One day we’ll all be dead;
survival chances: slim.
So concentrate instead
on aspects you prefer:
“I’m winding down,“ he said,
“but not as fast as him.”
“Losing my looks,” she said,
“but not as fast as her.”
*****
Speaking as someone now in the 4th quadrant of my 1st century, what other options are there? Anyway, this was first published in the Asses of Parnassus – thanks, Brooke Clark!
“Old people party 2” by weldonwk is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
These are the waters of the buccaneer–
they live large lives and lounge around with liquor,
floating on waters calm, gin-clear,
their risks outrageous and their thinking thin,
alert to bargain and to dicker
and not averse to sin–
a life erratic.
The time of storms starts… ends… another year
has gone by, always it seems quicker–
thoughts of a distant home fade, disappear–
beard covers sunken cheeks and chin
and there’s no comment, jibe or snicker,
only a rueful grin,
wry, enigmatic.
There’s no reflection or confession here,
for there’s no use for church or vicar.
Security is in the bandolier;
here, courts and coppers don’t look in,
the flame of justice can no more than flicker.
More feared is the shark’s fin:
steady, emphatic.
But years creep up–ears deafen and eyes blear–
dry stone gets harder and wet walkways slicker,
and friends go out upon a bier.
It’s hardly worthwhile trying to begin
new quests once you’ve absorbed this kicker:
‘Really, what’s there to win?’
Change becomes static.
O pirate with your dwindling sense of cheer,
while lounging on rattan and wicker!
Though others lack your lazy lack of fear,
their fine awards, like yours, are only tin.
Enjoy your days and friends; don’t bicker:
soak in life’s warmth and din.
Be undramatic.
*****
I wrote this poem two years ago, and thought it was strong enough to get me into a good new magazine for the first time. And so it turned out… after 20 rejections, the 21st accepted it. So now I’m proud to be featured on the promo page for the latest Magma.
And about time too – after being brought up in a house called ‘Buccaneer Hill‘, by parents who started the ‘Buccaneer Club‘ guest house and restaurant, this poem was long overdue.
Illustration: RHL + ChatGPT
At sunset he ascends the crooked hill
to ruminate on times past and to weep
for friends long dead and lost friends living still.
Each time he climbs this hill it grows more steep.
A day’s end is somehow akin to death
as time bleeds out and cannot be revived.
He stands on the hill’s summit, out of breath
and wonders how on earth he has contrived
to be the last survivor of his peers,
avoided heart attack or foul disease.
The red sky is a bonfire of his years.
Pure luck, the answer whispers in the breeze.
*****
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
Photo: Richard Fleming post
Time was, we spent our muscle and our nous
propping an aging house
against the pummeling of its hundred years.
Clean paint, neat gardens, upkeep rarely in arrears,
sober as Donne. Yet now each year afresh
burdens us with new failings of the flesh:
Legs that once mounted ladders without qualm
tremble. Nor are we calm
confronting pipework; torsos will not shrink,
backs bend, or shoulders fold to grope below a sink.
Hands shake; eyeballs glaze over. What appalls
is that our bodies buckle like our walls:
plaque in arteries, soot in chimney stacks,
stubborn and troublous cracks
in teeth, in plaster. House! Ought we to call
ourselves—and you—new poster children for the Fall,
for that hard doctrine grumbling down the ages
that Sin’s to blame, with Death and Rot its wages?
Entropy as theology—would Donne
jape at it? Wink and pun
as in his randy youth? Or solemnly
robed in his winding sheet, sing Mutability,
spinning into the praise of God in Art
the fact that all things earthly fall apart?
Or pull from air some bit of modern science,
yoking (even by violence)
thermodynamics, shortened telomeres,
transplants, genetics, sex, the music of the spheres?
Strange physics and wild metaphors—all grand,
but Rot and Death, plain woes we understand,
are better fought with checkbooks than with verse.
We’ll sit, these days. We’ll nurse
our beers, while able bodies stir their dust.
A distant siren whines—we sigh; it whines for us.
Let plumbers, painters, carpenters begin
this season’s round of battling Death and Sin.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “Last summer, Clarence Caddell was just beginning work on a new magazine, The Borough, and was planning a second issue while the first came together. He had in mind an issue centered on Donne, and he commissioned me to contribute a poem. I’d read the wonderful biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell not many months before, so a lot of the life was fresh in my mind–but it was also the season of endless repair that is the eternal truth of owning a house that’s 113 years old. It wasn’t hard to pull together a poem about the woes of home ownership with tidbits that “everyone knows” about Donne–his worldly-to-holy conversion, the familiar line about his yoked-by-violence metaphors–under an allusive title, and in a stanza form a bit like one of his. (Alas, this blog can’t show you the indents that would best imitate Donne’s way of laying out a poem. You’ll have to imagine all the trimeter second lines indented and the hexameter fourth lines hanging out farther left.) In the end, Clarence had to use the poem to fill out his first issue, so it sat alone, unassisted by an issue theme.”
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.
Photo: “House Repairs” by JessNityaJess is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “I suppose Sunny Afternoon reflects my own station in life, that is, drifting steadily towards the end, with the usual collection of regrets that most of us have.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
Photo: posted by Richard Fleming
I found myself in bed with an old man.
His beard was silvery, his scrawny chest
a rack of ribs, his loose-lipped mouth open
and toothless as a baby. There he was,
there in our bed, as if he owned the place.
He snored and grunted like some ancient king
asleep after a banquet. But what feast
had led, dear heart, to this? What partying?
He turned his head to me. I saw his face—
a travesty. Some metamorphosis
had happened in our sleep, my love replaced
by a bag of windy bones. I need a piss,
he muttered, and got up. O then I knew
what age had done to us, and who was who.
*****
Helena Nelson writes: “Everyone experiences it eventually. You glance at your own reflection in the mirror and get a shock at how old you look. So that’s one of inspirations for this poem. The other spur to write this was a dream I had one night, though in the poem it’s intentionally unclear whether the experience is or isn’t real. I started with near rhymes in the octet and moved towards perfect rhyme at the end to convey the shock. I do hope the reader feels that shock at the end.”
‘Dream’ was originally published in The Dark Horse.
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems, one of which appears in the Potcake Chapbook, ‘Lost Love’. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.
They lift and fix their heavy insect eyes
upon the East, from where the sun will send
the bees to stroke and lick and fertilize.
They wait, where once they craned their necks to see
his passing arc. They wait, amazed. Surprise
has painted yellow lashes, perfectly
coronal round a crowded, dark eclipse.
Its buzzing beauty pixelates and stares.
An alien array of cells unzips.
A thousand thousand sisters nurse the same
regret. His warmth is gone. And left behind
to hang their heads, disconsolate, they blame
themselves. Their tears drop hard and black and blind
*****
Joe Crocker writes: “The French call them Tournesols because, when they are growing, the follow the sun. But when the flowerhead is fully formed, they all face East so they warm up quickly and are more attractive to the bees. The poem came about because I’ve been seeing them more frequently in our local supermarkets and my wife grew some this year. Seeing them close up, I was reminded of the reaction a friend from many years ago used to have. She liked them but kept her distance because she was spooked by their dense busy centres. So the insect eye was the starting metaphor and then the poem led me on. Big, beautiful, disturbing, and in the end, sad.”
Joe Crocker is no relation of the Sheffield-born rock singer. But he does live in Yorkshire and gets by (with a little help from his friends). He is a bit old now to be starting out in poetry but was infected by the muse during Covid lockdown a couple of years ago and has had a few things published, mainly in Snakeskin magazine (where this poem first appeared) and other online venues. He doesn’t have a website but if you Google him, you’ll learn a lot more about a certain Sheffield-born rock singer.
Photo: accompanied the poem in Snakeskin.
“The trouble with this growing old,” he said,
“You lose so much . . . and you get what instead?
If you can hang a bath towel on your tool
it’s wasted when you’re in an all-boys school.
Time was, I’d come — as you’d expect —
with just a look, a touch.
Now, not so much.
The only thing that gets me full erect
is feeling flesh firming from kiss and grasp;
so all my work is trying to make her gasp!
I need her climax if I’m to get sated.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. He waited.
*****
This semi-formal poem was published in the Lighthearted Verse subsection of Formal Poetry in that wonderfully rich and varied magazine, Better Than Starbucks. Where else could you find such a variety of areas of expression as BTS’ Regular Feature Pages?
Free Verse
Haiku
Formal Poetry
Poetry Translations
Poetry for Children
International Poetry
African Poetry
Experimental, Form, & Prose Poetry
Poetry Unplugged
Fiction
Flash Fiction & Micro Fiction
Better Than Fiction (creative nonfiction)
The Interview
Interviewee Poems
… and From The Mind of Alfred Corn
And tolerant enough to put up with my verse on occasion! Unfortunately they have announced they are going on hiatus… hopefully they will be back in 2023, as they have been a truly excellent outlet for all manner of poetry and prose.
Photo: “Mystery Man meets a friend” by mossimoinc is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
Indescribable—our love—and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
“I love you,” in the ordinary way
and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white…
indescribably in love. Or so we say.
Your hair’s blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
“I love you,” in the ordinary way.
Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say
we’re older now, that “love” has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
“I love you,” in the ordinary way.
Michael R. Burch writes: “These are some tidbits about the poem:
This was my first villanelle and it’s missing a tercet. The missing tercet was pointed out to me by the formalist poet Richard Moore, who said he still liked the poem. I didn’t feel that I had anything to add, so I left the poem as it was. I’ve never been a stickler for the rules, anyway.
‘Ordinary Love’ was originally published by The Lyric. It later won the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne Poetry Award, was published by Romantics Quarterly, which had sponsored the contest, and RQ nominated it for the Pushcart Prize.
The poem has been translated into Hungarian, as noted below.
That’s not too shabby for my first villanelle!
Here is the complete publication history:
Published by The Lyric, Romantics Quarterly, Amerikai költok a második (in a Hungarian translation by István Bagi), Mandrake Poetry Review, Carnelian, the Net Poetry and Art Competition, Famous Poets & Poems, FreeXpression (Australia), PW Review, Poetic Voices, Poetry Renewal, Poem Kingdom and Poetry Life & Times; also winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne Poetry Award sponsored by Romantics Quarterly and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The last time I checked online, it returned nearly 10,000 results for the first line.”
Michael R. Burch is an American poet, editor and translator who lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Beth, two outrageously spoiled puppies, and the ghost of a hamster, Olive, murdered by a former canine family member. For an expanded bio, circum vitae, career timeline, reviews, interviews and other information of interest to scholars, please click here: Michael R. Burch Expanded Bio. To read the best poems of Mike Burch in his own opinion, with his comments, please click here: Michael R. Burch Best Poems.
“Ordinary LOVE” by InfoMofo is licensed under Openverse from WordPress.org
Old fool! You really think yourself the same
As I who write to you, aged 22?
Ha! All we’ve got in common is my name:
I’ll wear it out, throw it away,
You’ll pick it up some other day….
But who are you?
My life’s before me; can you say the same?
I choose its how and why and when and who.
I’ll choose the rules by which we play the game;
I may choose wrong, it’s not denied,
But by my choice you must abide….
What choice have you?
If, bored, I think one day to see the world
I pack that day and fly out on the next.
My choice to wander, or to sit home-curled;
Each place has friends, good fun, good food,
But you sit toothless, silent, rude….
And undersexed!
Cares and regrets of loss can go to hell:
You sort them out with Reason’s time-worn tool.
Today’s superb; tomorrow looks as well:
The word “tomorrow” is a thrill,
I’ll make of mine just what I will….
What’s yours, old fool?
This poem, first published in Snakeskin No. 147, September 2008 and recently reprinted in the Extreme Formal Poems Contemporary Poets anthology edited by Beth Houston, is symptomatic of my constant concern with mortality. It was also a way to be provocative: under the guise of insulting myself, I got to insult all older generations. And it was also an exercise in poetic structure: each stanza presents an aspect of the superiority of present youth over future age. (Premise and conclusion aren’t necessarily made as statements, many times rhetorical questions are used instead.) The structure of each stanza is to begin with pentameters for a sense of reasonableness in the first three lines, pick up the pace for the next two lines, and end with a short punchline. Aggressive and effective.
Yes, I wrote it when I was 22. I don’t know if I will be able to concoct a suitably terse and dismissive answer when I’m 72. But it’s a favourite poem of mine, and I owe it a response.
Photo: “Day 005: The child is father to the man.” by JesseMenn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Form in Formless Times 