Saturday 20 June 2020

To Do List

  • I make a To Do list,
collated from the past:
a Fish and a Rusting Barge;
and from the present, a long list of essentials,
bullet pointed, to be prioritised,
including words wise now not to use.
  • The gap between bullets is so important
but unfairly placed
way down the machine gun
trail, past a blank page, and a wish.
Someone will surely write some of those,
so I have this poem to write about a fish –
a really ugly fish, but until I begin
and find a way to properly explain
the colour of ugly rust – I must leave it. Bulleted.
  • In favour of what is less urgent.
  • (Next includes bullets of unused words.)
So, far down, and also urgent, it is all about Harry,
a lockdown story so extraordinary,
but the fish, the really ugly fish,
has just sloped by, flat and feigning elegance.
Top fins are never ugly, cutting
the dense shield of water – neither
was famous Fat Mary, the fish at dusk, concealing
an underbelly the colour of…........rust, slinking through the flotsam.
  • Then there is a list of poems – all Tarot cards,
which wait and shuffle like discarded side salads.
poems containing loops of inedible nettles
and cabbages, all coming up roses. (Never mind
the catastrophe of the vegan lasagne  - layers
and layers of gloop with no bite, no crust.)
  • With Harry, it’s a long and incredible story of lust,
  • until shortly, when who knows they may love and marry,
  • so quickly, before she leaves tomorrow, Harry
has fallen, via lockdown Zumba and Zoom
with a match/flirt/fling/Fin from Belgium,
which is exactly
where I ought 
to begin:

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