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The Blog Bog
The Mag Rack
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NELLY'S FIRST CHAP
I am very puffed up and far advanced in goodness.
Sometimes I live an imaginary existance
where I am better and happier than in real life.
I do not thrust myself forward but prefer
to take a step to either side, out of view.
An invitation to have dinner with a friend
causes an anguish in me that's hard to define.
What a tender thing I was as a young man,
how for all my swagger, a whisper , as I passed
a group of strangers, could turn my heart to dust.
Even though I took no interest in absurdity,
absurdity seemed to take an interest in me.
Sometimes I do some of my little childish jumps
or a bit of swooning, by way of illustration.
My relations with women, somehow had to endure
frank discussions, endless pointless talk, weighing of guilt
and innocence, reproaches and nagging letters.
I have an infinite capacity for delusion
and staying hopelessly awake, staring
at my future, which is practically behind me.
Our morning lacked promise Nelly, our evenings too.
A supermassive black hole the size of one billion
suns was hurled out of its parent galaxy today.
I was just hoping for a pang. This might be a pang...
I hope that it is; not just the humiliating
grief of being in love or not being in love.
tony dash
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NELLY'S SOLILOQUY
Yesterday I was visited by a swoon
serenading me with a jaw-bone flute:
"Nell eee, Nell eee, my dear old Nelly"
Afterwards my far-fetched man imagined
I told him I wanted to be in love,
and all he said was, 'Is that so? Well me too.'
I asked a question , to myself, really,
but out loud: Aren't you only (as someone said)
a vaporous transient consciousness
in an incidental universe ?
My far-fetched man overheard, agreed
and added, that I was probably
also, 'just a wee bit de trop.'
An amber statuette of a man used to cost
more than a number of healthy living slaves.
I wouldn't mind just one, one with half a heart.
I have been meaning to speak about it,
I have several pages of notes and instructions
and monkey-knuckle readings and a tortoise -shell
full of pearls and financial instruments.
My far-fetched man is noted at his bank
for his financial instrumentation.
'Volatility is proportional to the square root of time,'
he chants. That's one of his that caused the big doom.
Toward the end, he did an amount of night work
and overtime and piecework and time and a half.
Everything tired him, that far-fetched man,
including what didn't tire him.
I wondered if my life had the right people in it,
and if it wasn't time I found an outside man.
tony dash
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O
The italic capital O
of his mouth,
skin the colour of butter
and the burst traceries
of blue an violet
veins, flowering late,
conspired to add
half a century
in an hour, to his
then irrelevant age.
For one whose mouth
rarely opened in life,
it lolled indiscreetly,
I tried to close it twice,
but it wouldn't.
Later I saw the alabasterÊ
tears of the Magdalene.
These are two silent things:
The falling snow...
...the mouth of one just dead.
tony dash
____________________________________
ASK THE DOCTOR
Oh to be in all, or one of the suits,
of a deck of playing cards doctor
and to stop praying to the mute god
of the ever counted chicken.
Woke to one of those rendings of the heart
which follow great expenditure,
then, needing things to be more exacting,
I took to the golden streets of Liverpool
and wandered, useless as a poet.
Do you think I should try to be
a shade more avid doctor?
tony dash
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