Showing posts with label allegory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label allegory. Show all posts

Collectors

Some people collect stamps.
Some people collect coins.
Some people make air fix models so well
You can barely see the joins.

Some people collect conquests.
Some people collect scars.
Some people collect experiences
during which they see stars.

I've got a new collection,
and not through conscious act.
It's been kind of foisted on me and
I'd rather give it back.
I'll put it in an album,
Neat, protected, labelled, proud
private slice of all the lives
that used to be around.
Past tense.
You see it's all the funeral cards
with photos and songs and poems.
It's hard
to watch the collection grow.
I have no control
over this.
It's not like pokemon cards or vintage picture discs.
They're all limited editions,
all one off works of art.
All threads in one rich tapestry
of which we're just one part.
And the pattern that they weave glistens
Crystallised in wisdom.
Passed through timely advice
and an ear willing to listen.
It's not like I can display it.
For flat living it's highly compatible.
For the major part of it,
It's completely intangible.
The cards are merely a symbol:
A trinket in place of a jewel.
One hydrogen atom representing
Each universe of you.
So I'll put them in an album,
neat, protected,  labelled,  proud
and share them with the enthusiasm
of the traction engine crowd.

Some people collect conquests.
Some people collect scars.
Some people collect experiences
during which they see stars.

Some people collect stamps.
Some people collect coins.
Some people make air fix models so well
You can barely see the joins. 

The Company (Part 1)

Once there was a company
that traded magic beans.
It co-opted people’s tragedies,
it monetarised their dreams.

Selling wishes granted,
with side conditions attached.
Agents of The Company
were everywhere dispatched.

Wielding shiny printed pamphlets
and wearing brittle little smiles.
They promised the world for a simple exchange-
just to keep your record on file.

The People were pleased with such offers of service.
The Agents worked ideas to bone.
Then came news their Benevolent Dictator
had given up his throne.

The Troll King, his replacement, quickly set about
installing Goblin minions and rationing magic given out.

To the enormous surprise of no one,
things began falling apart.
Without enough magic
wishes were only fulfilled in fits and starts.

The People began to get angry
and The Agents began to get scared
because when they asked for helpful smiles
they were rewarded with barbed teeth, bared.

Heady Goblin Henchmen
began to run amok
as The Agents fell into a state
of ongoing traumatic shock.

***

There is no happy ending here,
for the story is not yet done.
Be sure to check back in a little while

and find out how they’re all getting on...

Home and Hospital for the Incurables

Gothic institution, high on island hill.
Oceans of ink. A sky entirely of quill.
The Warden’s keys jangle alarmingly in the lock.
She punches in, signalling day’s beginning on the clock.

One by one along the stacks
the strip lights buzz and yawn.
Their dust dilated haloes are vesperturnally forlorn.
Muffled footsteps on threadbare shuffle
and distantly a hushed kerfuffle
whispers through still air.

The Warden sighs and rolls her eyes
at the metronomic morning mantra
as the echoed mouthfuls materialize:
“You can’t make me get up if I don’t wanna!”

This is Gulchik. Every day
she wishes that the night would stay.
She likes to moonbathe. It helps to soothe
her erratic solar-stifled moods.
The Warden pays her little mind
but checks the email, flips the sign
on office door from “out” to “in”.
Another day at work, for her sins.

A shadow flicks across the door
trailing a wake of intense intention.
Lamps flick on. Decisions are made.
Coffee brews.
Its olfactory serenade draws others to the room.
They are gathered in a foyer of a library of sorts.
A refectory of writings and of reactionary last resorts.

The people here aren’t free to leave
but purgatorially persist.
Endlessly refining their flaws
as three dimensional as a Moebius Strip.

The self-appointed Head Librarian is a very jovial chap.
He wears a suit of sepia wool and a shiny brass-badged cap.
Perpetual cup of half-drunk tea
in hand. You’ll find him at his desk.
Any scrap of thing you want to know
he’ll give upon request.
He has it all neatly filed away,
it’s hidden in the stacks.
Taped up dusty cardboard boxes
labeled “Synonyms”, “Sources”, “Syntax”.
BUT.

He really

loves

charades.

The Simpleton Sphinx has found a way
to turn easy admin into frustrating play.
He will answer all you care to ask
in cryptic clues an interpretive dance.

Gulchik tries to help the situation along
offering answers so painfully, blatantly wrong
that Warden orders her to read
and get the education so clearly needs.

As she strops away we catch a glint
deep in the murk. If you squint
you might just see a figure slim,
locally known as Tin-Foil-Tim.
This is a name the others gave to him.
He will not reveal his own for fear
of hidden cameras, tracking devices conspi-
racies and the mere
acknowledgement of his presence
scrambles him like a startled pheasant.

Thompson or Thompson,
(It’s not clear which)
twinkles his eyes
and gives his moustache a twitch.
“Only 3% of pheasants live to be age 3”.
The bowler-hatted figure grins charmingly, broadly.
His lapel-pin draws the gaze
in pompous-fonted letters the phrase
‘Keeper of Ephemeral Wisdom’ is engraved.

Bouncing his cane he turns with flair.
And all returns to the still, silent air.

A distant light fades into view.
A pale coral comforting hue.
The kitchen with its Aga and its well worn table top
is host to existential debates that never really stop.
The sisters here go on and on about the nature of truth.
One’s called Anna-Nostalgia and the other is Memory-Ruth.
Steaming tea-pot, pink wafers biscuits, cross-stitch and knitting.
The only thing they agree on is which chair the other should sit in.

This little room is haunted by the wraith of poor Miana.
She hisses now from shadowed corners.
She was drowned in raucous laughter.

While this cosy little picture may well warm your oysters
there are secrets to be discovered in the dark beyond the cloisters.

This monochrome stone is Daemenzia’s domain.
Her most terrifying weapon her glaring disdain.
All angles and German modernist lighting
she is used as a guard specifically to frighten
others to stay out and one to stay in
the padded devotional cell that she’s in.

Through the door-grill she may be glimpsed.
The disheveled, wide-eyed Mistress of Mince.
Hunched over paper, desperately scratching.
Her dress is so well worn its mostly just patching.
Bare foot and grubby she tremors with breath
for if she ever stops writing it would be sudden death.

The Warden sees the Mistress but they rarely interact.
How can a rock hope to understand the notion of the abstract?
For Warden knows what others don’t, by virtue of being the carer.
The Mistress’s powers are transcendental. What Warden discovered had scared her.

All the books in the library were hand written not typed
in identical scrawly pea-green swirls on identical pages striped.
New volumes are forthcoming at an ever steady rate
but the oldest book in the library is sealed inside a safe.
For it describes in detail the ink washed island hill
and how the Mistress had created it through the force of pen and will.
The sudden death she fears isn’t her earthly own
but everyone that’s placed in the Hospital and Home.
For although they cannot leave and are prisoners of her construct
she has grown accustomed to their distracting disorderly conduct.

And so she goes on writing
above ink sea on island hill.

In a gothic institution

where the sky is made of quill.

Humanity is a Virus


Lady Gaia blew the sleep sand from her dust encrusted eye.
Rippling verdantly she turned, serene in what she felt and why.
Intrigued she watched as her leaf-locks dis-re-dis-reappeared
in pixel squares. She raised a brow and thought, ‘That’s weird’.

She sought Ra’s malady-monger opinion.
He squinted and told her to stop thinking
about string theory and quantum bunkum
and try to get more sleep.

So she ignored it as best she could,
 although she began to feel strange.
Her friends were kind enough not to mention
her face was becoming quite changed.
Malodorous gases clouded her vistas,
she developed orbital detritus.
Even poor Luna’s surface wasn’t spared;
a sad case of environmentitis.

Jupiter came concerned for his friend
and of the terrisy he might catch,
raised the alarm and Lady Gaia
to Ra was swiftly dispatched.
With somberly professional flair
and a touch of harsh halitosis
he pronounced what she was scared to hear,
a terminal diagnosis.

“I’m sorry, my dear. It is clear you have caught
an industrialized case of the humans.
There are things we can try, but to you I can’t lie;
The prognosis is millennia not aeons.
As a titration resource I’ll give you a course
of anti-anthropotics.
It’ll slow them a while, come back when you feel
a definite change in your tropics.”

So Gaia took the microbes with great sad apprehension
and loosed them through her fleas and on her water’s surface tension.

The first wave seemed to go quite well
and the tooled-up apes retreated
in the face of the poxy buboes swell
and their fruitless attempts to treat it.
Gaia felt buoyed by this seeming improvement
and decided to contact direct
these creatures hell bent on destructive denuding
and persuade them this path to reject.
She consulted humble Roodrelac
The universal mediator.
(his heroism know no bounds.
We’ll discuss his story later).
He inspired her with native thoughts
of harmonic shamanism.
Persuaded her to try his spores
To help improve her vision.

She’d never felt so overwhelmed with new connections formed
A flood of shared experience and a flickering sense of divorce.
She returned to Ra: “I’ve found a way! I’ve heard it really works!
I can guide them through my inner strength and corrupt their own networks!”

“What quackery! It’s never proven. It’s just the placebo effect
The truth is some planets have natural immunity, or some we’ve come to suspect.
It’s a treatment nearly no one survives and the physical costs are most dreadful.
It’s still being tested, it’s not even licensed. It’s hippy-dippy and experimental.”

“Go on.” Said Gaia, her eye a whirl of desert storm sand concentration.

“They say that within them is coded a course of ultimate auto-extinction.
Apparently if you encourage their enhanced neuronic evolution
beyond the pace of their cellular form they will drown in their self-made pollution.”

Gaia looked shocked.
It hadn’t occurred that she’d have to get worse to get better.
She wanted to weep
But the glittering hope in her core
Wouldn’t let her.

Now she has fifty year checkups with Ra and he’s writing a ground breaking study.
Proving conclusively the treatment was real.
We wouldn’t want to prove him wrong.

Would we?


The Mermaid and The Sloth

Come and meet some friends of mine,
we'll go to where they stay
with toasting glasses held aloft
and witty repartee.
I'm sure we'll have a lovely time -
they're very welcoming.
They are the Mermaid and the Sloth
to them ourselves we'll bring.
Please don't mind their way with words.
Their oft-referenced archaic verse
is harmless at the very worst.
With intelligence they're cursed.
The Mermaid and the Sloth.

The Mystery of the Moon

One crystal-aired and clear-skied day
I wandered pondering away,
To discover if the tales were true;
Is lunar rock just cheese of blue?
I asked the solemn cows so wise, but all they said was "Moo".

I had heard told the deep blue sea
Could answer any mystery,
So went and stood on windswept shore;
Begged and pleaded, screamed and swore.
The waves to calm me murmured "Shhhh", but gave no answer more.

I went to university,
The learn-ed folk and library,
But they were in a picket line
With angry looks and waving signs.
It seemed they had their own questions and wouldn't answer mine.

I scaled the Himalayas,
(The grass, the rocks and icy layers)
To see if I could see from there
If it were stilton or gruyere.
Altitude sickness got me first- I need much thicker air.

Atlas mountains on camel road,
With Bedouin tribes and desert code.
I saw the moon more clearly then
Than I ever will again.
I saw how silly I had been and found a peace-like zen.

It was obvious to me
The moon's not rock or cheese of green!
It's each unanswered mystery;
The "what' if"s, "what now"s and "what's to bes";
The gotten undreamed and the great-never-had:
That's why She glows and why She's sad.

Bitterly Cold

How dare the Sunshine show his face,
When with illusory Autumn Summer’s replaced
And offers only cold embrace
To those who crave his warmth the most?
But cradles the cruel and wantonly idle
Whose joys are temperate and tidal;
Who never do a thing but sidle
Out of work and blithely boast.