Party Pooper

‘But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe’

-Hamlet, Act 1, Scene II

Excuse my disinterest

But I struggle to see

What swell of occasion

Could overtop me;

What drift of disinterest

Could rally my speech

From this sullen aloofness,

My trappings of grief.

Forgive my disinterest

But who gives a toss

If it’s so-and-so’s birthday

Or our dinner is ‘posh’?

Four years with your girlfriend

Is all well and good,

But I don’t give a damn

Unless I’m understood.

So I’ll swim in my silence

Brush small talk aside,

And frown and feel hollow

Like somebody died.

If you won’t catch my moods

Then I’m out of your reach.

Though you offer a lifeboat

I'll stick to the sea.

The Parable of the Talents

'England is mine, and it owes me a living,'

-The Smiths

Joe totted up his net worth on

A dog-eared restaurant napkin.

His date was twenty minutes late

And he was hardly happy.

Joe totted up what he could give

To a vast indifferent world.

To woo uncaring multitudes

He totted up his worth.

And writing on the napkin’s right

In a cramped and nervous scrawl:

His virtues, talents, modest skills.

On the left his faults and flaws.

He started with the positive;

The things that he could do;

Like mediocre portraiture.

He used to play the flute.

But he quit karate needlessly

In a fit of childish rage.

The novel he was born to write

Never stretched beyond a page.

His French: no more than a bald Bonjour.

His verse was pretty bad.

He felt like the man who must multiply gold

But instead hid his charge in the sand.

His heart kept time in a sickly thump.

The sweat sprang from his skin

And left damp marks on the feeble start

Of his feeble offering.

He crunched the list in his clammy hand.

‘This isn’t all of me!’

‘But,’ said the absent place of his absent date,

‘This is all that I can see.’

Palm Sunday

Sunday.

The trees swallowed me up

And cogitated me softly,

With the leaves falling down in a vertical march,

Like the weeping of trees, a procession of palms.

They were not gold

But pale and brown,

Though far away

They shone like stones.

So as you were sinless you cast them at me

To bloody my body with loss of belief.

Now nothing remains of the lies that I weaved,

But I don't want to see.

So I shed my skin with muffled cracks

A constant, gentle breaking

And shift this flaking, wasting corpse

In one painful act of waking.

Now turn your eyes away from me

For I don't want to see.

And take your tongue and bury it

My covered ears still bleed.

And take this light away from me

For I don't want to see.

For I don't want to see.