CONNERLABS

Category: poetry

  • Ode to Jupiter (II)

    Down
    Down through towers
    And towers of clouds
    The pressure of the red spot glowers
    at what?
    You’ve penetrated further than you thought.

    And there’s no ground.

    A lamp receding in a pit
    The hull grew green, dim,
    buckled,
    split,
    winked out.

  • Ode to Jupiter (I)

    Richard Feynman:

    “If you are a good enough poet to write an ode to an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, you are writing something original, about a newly discovered part of the real universe. It may not be as dramatic, or as gripping, as Hamlet. But the tale of Hamlet has already been told! If you write of Jupiter as though it were a human, you are making our map of the universe just a little more impoverished of complexity; you are forcing Jupiter into the mold of all the stories that have already been told of Earth.

    Me: [With apologies to William McGonagall]

    Oooooooo
    Beautiful spinning sphere of ammonia and methane
    Which has nothing remotely resembling a brain
    Literally just a ball of gas
    That still deserves respect due to its mass.

  • Buds

    They’re wrong
    Those buds
    Your bod

    It’s bad
    It’s not a gift from God

    The blood,
    the curse unchecked will burgeon
    I’ll buy you time to think
    -Your surgeon

  • The Shooting Lodge

    At dawn, a gosling stands upon the lake
    He doesn’t fly or swim
    He’s fake
    He’s driftwood?
    Grains, or bars upon his wings?
    There’s things suspiciously like other things

    Five times a day the trains
    From London mostly, Edinburgh and Wick
    Disgorge their loads of promises and pains
    The visitors come fast
    And thick

    They chafe at their disguise
    They groan
    Forlorn, they stumble over stones
    And underneath the surface cables hum

    The cameras are tucked from view
    The Starlink dish is new
    A winch to drag the carcasses
    A gun

  • This War Of Words

    This War Of Words

    THIS
    is an anagram of SHIT
    Pithy observation, isn’t it?
    Observing doesn’t help one bit

    When WAR is RAW words fail.
    Let EVIL LIVE and rip the VEIL
    To crucify
    To kill
    To nail

    Two letters keeping LAMBS from BOMBS
    The lambs are in our prayers

    EXPLOSIVES
    CRATER
    BURSTING LUNGS

    O shattered bones
    O burning hair

  • The Blind Photographer

    The Blind Photographer

    Guide, please explain the scene.
    It is tangled colours, jumbled like a dream.
    A petrol-slick of possibilities
    Not unlike the sun through screwed-up eyes.

    Graffiti leaps out from the walls
    There’s light and shadow, shape and form
    The architecture’s come alive
    Touch the concrete here, it’s warm

    It’s evening now, the golden hour
    Oh quick, you’ve got to shoot!
    You’ve hardly any eyesight left.
    The composition’s up to you.

  • Navigating

    Navigating

    Soon you’ll be falling by starlight,
    My ill-starred friend,
    Who was with me till the day the signal went.

    Too soon, our moon goes blind
    Our tent becomes impossible to find.

    Too soon, our sun goes down
    Eastward draining valleys fill with cloud
    The compass spins, the GPS is out

    Wind snatched away the map

    The darkness bearing down on you
    Until your ribs are snapped.

  • Dogging

    Each year the leaves fall a little more,
    The thickened tree-arms spark
    With frost in the park,
    where other middle-aged men
    Kiss dogs that don’t belong to them.

    These men consume their friends like food.
    But underneath pond-scum and weeds
    A man retains his hair, his needs.
    Why won’t you stay for good?

  • Casual Socks

    I wandered lonely as a sock
    Discarded on the floor
    To consummate our passion
    Till I couldn’t handle more

    Although you made my skin crawl
    I wish you all the best
    I’d love to pop it in the post
    But don’t have your address

  • Inaccessible Pinnacle

    While I was distracted
    The grey hairs appeared
    First in the temples
    And then in the beard

    Meanwhile on the Cuillin ridge
    In flats with empty beds inside
    A slim fin of rock waited and waited to be sat astride

    The so-called “peak of the young men”
    Who got stuck at the planning stage
    Hoping they would somehow gain attractiveness with age

    Still with none of the instruments studied
    Something wells up and up
    The window was open
    You wanted to jump

    Several times, but something else always came up

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