Present in Scent

Chuffed to have my poem ‘Present in Scent’ in Ink, Sweat and Tears today.

Yellow Rose

My third colour poem makes the triad of painter’s primaries. It takes its starting point from a lively tune I remember from the radio when I was a small boy. Of course I didn’t know then that the origins of the song went back over a hundred years earlier, or what the lyrics were about.

Sounds of rain

click to listen:

     Staccato taps syncopate
           justification on your cautious hood.

Essential labels

Somewhere in the back of my mind, were the wonders of the ‘perfume maker’s organ’ – like this magnificent and rare specimen at the Palazzo Mocenigo Museum in Venice.

Something a little different – a series of seven ‘photo-label-poems’.

These are a light hearted response to an invitation from my brother-in-law to take part in a seven day ‘nature image’ photography challenge.

I decided to combine my response with a small collection of old laboratory bottles loaned from a colleague at work, and with some [very] short poems responding to each image, in the form of a label…

 

Unscheduled tangents at half past eight

CHOICE	So many alternatives Here, there, everywhere. Shall I, shan’t I? Rolled, unrolled? A multiverse of tuneable futures.
The Lady Vanishes	Was she real, was she ever, or was she The impure fluid green fairy of liquid confusion? Do all her accessories also dissolve, Or she herself alone, leaving only air To cosset a sudden feminine free-falling of silk, chiffon, and organza?
See Pick of the Day	Best of the batch, top of the heap Today’s top tale, or tomorrow’s – Back when chips had a whiff of printer’s vinegar – STOP PRESS! (red ink, block caps) – A late-night poke from Brattisani’s wafting so salt-n-saucily into the house.

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(Until 2004 Brattisani’s was a family run fish-and-chip shop in Edinburgh, reputedly the first, or one of the first, in Scotland)

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Ouroboros drift

Reaching that point
I consider turning and feel
that rankle in his bones.

A circle remains acceptable,
a periphery traced will
leave the walk unspoiled.

In balance but un-symmetrical.

Backtracking would
retread time already mingled
with our recent scents, so as

Sines from a cyclic, we wander
along the wave until
we sense our true lie.

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aromatics

Familiar, but

[
an old drawer
utility furniture
leather cased
boot brushes
old diaries bound gilded
Letts not quite leather
Toblerone section promotional pencils
a penknife required to
make a point or extract a fly
demi-bics from the betting shop
always unused hide cased poker dice
shirt suspenders the essence of unsexy
a musk of dampness
in cold air.
]

still unkent.

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