Tags
A game of several halves, a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside, “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”, Fickle tickle of Fate, Heads will roll, Only time will tail, poem, Poetry, Prosetry, sleight of hand command, The Devil is in the Detail
The accumulator calumniator:
A spender in dark mottled splendour
Which has coined a thousand phrases
Drops — never has it fallen so far.
Caught, it tic-tacs forwards
On crenulated tipster toes
Blind clothed in well-groped garb,
Seemingly heaven cent,
Dimed if it don’t
And dimmed if it does
It plucks from thin air a dare
That pays as it plays —
You have to be in it to win it.
The thoughtful sleight-of-handed
Celestial performer holds it close,
Tucked tight in hermetic fisted fingers;
Then undulates the opposite metacarpus
— In for one, in for one and all —
And so begins a slow unfolding
Of perfectly oiled, slick digits.
A dark-veined nail brings its bad-odds goods
To the tableau and . . . flicks
Pure pertinent luck,
Felicity spun from day to night
As up, up, up she goes and where she lands
Is a bluff of the prose.
Like Amy’s Back To Black, Jack,
Tiny grooves of torment roll up the walls
Whilst sparking and a-glowing;
And you wait for your fate
Hearing the birches scrape across panes
Whilst the wind milks cruel the moon.
‘Spare me one’ you cry in case
It’s a bad’un that marauds this chilly eve
Culled from the eyes of the lost,
Begged, mugged, borrowed, no matter matters,
For it may still leave you sickeningly short.
Hold the paper notes — there’s a chance of change,
A trick of favour that could break chains . . .
Or wreak havoc,
Murderously unfortunate,
A maddening wise-crack —
Who can possibly sway the say-so?
Now, when pinched
On the downwards journey we see
In its lee a tail that snaps from side to side,
Then a palm slaps buckled knuckles,
A head rolls and pivots . . . falls flat on its face.
Its mark is now made.
So billow a wish, eyes smashed tight
Sending love day and night until
Another new one spins your way.
For life’s a lottery
Hope just another ageing day;
This dreadful copper burnished bright,
It’s a hands down celestial steal
Prised from some personal hell’s wheel.
Your thoughts on this bilateral gamble
I am keen to glean;
So come, meet your maker of books,
Here to account for countless
Tossed and star-crossed coins.
A penny for them?
Place your bet Sincerely,
P. Dreadful.
Esme's Cloud 
I am not sure I have the entire gist of a narrative, but this sounds like story of a trickster, a pickpocket, a rogue. Someone who uses slight of hand to amaze, and apparently also knock somebody behind the head when they aren’t looking and can play a mean game of rigged 3 card Monty.
As always the flow is sublime as you play with words as a magician plays with your attention. Like all your poetry, it is often easy to lose the plot because of the way you dazzle us with your artful use of the English language. I loved this!
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Thank you Swarn. It’s an analogy of sorts for life; the flick of some coin on some otherworldly plain amounting to the gambles taken in life without realising it, or ones we don’t take at all, they just happen – that coin is slapped down for good or bad as we watch on trying to find sense in it all. Perhaps there is no sense to be found. Perhaps we make our own sense out of none. The penny is the skeleton here, the character flicking it no more than a prop, but a necessary one as he needed to be dark, and the bones are all the many phrases connected to pennies, which seemed to fit the bill. Have you heard of The Penny Dreadful? That’s the penny’s name at the end.
‘a mean game of rigged 3 card Monty.‘ – Rigged. Yes, probably.
My two favourite games at the amusement arcades that lined the seaside front were Penny Push and the One-Armed Bandits. Just one penny spent could equal a massive bounty of at least . . . two pounds in pennies I suppose, hahahahahaha. Also many public toilets in the UK would charge a penny to enter, so you would say you needed to ‘spend a penny’ when you wanted to go. Charging people to wee and poo, humans are quite something. I forgot ‘farthing’.
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Thank you for the explanation. I never mean for a poet to explain their poetry. I was way off apparently! Lol
But yes maybe not so much in the sense that maybe the theist vs atheist debate can be boiled down to whether the game is rigged or just a game of chance. I think our own cognitive biases lead us to seeing a rigged game, when it’s nothing if the sort. We are just applying meaning where none is to be found. I don’t think that’s ahead a bad thing until it becomes dogma.
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In some respects it drives both sides mad, though really it’s just the aliens beggaring about in their giant Sims game – Earth – Part Two. Part one was the dinosaurs. Part Three will involve jellyfish prominently I hear. And you’ve probably done many a favour for getting a reading out of me on this one, hahahahahaha. I like people to get their own gist generally, but ideally not leave them just puzzled. I don’t mind filling in the gaps at all mind you.
-Esme filling in as she goes along upon the Cloud
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Well I appreciate the explanation, especially so because of the depth of thoughtfulness to it. And again the artfulness of your word play, the homonyms, the breaking of compound words but using them intentionally to incorporate both meanings is a joy to read. ❤
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‘the homonyms‘ – By the by there’s a small family of Homonyms who live in The Cloud’s aga stove during summer and then migrate during the summer to Easter Island where they have a small holding under one of the chins.
Thank you dear Swarn, you are a love, and I do appreciate your words. ❤
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I mention Amy in the poem, being Amy Winehouse, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her? It was all terribly tragic, she was an incredible writer and singer who died too young, and here, right here is the first and only ever to be seen live clip of Esmeralda Cloud in the crowd watching Amy sing Back to Black at Glastonbury 2007.
Just in front of the flag.
Don’t say I don’t give you anything.
Hahahahahaha
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Now repeat after me: Person, woman, man, camera, TV.
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Hahahahahahahahahaha. Hey gorgeous (as he introduces himself on Twitter, this is true). He’s being sharp to you Swarn, tsk. However, she is very, very funny and I’m happy to host her anytime.
Feel free to actually mention the Godamn poem whilst you muck up the welcome mat eh?
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You’re at your best with this style; but I don’t normally compliment people in the clouds as they might get flustered and a fall from those heights could be fatal.
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The odd crumb helps survival mind, so thank you. And I’m not easily flustered either. Hahahahaha.
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There’s a tremendous sense of rhythm present here, Esme, which eases perfectly fittingly in the closing stanza. I see it as a stream-of-consciousness piece by and large, in that whilst there is a thread running through it, it’s highly fractured, constantly darting into abstractions or branching off down oblique avenues. This is how we think to ourselves privately, by and large, though few will admit as much, or even know that it is so. Our inner selves are nowhere near as orderly as the social performance we present to the world. It’s a juggling with loosely related imagery whilst neither hand quite knows which piece of imagery will land in it next. I suppose the subconscious is at least in part our ‘celestial performer’, along with his glamorous and sequinned assitant Felicity. But then nothing stands alone, nothing comes out of nothing and our subconscious itself is formed by countless billions of sensory contacts with the external world. In that sense, it’s all a spin of the wheel as to where our balls land. Tremendous work — many congratulations. Hariod
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Rhythm is top boss with any writing but especially poetry, and double that espresso expression if there’s not specific rhyming format, so I’m really pleased it has that going on so well Hariod. Tremendously no less! Thank you, it’s always interesting how others interpret our offerings and this one started with one penny, possibly dreadful, possibly not but certainly grubby from having been through so many hands, so many lives, luck of the draw where it ends up and what carnage occurs along the way. It’s less structured than even that technically, however, I’m a big fan of booting ‘technically’ out the window as you know, hahahahaha. I love the name ‘Penny Dreadful’, an excellent choice for a set of stories.
‘along with his glamorous and sequinned assistant Felicity‘ – falls about Kendal in her heyday?
Very kind of you to come over and tell me such wonderful things H ❤
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My Ode to an Inspiring Esmeal Poet
Ever-weaving interleafing
Kinetically quilting quitting
Faultline-letter rendering
Insertioning
Magical embodiments slipping
For earthquake-making taking
Joints breaking and snaking
Desertioning
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Esmeal Clood forward rolls, jumps to her feet and shakes Bills hand warmly for the wondrous ode! Great stuff, thank you!
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Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
WELL-DONE POEM!
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Well thank you kindly Mighty Mumford! Very kind of you to spread a little Cloud around, I’m pleased you enjoyed it.
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WHO’D DARE THROW ROTTEN CABBAGES??????
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I know, you just can’t get the paid audiences these days!
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😀
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Nice blog
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Thanking you kindly Saania.
Esme handing over a plate with a piece of lemon drizzle cake on it for the kind words
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