ANYONE
FOR LOVE?
Poems
by John Howard Reid
****
Published by:
John
Howard Reid at Smashwords
Copyright (c) 2011 by John Howard Reid
****
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Smashwords
Edition Licence Notes
This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for
each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did
not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then
please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
****
Entire contents
including photos copyright (c) 2011
by John Howard Reid
All rights reserved.
Enquiries: johnreid@mail.qango.com
****
Table of Contents
--
Index of Titles
Actor
Deprived of His Voice
Albury
Alone in the Dark
Always
a Good Show at the Rialto
Another
Day, Another Death
Anyone
for Love
Art
Gallery to Quay
Athlete’s
Foot
Big
House, Little Mouse
Bonkie
Bird Is Heard
Books
Born
Again
Born
Blind
Broken
Memories
Brushing
Against the Famous
Bus
Stop
Caring
Nought
Casino
Cinema
Sixties
Clerical
Ties
Concerning
the Land of Eternity
Confidence
Counting
Pennies
Country
Living
Crossing
Cure
Death
Does
a Sparrow Fall?
Do
You Ever Feel?
Drought
Dry
as a Ghost
Film
Freaks
Fence
Falling Down
Following
Ben Sirach
Gone
Fishing
Good
for the Heart
Grafton
in Flood
Grandma’s
Rules
Grandpa’s
Sport
Happy
in His Work
His
Faithful Witness
Howling
Dogs
Idea
Escaped
I,
Judas
In My Name
In
Sincerity
Internet
Dating Song (Soprano)
Internet
Dating Song (Tenor)
Jerome K. Jerome—3rd Floor Back
Legend
of Miners’ Flat
Letter
to an Ex-Husband
Life
Little Girl Lost
Local
Browser
Long
Vacation
Lost
Books
Lost
Files
Lost Glasses
Lost
Youth
Lotus
on a Windy Day
Love
Love
Is a Book
Making
Open Doors
Manly
Matinees
Merrymen
Moping Mum
Midnight
Phone
Mirror
City
Modest
Love
My
Heart Is a Song
Newcastle
Not
Needed on Voyage
One
Speaks for the Nine
Park
Pool
Political
Credo
Poor
Little Rich Girl
Proverbial
Philosopher
Pull
Down Blinds
Rain
Again
Retired
Life
Romantic
Fantasy
Schooling
Blues
Self-Portrait
Showman
Remembers
So
Close to Home
Song
for Easter Tuesday
Stay,
Rabbit
Still
a Bit of Wilderness Left
Talk
about the Weather
Tenterfield
Tide
of Roses
Tinkering
Trains
Training
Trees
Trouble
with Love
Twilight
Magic
Ub
Iwerks
Unfashionable
User
Friendly
Why
Don’t They?
Winter
Waves
Word to the
Wise
*
Whatever
happened to Romance?
You remember Romance—Romance with that
Romanesque glance,
that hungry thirst for tulip-tossed words in
time and season,
those whispered endearments in boundless
variations of radiance,
rhyme, rhythm and reason.
What
unhappy critic would seek to refute
Love’s hackneyed expressions
of enslavement?
What misogynist would spurn his lover’s
argument,
her surrender to a spell of all that is both clichéd
and cute?
Have
your ears echoed those forever seasonal phrases, those
great
repetitive keys to the unlocking of heaven’s gate?
Those
simple, innate
words: “I love you.
And only you.
You
alone.
My own.”
--
The
trouble with love and the senses
is a folly of Life’s ambience
and defenses.
We find ourselves skirting an obstacle
course—
impelled by this outmoded yet overwhelming force—
studded
with passions and nirvanas we can never win.
So let’s side with
St Paul who sees Love as a sly, sexual sin,
outguessing faith,
nixing hope, invading charity, rippling our soul.
Problem is, it’s love that makes us whole.
Alone in the dark with
Alice Faye
There’s a youthful dream come true
a Technicolored
wonderment of Hollywood
allure, a gauze of commandeered
carefreeglamour
the very heart and essence of manufactured
incandescence
You can keep your Betty
Grable
I hate her perky brash assertiveness
And you can swoon
alone
with your girls next door
your simpering Barbara
Rushes
and that dimpling Terry Moore
I want a songbird not a
mermaid
real flesh-and-blood not chrome
yet unsparing with her
make-up
You can envy me my
paramour
whose heart is soft and loving
not tinsel-toned,
home-grown
--
Perhaps,
when the beached moon is setting,
and all the stars of that
time-tinged sky have muted
into echoes of last evening’s
rain,
when we sheltered beneath the pasteboard frieze
of a
tubular steel café,
drinking Beethoven with hot
chocolate,
Mendelssohn with raisin-bread,
perhaps you missed
the anguish in my eyes,
for I knew we were merely treading
time:
I knew I’d no hope in eternity
of ever winning your
love.
No
intellect mine to wing the cliffs of knowledge,
or dream in the
caverns of thought;
no riches did I bring, no gifts,
but a
shadow.
Yet
perhaps, if you lie awake,
listening to the sea-shell salivation
of the sea,
indigestible, minor-irritating, barely
imperceptible,
perhaps, you will hear my voice;
for one day,
skeined in disserviced dreams,
when desires have downgraded
desert rims of mindless monotonous moons,
you may hear the
urging of my love.
--
my heart
is a song
chorusing love
your tongue is a cruel
mocking
echo
my heart is a fool
--
Please
cry out, — scream and shout your love,
my love, my moody, silent
love!
Command, impel, move me to fright
your spirit to scale
lonesome heights,
star-silvered kisses, dream delights.
My
ears hardened to whispered snares,
my mind opaque, game eyes
beware, —
your soothing input unaware, —
heart indifferent
to love’s soft prayers,
my soul untouched by swaddling care.
I
need:
Causeway cataracts, screaming
tides,
cascading rapids, engorging slides,
engulfing surf,
impounding seas,
floods, broken dams, capsized levees.
You
want:
Romance caressing
shadow-ferned lagoons,
rustling vines under autumn moons,
breezes
marrying lilac eves,
night gnats dancing on ochrous leaves.
A
winking of haze-enshrouded light,
with clippy-clop frogs in lazy
flight,
bees mark-timing honeyed feasts, —
mynahs brawling
like placid priests.
Alas:
True
love is rough, real love is mad,
all things “beautiful” gone
to the “bad”.
No room in love for mossy pools.
Romance
flickers — for eternal fools.
--
love is a
book
a hopeful dream
a tide of delight
or a gallant
search
for sorrows unseen
--
Can
you remember
nights when dreams were broken riddles,
jig-saw
sighs, self-frosted lamps,
illusions rubbed by paper-topped
tears
along grey-greened arcades
of song-silent years?
Can
you remember
days when Duty,
dimmed by tunnelled
desire,
side-glassed, glanced by passion’s dart,
swept
through the void,
and feasted at this empty heart?
Can
you remember
weeks when words untapped,
flowed only on
penumbral air?
When shadows, sparkling in Love’s
embrace,
tempered twisting twilight
on my tempted, tingling
face?
Can
you remember
months when seasons swallowed the moon,
stars
shone bright at mid-day,
sensuous perfumes floated in the very
fabric of the air,
a tactile touch of musk and aromatic
pine,
spikenard mixing lilac and sweet-incensed never-care?
Have you forgotten
years when weeds stunted the
growth of our love,
when thorns garnished our garden of
roses,
parasitic vines trapped our contentment with lies,
when
the night-wind shrivelled the green of our hopes,
and slivers of
dust slowly strangled our sighs?
--
Inebriating,
terrifying, scoriating Love,
What destructive whirlwinds of
numbing desires
You create in minds and hearts! Above
Suspicion,
yet not below reproach, your raging fires,
Praised by dean and
deanery, — if denied on Shove-
Friday by Lenten zealots, — yet
still creating strife,
Even though blessed by priestly mouths.
What dove
Of saintly tranquillity can offset the onslaught of a
wife?
What empty, mealy-mouthed words, hand-in-glove
With
soothing platitudes, can prepare even the most bemused of men
For
life in a purgatorial prison, both arms chained above
His bowed
and bloody head? “Nobody but yourself to blame!”
But what
about nature? What about the stirrings of that famous
turtledove
Whose cry echoes in the land? Put
the blame on Mame, boys! Put the blame on Mame!
--
When
I say I love you, dear,
it’s hard to make my voice
sincere.
These words so often have been expressed
before
Creation even began. Antony thus addressed
his lust for Cleopatra.
And Paris to Helen confided the same.
Were their endearments
founded on a rock or the sly sand of shame?
Countless
lovers in song and verse
have sought to make their sweet
converse
convict their sweethearts of their one true feeling,
but
dull, worn-out clichés are all their Muse keeps dealing.
So
what can I say in all sincerity
to impress you with my heartfelt
verity?
I’ve
never seen the moonlight dancing in your hair,
or your pale green
eyes reflected in a sparkling pool affair.
You’ve denied me the
joy of tasting the soft salt tang of your lips
and even the
pleasure of resting my eager hand on the curb of your hips.
You’ve
never given me the chance
to measure a single, affectionate
glance,
never curled out a little finger on my shoulder,
never
so much as smiled when my hand grew bolder;
so it’s doubly hard
to fashion those old saws fresh and new:
All I can do is
ingenuously repeat: I love you, love you, love you!
I
told my old girl, as I woke last morn,
of a cracker poem for
Tuesday night.
I’d dreamed it all up at yawn of dawn:
Behemoths
wild, howling dogs, fearsome frogs,
all manner of ghosties and
grimy gogs
that dance and frolic, carol and towel,
mortising
minds at mesmer midnight.
“No
such geek as a ghost,” she declared.
Then what’s that
fright at the foot of our bed?
“A discarded sheet or chintz
dressing gown.
No vampire or demon out on the town.
“There!
Yesterday’s news or the day before’s;
or maybe last month’s,
or two-oh-four’s.
Just a weary Herald lost on its way
to
the recycling bin on the great Highway.
Who cares what its date,
the one thing I know:
It’s no ghoulie specter up here from
below.”
Glad
you’re so confident, Sue, I said,
‘Cause that’s eyes
of fire that glow in its head,
arms big as cannons, fingers like
swords,
mouth wide as tunnels with scissor-teeth gourds!
“Stop
raving on, you moronic old mope,
can’t you see fiery eyes are
but bars of soap,
arms are just cushions and pieces of
rope,
fingers — paper bags and a used envelope?”
I
blinked. Oh, wow! It was true what she said,
just the usual old
rubbish playing dead!
--
There
used to be a bus stop right outside our house.
And that was the
main reason we bought this house
in the first place.
(The
second place, of course, is that by the grace
of God, the vendor
met our rock-bottom price).
“Don’t
you think a bus stop is just so good and nice,”
the realtor
enthused. “Why’s that?”
we asked. “We have a car. We don’t
give a gnat
for public transport. We like to be on our own.”
“With
a bus stop outside, my dears, you’ll never be alone!”
That
agent was unstoppable. “Just stop to think
of commuting crowds
struggling for shelter.
You could offer them all a drink
and
serve your good deed for the day right out of the way!”
“Maybe
we’re not into good deeds,” we say.
That agent nodded her wise
old head.
She knew a couple of born-and-bred
do-gooders at
first sight.
She
was right. My wife and I were both too polite
to resist the lure.
We did everything but set up a soft-drink stand
under the lemon
tree. We installed a bench on our own land,
ran messages, stored
lost property and were just about to expand
into minding mislaid
children when meddling police issued a demand
that the bus stop
cease.
Why
this sudden governmental caprice?
“Your bus stop—’tis a
traffic hazard, it is,” a grimmer
Inspector McLaimoir
explained.
“Harboring a potential accident there.
Besides,
yon neighbor complained,
and we officers of the law must act on
complaints.
‘Tis our sworn and wholesome duty!”
“Which
neighbor was that?” we asked,
mentally offering that whiner a
beauty.
Ever so unreluctantly, McLaimoir dropped the name:
“Mrs
Worth, it is. A Mrs Constance Worth.”
“Mrs
Worth?” wife and I complained in unison.
“Never heard of a
Mrs Worth round here
“Number 26. Right next door.”
Wife
and I shook our heads.
“That’s Mrs Dix. Mrs Dottie Dix.
Must
be a nifty mistake, McLiamoir.
Some typically droll bureaucratic
bungle.
Sure you’ve got the right street, crescent, road,
avenue, drive, parade, alley, lane, viaduct or jungle?”
The
bureaucrat was triumphant.
“Macey Drive!” he
smirked,
pointing to the mass of Maceys in his notebook.
His
stratagem would have worked a treat.
We’d have gone our way,
convinced Mrs Dix was a living lie,
a disguised Worth in
mufti;
that her Ronnie wasn’t her Ronnie,
her Monique
not her Monique.
But by the grace of second sight,
my
sharp-eyed wife spied the date:
Nineteen hundred and forty-eight!
“You’re
fifty years too late!” we cried.
“Let joy be
unconfined!
Invite the neighbors to the feast.
Let all be
dined and wined.
Send couriers to the roadsides!
Round up all
the neighborhood bums!
Freight freeloaders by the truckful!
Sound
the klaxons and the drums!
Let it not be noised in this
neighborhood
that Reids do things by halves,
we’ll lay in
enough good cheer for a brewery,
and slay ten fatted calves!”
We
were dancing on the sidewalk,
when the inspector stopped us
short.
Warbling Roaming in the Gloaming
when McLiamoir
made us abort.
“Ye’ll
not ken John Kean any the more
when I tell ye a complaint’s a
complaint
and the law ‘tis the law.
No matter the date,
the
law can wait.
It doesn’t give a hoot,
it still bears fruit,
whether it be
eighteen thirty-three
or nineteen
ninety-eight.
I’ve no right to hesitate,
no power to
conciliate,
so resign ye to an awesome Fate.
Yon stop is
cancelled, ‘tis no more.
No bus will ever be stoppin’ right at
your door!”
McLiamoir’s
prophecy soon came true.
Only fours years later in two thousand
and two,
twelve workers in three yellow trucks arrived out of the
blue.
They pitched two green tents a bit askew,
played cards
to see who’d do the job
while the rest of this council mob
fired up two kettles for morning tea
and laid back in a
spirit of jeu d’esprit.
Two
battery radios blared the local races full blast,
only stopping
for lunch while our twelve-man cast
deserted their erstwhile posts
for the local store
where they bought cans of beer and meat pies
galore.
By
mid-afternoon the damnable deed was done:
My four-sided
post no longer stood proud in the sun,
but lay upturned in the
grassy knoll beside the road.
He
had just been freshly painted too, in a nice blue-red woad
that
imparted class and a transportively high degree
of distinction
and sobriety
to comfort intending passengers with their choice
of
locale for boarding and alighting.
But no slurred or slinky
voice
would ever shout again, “This is my stop, driver!”
And
no pre-emptive hand or finger wave a frantic fiver.
Farewell, “SIGNAL DRIVER.”
Wife
and I didn’t take this debacle lying down.
We made it our
business to go to town
and wrest the local councilmen from their
bed
of boredom and inertia. But nothing that we said
would
induce them to re-instate our stop.
They were so sorry, sorry,
sorry we’d lost our prop,
but the stop’s close proximity to a
hill
made a serious accident or spill
inevitable. Not this
year, of course, with traffic sparse and slow,
but give our quiet
little street another fifty or seventy years to grow…
--
Ambled
in to my local library
to find a book to read.
Hadn’t been
near the place in a couple of years—
Found everything gone to
seed.
Where’s
the serried row of out-of-state newspapers
that used to hang
not-so-neatly from the shelf?
Where’s the carton of ill-used
books
and damaged magazines, labeled Help yourself ?
What’s
happened to the Community Notice Board,
full of wonders rich and
rare:
Sewing contests, spelling bees, raffles, rorts,
all the
fancy fun of fete and fair?
Where’s
the big banner inviting SILENCE:
No talking in the library,
please!
Who did away with all the nervous whispering,
and
borrowers crawling around on hands and knees
to
reach well-thumbed books in bottom racks?
When did all the C.S.
Foresters just up and disappear,
Paul Gallico, Betty Smith, Daphne
du Maurier, Mickey Spillane—
all my favorite writers of
yesteryear?
What’s
happened? People talking, buzzing about,
half-empty shelves, kids
in baseball caps, some barefoot,
yet everything super-tidy,
hospital clean—
no hidden treasures buried in cobwebbed dust
underfoot.
“Any
Kenneth Roberts, Booth Tarkington, Max Brand or Zane Grey?”
I
ask the librarian. She looks up in alarm.
“They don’t work
here!” she snaps. “Not workers, they’re authors,”
I reply,
keeping my voice nice and calm.
“So
perform a search on the net!” she barks.
“The net? What net?”
— “Stop wasting time, upsetting my routine:
I’m here to book
in surfers for the Internet
or give out change for the copy
machine.”
So
that’s the library of the future now: sterile chrome and scrolling
screens.
Borrowers no longer borrow. And I’m the man who wasn’t
there.
Teenagers brush past me, waving fistfuls of fees,
eager
to get online. I don’t rate so much as a stare.
--
Why don’t bookshops sell the latest books I dearly
want to peruse?
Why doesn’t the area directory list the
emergency service I need to use?
Why doesn’t the corner
convenience store shelve my favorite brands?
Why is the local
undertaker so keen and fulsome to shake hands?
Why
is my morning newspaper never delivered on time?
Why, when I’m
racing a deadline, can I never think of a rhyme?
Why does the
butcher close to my corner never have any brains?
Where does my
umbrella hide every single day when it rains?
Why
is there a mile-long queue when I’m impatient to get cracking,
And
whenever I’m expecting a raise, how come I unfailingly get a
sacking?
Why does a bottle of vintage brandy always find its way
to a souse?
And why—except in movies—is there rarely a doctor
in the house?
Why
do I always break my glasses during my optician’s annual hike?
Why
does my car come to grief while all the bus drivers are on
strike?
Why is my desk never spruce and tidy when the manager
passes my door?
Why are my feet always first to slip trippetty-tip
on a newly polished floor?
Why
does the after-hours dentist never answer his phone?
Why does my
phone never ring when I’m sitting at home all alone?
Why is my
train always early when I’m running a few seconds late?
Why
didn’t I shave this morning when I’ve a sudden prospect of a
date?
Why
isn’t my friend, the plumber, licensed to fix my icebox?
Why
does the laundry always deliver me someone else’s unusable
socks?
Why don’t video rentals stock just one of the thousands
of movies I’ve never seen?
Why does my lawn raise weeds galore,
but never a snip of grassy green?
It’s
a worldwide conspiracy—of that I’m pretty damn sure!
But for
the solace of my garden gnomes, I’d need to take the cure.
--
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Always a Good Show at the Rialto
Oh, yeah?
No
kidding!
Not
Johnny
Weissmuller again?
Not Jungle Jim? Not
that
nicknackitarion? I entreated ten
gorillas to greenboard
him and a swallow
of headhunters to counsel extramundane
retirement.
I blunted his knives by sharpening pencils, tightened
his belt a
full half-notch, loosened his shoe-laces and polished
my tupperware on his
Not
Ma and
Pa
Kettle?
Not the screaming
eagles of the Ozarks, the
holidaying
ruminants of Paris,
the dilly-dalliers of New York?
Not
Abbott
&
Costello,
old Bud and Lou!
Bud should be nipped
in the bud,
and Lou locked
in the nearest loo!
--
Books were grandma’s enemies:
Try as they might, they
never
looked neat. Simply “Impossible!”
Resisted attempts
to stand them up straight
because spines were too flimsy or pages
overweight.
Cover colours mismatched, heights implacably awry; and
even
breadths delighted in non-uniformity. And as for lengths!
Some aggressors
pushed their owners way off the shelves, whilst
others skulked at the back, so modest
and shy, a lady never knew
their presence (let alone their stance) from one year to the next!
Books magnetized
dust.
Like the dickens they did! Failed
all the tests
physicians prescribe to keep germs
quarantined and never let loose
in houses scrubbed clean.
Except for
Condensed,
books despised uniformity, came in all
raiments and
roundelays, all baggage and none,
wore skirts and plaid topcoats,
Leicester cottons and dun,