A piano and a Wurlitzer were playing from a field next door.
A gramophone record and a wireless from a meadow across the hall.
A violin and an accordion from a stream 3rd floor
and a xylophone and a chiming glass from an upstairs market stall.
Typewriters tapped away, and words got scattered across sawdust moors
as sheep wandered and cows grazed on living room carpets, treading the boards.
Everyone puts in their password.
Servants to the server. Expecting to be accepted.
But there’s a spanner in the works
as their letters and symbols get rejected.
Nobody understands why.
Nobody gets anywhere.
Some go mad and start to cry.
All spend hours and hours in despair.
Question upon question to do.
Get one wrong and you start anew.
Walls of technology crashing round them.
Debris of a system.
The whole race dies out.
Skeletons clutching their phones.
Suddenly a big beep breaks the silence all about.
It was just a virus; skull and crossbones.
You can bury it underground
sink it underwater
send it out to space
But
When it sprouts
or floats to the surface
or comes down to earth
It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
You can burn it,
set it on fire.
Have it eaten by the sows,
have it gone away forever.
But
When the ashes and the bones
get to make breaking news
when the ashes and the bones
bring to life DNA
It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
Treading the tight-rope with gusty guile
As far away as a horizontal mile
keep everything balanced until it teeters
like snapping a ruler at 32 centimetres.
He cut himself off.
Didn’t answer the phone.
When the doorbell went
He wasn’t at home.
He simply switched off
Sat Anon.
In a dark depression
Kinda turning him on.
A man going down
For a very long time.
Not behind bars
But a put-on smile.
No-one else knew
Of his inner other.
A bust of himself.
His own Big Brother.
She felt down and out of it.
Looking out from her look-out post.
Everybody, everywhere:
Some far-off fifteenth-century ghost.
Guests would swear her eyes had moved.
Her portrait face, hung on the wall.
Behind the canvas, keeping still
Out of sight, she’d eavesdrop all.
She wasn’t happy and she knew it.
Happiness she’d never known.
Not a soul had ever come close
And closeness, itself, she’d never shown.
Suits of armour in the hallway.
Manuscripts by candlelight.
She didn’t speak to anyone
But wrote her diary every night.
The streets are empty when a blink ago were full.
The buses running with no passengers are just the ticket for wasting fuel.
The beggars have nobody to beg to
or have a two-metre vaudevillian wooden arm out if they do.
The local drunk shouts out to walled-in deaf ears
You’ll die of the virus! I’ll die of alcoholism! as he holds his bottle of beer.
Supermarkets are still open to shoppers in their cellophane masks
who weigh themselves on the scales and stick the prices on their arse.
Dogs are a new leash of life to get out the house for a stroll
as owners, tongues hanging out, jump with excitement as police patrol.
You can’t go out unless absolutely necessary or you’re in the doghouse
as helicopters above make sure anyone below looks like a mouse.
Statistics is the new board game and quiz show everyone’s glued to on their sets
As hospitals have stress shooting off the graphs in their attempts to offset
the sad, inevitable truth that people, cut off from their loved ones, are dying
and funerals can’t even be had for any god’s want of trying.
Raindrop bodies cloud-gather ready to teem down
for a downpour on the battleground.
The forces of good and evil and in-between
are rolling up with mangled up metal ribcage spines.
Black crow words uneasily perch on carbon paper cable lines.
the plate spinner spins his plates
but he’s let things slip
a little of late
his life in pieces at his feet
that magic touch that filled the seats
a helpless helping of butter fingers now
all washed-up he takes a bow
what a shame what a pity
this inconsequential little ditty.
A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 