TIM LOVE’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc.
Blog: http://litrefs.blogspot.com/
Love’s only a letter away
If a madeleine melted
on my tongue, I’d
deem alien a denim eel,
emend a lie, elide. Amen,
because that’s
when god’s as close
to gold as heaven,
when a man with a diction addiction
and two left feet wore flip-flips,
his fears of a flop unfunded –
solitary, so literary
that he almost found
meanings in enigmas
from a muse ‘e visited abroad.
When the chaste sun escaped,
the wax molted and drown he fell
into Bruegel’s pained wake –
a nude manoeuvre bored
Auden’s man overboard
went head over heels for,
his craft speeding away.
Time will say nothing though
love dares to speak,
the world broken into letters
written off, pathologists
studying two ways not taken,
regrets that sprout confused
in a cork-lined gloom.
Some versions of Pastoral by William Empson
Llamas yawn, bite, romp, spoil,
ably trap plowman similes. O
winsome lambs, play a lot. R.I.P.
iambs, po-mo, sly awe. Print all
prose. Sit by a plowman, a mill,
a map. Paint lowlier symbols,
embalm apparitions. Slowly,
a man, possibly ill (tapeworm
symptom? aspirin allowable?)
browses a laptop minimally,
wearily limps on a pal’s tomb.
Wartime sin palpably looms.
Oil barons’ wallets may pimp
intolerably, POWs slap imam.
Top moral lawmen spy alibis,
misapply some tribal law. No
military weapons – lob psalm
at an imam – low slippery lobs.
Imams brew ploys, toil, plan a
small power-play. Ambitions
will empty oil barons’ maps. A
ransom implies a bylaw plot –
bait sloppy imam, worsen all
postwar alimony. Blame Pils,
blame lowly paras. Omit spin.
Blame ill POWs or paints. May
lawyer’s ambitions – all pomp –
roam lawlessly. Appoint IBM.
Pose brilliantly, swap ammo
or map, palm sweaty billions.
All works published by the Glasgow Review of Books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and the journal reserves the right to be named as place of first publication in any citation. Copyright remains with the poet. http://www.glasgowreviewofbooks.com
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