Ode to a Cat

Oh mystic beast
My furry child
You grumpy dumpling
From the wild


nocturnal creeper
Shoelace eater
Omnipotent creature
Has stole my seater


Dried liver gobbler
Ornament wobbler
Often moody
Gourmet foodie


Makes me broody?


Wars with armchair
Sleeps for Britain
Many layers,
many lairs
Many hairs


Furball with teeth
Commander in chief
Prison guard to moths
Chaser of wasps


Oh round-faced wanderer
You expert ponderer
Wise man,
Buddha
Superior comforter


I'm your cat lady
And you're my
cat-boy baby


http://www.cheshireandwain.com/blog/2016/3/6/ode-to-a-cat

The wind whips backwards picking up leaves, twists to whispers scraping down Tarmac, uneven flag stones sticking in puddles as wind moans breathing cold air that smells of smoke and late nights waiting for buses clutching arms to keep warm fingers numbing in thin pockets tingling to warmth as doors close windows rattle the piercing breaths through tiny cracks caught in thick curtains that smell of roasts. Here comes winter and long nights and dark mornings testing patience to stay positive to juxtapose to keep going with warm clothes and seeing friends keeping busy to interpose winter with warm fires to find company thats not your own in noisy bars and restaurants to dance like those leaves on cold nights that float in whispers and cryptic flight.

Wind Chime

How loaded idle chat through stress becomes, When plainest meaning's metaphors are wronged and new associations strung now frameworks; simple carriers they've become. When complicated is the talk which building, building bottled wrought, some deeper problem tensely lies, in trivial words and trivial signs. And through some saintly gentle murmur, that quiet sound is growing fervour and clanking through the peaceful quiet - through that stillness in the night to compete with rippled sighs of trees as conflict's clatter - interweaves.

UNTITLED

Myself and three other men were spending our Sunday evening at a gentlemen’s club in East London. The surrounding windows were open fully to allow the mist of tobacco and opium to escape into the night. We sat around a table in the corner with red wine and a solid silver candelabra dripping red wax from its red candles. Some way into our evening, the conversation turned to that topic that we were oh so fond of; that of love.
“De Flores, your goblet is empty, do pass it hither and let me set that right” I said. De Flores leaned his velvet sleeve past the candle flame to pass me his empty glass. I placed it firmly on the table and trickled out the last droplets of the Nebuchadnezzar.
“Thank you kindly” he said as I handed it back to his smooth almost feminine hands. De Flores and I had known each other since birth and had spent most of our boyhood adventuring on the Somerset Downs. The other two in our company were more recent acquaintances that we had invited over for no other reason that social gains. They had been in a separate conversation of their own before we all merged in an argument over a Miss Venetia Rose.
The two men had raised their voices quite some degree over the general murmur of the club and De Flores and I overheard Lucius say, “But no my Decimus, do you really mean to suggest that we are sharing Miss Venetia Rose in much the same way that we are sharing this bottle of wine!?” My friend looked over at me and joined to say “I do think I hear you men are talking about a miss Venetia Rose.”
“Why yes we are De Flores” replied Lucius. De Flores moved a little closer to Lucius and said “but surely you men don’t mean the Miss Venetia Rose that I was somewhat intimately acquainted with this summer last: the miss Venetia Rose that was later secretly involved with my dear friend who sits with us tonight?” The two men looked wholly confused and Decimus said, “I do fear it is, for how many Miss Venetia Rose of London can there be”
“Well it would seem there are four” said Lucius positively.
“Oh don’t be ridiculous!” I interrupted, there is surely but one my men and we have all been had by the harlot.”
“Not my rose bud! She is no harlot.”
“Well she’s something beginning with H or thereabouts sounding,” I said
I looked over at my friend who was suppressing a smile, he winked at me and then the other men’s attention shifted to him as he said “Please dear men, let us not argue. Stay positive. I interject that yes it is unlikely there be four Miss Venetia Rose, but more likely to be two. If there be two then this might raise each consecutive Miss Venetia Rose by fifty percent in your estimations and therefore repair you egos by half. Is that not correct?”
“No. For what if one Venetia Rose is the strumpet who has acquainted herself with three men and the other the delicate angel who has been true to one of us?”
“Fair point” said my friend “but which ones of us have pulled the three jokers from the deck of hearts?”
“Surely not I, I am almost certain it is not I” Said Decimus. He turned to Lucius and continued “My Venetia Rose who so divinely acquainted herself with me is surely not such the same Venetia Rose who would acquaint herself with you Lucius.”
“What do you mean by that sir?” said Lucius
“Well, thou Lucius of such puny mind and even punier purse. She would not tolerate you. My Venetia Rose enjoys to be spoilt with lavish gifts that I am only too pleased to provide, and you my man could not produce a ham!”
Whilst the two men continued to shout and curse in there own world of Miss Venetia Rose I moved over to sit by my friend. I squeezed his soft hand, looked forward and smiled. We knew no Miss Venetia Rose.

BOSIE AND BANJO RETURN TO CALIFORNIA

Day One

brief due to jet-lag...
1 Ate a massive salad
2 Bought a mac book pro
3 Drank red wine from a plastic cup
4 Bedtime

WHAT ARE YOUR WORDS WORTH?

I wandered lonely as a funeral shroud, shamefully sucking each hapless cloud, putting them to paper as cotton wool: what an obvious originality cull. But is it any worse that your repetitive green; the only symbol you have to display jealousy, or your infinite love prose, hued in red, do you really think that’s better instead?
For these words and their meanings are words in themselves and into the cannon our minds often delve and we’re searching for new ways to say the same thing; I’ll try hard not to use the image of ‘spring’. By the looks on your faces, you seem confused perhaps unclear are the symbols I’ve used? You see, words are like daffodils, in bulbs and dormant, fighting off parasites, a daily torment. And parasites represent clichés, forever worming their way into phrase but if you work hard to protect all your words; make sure the bulbs are safe from the birds, then what a glorious emotion you’ll feel when you order ideas to create the ideal and out of the ground just like ink out your quill will sprout the shining daffodil.

This yellow no longer has hue of decay but looks to me like a pleasing bouquet. And oft when on my couch and say: “There’s no worth to words without joy of word play.”

ILL POET

The map of a thousand inky worms; an unfathomable deep of wordy concerns but we’ll hold on to beacons; our symbolic terms; those obvious words that our hearts often yearn.

Oh vile uncertainty! How our minds do return, Oh you vague, ugly signs, yes for you we do spurn! But in sickly anxiety our brains they will churn ‘til we build up a fortress that’s deformed and infirm.

Your castle of words is crumbling down and into the moat your symbols will drown, you should dredge out the mould and recover the crown and bestow it (ill poet) to forgotten nouns.

Why laugh at the thought that poetry’s dead when all you do is repeat what you’ve read and the literary spider is spreading its web but you don’t seem to realise it’s captured your head.

Is it lexical choice, or your love for James Joyce that has stopped you from having original voice? How absurd that you drown out of arrogant choice!



And we take it in turns to repeat what we’ve learnt, how we love that precision of shared, ailing terms, but when will we see the inbred is infirm? We will die in this moat ‘less innovation returns.

You can’t just live in summer days; in quiet breeze and happy haze; we’re gliding down the night-time ways; I hope you know it’s just a phase; I feel like it’s all slipped away; the feigning smiles; the disarray; we’re working through the black; the grey; empty bottles; stale ashtrays; but when you turn to me and say; ‘please help me not to feel this way’; I’ll say, my dear, you’re just the prey; the green will feed off your dismay; I’ll say that we have hell to pay 'cause Eli Lilly made things this way.

PLEA TO S.W.M - the Yellow Wallpaper

Petals shatter off delicate trees
While the songbirds and swallows litter the eaves
For a winter of silence and a terrible breeze
And the sunshine that’s starving its heat for disease

It’s icy and shallow and as shattered as she
There for hours in coldness and waiting to leave
But all power and warmness is caught in the eaves
For a winter of silence and that terrible breeze

But she’s waiting and hoping the knowing trees bleeds
Out a sap all of fire, blazing energy freed
But it’s cold and it’s quiet and as quiet as she
In the rooftops of treetops in the eaves saved for she

So come crashing and trashing alone through an air
Cold and piercing and evil and dead and unfair
Unforgiving, aborting the stale, stagnant air
There’s no room in the house for this strong female heir

But she’s breaking and stabbing and filled with despair
Full of anger she’s winning this game: solitaire
And the men are downstairs smoking pipes unaware
That the prayer she is screaming is piercing the air


Take your chances, be different and paint over yellow
Then just wait and be pleased at the people who follow

NEW-OLD WORLD

We bribed the sun to sit near Icarus
So we could make more candles
And we used the candles to shed some light
On this vast pink-papered scandal

They needed more cheese for their bread
But then they needed more bread for their cheese

The door slammed in the kitchen and
The windows screamed sweet nothings to the wind
They’ll take you back to the storm
But it’s not so tempestuous and not so big
It’s round and quiet and it echoes myths
A wishing well where all the coins have been stolen by gypsies

So we won’t build ruins anymore
Or let the horse in through the door
Let’s not cry over muddy mounds
But help pick Icarus off the ground