Four Pages from
a 24- page poem I call Star Jelly
14.
A millstone bedrock outcrop overhangs
a twisted neck of woods, and on another level
brink crowns bank and sikes run tribute
for the drain. It was somewhere there
we stumbled on some star jelly along a path
along a long catchwater drain. The path is made
permissive, and we’re glad to walk its way, but when
they privatised water, the heart evaporated from the state.
It is well to be free of any such allegiance.
Boulders tumbled from the outcropped shoulder
in a jumble down below. What do we know
about star jelly? A translucent mass, no smell
of redolence but looks like life,
but yet they say it has no DNA,
and so is disregarded as a little mystery.
How come the folklore and old poets both were in the know?
What part did gravity play in the scene of the fall
from the stars? We do know why
waters fall and boulders tumble.
Flippant words can neither wish nor flute
geomorphology away.
15.
This is mostly not hunting country but here it is
the envisaged soul is pictured vixen
running from the hounds. There’s hope worth steading
on the skyline on a dark december day.
Fangs have to tear and flay. Fur flies.
And what it is is like a vapour
and a ghost of victim, vanquished
and evaporated in pure fiction.
And what it is is it’s a flit
become of something that did not exist
in thicket brake, hung over nothing in the mist.
Star jelly comes back down to earth.
The active frogs spawn in an idle goit.
One clump must represent a great amount
of eggs per frog. The leaden sky reminds me of
a visionary boredom. There’s a heron flapping out
on bogflat mire. Untidy clutters. Old abandoned workings,
pitted sumps beneath the brink, along a seam
of shaly coal of no great height. A frog
eructs a croak. A horse erupts in flatulence and stale.
Star jelly as the soul is neither male nor female.
16.
Invalid or invalid as the stress has fallen,
a pupated nymphalid or
unintended neophyte, a something swatted
by demonic cobblers while hobnobbing soles,
the sole excuse for a transcendence in consensus
with the faiths of ages. In their battles,
in their fights, there must be troops of tropes
falling flat from platitudinous heights.
Here’s patience wanting her emoluments.
Her wants are for the rudiments of sense.
She waits for her thoracic wings.
A cabbage white in blue cerulean.
The flutter by of phansy fantom.
The wait for wings of song for one thing
and the spring to sprout another,
May rains drop. Who was she
left her footprint in last season’s frost?
June passed across the grass
as lushly glassed with graces
glossing who you are as
what one is.
17.
The meaning of the spring is cleanly
a mechanical escapement, the release of tension,
no more want to mate than any other
busy birds and bees. Love’s folly
felt like fate. Some highly-strung ones
like some young ones need
a daily abatement, just can’t wait
for what they’ll want again tomorrow,
are yet disinclined to masturbate,
prefer their sorrow and a mate to hate.
In sunshine may showers evaporate.
Grasses ingress, and at the back end of the year
in part regress. Genetic lines digress.
Anima’s in our DNA, innate.
So earth has caught this star out on the moor.
A gelatinous slime under foot or in the palm.
Angels working themselves off their own endurance.
I’ll plump for frogs like us are made to mate
with other insectivorous amphibian anurans,
but at hazard with the lizard from the buzzard
while the heron scoops the spawn into its gizzard.
a 24- page poem I call Star Jelly
14.
A millstone bedrock outcrop overhangs
a twisted neck of woods, and on another level
brink crowns bank and sikes run tribute
for the drain. It was somewhere there
we stumbled on some star jelly along a path
along a long catchwater drain. The path is made
permissive, and we’re glad to walk its way, but when
they privatised water, the heart evaporated from the state.
It is well to be free of any such allegiance.
Boulders tumbled from the outcropped shoulder
in a jumble down below. What do we know
about star jelly? A translucent mass, no smell
of redolence but looks like life,
but yet they say it has no DNA,
and so is disregarded as a little mystery.
How come the folklore and old poets both were in the know?
What part did gravity play in the scene of the fall
from the stars? We do know why
waters fall and boulders tumble.
Flippant words can neither wish nor flute
geomorphology away.
15.
This is mostly not hunting country but here it is
the envisaged soul is pictured vixen
running from the hounds. There’s hope worth steading
on the skyline on a dark december day.
Fangs have to tear and flay. Fur flies.
And what it is is like a vapour
and a ghost of victim, vanquished
and evaporated in pure fiction.
And what it is is it’s a flit
become of something that did not exist
in thicket brake, hung over nothing in the mist.
Star jelly comes back down to earth.
The active frogs spawn in an idle goit.
One clump must represent a great amount
of eggs per frog. The leaden sky reminds me of
a visionary boredom. There’s a heron flapping out
on bogflat mire. Untidy clutters. Old abandoned workings,
pitted sumps beneath the brink, along a seam
of shaly coal of no great height. A frog
eructs a croak. A horse erupts in flatulence and stale.
Star jelly as the soul is neither male nor female.
16.
Invalid or invalid as the stress has fallen,
a pupated nymphalid or
unintended neophyte, a something swatted
by demonic cobblers while hobnobbing soles,
the sole excuse for a transcendence in consensus
with the faiths of ages. In their battles,
in their fights, there must be troops of tropes
falling flat from platitudinous heights.
Here’s patience wanting her emoluments.
Her wants are for the rudiments of sense.
She waits for her thoracic wings.
A cabbage white in blue cerulean.
The flutter by of phansy fantom.
The wait for wings of song for one thing
and the spring to sprout another,
May rains drop. Who was she
left her footprint in last season’s frost?
June passed across the grass
as lushly glassed with graces
glossing who you are as
what one is.
17.
The meaning of the spring is cleanly
a mechanical escapement, the release of tension,
no more want to mate than any other
busy birds and bees. Love’s folly
felt like fate. Some highly-strung ones
like some young ones need
a daily abatement, just can’t wait
for what they’ll want again tomorrow,
are yet disinclined to masturbate,
prefer their sorrow and a mate to hate.
In sunshine may showers evaporate.
Grasses ingress, and at the back end of the year
in part regress. Genetic lines digress.
Anima’s in our DNA, innate.
So earth has caught this star out on the moor.
A gelatinous slime under foot or in the palm.
Angels working themselves off their own endurance.
I’ll plump for frogs like us are made to mate
with other insectivorous amphibian anurans,
but at hazard with the lizard from the buzzard
while the heron scoops the spawn into its gizzard.
