dear brit-poets
as there seems to be an explosion of poeticules on this list i felt it
was high time i proffered my own partially burnt offering - twas just
created last thursday & i hope it will bring the odd smile here & there
( please note, italics intended at places but not available owing to
e-mail typography) :
STUCK
Looking much alike a chest-freezer, and grey, and exuding airs of
disconsolate obsolesence, AutoDavid stood vacant in inattention in an
attic corner. Verseless. Themeless. Wingless.
Sparse, an allowance of light crept through a slit of window. Time had
crumbled like an acid-paper calendar. The ghost of Robert the Bruce had
given up the spiders. Omnipresent dust roved, like the fetch of a lunar
sea.
Suddenly, without authorial preparation, and in a spirit of narrative
intrusion, a yellow-beak poked out like a neighbour's nose in mid-air.
Ancient circuits stirred within AutoDavid; agéd, forgotten crystals
blinked into life; encyclopaedias hurriedly consulted themselves and
upended verse-forms were righted by anxious, heaving scansions.
"T-tell me", croaked AutoDavid, his voice hoarse and rusty with disuse
and an unoiled larynx. "T-t-tell" the mechanical bard implored.
The yellow-beak was joined by two black-button eyes. It did not blink.
It did not speak. It but hung there, resting upon an impossibility, in a
conjuror's thin air. Then the author prodded. The bird squawked:
"Write 14 sonnets upon the theme of 13 lines. Kree. Boil down a ten
book epic into a chain of 7 haiku. Sqwaa. Recite all known villanelles
backwards. Compose a happy ending for Samson Agonistes. Annotate Hansard
in Common (Skwaagh) Measure. Burn the manuscripts of Sophocles. Fashion
a libretto from The Shepheardes Calendar. Expropriate the means of
capital. Kree, sKree. Inveigle yourself into the underfelts of the
mighty. Skwaah. Resist all beans, resist all beans, resist all .....
phuut."
Yellow-beak blinked out, like an unreliable light-bulb (25p each at
Mumtaz Stores, Chaucer St). Slowly, disappointedly, AutoDavid pondered:
Ode to Rust.
© David Bircumshaw 1999
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