It’s quiet. Just me; some music, and a

Christmas Eve now dark. The night descended

As a song invades my fingertips, not sage

Perhaps, emplaces, aiming where might wisdom seem to rise

Inveigling; hoping and foreseeing,

An optimistic sanction for a joust with letters

Betters have gone before, and have been tried

By trickster tongues which modulate mercurial

Thoughts into language messy-liveried

Fraught thrusts unfathomably informing as if source or mine

Were from covert a place, palatial, sublime, sometime devolving

Downwards, and somewhat dissolutely, into lines and feet

As serpentine-like consciousness goes Hectoring Parnassus

Tackling to meditate as faithfully as can

As giddy modern lights might train it to……… here so

I commend to paper.

Mine has no surly-sinewed style of old persuaders

I do not (yet?) possess such stock of character, mayhap

I shall not ever tether, bring together, suchlike marbled

Delicate-souled tomes, of sympathies of men, so ardent-solid made?

Bestead, bestir; but something pallid my most likely dereliction,

My hoped impressive print bringing batteries of symphony

To assign,

To assay and to appoint thought’s contemplations figured

Into design

As test laborious to scope the haunting rhyme

With dexterous oracular accidence and chime, (a

Chimera?)

A discourse raising aggravated clangours

Which ransack sans pareil, play out their moot persuasions

Bespoke award-winning and sense-bedinning fervours

Great high palavers, won applause; the braid of accolade;

Behooven sympathies

Subjected in the moment by self-subjugations’ chaste

Poured adulations contrapuntal mirror back and forth

A piebald wealth of praise-display accompted, advertised

Seen as the late obsession, by self-possessions’ fashionistas

Winding out antic passions as nascent fancies lightly raised

On balustrades in Babels, the High Places where fame hies

Hot and arrived. And I?

I stand convicted to survive a nine days wonder

Thunderclap-happy hands; enamoured following bands;

All’s coalescent

Bee-like is this swarm, of hurrying reverers, blowing warm

For a chosen-one elected to the present throned elites

Confused contenders derogated, turn to menials, other sheep,

Bell, book and verger sanctify me; vassaldoms alike

A living god and haughty; cute, a jive…… upclimbing shoot

Bringing out peoples; the crippled, halt and lame

Here’s the powers-that-be, defenders of mine adulated cause;

So I head a band of raconteurs whom a rapturous eager horde

Hold in general estimation, yet their wisdom yet to school

Itself in judgement; nursing to aptitude;

And I?

I gain a world won wantonly, blessed by a fool

So soon to become discarded, plumped, repulsed; capricious pains

Identically incident in former times

According me again just another ha’pen’orth ‘what’s-a-name?’

A tool of the hour; attention of a day; a ray

Of sailing sunbeam whereupon clouds quickly overlay,

Make holiday to block high skies, free vestibules of light – great height

All flown as wing those birds away which sweetly sang of late

Brief is the mangled glory in its figure, in its flame,

This iniquity a taster as a humble tester cross

One had not thought one carries, until overcast

The platform for amusement, its pursuit pillar to post

Five minutes done, and Lethe-wards …… I’m toast!

Fantastical dreamer schemes that would one live forever

Rear of moment momentarily on momentous tides

Undergone soon and downwards lark descending backwards glides

Around the sink and plughole slides beshrewed the fairground ride

Drops down a slope of fickle legerdemain

Crack! breaks the brittle shiny cellophane

Wrapping the package emptied of your bayes

Grappling you follow down; as rises from below

A cackling come surprising; a magisterial derision

Critics tool-up, now tear, now work-out cheap devise

As makes you an afterthought

Outlaying simian lines they cast imperious dragnets

Needle-sharp hooked and sinkered, penned, set down, notice that blasts

Crumples one’s equanimity under flung backstab rejoinders

Carp, dig-in, carve-up, sup the carcass, forward Fiends!

And Furies, admire no more, go disaffect, ye Harpies!

Enjoy your adrenaline-pouring-out of surfeit enmity

Your wrecking-ball pronouncement engines of percussion

Define, delineate fatal failure’s sell-by-dates bygone,

And cast aside what’s passed-around on lowly pity’s-plate

So seek you not to know postured celebrity.

That stumbles, staggering like to ancient fists on sticks

Endurable, robust, as a crazy pensioners’ tholed hip

Teetering over pavements treads dependent on cork-tips

Anon. Anon.

Favour’s no more than scullions scrapings, scavengings of pots