John Taylor
Return to ORIGINAL FICTION Page
Looking At Mother In Her Old Army Boots
After Emily: -3.14159 (Judi's Joke)
A Translation From Sappho, The Poem Now Lost
Manchmal Gibt Es Blitzsüße Erfühlung Im Hals (Trockenbeer)
On A Favourite Cat Called Gray
To A Solemn Musick, Without Blaming
Dignity's a melody,
That's badly out of tune;
For it's very hard, you see,
To avoid a rhyme in "June".
She killed a rat. As domestic as a hat,
She slumbers softly by the kitchen range;
Tiger's well-fitted to being a cat,
But why do I feel so bloody strange?
In Sir Kay's glorious days,
He had noble dragons to slay;
Li Po had dragons to praise,
Jade-keepers in the lake of Wei:
Now (dear God!) I have real dragons to save,
That crash, explode, leave smoke for their grave.
Looking At Mother In Her Old Army Boots.
There's my mother in her army boots,
Independent to her very roots.
My mother still hauls in the coal,
Turns down offered assistances;
She's ninety, and still a quiz,
A very determinèd soul
I'll never be the man my mother is.
Although she says she's shy,
She's really caught my eye:
Oh, can it be?
The maiden is waiting for me.
Now she's talking free,
I'm happy as can be:
Oh, can it be?
The maiden is talking to me.
Now she's laid her plan,
She'll join me when she can:
Oh, can it be?
The maiden is looking for me.
Now I'm feeling fine,
I'm hers and she is mine:
Oh, can it be?
The maiden is living with me.
She saw I was blind,
She unlocked my mind:
Oh, can it be?
Marina is living with me.
After Emily: -3.14159 (Judi's Joke)
It's a cause for debate
Among women and vicars,
Why love means he'll get
Inside her knickers.
I am no hypocrite;
I tell what's true:
You get what you get,
Remembrance, or rue.
A Translation From Sappho, The Poem Now Lost
It is night; Nyx and Pan embrace,
In subtle mood as cool and black as jet;
And holy Nyx, in eloquent space,
Wears jewels of stars so richly set.
It is day; Nyx and Pan separate,
And Nyx arches over the golden sun;
And her dear children, Air and Dew, create
A space for folk to dwell upon.
From twite to tench, or fawn or foal,
From sprite to man, from tame to wild,
By night and day, each living soul
Is sustained as Pan's beloved child.
The step of someone. An opening door.
The subtle creak as mystery comes in,
And who knows the footsteps on the oaken floor;
What may they be in the sullen moonshine thin?
The subtle creak as mystery comes in,
A grey shape, alien to this mundane world,
And who knows the footsteps on the oaken floor?
And then you hear a picture being hurled.
A grey shape, alien to this mundane world -
And who knows the footsteps on the oaken floor;
And then you hear a picture being hurled,
The step of someone, an opening door...
It is a sunny July day;
Having been twice dared,
I sit on a fine gelding bay,
But I sit here scared.
He's like mad Atys, gentled, strange,
Unmanned, not quite a horse;
Tears come to my eyes at his change,
His hidden loss of force.
Do you understand the despair
Of unrequited love,
That makes a lover tear his hair
And cut his gonads off?
I sit on this quiet castrated bay,
Who knows not his loss,
Who dreams of a stable of hay;
He will never know the bliss or way
To cover another horse...
He is half-fake; an unkind mind
Rendered him contrary to kind.
And yet, my ill-hap is thus defined.
He is want- fake: an unkind mind
Rendered him contrary to kind.
I remember how she taught me to love,
The delicate tenderness
She poured on me, her breasts above,
And, oh, so gentle caress,
Such things I never knew before,
Such things to learn of women's lore.
I'd love once more to feel her hand,
The way she did that first time,
When she seduced me on the sand,
And taught me the rhythm and rhyme
That I was still a stranger to,
That I was still a stranger to...
Drowsy,Blake
Strokes the snake
'Neath his coat.
Ermintrude,
Who was screwed,
Plays a note
On Snake's eye,
Which, by and by,
Acts the goat.
This walk on eggshell slenderness:
I'm strung out as on a wire,
Longing for your, oh! tenderness,
Wondering what you require;
And it is hard to understand
The knife through my hand.
Manchmal Gibt Es Blitzsüße Erfühlung Im Hals (Trockenbeer)
That sweet voltaic catch in the throat,
As alegar sprinkled on fried plaice,
That sweet voltaic catch...
A walk in the mad March wind in warm coat,
Or consider this alternative case:
That you regard these things worthy of note:
Her bosom, her limbs, her lips, her face,
That sweet voltaic catch.
Atalanta, please let this lover know
Why's it always the wrong bloody time
To love, and why's love so hard to show;
The question is hard even to mime...
This is hard to talk to any she about:
I long to love; and yet I am in doubt.
Measure my manacles: they are steel -
Do you know what it is, the pain of being male,
The forbiddenness of admitting you feel?
I bang my bracelets 'gainst the bars of this gaol.
It has been years, years since I dared to weep;
I was, what? eight at that secret joy's time.
An anthropic machine since, I wonder where's the crime
In admitting the need to weep before I sleep.
The myth is lacking; it is madness to tell
The ache to brothers; you're stuck in hell...
I cannot do a blind thing right:
Even now, underneath the moon,
As we made love this sullen night,
I came too soon, too soon...
Araminta, I know the drummer chappie
You fancy, the one in Junkano,
And he'll do his best to make you happy,
For his manager tells me so.
I don't mind his taste for wearing rose,
For Prince John, well, don't you know?
If he even dares to propose,
My God! Araminta, say No!
I'll be honest - this is the reason -
I don't care if you both smoke "blow."
Marrying Bill may be treason,
And I'll be very sorry to see you go,
But however heavy the Royal hints -
Hanging, burning, being slit from top to toe -
To marry this dysfunctional Prince...
My God! Araminta, say No!
The waiter witters on with nothing to do
But to rest his hand on my shoulder:
It's set for rain in this region, he says,
It's called throat-rincing weather.
I hope this boozy Bavard with pervasive thirst
Will have the courtesy to leave my drink alone.
He goes on: it's down by the budding river salix -
Like one who hates me, she has another,
She's had my springtime, and there's another -
And me enduring seven years on a diet.
His waist's still thirty-eight portly...
For a laugh I'd like to hear her scream, he says,
I'd like to try a brief hour of madness.
M'sieur, the dog's at the door, it's hard work.
I'd like to jack it in, it's so bad.
How can you wipe the smile off his face,
This old soak of indeterminate age?
I say, you make your bed to lie on.
Here's the knife for her delicate throat,
If you're so ready to pay the price;
Or here's ten sous for the use of the bathroom.
It's a bare, spare, granite land,
A land damned since Adam sinned,
With winds as bitter as a brand
And geology savage as the grind,
A lost, one-time scrap of Britain,
A wild site of isles in howling sea
Whose very gannets are gale-bitten,
A forgotten, an isolate country...
The ways of Odin still make sense
In a treeless land whose ways are hard,
Where stone and tundra and insolence
Of Nature hold, and men must guard
Themselves from storms and gales:
Where, to exist, they have to murder whales
The disappointments of lost love,
Feeling like a discarded glove,
The ache that lingers in the soul,
The acrid taste of your whole
Being, the not knowing the rôle
You played when you got the shove...
The disappointments of lost love,
Feeling like a discarded glove.
Let us fly together, us two,
Like eagles, dearest one,
A courtship flight, ever new,
Ever renewing in the sun.
A strange, lunar change is here,
A tender, tentative slip in time;
Hear the dream, my dearest dear,
Of one ensnared in lime.
I'd love to love you,
If I only dared:
Tell me what to do -
Oh, brave heart, I'm scared.
I climb relentless the cyclic staircase
Of life (there is no end, just everlasting
Trudge through slowly passing time):
I slow and think as others faster pace
In their never-ceasing pursuit; I cling
To the side, watching them climb,
And ask myself when time will
Cease, let us hide in eternity's wing
And God, or who, will make shine sublime
Suns of eternal life - and still
I climb.
Enough of Victorian values:
In among the urge to be respectable,
Jack the Ripper was quite at home
In Whitechapel, that vast brothel...
Take a book of poems to bed
Instead of the Playboy whore,
And learn the forbidden rites
Of feeling; close the door,
Acknowledge the scars,
Though others mistake
The settling of scores
Through Clare and Yeats and Blake.
It was too high a price, and the wrong one paid,
Incarcerated, as she was, in the madhouse;
Too high a price for a maid betrayed,
Pregnant, and disowned by her boss.
She was declared mentally deficient
And of her son was cruelly deprived,
And when her review was just dismissed,
It was clear she'd be their for life.
For not being taught society's way,
For falling victim to her boss's whim,
For losing position - a woman in service -
For bearing a child disowned by him.
And it should have been him that bore the shame
Unless the Dance involve the Male and Female,
Nature and Earth will assuredly fail.
It is not good that one should lead;
Both together is the world's true need
He loved her so much, he learnt
Her ways and underwent the knife:
Greater love hath no man than this:
That he lay down his foreskin for his wife.
Blessèd Mary, it's tough to know, as a man,
That you had the best lover of them all;
However hard I try, and I do all that I can,
The father of your child outdid this small
Individual in bringing you all the bliss
You knew: and all I can do, compared to this,
Is a damp squib on a wet night, a distant miss.
It must be him; how else explain the feathers
In the bed, unless you've been plucking more
Chickens for dinner, in saddest nocturnal weathers:
I am old; never cuckolded before
By an archangel, I don't know what can be done,
Except, now that all my happiness is gone,
I hope that you had the best bang since the big one.
When you're twenty, your sole delight
Is the beauty of Barbara Hamill;
Come thirty, just one question seems right:
"Are you, dear girl, a mammal?"
Such are the quandaries in finding a date:
First, far too fussy, then nearly too late.
Peace is the cultivar this rose is,
Named at the termination of the war.
They hope against hope Peace's posies
Will smother the hawks who these doves deplore.
I've grown old, old, have seen such wanhope
Mankind's sole peace is the end of the rope.
Take courage, brother! Even this rose has thorns,
And Death comes lamentably soon; endure
Wthout hope, but grit in the sullen morns
To come. Living is now dread, is unsure,
Apocalyptic. All that remains
Moulders. Wormwood is all that sustains.
A traveller called Arthur Dent*
Found the Universe terribly bent.
Which caused his dismay
And his screams, sad to say,
And his bewildered existence in Ghent
*(from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams)
It's bitter cold, and coal is short,
The only food off ration's snoek;
As usual, I have to report,
The only organised soul's a crook.
That voltaic sweet catch in the throat,
Like alegar sprinkled on fried plaice,
Or a bright March day in an overcoat,
That voltaic sweet catch...
Or think of this alternative case,
That voltaic sweet catch in the throat -
Her limbs and belly, bosom, face -
Her splendid body, worthy of note -
That voltaic sweet catch.
...this is sad:
It's learn to doublethink,
Or resolve to go mad
Who knows exactly what to do?
Drink beer, kiss Eve, have a smoke,
Godless, occupy a pew,
And break a heart with a joke.
So it goes: with each sad kiss
Glum each does glum each betray
(In the hellish search for bliss)
Day after day after day.
It is sad that we've parted,
But there is hope, truth to tell:
Although I'm broken-hearted,
I'm not the first to feel like hell.
Ignoto each sorry day unaware succeeds
More through luck than wisdom in his foul crime:
C'est la guerre. Given the awkward old steeds,
Luck and Wisdom, choose Luck every time.
There was a time of love, engagement, marriage, so sweet that I before this time, no, never knew,
And I loved her fouteen months pre-wedding, that glorious joy, my soul's sweet name;
But what, I wonder, happened, ending our marriage, an ending we can never finally frame?-
Why blue the skies then, when sadness bears that hue? why? the skies in sadness bore such blue
As I felt in that desparate distance, an ending hopeless as a desert hopes for dew,
Or as a candle unlit, no matches by, might long to be bright in glittering golden flame:
Perhaps a Hercules would buckle at such treatment as she unwittingly gave me when from her I came -
Another aspect, though: I see we were doomed, deemed to part in our friends' view.
Although the reason in the dark so lies, a mystery that still lies concealed,
I hope, half-recovered from parting from her, that reasons may become easy to find;
That honesty will come to me, wisdom and mercy to myself too, revealed
I was emotionally blind, numb, dumb, in my joy, in my wild strife:
I want to meet a maid again, to love as I did she; thus I might lead my life
Like as one who can see, operated on, who once could not, unseeing because blind.
On A Favourite Cat Called Gray
Hark! she is calling to her cat,
Who oozes across the floor,
And whinges softly on the mat,
Always demanding more.
He lurks halfway up the staircase
Sometimes,and, to her sweet despair,
Catches a sparrow to his disgrace,
But to his nature fair,
To A Solemn Musick, Without Blaming.
Er, yes...With your sad sloe eyes,
Howl with me for the stricken
And fallen in war (alias sin). Despise
Them not. In all of us the guilt lies,
Even in you, alas! We sicken
Too; this sorrow is what war means
Now: men, ordinary men, whose price
Is less than the infernal machines,
Broken so badly ordinary routines
Become impossible. A slice
Of my saddened brother's memory:
A veteran so much distressed he shook -
Through the First World war's stupidity -
When they made his cup of tea
They half-filled it, and dared not look.
Take not this to heart; it's not just you,
It's men just as much, or even more.
It's the price we reckon as entirely due
To you, even though we detest it too;
It is mothers who fear when there's war...
Howl for their pity, dear, howl
For these brave soldier's dreadful waste,
The deadened in mind who endlessly prowl
Like wolves through turmoil and foul
Memories of bitter, bitter taste.
So many men who are dead inside,
The infernal waste... Dare you feel
The mechanical state they tried
To batter men into? Or the pride
In becoming a thing of steel?
It is gone, this, their honest pride;
They became a spare part, a rowel,
Or washer, or mess-tin, to be thrown aside
When broken, and yet... and yet, they tried;
So howl with me for their sakes, dear, howl...
Time's wingèd chariot - Andrew Marvell
Like a morning glory,
Pleasure's sweet, and then it's gone;
In Love's pleasant story
Both thou and she have won.
The wingèd chariot of Time
Races faster than this rhyme -
Thou sardonic male,
Tardy as a snail,
Employer
Of thy honest dart,
She is waiting, waiting,
Desiring her mating,
Desiring thou play thy part -
Though thou dither in honest doubt,
Enjoy her -
Before thy hair and teeth fall out
What is a dream? Dreams are the things you desire,
They are an ecstasy of burning ice and cold fire,
An everlasting mutability, a bittersweet hire...
I'd like to meet the scriptwriter of my dreams;
He writes about first-floor canoes, and beams
Of ultraviolet, cocoa people, and curry ice creams.
The goddess Moon, so subtle and argentine,
Is the secret repository of dreams and fine
Hidden wishes, and the not so divine.
Dear Moon! what are my dreams,
My innermost delight,
But the sweetest themes,
And worst, of the night?
Return to ORIGINAL FICTION Page