London Poetry Review

THE LEADER: A STUDY IN STEADINESS

Richard Moore — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:01:55 +0000

Because he's free of wit and whim

and feels for you, you follow him.

He has no problems of his own;

or if he does, they're not well known.

With yours, thus freed, you sense him cope,

absolute as a gyroscope.

Who cares if he, with secret sinning

humming within, is madly spinning?

THE UNDERGROUND

Mark Allinson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:01:19 +0000

In the 70s, in London, I lived for a while

In an old, cramped, single-bed room

Above the underground Central line.

Lying in the dark I could feel below

As the tunnel filled with passing strangers

Being carried home from a long day:

A faint rumble would grow till it quivered

Then shook the narrow bed like a tremor,

Blurring figures on the digital clock,

Jangling wire hangers in the closet,

Buzzing pill-bottles on the table.

And I thought of that cold, dark river

Of air below being pushed out ahead

Of the train, and manholes breathing out

That earthy, sour, underground odor

Into Soho alleys, as the rattling

Carriages clattered through echoing space

In the tunnel, down there, beneath my bed.

Some nights, awake in the early hours,

Long since the last train had passed,

I could still sense this dark space

Below the foundations of the old building,

Waiting under tons of earth and rock:

Nitre crusting the blackened walls;

Scrabble, plash and scuffle of rats.

And even now, thirty years later,

Living on the other side of the world

In a quiet country town by the sea,

Sometimes, sleepless in bed, I feel

The dark tunnel still below,

Echoing drips through an unlit night,

Waiting to carry more passengers home.

MISSIONARIES

E.M. Schorb — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:01:12 +0000

Wending our way, we wonder where

the Guys and the Gals went who seem to be gone.

Are we to wander inside of this weather

until we are lost like the others were?

Why were they lost, we wonder moreover,

the brave Moravian men with their women,

the ones in canoes and the cannibals too?

Some seemed to drown in the ever-new river,

some went along for the ride because lonely,

and some never got to the gates made of horn;

but some sought to come back to where they were born,

the ones who cried only, if only, if only.

CROW

Leo Yankevich — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:44 +0000

Crow, the doves descending on the square

have sullied your name, cooed gossip to wealthy tourists,

their gullets stuffed with handouts, while you soar

over the oaks with dreaming clouds, with the glare

and glimmer of the distant but holy sun

in your misunderstood eyes, your paeans one

with the wind. Yet it was you who, perched on the shoulder

of Jesus, watched him suffer and heard him cry,

and it was you who saw the enormous boulder

moved, and you who saw him enter the sky.

PRINCESS DIANA SPENCER

Joseph S. Salemi — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:30 +0000

(from A Gallery of Ethopaths)

Just as the sacred oak and eagle

Mark Jove as both divine and regal,

So do the unicorn and lion

Stand guard o’er Britain’s kingly scion.

Heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales,

Whose austere destiny entails

Marriage to one of equal station,

Wedded a girl whose inclination

Made her an ethopathic cripple.

After that day, the rack and whip’ll

Seem cozier, I dare avouch,

Than poor Prince Charles’s nuptial couch.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a denser

Moron than Diana Spencer.

It seems the English upper classes

Abound in weird, eccentric asses

Who dabble in exotic things,

Have unrestrained erotic flings,

Indulge in chic and faddish frauds,

And posture in the House of Lords.

Diana was a case in point—

Her mind was clearly out of joint.

She followed every crackpot trend,

Saw therapists sans stint or end,

Was hooked on diets, drugs, and pills,

Paid thousands out to quacks and shills

For Yoga, Tai-Chi, Zen and junk

Enough to fill a steamer trunk.

She moved from nostrum to cliché

Obsessed with what was “hot” today.

Apologists claim she was seeking

Self-fulfillment, but that creaking

Argument does not hold water.

At twenty-five, a person oughta

Have some sense of self-awareness.

I think that we can say, in fairness,

Diana was a textbook case

Of how, within the human race,

Ethopathy is even found

In ermine robes, among the crowned.

Among the stupid bitch’s sins, her

Worst was to wreck the House of Windsor.

The kingly fabric of Great Britain

Was clawed up by this little kitten

Who left its old prestige in tatters

And—the thing that really matters—

She placed the royal seal official

On everything that’s superficial.

The marriage left Prince Charles in shambles—

A broken man whose speech now rambles

On in a haze of sheer confusion,

His battered brain one pure contusion.

All he can do is haunt the palace

And pour himself a hefty chalice

Of Scotch and soda till he’ blotto—

In fact, we ought to see this motto

Emblazoned on the Prince’s banner:

“Why did I marry dumb Diana?”

Afterword

The foregoing section of A Gallery of Ethopaths was composed in early 1997, at a time when my epic poem was just getting under way. Indeed, the portrait of Diana Spencer was intended as the very first discrete segment of this larger work, coming directly after the introductory elements and proem. I chose Diana for her royal status, following the venerable tradition of those epic writers who began their compositions with references to gods, kings, heroes, or other exalted forces, though of course I did this with the full intention of undermining and deriding my chosen subject, as befits a satire or a mock-epic spoof.

As fate would have it, in August of that same year Princess Diana met her death in an automobile accident in Paris, accompanied by her lover Dodi al-Fayed, the scion of a wealthy foreign merchant domiciled in London. It was impossible to get any editor to publish this particular section of A Gallery of Ethopaths in the media carnival of orchestrated grief that followed this event. Diana had become, in the words of the fatuous Tony Blair, “the People’s Princess.” The fact that Diana epitomized and encapsulated everything wrong-headed and banal and spacey in modern Western culture was lost in the fulsome emotional flood-tide generated by her obsequies.

But now twelve years have passed. It seems an appropriate moment, in the backwash of public hysteria that ensued upon the recent death of Michael Jackson, to bring this section of my poem into the light of print. And after all, the great Horace advised leaving a completed poem unpublished until several years had elapsed, so that one could re-read it with the perspective that distance gives, and perhaps revise it with the hindsight of maturity.

After re-reading the piece, there isn’t a thing I feel needs changing, except the generalized psychic distemper that produces a mentality like that of Diana Spencer. I’m proud to have the poem illustrated with a drawing by the superb political cartoonist Bob Fisk.

Before my enemies start howling about how cruel and vicious this portrait of Princess Diana is, let me pre-empt them by quoting from the British commentator Melanie Phillips. Just last year, in a Spectator column that made mention of the touchy-feely freak-scene that followed Diana’s death, Phillips said that “Diana Derangement Syndrome” was “the defining disorder of contemporary British society.” And she went on to say that “the main characteristics of DDS are the replacement of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility by credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession.”

So it isn’t just me. Even the Brits see it. God save the Queen.

NOCTIFIERS

Mark Allinson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:01:37 +0000

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

—C.G. Jung

The liberating angels stand
With faces flushed by light;
A wise, a pure, a righteous band
Who clearly see what’s right.

But as they crowd the cheering fire
To celebrate the glow
Of standing tall and reaching higher,
Their low dark shadows grow.