Sack (20.vii.1987)

You can't sell men any more.
Not so long ago, a man was money.
If you could capture four,
you were on the pig's back, no baloney.

And if you took a score,
you'd fairly drown in milk and honey,
with wives enough to pave the floor
and more kids than a nest of coneys.

Even women weren't too bad.
A brace were worth a Spanish horse,
more, if they were nobly bred,
or fairly pretty, blonde, or Norse.

But that's all over now. The new
rules mean the men go ape.
They mostly kill the women, too,
but save the choicer ones to rape.

E Pluribus Parvum. (20.vii.87)

There are two places most Americans will boast of
Without shame or fear of ridicule.
Both are cities: Boston and San Francisco.
Neither names's original.

Boston's precursor is a fenland village
which differs mainly in that it lacks:
orchestras, museums, muggers, strippers,
ashphalt acres, megastores,
bookshops where the famous accent,
vainly anglophilic, purrs,
Route one-two-eight and Filene's basement,
screeching subways, and a river
so unclean, that falling in
calls for a day's intensive care.

I've never been to San Francisco.
Three times I stood across the bay
in easy reach of downtown, but I didn't go.
I'd seen Boston, and doubted that this western Eden
could match the spirit of the ragged genius
from whom it took its name,
and whose notion of success finds little echo
in the minds of the New World.

The flat banality of conversation,
the minimality of the common culture,
the thin skim of the melting-pot
are what repel most Europeans from America,
but the place is far from hopeless.
Just and true and thinking men and women
are as common as anywhere else, and may be found
pulling protective wagons about them in the desolation
and calmly watching Eastward for the dawn.

Brain stops Play (19.vii.87)

Our genes exult in careless rapture
sand-dune chases, bubbling laughter,
hot blood pumping, wild eyes glazing,
wriggling, squeezing, panting, moaning,
giggling, licking, rolling, groaning,
slipping, dipping, no-ing, YES-ing.

Genes have no time for dull precautions,
condoms, coils and calendars,
intra-uterine contraptions,
hormone pills, thermometers,
caps and cling-film, spermicides,
douches, interruptions, lies.

For genes must live. It's what they're made for.
Genes must give their shape to future
faces, noses, teeth and freckles,
graceful roses, sweet and reckless,
lusty gardeners, happy churls,
rogering their ripe-thighed girls.

So down with jeans and up with genes
and fecund propagation!
Away devices, artifices,
hail insemination!
For het'rosexual unimpeded missionary one-on-one
in Nature's Way, the Perfect Way,
the best of lays, and matchless fun.

Lay on, selfish gene!
And sucks to anyone
who won't rhyme girl with churl.

Preface, 1987

I have a limited interest in finding new ways to say the obvious, and no interest at all in finding clever ways to say nothing.
It is undeniable that waves break on the shore, that frustrated lovers pine, birds sing, various bits of the world look nice, sound nice, feel nice, smell nice, and taste nice, and that most of us are equipped with appropriate organs to record these facts. Equally, life is hard for some of the peasantry, and hardship builds character. I propose to ignore all such information.
I didn't write poetry when I was a love-sick youth. It lay ready-made in armfuls. Right now I'm not writhing in agonies of conscience.
The less astute among you may be wondering what there is left for me to versify. The shrewd will have spotted that I've left myself almost all the nasty things, all the funny things, and all the things that ordinarily interest humanity.

There are two polar views about poetry. The first is that it consists of that which is lost in translation. The second view is this:

   Verse is what is lost
   in translation. Poetry
   is the residue.

   Poetry is not
   a way of saying something,
   but something to say.

The present dominance of English, and its illusion of permanence, makes the first view popular, but how many Englishmen read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Psalms, or, for that matter, the Kama Sutra, for the word-play?
I have no gripe with the first kind of poetry. It is often wonderful. I simply feel that, given limited time and talent, I do better to write the second kind.

I am a man who thinks in propositions. Propositions are things that can be true or false, or funny. Questions are not propositions. I find many questions interesting, but I prefer answers. Orders are not propositions. I'm not telling you what to do. The poems I write are thoughts expressible in words. I've put them in English. If you prefer, they should make equal sense in the language of your choice. You might well improve the expression while you are at it:

   Verse translators, suit your pleasure,
   state your fancy, pick your measure.
   Take me into rhyming couplets,
   terza rima, haiku, sonnets,
   hexameters, pentiambic blanks
   or polymorphous logopranks.
   Take my meaning, not my metre.
   Watch my logic, not my feet, or
   whether I have reasonable
   rhymes to end my lines.

Very likely, you can put them into better English. Feel free!

Dedication

Daniel, we see the
bright jokes and the blue jokes. Help
us see the dark jokes.