Index
- Imaginary World
- Big Kids’ Comic Book Thought Bubbles
- A Seagull
- Trench Mentality
- Tricks of the Mind
- Immortalized Studio Queen Quote
- Out of it
- add another death of a loved one to the toll
- Political Football Commentary
- A Week in the Whole History of the World
- Domestic Violence
- World Kissing Day
- At least forever minimum
- Dream Pop
- 70s Kid
- Human Stories
- Mucking about making me a god
- Happy New Year, Me Hearties
- A Pie Eye for a Pie Eye
- In a Perfect World
- B+
- Photoshopped Vision
- O look! A Wren!
- Sorry, little pigeon
- Mr Bleaney’s Suicide Note Double Negative Never
- Collide-O-Scope
- Photocondriac
- Plane Overhead
- Trip Dream
- Paradise of Devils
- Red Night Cool Blues
- Vicious Circle Serial Series
- Case for the Defence
- Mystery Death
- Mr and Mrs Money
- Cats’n’dogs
- Scratch-Card Self-Promotion
- Fan Club
- On My Balcony
- Bus no. 1 Route Revelations
Imaginary World
Day dream out the window.
Watch birds perch on trees.
See sums mathematically disappear
and photographic figures historically freeze.
Watch your parents come back to life
and yesterdays miraculously dawn.
See your diary mundanely return
to the day you were born.
Watch glasses drink up bar tenders
pouring down their throat benders.
See calendars for decades to come
and chew predictions like weather forecast gum.
As bad kids get told off for telling it as it is
and good teachers tell their pets off for not questioning a quiz,
day dream out the window
and muck about making up a god that might last ‘til tomorrow.
Big Kids’ Comic Book Thought Bubbles
As social media mimic philosophers
write ‘life’s not a rehearsal’
which extras put a like for, while doing
the same thing every day eternal,
flash car deep thinkers
wear fashionable hundred dollar bill suits,
and second hand beggar cat walkers
rub together coppers like perfect poverty beauts.
Meanwhile, hairdressers, famed for
idle chat shop talk,
go on strike deep in thought,
as their sitting waiting mirror-gazing customers
mull over their greying hair experience
they might have swept away to nought.
Aging over-thinkers turning sixty
wonder how the years went by so quickly
while those living life to the full
don’t have time to think and act the fool.
A Seagull
strode across my small-hours square.
Noone there.
Acted like it owned it – strode in defiance.
Then flew away when it heard
a human break the nocturne silence.
Trench Mentality
Keep away if you know what’s good for me:
As welcome as the enemy.
Wish there was some way to gag the voices
that order me about like a headless chicken with roasted choices.
You’ve got some front to shout what you shout.
I’ve got no defence to rant what I rant.
To get anywhere, I try to smoke myself out
with a fag that burns out to everything I can’t.
Darkness is the new light at the end of the tunnel
with the earth being blasted and pummelled.
Some luck is on its way
on a scrunched up piece of paper with codes that need deciphering by dawn today.
Tricks of the Mind
Plate-spinners spin tales.
Jugglers juggle coincidence destinies.
Acrobats do tumbles and cartwheels
while banging against skull cavities.
What people said and what they did
gets distorted in a hall of mirrors
as escapologist brain cells
vanish and disappear.
Trapeze artists in high-low mood swings.
Clowns doing slap stick comedy routines.
Dwarves playing pranks round and round in rings
as magicians cast spells to magic away and free lions and horses and childhood dreams.
As tricks of the mind cloud fuzzy senses
big top heads get lost
in thick theatrical smoke that billows and tent-denses
while thought lines get telepathically crossed.
Immortalized Studio Queen Quote
Reel emotions cling-film celluloid eyes
with developing chemical dark-room tears
as cueing clapperboard teeth synchronize
take after take dental decay from tooth-fairy white to sepias.
This reel cannot last forever
and will self-destruct in a blink
A great line I’ll never forget ever
‘cos you made me think
was just the other day walking red-carpet home:
I want to live alone but I don’t want to die alone.
Out of it
Someone dies and you know them
as you stick your head under the sand cos you don’t want to know.
Do your CSE maths on how long
you’ve got to go if their life was yours in Death Row.
Then there’s those who die before you
fresh as a daisy and with a wreath pressure.
Some maths don’t add up like 2 and 2
and tragic it is for sure.
I always hated maths lessons.
Never got Mr Colman and what he meant by ‘O’ level glory.
Survivors get on their knees to read obituaries and bless ‘em.
Glad I’m no part of it and out of it, end of story.
add another death of a loved one to the toll
like a piece of you has gone
gone into another life cut short and wrong
i’m standing mime-drumming on my balcony
and the next day is as tomorrow as far as I can see
football is the theme tonight
a match between my heart and soul
everything I love is out of sight
and trying to understand is the goal
Political Football Commentary
Chances go begging for fate
as street photographers get the shot too late.
Soup kitchen protesters making an almighty din
end up under spin doctors’ knives sticking their fork tongues in.
A Week in the Whole History of the World
The dead are like those alive:
Paranoid, mad, and clicking with nobody.
Newborn souls buzzing around, trapped in a honey money
modern mayhem medieval ancient digital world hive.
There’s no escape.
Tracker dogs sniffing them out and tracking them down.
Ropes or chains or rat face torture cages or red tape
and surveillance squads unearthing corpses still breathing underground.
How is it in the afterlife?
Can you still keep in touch?
Back and beyond, betrayals and ambitions as cutting as a quality steel knife?
Does it matter that much?
Not knowing where to start while looking forward to the end,
this week has been one long headache and Friday topped it with a computerised migraine.
Nothing works and I broke it anyway cos I lost my temper with cables and connections that tied me up in knots round the bend.
Would take my guitar to the mountains
but I can’t play, and I can’t climb
but worldly fakes can feign.
What’s your poison? Same again?
Domestic Violence
Hit those machines
cos they’re mean
and don’t work on purpose
with their hocus pokus.
Computer driving you nuts
for two hours? Punch it!
CD player stuck
on track 3? Shake it!
Wi-Fi not working
yet again? Scream at it!
Internet radio getting
your goat? Throw it!
Show them who’s boss
or they’ll have yer!
Time to start giving a toss
cos they’re taking over.
World Kissing Day
I’m a bit tearful thinking of it
but had some wine and that puts me in touch with what I’m feeling.
When my heart and head collide and fit.
Sorry, yes, it’s embarrassing.
Tough as nails I’m gonna drive it home.
Laying on the floor I’m ready to give in.
Writers everywhere have their favourite illiterate reader riddled with sin.
Tips for everyone serving a glassful of tonic with a nothing of gin.
This is the heart of the matter
as a matter of the heart:
I’m full of fear about the future today
and the future is so full of fear that I’ve stayed up too late to not let tomorrow have its say.
Today was world kissing day.
We kissed all day.
You put me in a good mood and me you.
This poem isn’t about anyone but you.
At least forever minimum
The psychedelic pseudonyms
written on your medical certificate
are illegible on soggy paper
and going for a song at your old school fete.
You’re sweating in a heatwave.
Wrapping up to keep away the cold.
You’re not bowled over by anything anymore.
Wear dark sunglasses to be cool on streets of gold.
Your problem is you have none serious enough
to be a problem:
hardly like a pretty flower head
without a stem.
Dream Pop
The old preach to those who don’t give a shit
as the young throw them out of their punk pulpit.
Pop is a dream dreaming of pop
and what you can do and what the others could not.
Some old stay young
and some young who never were get unceremoniously thrown.
Heroes are decorated or unsung.
Pop dreamers decorate their own.
I look around at powers that be.
Feel powerless down on one knee.
Arrogantly know I’m right
and dream pop every night.
70s Kid
Candle waxy eyes shining
in the dark, during an electric cut.
Shouting heads off while singing
to glam rock.
My poems are so memorable
I can’t remember them to recite.
But can still remember that Dracula black’n’white film horrible
that kept me up Into the dark of the night.
But memories are good on my memory board
when Polaroid cameras printed out little snaps
when amateur improvising hit the right chord
and where things seemed so simple, all you had to do was fill in the gaps.
Human Stories
Just watched an episode of ‘Mastermind’
and the guy who won the heat
commented on it and the human story behind:
Remembered watching the quiz as a kid with his recently deceased father. Voice cracked, but he hadn’t in the hot seat.
Human stories behind everything we do.
Personal affects in everything we do
Everyone has their own reason for whatever they do.
And behind it is somebody in whatever we do.
Mucking about making me a god
Messianic me.
The chosen one.
Billboard’s in the sea.
Backlight sun.
My words burst out like bulbs and flowers
flourishing eternally.
I have a name card, a director’s chair, a diary full of appointment hours.
I’m beyond any votes cast democratically.
Mucking about but back down to earth,
lego kids like lords building cut price cheap church properties.
Exalt yourself to what you’re auction worth
or go cheap in sales like heavenly Januaries.
Happy New Year, Me Hearties
Happy New Year to everyone dear
whose names belong to your alphabet song:
To A and H, J and K, B and C, D and E,G,P, T and V.
F and L, M, N, and S, and X and Z, W,Q,and U, R,I,Y and O.
Play them on your own pirate station radio.
Start the next 365 days with good intentions
and peace pixel resolutions:
No more missiles. No more missing files.
No more money mad Machiavellians.
No more limp lessons to learn lessons.
Now, come on, holy brand names
and vote can-stuffing X canvassing psychos,
behave and put a lid on it.
Let’s listen to our pirate radios and sing together a bit.
Happy new year me hearties!
A new year sets sail round a flat world.
Maybe this one will end in treaties
lasting forever with hand grenades left rusting, unhurled.
A Pie Eye for a Pie Eye
Drunk on revenge
See them square up to each other.
The same old scraps.
The same old bother.
They hold their minute of silence
while bad-mouthing and incapable of keeping silent.
One day, they might come to their senses
as amateur giant-killing peacemakers beat professional war mongers in a cup tie upset that sends dailies into delirious cup fever excitement.
Meanwhile, the school blackboard is blank.
What have we learnt in centuries of learning?
Give as good as we get?
Leave revengers and pie-eyed war party disco dance floor revellers burning?
Very wordy.
Too much so.
Simple message:
Let it all go.
In a Perfect World
Wars don’t exist.
You do your health good by getting pissed.
Nothing once living is ever on the menu.
The many stick it to the few.
It turns in everyone’s favour
and it turns out we all get what we deserve.
I’ve got too much money to spend
and you score the golden goal in extra time seconds from the end.
B+
There’s a drug going round
hereabouts and round-a-while
lifting everyone off the ground
while floating with a cardboard smile.
Never dare to be down
or you’re met with a frown
or told chin up
by addicts hooked.
Facing facts is a fraud.
Head in the sand, they applaud.
Everyone on a merry-go-round.
Truth is I’m Iggy Pop bored.
Photoshopped Vision
The sea turned to turquoise from grey.
When my memory lapsed, I remembered what I was here for.
The rain fell like a rainbow that had missed out on people who couldn’t stay.
People who were in
as you knocked
but who hid behind their door.
All those excuses to keep horizons in the distance behind lenses double-thick.
Smoking behind the bike sheds.
Authority’s gonna come down on you like a ton of bricks.
You never went for it 100% and your tongues are gonna chop off your empty heads.
O look! A wren!
I try to believe in me.
Otherwise, I’ll lose faith in myself, see?
Push me over the edge, see?
Fall foul to hard gravity.
The midwife death-masks
scare the shit out of you.
You’re such a fake, your puppet asks
if you’ve ever had a spell work out of the blue?
Sorry, baby pigeon
You were helpless
and asked for help.
What to do? Did nothing.
Twelve hours later too late.
Had a chance
but in the wrong hands.
Such a sad end.
Ending so sad.
Poor little baby pigeon
Abandoned and lost.
Walked towards me
and that was me being useless.
Mr Bleaney’s Suicide Note Double Negative Never
I post whatever whenever I do
as a, sometimes occasionally at times, mini little crap cry for help.
And i might get a thumbs up or a laughing face like I would put too.
And this is the new modern ‘if you’ve been affected’ caring society.
I’m not going to top myself any day soon
but I’m worried about what people can do if they might want to.
I was demoralised tonight but couldn’t think of one person I’d call to say so.
Pride comes before a fall, or just descending low?
What happens when you don’t have the words that you imagine ears would never listen to?
Better keep it to yourself?
Do whatever picks you up when you’re lonely?
Grow roots, that will never die?
Get out of your tree?
Repeat: I’m worried about what people
can do if they might want to.
Copy and paste ‘talk’ and ‘share’.
Post something sometime somewhere?
Is it a fact that most people would rather go to a stranger?
Feel safer and ready to let themselves go?
I wonder why, with friends and family, I’d rather not bother them or bother.
Like Larkin once wrote: ‘I don’t know.’
Collide-O-Scope
Putting an old record on:
an old favourite out of favour,
I remind myself of how I got it right wrong.
A last will and test-a-what I meant brainwave waiver.
On the same wavelength with a few radio station dial quavers,
the starving wait forever for the dinner gong
and the saved wait forever for a saviour:
so far to go and it’s been so long.
Photocondriac
I never get the exposure I like.
There’s either too much or too little light
Either I’m the centre of attention or ignored.
I never get the exposure I like.
I never seem to be in focus.
There always seems to be a bit of blur.
Like squinting and not seeing right.
I never seem to be in focus.
It makes me momentarily snap.
Noise I can’t help but notice.
Always sort of in the wrong frame of mind.
It makes me momentarily snap.
Though I get my daily dose of the Masters of Photography
I wonder what’s wrong with me.
Nothing clicks
though I get my daily dose of the Masters of Photography.
Plane Overhead
Made a guess at hearing the plane you were leaving on across the sea overhead
as I looked up from my balcony breadcrust
with your home emptied of your books, and clothes,
as my books gather dust, and my wardrobe hangs like lead,
while moth-eaten with wanderlust.
I guess you’re halfway done with here
and halfway done with there
as, like you say, “it doesn’t feel like home”
like someone who needs space from what’s coming and what’s gone.
Every explorer needs an evening sat on the sofa.
Every malcontent needs a laugh.
Every boring day needs adventure.
Every squeaky clean pop star needs a bath.
Everyone waiting for something.
Some have the wherewithal to force it.
Some join the circus wearing their lucky ring
as others stay put and frame their face in a photofit.
Trip Dream
out way out on another planet
way out way off there
i bumped into no-one i never met
and sat on the burnt-out charred remains of a chair
all of a sudden i gradually appeared on Polsloe Road
and disappeared for all to see near enough
meanwhile back at headquarters they came up with a code
that made no sense to me so i sacked them in a huff
music abounded and anything that could jump did
i was lost for words but ranted ‘til I ran out of even more of them
auctioneers hammered away for a few quid
and the rich gave in to the poor and handed over a massive gem
all this to say
what’s black’n’white is a clear vision of come what may
and way out on another planet way off there
sometimes i close my eyes and sometimes i stare.
Paradise of Devils
Live life for the moment
under a volcano
as hearts in ashes over-the-top blow
like passionate loves that went.
I count on your visits.
Help me get through my time.
Free as a jailbird that sits
preening feathers that off plume don’t rhyme.
Pure joy out of everything to lose.
Singing in a city full of blues.
Celebrate one of Dante’s circles
with a passport to a paradise of devils.
Red Night Cool Blues
I’ve got it all.
Can’t grumble about my fall.
I got something looming
like impending tarot cards dooming.
Listen to those cicadas (sounds more poetic than crickets)
in the heat of the night: so loud yet so miniscule.
I lay sweat beads down for bets
on how hot it’s going to get before I lose my cool.
Listening to Billie Holiday.
I’ve got a feeling this feeling ain’t wrong.
Got an ear infection like things that stay.
Like those cicadas on song.
Vicious Circle Serial Series
Those animals kill
like humane humans order a coffee at a bar.
Those animals pretend to be humans still
and get a prison cell with a star.
If their names don’t come up as a lead
they’re happy.
They don’t speak to keep victims dead and buried.
They end up wanting to get caught to boast of their crimes without setting anyone free.
Case for the Defence
By all accounts, my cat is a vicious little ‘bastard’:
A nuclear claw-wielding war machine hazard.
Infamous for attacks and famed for delinquent behaviour.
People don’t turn their backs, scared of a monstrous ball of fur.
But they’ll never see him and his better side.
Purring or sleeping or yawning or whiskers to face or drinking water on the washing machine
when he lets go his territorial pride.
When he recluse lets what the public has never seen.
He’s a cat.
He’s got his reasons why he doesn’t like you.
He eats too much and he’s fat.
In his defence I’d be his lawyer and everything he’d miaow under oath would be true.
Anyway, look at yourselves: not sure I’d want you as a client
with all your human intelligence.
You do things that are wrong, but believe you’re right, ridiculously defiant.
I’m as sure of his innocence as any courtroom parent.
And that closes the case for the defence.
Mystery Death
Lots of clues but nothing
to build a case on.
Witnesses and testimonials
but it was a mystery death as mysterious as any death any book had been written on.
Take a deep breath after that last sentence.
Death’s a mystery
as mysterious as anything could be.
Birth is easy.
It’s as predictable as any rarity.
Mr and Mrs Money
He counts on her.
She counts on him.
Obsessing with what they’re worth
Investing on each other’s whim.
They share what’s in stock.
Their market moods swing.
Open the door when opportunity knocks
and close it when their heads fluctuate and spin.
Have child benefit for their childhood memories.
Have a mortgage for where they live.
Have mortal assets which they freeze
and a pension plan in place for every day they cross fingers to with.
Mr and Mrs Money
say money’s not important ‘cos they have it.
They flip a coin for whether
love is more important than owning each other and property.
Cats’n’Dogs
Teatime rain brewing in teapot clouds,
powers-that-be dunk their big biscuits in their big cup.
A pretty kettle of fish and bones boiling in up-the-revolution kitchens with rights overlooked and doffed hats centuries kow-towed:
something’s getting somewhere like a cat from a kitten or a dog from a pup.
Legendary ties get consigned to history,
to be dug up again and again in eternal rematches that get postponed due to rain in waterlogged trench pitches.
Fighting cats and dogs, with little mercy,
a paw, a whisker, a tail, a skull, bubbling and steaming like being promise-vowed and brewed by 16th century revenge accountants and little quill-pushing civil snitches.
Meanwhile cats and dogs in many households
live together in peace or blissful non-aggression pacts, at least.
Time’s getting on and it’s getting muddled and old
as future generations drink and guzzle and party-revel, oblivious to a copy-cat unneighbourly dog-barking politely-camouflaged unidentified cat-dog mechanical biscuit-eating Yeatsian beast.
Scratch-Card Self-Promotion
When influenced by your inspirers
be careful you don’t get carried away.
Write your poems, paint your paintings, outlie your liars
but chances are, however much they’re somebody, a nobody you’ll stay.
Listen to a bass line.
Remember a line you were told when you had no way of knowing what it meant.
Say everything’s fine
Give up saying the truth for lent.
I’m sorry I put you down, but I can’t help but fight back.
In another life, on my death bed, I’d reach the unreachable.
In this one, I’d get the sack.
Isn’t it ironic that I could avoid my mistakes unimpeachable?
Fan Club
I’m your biggest fan.
I follow you everywhere.
I’ve got your autograph
but it doesn’t stop there.
I got your number
and on the back of my shirt.
When things go bad
I feel your hurt.
On My Balcony
Sitting on my balcony.
it’s eleven o’clock whenever that may be,
looking down on chess piece people check mate happy
far away below wherever that squared street is I see.
Meanwhile I’m booking whatever flights of fantasy
may boarding card me to greener grass destiny
as my cat is playing with the dangling string bookmark
in whichever ‘notes for poetry’ notebook I happen to have tattooed on my knee.
Both of us restlessly resting from overnight infamous anonymity.
Bus no. 1 Route Revelations
Writing this on the Number 1 bus.
Late meeting my instant love for dinner.
Met by chance lingering friends drinking to us
and, having to get away, made excuses like an original sinner.
Today I’m in such a good mood:
I might have cracked the meaning to it all.
Be cool, don’t fret, avoid any feud
and, if possible, stick to routines that punch the clock or knock down the wall.
All poems and collages by John Di Girolamo
This collection completed November 2024
A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 