,
Hartcliffe or some such godforsaken place.
I watched her back recede towards St Pauls,
then trudged away to heed, hard by the stews,
the elegiac spirit’s fluted call.
Euterpe, was that you, alone and bruised?
Beweep, Mnemosyne, her fallen state.
No more in Frome shall disport lissome nymphs;
’tis all old mattresses and plastic crates,
and scripts defaced by palimpsests of chimps.
Published by the Society of Classical Poets, 2022.
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Sonnet 141
Après avoir ces cent quarante écrits,
je suis épuisé et me considère
une langue craquée léchante, dedans, un puits
empli d’une boue visqueuse, d’une croûte grossière.
Il en reste quinze encore, coincés, cachés:
des crapauds rotants que les murs moussus
font résonner. Enfin, bloquée, fâchée,
la langue, toute sèche et vulgaire devenue,
va bifurquer, et désormais siffler.
Chaque midi, pour un instant, le soleil
éclaire cette vie grimpante - viens regarder!
Voilà en bas, frétillante et vermeille,
la langue, les crapauds fugitifs, la chasse
avant que l’ombre couvre la disgrâce.
Sonnet 141 was first published in the French Literary Review in 2016, and subsequently in The Hypertexts in 2020.
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Sonnet 142
It’s katabasis for the French school kids,
and he’s the psychopomp, decoding tags
with the chutzpah of Pound libelling yids.
Appropriately lame, his flat feet drag
along the sidewalk, past the gurning drunks
and jaundiced ghosts outside the pharmacy.
The overwhelming reek of Mendip skunk
betrays the junction with Jamaica Street,
where Murakami’s Wave was haply sprayed.
String ties to rail a fleabag Cerberus
under the calvary where Christ’s been made
to spin upon his head. Our Virgil must
now take his leave, for chums of his slouch here
with Stowfords cider and, he hopes, some gear.
Sonnet 142 won 2nd Prize in the Sentinal Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition in September 2016, and was subsequently published in The Hypertexts in 2020.
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From the Odes, Epigrams, & Further Sonnets. The OE&FS is an ongoing accumulation of verse which I have been writing for four or five years in between other projects.
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XVII
Sonnet 141 en englais, traduction de l’auteur
These forty and one hundred thus inscript,
being sore fatigued, myself I do conceive
as cracked tongue licking in a dirty crypt
filled with a slimy mud up to the eaves.
Just fifteen of them left, captive, concealed:
those toads whose croaking on the mossy walls
reverberates. At last, rancid, congealed,
the tongue, gone dry from talking utter balls,
will bifurcate, and like a serpent hiss.
Each midday for an instant, the sunshine
illuminates the orgy - come, watch this!
Down there below, writhing and intertwined,
the tongue, the hunted toads, the brutish chase,
before the shadow covers the disgrace.
As its subtitle suggests, XVII is the translation into English of the SMB Sonnet 141. It was published in The Hypertexts in 2020.
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XXVIII
A Sapphire in the Mud
Inscribed Mattress, Ashley Road, St Pauls
Behold the “nothing mattress anymore”
mattress - king-sized, warped, stained, propped up against
damp brick. Beguiling like an unlocked door,
the truth thus written is, without pretence:
this mattress, having lost its function must
no longer as something mattress exist.
Instead, a canvas for a wit’s mot juste,
the mattress bears the koanistic gist
of its own annihilation. Just this once,
one countenances some conceptual art
as something not shat out by blue-haired cunts
with attitude who hold themselves apart.
This thy Upanishad, thy Torah, Tao.
Away to the recycling centre now.
XXVIII was published in The Hypertexts in 2020.
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