Poems Of The Week

A couplr of poems that i have enjoyed -

Against Gregariousness

BY CLIVE JAMES

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels
Tap-dance on the water.
They pluck the tuna hatchlings
As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,
Might once have picked up pearls
From a broken necklace.

Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines
Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters
Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them.
Birds from above and big fish from below
Rip at the pack until it comes apart
Like Poland, with survivors in single figures.

The krill, as singletons almost not there
But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust
Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,
Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline
Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen—
A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir
And nullified, a deep-space mass extinction
Watched only by the Hubble telescope.

Make your bones in a shark family if you can.
If not, be tricky to locate for sheer
Translucence, a slick blip that will become—
Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws—
A lobster fortified with jutting eaves
Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya
Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward
Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done,
Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

The Idler

BY ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON


An idle lingerer on the wayside's road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.

No matter if the world has marched along,
And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed;
No matter, if amid the busy throng,
He greets some face, infantile at the last.

His mission? Well, there is but one,
And if it is a mission he knows it, nay,
To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun,
And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away.

So dreams he on, his happy life to pass
Content, without ambitions painful sighs,
Until the sands run down into the glass;
He smiles—content—unmoved and dies.

And yet, with all the pity that you feel
For this poor mothling of that flame, the world;
Are you the better for your desperate deal,
When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?

Monday Musings

Another grey day and apparently warmer weather coming towards the end of the week. Today still chilly. I will pop into town and post some items i have sold online. I doubt I will be heading anywhere today although the Westwood Cross phone store visit outside of margate and also do the cinema visit again. Will check what films are on.

Roll on warmer days.

Five Important News Stories We Might Have Missed Due To Salisbury Attack.

1) Cuts to school meals. The government have cut free school meals in England, but not in NOrthern Ireland, because the DUP said no, we want free school meals for our kids. And May said okay then, I'll just fuck over English kids. Ha ha. That will teach the stupid racist shithead english arseholes who vote for me. Those idiots are so stupid I can literally take food off their childrens plates and they'll applaud me doing it. What utter wankstains.


Did you know there are several heavily taxpayer subsidised restaurants and bars inside Westminster? Seems a bit wrong that our MPs get cheap food and drink subsidised by the taxpayer, but they've decided hungry children can't have that anymore. And yes, we do now live in a world where for a lot of poor kids from poor families, the school lunch was the only nutritious meal they get.

Fuckers.


2) The NHS has refused to rule out giving confidential patient health information to welfare inspectors who want to use it to track immigrants and/or welfare claimants. Because sure, I'm super confident with the idea of every government agency having access to my private healthcare data. Nothing can go wrong with that at all.

You know how a lot of Americans don't get mental healthcare treatment because they don't want it to be on their records because it can come back and bite them on the ass? Yeah, we're gonna have that too.

Fuckers.


3) Still Posh Only.

A study was released that found privately-educated pupils are increasingly more likely to be accepted on to a prestigious Civil Service scheme than comprehensive students.

Posh fuckers.


4) Brexit Is Still A Clusterfuck.

In February the European Council published its draft of what it thought the Brexit deal would look like. A defiant Theresa May told MPs “no UK Prime Minister could ever agree” to the draft text, as it wanted to keep Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs union after Brexit if no other deal was reached.

On Thursday, the EU published an update to its initial document - and completely ignored everything May had said.

Delusional fuckers.


5) Brexit Again.


The Commons Brexit Select Committee recommended that the PM should request an extension to the EU’s Article 50 process beyond next March. Because there is no way in hell the country is going to be ready to exit by the deadline.

Tories ignored this.

Fuckers.