Why Birds Fly

Ah, that old philosophical conundrum –

do birds fly because they have hollow bones,

or do they have hollow bones because they fly?

 

On such matters, ask a biologist

seems a better bet than ask a philosopher.

 

I don’t know what the details of their answer

would be, but somewhere in the unfamiliar

landscape of scientific terms which they employ,

you’d see the word evolution stretched across the sky,

the clouds, the tops of trees and hills and mountains.

 

Just recently, as I was walking at the edge

of yet another field on my morning stroll,

I saw the local crow collective scattered

around the brown, uneven surface of the land.

 

There were so many of them that I paused

my walk. I stood and watched them as they went

about their birdy morning ritual:

take-off, ascension, glide and swoop

and swoop and glide, descend and land,

all taking turns according to the crow flight roster

which they had spent the previous night working out.

And as I watched their mesmerising movements,

I heard them laugh at all the world’s

philosophers and scientists,

whose ignorance of why birds fly

amused them greatly.

 

‘We fly,’ their whole demeanour said,

not because of any bone-related sophistry.

We fly because we want to.’

 

And all of this has left me wondering:

do so-called poets write because they have

a pencil and a notebook stuffed with paper,

or do they have a pencil and a notebook

because they write?

 

It doesn’t matter. None of us can fly

like birds, and very few, if any, of our poems

will swoop or glide, but sometimes when

we’re lucky, one or two might land.

All Day

I have just reached the conclusion

that time is as relative

for a pub landlord or landlady

as it was for Einstein.

 

Last week, I drove past Tewkesbury’s oldest pub,

whose gloriously higgledy-piggledy

Tudor architecture could entice

even the most hardened teetotaller

to abandon their life of sober deprivation

and nip in for a swift pint,

 

swift pints, as any ale-bibber will tell you,

being absolutely the best type of pint.

 

On the pavement outside of the pub,

a black sandwich board proclaims

in its chalky voice

that this centuries old drinking den

now has Food Served All Day!

an impressive dedication, I think,

to their insomniac punters.

 

Who among us, during the

drunkenly misspent years of our long-vanished youth

did not entertain the notion

that what was really needed, right now,

was a slap-up pub meal

to soak up some of the self-inflicted poison?

 

Even when ‘right now’ roughly translated as

‘about three I the morning’.

 

But underneath the hyperbolic exclamation,

the sandwich board sheepishly adds,

‘Between 9-12pm.’

 

I wish I’d known that entire days

only existed between the hours

of midday and nine in the evening.

 

Perhaps I would have used my time on Earth

more wisely had I been taught that days

were fifteen hours shorter

than my maths teachers had me believe.

 

Instead, I have wasted my months and years on poetry

‘twenty-four seven’, as the saying goes.

 

As the son of a former pub landlord,

I should probably add:

that’s twenty-four hours a month,

seven months of the year.

Grand Plan Man

We all know that Elon Musk

has plans to colonise Mars.

Quite how the red planet’s rocks,

valleys, mountains and hills

will react to this coming event

is anybody’s guess,

but it probably won’t end well for them.

The best they can hope for

is a wildly dysfunctional democracy

and perhaps the introduction

of some Victorian sport to divert their attention

from the planet’s plundering.

 

We all know that Elon Musk

wants to colonise Mars.

What most people don’t know

is that what he is planning on establishing –

   is an ant colony.

He’s a man with big ideas,

the biggest of which being,

‘Can I convince people

that everything techy was my idea?’

His second biggest idea,

and his first and only original one,

is the dream of setting up an ant colony.

On Mars.

His epiphany arrived while he was listening to

a cover version of Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’,

by, of all people, Adam and the Ants.

 

But I guess that’s just how genius works, eh?

Strewth!

Getting up too close to the mirror of poetry,

all you see are reflected egos

and stories which never happened.

White Noise

Take the writing from the page

and put it in the material world.

 

What was white, blank,

‘waste of space/paper’

is now silence.

Sun

Eyes closed, I stand and face

the unexpected autumn sun,

my skin taking delight

in the warmth of the rays.

 

The sun has been, and doubtless still is,

a goddess or god,

and it seems unlikely that people would worship

an entity which they didn’t believe

had divine consciousness.

 

With this in mind, I raise my arms

and proclaim a spontaneous

prayer of thanks.

 

Although the raising of the arms

was poetic licence,

and the proclamation was in my head.

 

There’s enough to contend with

on crowded railway platforms as it is.

New Restrictions

   after Dean Young

 

I don’t care…

 

if you have

learnt all of the ‘popular’

bits of Shakespeare in order to appear

more roundedly intellectual

than you actually are

 

or if you once saw a cloud

that looked like a bucket of gladioli

 

or you’re ambidextrous,

but only in one hand,

 

or how tall you are

 

or whether you prefer

the burnt orange bedspread

 

or you have too many pairs

of cheap reading glasses

 

or whatever tiddlywinks team

you claim to support

 

or if very blue

is your favourite colour

 

or if you really did meet

Alan Watts on the road to Damascus

 

or if you escaped from Alcatraz

for your summer holiday

 

or which wretched school you went to

or if you can’t watch a sunset

without running for cover

 

or anything that you could

possibly think of…

 

You can’t park here.