From From A View To A Death

My children, I have to announce a hiatus

Though sure shan't be long, nor sharply adhered to;

Yet several concepts convene on a gap -

You'll need a wee Prelude, or yet antiPrelude,

So I'll trace it from pretext to fact.

When I came to Oxford - came again to Oxford -

(not as if you'd ever been so far away,

you might say - well fair Slough is an hour and a half)

For some reason I thought that poems must be witty

Like Pope, or beautiful like Byron, but not serious

With sturgeon-like light novelled glory.

And when I resorted to them, it was due

To rejection, by my own journalistic face,

My prose weight, and then, smarting, by you,

Fairest readers to come. How such a lot came

From an appeasing sonnet from Balliol Bar...

And I cannot leave out my one true lover's role,

Who urged me on in envy, more striding than sorrow,

The captain and catcher of dreams - find him here:

www.sammyamjay.blogspot.com

For I felt, sure, he catches them, but then he's puzzled.

He allows them to float about flustered in cages,

And watches, ands loses the scientist's thrill,

Lets experiment drop, and puts it down to nature -

But I want to wright them and would shine them wrought

If my Thorspastic iron hands could only pin 'em.

But the catcher's last dream caught him up good and proper,

And he never now handles that butterfly net.

The centre, the vortex of shaping art guilt

Is now he who was here, I think:

www.ollyrowse.blogspot.com

 - that's not important -

the thing is, that splendid tyke's written a Play

And for sheer Love and Horror I'll crank out one too.

Those form one real reason - now time for some fake ones -

I can't ride with Guido! I'm not in the 'Sphere

I wield no power, not spitfire tins,

But Victorian railings spitespiked and fast rusting.

Well, back to the truth - the BBC offer

Twenty thousand pounds to a short story handler;

And if dreams elude me, maybe I can do coins,

And similar beasties. I shot off some prizes,

Antonio's argosies, then said goodbye

To Melpomene, Thalia, maybe not Clio

(Clio looks like you, Kirsty;

Becky, Euterpe's got your job, but the track record

Of Urania's better, and closer, with Sidney,

Mary Wrath, etc.)

Goodbye to the less than nine scholarly muses:

The anecdote chorus line, damsels sure met

In the forest wide, lucklessly tracked -

For I dreamt a comical story last night,

post too much Northanger:

not brilliant in itself, it folded these lines:

"Have you children?" "Stewart,

I'm a virgin." "So sorry.

Must be awful for them."