Tuesday poem: The ineffable boredom of Polonius
March 30, 2015
The ineffable boredom of Polonius
Hamlet had a go; stabbing him behind the arras,
which does not mean what you may think it means
if you didn’t do Shakespeare in your degree.
But he never dies, this Polonius. He pops up as
Scoutmaster, Deputy Principal, minor MP, Mayor,
spouting cliché through his immortal mouth;
To your own self be true
he tells graduating students, some of whom
have read of him being stabbed behind the arras
and have suffered quite enough already thank you.
Youth are the future of Australia, he adds,
and I’m sure there are American and Indian and
Kyrgyzstani Poloniuses, for he has bred, you know,
splitting in two in each grave; coming up each morn
at fifty-five years. They go on cruises, Polonii,
and spend their ineffable boredom in other places
dripping like middle-aged piss for
Travel broadens the mind
which, in this case, it clearly doesn’t.
Never put off until tomorrow, he exhorts.
I feel that there must be a way to kill off his breed.
And I will work and work to find a way to eliminate
every smear of Polonius from discourse public or private.
Make hay while the sun shines,
and I am forming daggers from papier-mâché
made from the most tedious editorials still written,
in real print newspapers
crapping on about the
sacrifice of previous generations
and the inevitable
need for fiscal constraint
and I will sneak up on him, like Hamlet, but less hosey,
and force a cliché dagger down his moth-eaten throat,
though I fear he will just regurgitate the dagger,
waste not want not
he will say or
Violence is the last resort of the unintelligent and never a solution
and it is, Polonius, oh yes it is,
and may you choke on your sayings
and die, smearing the arras, wall, or whatever
in horrible, tedious wisdom, like the worlds greyest
graffiti, little vombits of save and safe and think and
look before you leap
and it will be too late, and nobody, no nobody will weep
for the death of the boring uncle, with his inexplicable fetish
for hiding behind arrases, which is the only interesting thing
that the mouldy old sententious prick ever did.
And may flights of silverfish sing him to his rest.
P.S. Cottier
Now this is not a Very Nice Poem at all, but sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a rave.
Read the works of the other Tuesday Poets around the world by pressing here. That includes New Zealand, where they are quite good at cricket.
Dangerous ground
October 28, 2011
It’s so hard to write about love without being sucked into the great swamp of cliché. (That swamp is just near the level playing field and the field of dreams, incidentally.) Here’s a poem that attempts to avoid the swamp.
I’ve totally given up trying to make my poems copied onto here revert to single spacing; they just like to be double spaced. And who am I to argue with the muse of the computer?
Love
Dangerous ground, they say; thick sands
tending towards the gluggy, or cloying
like dessert wine, just too too sweet.
Roll it round your tongue and spit!
say the many, divorced from lingering,
an evicted dog’s cold fleas, itching.
But that is not it, that is not it at all.
I realise that now, tottering past forty,
smorgasbord stashed in past’s
crumbed pantry of regret.
Hungover with experiment,
trapezed into performance,
the gourmet becomes gourmand
or abstemes self into shape.
But the shape of love is not six-packed muscle,
nor even delicate lines of balletic grace.
Love is a vegetarian at the butcher’s,
gapes of bed-socks beneath ageing dreams
and the practised caress;
an ideolect of touch and lapping
curled like a cat in memory’s ample gut.
Stretching, it rubs against the legs of so far and thus good.
Then it stalks out into future’s thin twilight, hunting for self,
in the deep dear shadows of the you and the now.
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 