Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles
by Peter Cowlam
Published by Formulas of Electricity at Smashwords
ISBN 978-1-4523-6270-0
www.formulasofelectricity.co.uk | inquiries@formulasofelectricity.co.uk
Peter Cowlam has asserted his rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
Copyright © 2010 Peter Cowlam. All rights reserved
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The Boardroom… …is a medieval country in a long and eternally troubled night – in every hand you see a knife.
Pleasure Beach All I recall, under the white flannel of a cold compress, is sails unfurled to the ocean.
Zhivago A horseman riding slowly over snow.
Cold War It was, you only have to think, a premeditated threat – to light our global pyre – to say that we had died, in some way glorified by fire.
Poetry in the Round There’s a hoary old bard in Highgate who won’t attend our reading, when poetry now is abstruse, or sadistic, or both.
Derrida’s Teleology… …means the sum total of civilisation is the permanently failed convergence of two hopelessly parallel lines.
Patrician Before I leave this life, I would like to bequeath these kitchen utensils to the city’s Britart museum.
Amis Amiss I think really Time’s Arrow ought to have read in a circle or like a palindrome: ‘Time’s Semite’, perhaps.
Vacancy, Trafalgar Square Someone suggested putting on that empty plinth the sculpture of a sculptor sculpting.
Village Diplomacy Now you know I get but never spread the goss.
Contrariwise Ah but did you know, that chap in the damp depressing raincoat was only last week snorkelling in the Tasman Sea…
This Short Lyric It’s a perspective I’ve come to appreciate, having laboured all these years among the fierce dark flickers usual in our millennial prose.
Speak, Memory To be honest all I recall of home is an array of tiny fruit trees grown in endless tidy rows.
Retired Reader, Bridport Here’s a man says he can’t stand the company of giants, in literature or life.
Insomnia I get up, a man who thinks he’s been awake, who in his wakefulness has spent these naked hours unravelling a dream.
Quelle Heure? Well, it’s twilight, cliffside, where jagged rocks melt into smooth dark blue.
Angle Shot… …of a grey-eyed man bent double in the rain.
When I Try to Paint Perspectives… …all things drift into the distance, loosely falling into folds (though never lie flat like a hand on a weary brow).
Inspiration… …is the fathomless urge to see some private revelation in exaggerated waves.
Last Light One thing is certain: while daylight remains, I shall watch for the bluish night through the smears of my windowpanes.
Radio Prophet I think these sound effects indicate someone at the ocean’s edge, prepared to part the waves, tongue in cheek, cheek to the sea breeze.
Voices After Midnight I would have risen once to this, the grand debate: but the night is cold – our bed is made – and look, the hour is late…
Obelisk As a vanquished opponent of progress I am incomplete; a hand to the monument, I lean to the breeze of all passing things.
Christians… …who have proudly held their souls in open hands and raised them up to light a corner of the heavens.
Full Moon I know what you bring: you bring remorse – you draw the very tides of remorse from beneath my flesh.
Shall There be a Rainbow What do I ask, when I have seen a shrewd pedestrian folding back his damp lapels, when I have seen this unexpected sunlight out of clouds?
Monarchism The slow twist of heavy blades above our heads; the raised hand; the sudden clang of steel on armoured skulls: ‘…all hail the king!’
Lost in Orbit There is always a burning sun, and somewhere a white glove tumbling through space.
Picture Him, Thor Heyerdahl In a boat of reeds, on chaotic seas, on a lake of flames.
First Gardener Meet Adam, pink in an April wind, who shakes the blossoms from his blue lapel.
Groundwork I asked, what is it you’re trying to do, here in this yellow hour before morning, and you said look at that smoke through all these rain-drenched boughs, and the petals of this dew-soaked rose, and the wet leaves turning in the breeze, and here my box of paints…
Campus A post-graduate researcher in the philosophy faculty couldn’t avoid an accidental rhyme in telling me there are no reasons – there is only the faultless stride of our human seasons.
Living Rooms in Metroland… …are where a thousand suns fall through a thousand leaded lights.
What I Wanted to Say What I wanted to say when you said is there artificial intelligence (and I said of course)… What I wanted to say was yes – with the emphasis on artificial.
Christmas I say it’s incredible – these bells, this red-coated elder sleighing overhead.
Pompeii Today I have seen society’s basalt statuettes, here in its long volcanic night.
Becoming Please! Purgatory is so: an endless review of a life in wraps.
Memorial What of these stones heaped together and cemented – a lithos of remembrance – and no coat unpoppied?
Lake, Winter Restrain all these umbrellas, please! – such a high wind (that water, those suds, those blurs, those furrows in the lakeside)…
Flood Warning Try to think of rains, rivers, banks that have burst, strong limbs having to flail on a rising inland tide.
Political Winter Are you aware of our hustings as having to do with a lost decade, a cold wind, a man in an empty house sizing his coat?
House Front Only picture it, with its railings, its chequered path, its portico and arches, its one carved pediment.
Lakeside It’s a regatta, that toy boat there, breaking the reflections, and the boy’s Lake Makebelieve lined with albata trunks.
Metropolitan Grey Caught in a drizzle, while a thousand rivulets sluice down all these city umbrellas.
Science Heresy Let us propose that Newton was wrong – that far from attractive, gravity in fact is a force of repulsion.
Star Trek Lost in a distant nebula, and far from our village homes, we break our journey on the planet Dearth and cool our brows against a solar breeze.
Fantasy Under the arms of my cedar, through my porthole window, I blink a halfling into being.
Hikers Two distant specks, though not our friends, raise hats on a high hill, wave, we assume glowing.