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Monday, October 03, 2016

Examples of Poetic Flash Fiction in 51 Syllables

CLAPTRAPONOMY I
Time creeps backwards, forwards, closing statements, words open emerging worlds
Shifting sands, sentimental claptraponomy, truths variable
Made up worlds, breathed from words like collapsion - lies waiting to be de-mythed

Oceans waterfall from the thunderstorm, lightening never strikes thrice
Everything leaps sideways sometimes, even umbrellas turn outside in
Much like melting ice this galaxy and the next is subject to change

The things they tell me don’t make sense; they want to put me into their box
Scary stuff, they don’t understand that they’re the ones who have been brainwashed
I can take it or leave it - walk away before things get too heavy

But sin is addictive, harder to give up than tobacco or gin
Like the Gin mill, the Gin Palace, and the babies that are born in Gin
It’s the same the world over, different ones telling the same old lies

Selling the bodies of those that they have violently captivated
Prostituting themselves for peanuts when the candy starts to run dry
Leaving me sitting here alone, crying myself to sleep every night

The racket that they make, they think the carnival is still in full swing
All I can do is pray for rain, it’s like living on a fairground here
With next winter to look forward to - all I can do is hibernate

Lonely as the proverbial fish out of water - fighting for life
Gasping for air, stupid as a beached whale stranded on the sands of time
Beware of the fallen angels, demons, and delirium tremens

She’s screeching ridiculously like a flat tyre on an express train
Demanding as a child with a massive case of the terrible twos                          
She kneels in front of Father Ignatius and confesses all of her sins

Astronomy, astrology, Scientology (kicked it into touch)
World religions come and go unlike golden calves in the wilderness
That hang about like proverbial millstones around the felon’s neck  

Playing music manically suggesting it replaces all language
Dressing for the occasion stretching in her leotard yesterday
Upsetting the apple cart and the boy on the back of the beer dray

Walking in the snow looking for Poo Sticks to throw into the river
All knowledge is subjective you will realise one day when it’s too late
The milkman gives the little boy a carrot to make the snowman’s nose

Everybody’s going home for Christmas, sounds like some sort of sad song
Of course, I’m already home, I live here in fear of my life daily
The best I can do, is go to the match on Boxing Day, if they play

In the New Year things will be fine, all bad memories will be erased
Pleasant thoughts will be implanted into the corporate mind of man
Don’t forget, no one will need to regret anything ever again

Space rockets will come and go from the moon, shooting the bad comets down
Lovers will watch them from secret places as they dart across the sky
Whisky will be mixed down until it looks and tastes like river water

In Poland my cousins husband took me for a bike ride to the park
At the junction he dismounted, ‘We have rules in this country’ he said
The rest of the family had gone to Warsaw, so we ate Bigos

Why are the girls so beautiful in Poland? My son and his friend ask
We were driving from the airport to the cathedral in the salt mine
It was late September, but still warm enough for us to sleep outside

The ballerina and the bally dancer will practice at all hours
No mistake, lovers will be matched according to the music they make
Life is not a chocolate orange, a cheese mountain, or a lake of wine

The feng shui lady is coming today to rearrange the kitchen.
The cook has been throwing daggers at me all day, he hates changing things
When the tide goes out, will it come back? And where does the ocean go to?

The only stars the little boy knows play football on the TV show
It’s amazing the difference a little bit of investment makes
Mediocre Leicester can become champions with the right set up

She makes the tea letting it brew slowly in the kettle on the hob
People come to ask her the way to the mythical temple of love
She looks deep into their souls and saves the penalty for later on

Who are all these people, and where do they come from? Where are they going?
This life doesn’t have all the answers yet, the planets keep some secrets
Even on Mars they have water under the dust, if only you look

The Martians and the little green Moonsters that we’ve talked about before
Travelling at the speed of light, they might eventually arrive here
We travel anywhere, everywhere all the time, at the speed of thought

Nobody really knows how to have their cake and eat it, or do they?
A lot of people drink it these days, they make cake and shake it madly
Some married guys I know have a girlfriend on the side, what does that mean?

Check the afternoon lock-in at The Pancake House in St. Peters square
The skateboarders take a big holdall of cans of beer and hand them out
After they get tipsy they get spray cans out and graffiti the walls

She doesn’t need to go on a diet; she can buy the next size dress
All women are beautiful, ‘I know’, she tells me, when she smiles at me
‘If the barn needs painting, slap on the lippy!’ they say down south - sometimes

Old timers, blue rinse brigade, and grey, coffin dodgers to the last man
They say that I’ve only got eight years and eleven months left to live
Why were there some guys in the Bible that lived to nine hundred and odd?

We go to Oversize Elisabeth’s for the full English breakfast
Every month that’s got an ‘R’ in it, and a few that don’t like July
Last time Pierre the inebriated artisan came with us too

We sample beer shake brunch for starters, and take vodka smoothies to go
Then queue outside the pub, waiting for it to open at nine am
The red Rum drinkers sit there scratching their boozers hooters, it’s murder

The day drags on, drinking pint for pint with Peter the pissed up painter
Artistic as Cézanne, sober as a hanging judge, nowhere to run
When nightfall comes we stagger to another bar for cocktails at eight

Outside and up there somewhere planets collide, new worlds are formed by thought
You know what thought did don’t you? I think he just thought he did what he did
Satellites are falling from the skies back down to earth like lead balloons

But the cranes are still going up to build more towers to scrape the skies
Bent as a plastic fiver, crooked as the Chesterfield church spire
More backhanders than a tennis bat, one racket after another

Everything’s computerised, what will people do when the power fails?
The Millennials and the generation before them have no clue
The three day working week, no electricity, and candles for light

It gets addictive; starving yourself for more than three days is not cool
The self congratulatory society annual big ball
And guess who turns up? All the grabbers, all of the tramps, and all the thieves

The old Jersey lighthouse looks magnificent, standing there in the rain
The Grand National at Aintree will never be quite the same again
Runners and riders jockey for pole position at the Tartan Bar

We watch the international at the Corbiere Pavilion
It’s Scotland v England and they beat us 2-1 we buy all their beer
Only the year before we had thrashed them at Wembley five goals to one

I used to drink in the Trafalgar and the Tenby at St Aubins
All the pubs were open from nine am until eleven pm
Some hotel bars were open all night and the beer was as cheap as chips

I worked at the Royal Yacht Hotel in Saint Helier for a while
And later on at the Parade Bar where I first met the crazy beans
The head waiter at one place was a window cleaner from Wythenshawe

Deluded, waiting for the frost to thaw on a sunny summers day
Funny as a rocking horse rider on steroids, racing round the house
Bubbly as Champagne, fizzy as Cava, mad for it down in Dijon

Keen as mustard, fit as a butchers bitch on heat, fired up for the fight
Tooled up to the elbows, dressed up to the nines, if only looks could kill
Is commercialisation an imitation of reality?

The newscaster announces the capture of another terrorist
He says he is acting alone, but the devastation is so vast
A dozen organisations or so claim he was working with them

The flags remain at half mast as the president makes an announcement
‘The ceasefire is well and truly over, we will resume bombing soon’
The pilots scramble, and the ground crews kick start the jet engines over

The rebels, the terrorists, and the government troops blame each other
The superpowers can’t resist throwing in the Wellington for fun
Manipulating life, death, and eternity to win brownie points

Obnoxious as Baden Powell, with his Wolf Cubs, and the Boy Scout movement
I was the last Tawny Sixer and the First Red Sixer at Eleventh Sale Saint Joseph’s
Frightening as the Hitler Youth was, we would have beat them at football

Me and my street could have played for England, we trained outside every night
Five-a-side, seven-a-side, in the hockey nets at the tennis club
In nineteen sixty-six we beat North Korea at Worthington park

At Saint Aidan’s school we played football every day with a tennis ball
Two of the names I recall are, Antonio Bibby, and Chris Cain
I was a milk monitor, handing out the little bottles with straws

Mrs Harrison was the only shopkeeper open on Sundays
We would always stop to buy cream cheese, pickled gherkins, and kiełbasa
But the thing I liked the best was the cold milk machine outside the shop

3 comments:

  1. Thanks Stan, I cracked up and wrote about 20,000 words (so far) it's turning into a book length pointless poem.

    ReplyDelete