Rapunzel

Rapunzel

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your long and golden hair.
Let down your long and golden hair.
Will you not take me up into your walrus tower?

And where are you now?
Striding out along the dykes,
slender amongst the bulrushes and yellow buttercup.
Down by the rusty river
where brooks run in and rot in the shifty backwaters,
and the frog legions croak their gluttonous victory of flies.
High in the lupin minarets
“Allahu Akbar” echoes from the buzzing bee muezzin,
Honey-tongued, praising his God.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down, let down your long and golden hair.
There is no staying longer.
You are too close to the trumpets of the sky.
Come down to where the green dog-grass snaps at your ankles
and leaps laughing in the air,
beating time with its roots in the earth.

You are too close to the sky.
Out of the blue, bolts of lightening fall
with the inconsistency of summer hail, striking your head.
It is that season.
The tide is high on the sun and the full moon flaring.

Headstrong with impractical sorcery, you shall bend spoons
and send eggs, unfertilised, clucking across the road like old women.

And what and what and what
are little girls made of?
The scent of lemon and the smell of honey
and a whisper deep in the poppy’s throat:
“Sleep, sleep,
sleep beneath my spider-headed crown
in these arms,
silken, crimson, deadly,
till you awake to the harsh screech of an eagle
teaching its young to fly!”

Rapunzel, Rapunzel!
And whose is this encircling embrace,
scarred like an old man’s smile?
In rose-petal beds among the green thorns of love
you have bled without sighing.

In your windswept walrus tower
your heart is all bleached away
to hollow ivory.

Down by the restless river
crocodile logs rise and fall in the shifting backwaters,
indifferent as mud,
oblivious even of sleep.
Only the dragon-fly,
dressed for dinner and glittering like an opal,
hovers on the wings of appetite,
all jaws, teeth and expectancy,
lusting after sustenance.
And the frog legions croak their monotonous history of flies,
beating their own drum.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
have you ever kissed a frog?

I am of that Amphibian Race.
Once I was noble.
Long ago, long, long ago
I put away my armour.
Only my body has rusted,
squeaking like an old gate.
Down by the rootless river the frog legions creak
like the gates of Heaven,
which open only rarely, and never for strangers.

Rapunzel,
I am but a frog.
I wear the badges all knights covet,
but like my armour, I am out of time, and long unused,
an accountant’s harp,
rusty and buckled on for the occasion.

Rapunzel!
Let down your long and golden hair.
Come down. Rake your long talons
across my thick amphibian hide.
Wake me, wake me!
For I have dawdled away winters
in the grey hibernal clay,
down in the deep,
dreaming I am a dragon.

And what and what and what
are little girls made of?
The scent of lemon and the smell of honeysuckle,
and a whisper, deep in the prophet’s throat:
“Sleep, sleep,
sleep beneath my spider-headed crown,
in these arms,
silken, crimson, deadly,
till you awake
to the harsh screech of an eagle
teaching its young to fly”.
© Mike Absalom

Under the Magnolia

Under the Magnolia

It was, as always, under the Magnolia Tree.
At first there were the usual clichés:
the staccato thud of Kalashnikov rosebuds
as she stitched him up,
and, for no extra consideration,
a free crown of thorns.
“Hide them in your jockey shorts,” she said.
“No one will know, and the discomfort
will force you to remember!”

“No,” he thought, “No, I shall go down.
I shall go down now.
I shall go down now and I shall fall, fall forever.
I shall fall like red wine
into the green and whistling serpent grass.
I shall fall like blue silent thunder,
mute with un-realization
I shall bleed back into the red earth
like an unwritten song.
I shall lie there, scarlet at first, and then crimson,
And then black and hard
in the green and whistling serpent grass.”
But then, although the green grass
throated its full funereal chorus
and chirruped till the cows came home,
surprisingly,
there was no movement on the part of the ground.
This time the earth did not move.

This time the ruddy, bloodied soil
did not rise to receive him.
There was no enfoldment.
He remained unclaimed,
like a discarded cigarette package, rather.
And so, I suppose, after a while
The bleeding stopped.

June arrived, you see.
June arrived with pre-meditation,
and stepped on his face.
That’s what happened.
It must have taken the nimble pace of a conjurer
To skip across the garden like that,
and in a trice change the colours
of the flowers.

And indeed he did fail to see how she did it.
For where the sun shone through her luminous stride,
Vanishing the thin summer dress into a spider’s web of gossamer,
he was now struggling to glimpse the outline of her thighs
and the shadowed mysteries that accompanied them
through the wafer thin material of the dream,
with only moderate success.

© Mike Absalom

I heard as one hears on the Spider’s Web

I heard as one hears on the Spider’s Web

I heard as one hears on the spider’s web of rumour
already sucked dry after a dozen spins.
the news of his passing.

I do not begrudge him his headline.

He had done
in our first unfortunate encounter

nothing more sinister than touch upon the crime of my accent

His own was as blunt and unserviceable
As a scissors found in a cow barn.
Quite unsuitable for censorship.

In hindsight I see it might have been better
Offered as poetry.

Dark Nettles Take Heed

Dark Nettles Take Heed

My days are scattered like a dandelion clock,
dark nettles take heed in the evening.
There is a conspiracy amongst humans
that is unshared by weeds,
preparing them to stinging vengeance
not as warning but as of cold malice defiant

Dark nettles take heed after the sun has set.
My days are scattered like a dandelion clock
but I saw a white thing fall after the dusk had fallen,
bouncing like a ball off the blackness of the sky
offering an ominous and malevolent aspiration.

On the bog a night bird frets
in the bleak disputed turbaries,
and the judder of a snipe
scratches claws across the midnight blackboard
as the wish is taken up and copied.
Like a leaking clarinet the night bird weeps its last riff and fades.
But the light too has now gone out.
Dark nettles take heed.
And my days are scattered and the clock is broken.

© Mike Absalom

The Battlefield

The Battlefield

So this was Agincourt.
Or Gettysburg.
Or Arnhem.
Or, who knows?
Some long remembered battlefield,
scarred and somewhat canonized,
with a brazen plaque.

There was a stone wall, I recall,
and approaching it,
unarmed,
a meadow.








It was a garden in June,
boughed with the weight of summer,
bound down with honeysuckle and purple ropes of blackberry,
breathing slowly out its perfumed breath,
watching the swallows.

And then,
like a stray bullet,
a hummingbird ricochet’d behind my ears,
and I threw myself down
and felt the warm earth sigh.

© Mike Absalom

Applause

Applause

The fist night I made love to an audience
I walked back to my lodgings through the sleeping Athenian streets
and cold stiletto footsteps clapped me
all the way home.

Above the Acropolis
the moon icily applauded,
dropping chill white flowers
where my feet would fall.

Since my victory
I have bought your red silk concupiscence
as easily as a late night souvlaki.

If you dare, walk the streets by my side.
Applause is a whore’s embrace,
but it grips me tighter than anything your thin arms could offer.

In the streets of the Plaka
the crushed magnolia lie like dead snakes on the morning flagstones.
I am envenomed now,
for these blossoms have bruised my heel.

© Mike Absalom

Over the Moon. Under the Moon

Over the Moon. Under the moon


The moon rises above the rocky spine of the island
chalking the brittle harbour dusty white,
like an impatient customs officer
telling us to go.

There is no colour under this Aegean moon,
only a pallid sky.
It reaches unsympathetically
through the window
and marks PASSED across your shoulders.


No stars in the sky now,
but the floor is still white with moonbeams.
They flow over your toes
like spilt milk.

No use crying over that.

© Mike Absalom

The Booty of Poetry

The Booty of Poetry

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

Laurels were secondary.
He enjoyed the taste of words. He enjoyed mouthing them.
He enjoyed the intimate touch that came with their transmission.

When the coffee break arrived
the sweet taste of enticement was still in his mouth,
like the sugar around a donut.
There was no stopping it.

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

It worked of course.
That was the beauty of it.

© Mike Absalom 2009

Dead Instruments

Dead Instruments

© Mike Absalom 28 September 2009

A blind man jumped over a cliff towards the scent of flowers.
Is this retirement?

Only half blind
I felt the weaker pull.
I put up my fiddle
and pushed my harp into a corner.
It looks good there.
Its polished black walnut skin
displays my dust collection to a T.

I am often woken in the night
as yet another string snaps angrily in its sad redundancy
and gives up the ghost with a crack.
Gutless harp.

Although not quite.

During the day if I pass by absentmindedly close
the viper teeth of string ends nip playfully at my flesh
hoping I will catch tetanus.

Like the blind man I jumped over a cliff.

As I fall
the scent of flowers is not getting any stronger.

Bears who are Bats

Bears who are Bats. © Mike Absalom 2009

Among the Japanese plums in the garden
as spring hurriedly awakens,
hibernating bears fly up agile as butterflies
from the black tunnels of their underground dreaming.
They paw the air foolishly
and reach for the horrid moon
with lunatic inevitability
imagining they are bats.

The delusion of bat-hood
Is not theirs alone.
I watch a kangaroo rat lurking under the lupins.
At dusk
as it does every night,
it will jump hoppity hop over the orange harvest moon
and vanish into the thin air
of higher attitudes.

I am hoping that with a little uncharacteristic edgemanship
Batification might appeal to you.
You might even dare then to emulate the rat-bear pioneers.
I will be able to give you a bunk up.
The unkempt and hairy turbulence of my Welsh-Irish genetic inheritance guarantees my necessary instability.
And you,
well, don’t blush,
but you already have your zonk-pills.