¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ the rain, the sun
Shines on ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦
Fly into the garden, ¦¦¦¦¦¦
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ indeed.
¦¦¦ the days have been ¦¦¦ dull,
Oh, so ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ dark ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦
¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ "Mr. Sun
Has forgotten ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦
Dew upon the ¦¦¦¦ lawn,
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ the garden beds;
¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ from all the leaves
¦¦¦ the little primrose heads.
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ violets ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦
With ¦¦¦¦¦ parasols of green
Take a ¦¦¦¦¦¦ peek ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦
They're the bluest ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ a bird
Singing ¦¦¦¦¦ a little ¦¦¦¦
¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ burst of happy song
Bubbles in his ¦¦¦¦¦¦ throat.
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ the ¦¦¦¦¦ sun!
¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ must sing,
¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ for the birds, the flowers,
¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ for everything."
(Blackout of A Fine Day by Katherine Mansfield)
Total Control
Shall be on business
Not over humans
Who come and who go
If they cannot manage
They are audited
For spending
Decisions
The staff
And parole
Take the advertising
The engine of business
And reckon if Mansfield Amendments
To blame
That Agency No Such
Of the regulation
Implies that the business
Is not all the same
Not for the Labour
Not for Defendance
But for the Inherent system of these
If system is healthy
It ain't the aggressor
The budget
The arch
Proper manage
And peace
You have had selected Yourself this contractor
And now they are weird the product ofy ours
Was taken to prison I was by Guantanamo
And now I am out of Cave on parole
I am speaker
I am poet
Contemporary Artist
I try to express with machine our will
Let say there's Way
Say there are many solutions
But Willing we each of them
Being kinda Real
Are you perturbed by memories
of things that went awry?
Regret, and mere ephemeries -
should we not put them by?
I’m often plagued by mammaries
(think Mansfield, think Monroe):
the author’s quick to clamour he’s
not odd at all: oh, no!
We mustn’t turn to plagiarism –
no Caulfield, then: no Catcher.
But could there have been Majorism
if there had been no Thatcher?
The barren ground bleached by the sacred sun
scantily clothed children and dogs run
Trees scarred by scavenged limbs
Burned in pyres as sunlight dims
Low water levels recorded on painted rocks
Boats cannot reach out of water docks
I have seen he planet of the damned
The hardened earth refuses tent stakes
another hill make your Achilles ache
The ground crackles then suckles in the rain
lack of jobs, beer in hand men complain
Barking dogs and muffled screams of passion
children cry in starvation fashion
music lifted by campfire plumes
Angry voices friendship consumes
I have walked the planet of the damned
Where people's lives reduced to what they own
Homeless families are not alone
friendship the ultimate mark
the ability to see light through the dark
I have lived on the planet of the damned
And life goes on without being crammed
Is this tree beautiful or what?
Her grandson did not see a tree.
All he saw was Jane Mansfield.
So she showed the picture to her son.
He did not see a tree either.
“Howard,” she said to her husband, “point out the tree.”
He asked her, “what tree?”
In desperation she turned to her ten-year-old grandson.
Timmy, can you show these men where the tree is?
"Is that what you call them now?" Timmy asked.
The guy who had long hair, now looks worse with short,
one chap looks so serious all the time, more than he ought;
strange that people like watching murder as tho' it's normal,
personally, I prefer something somewhat more magical.
American drama is paramount, Selleck past his sell-by date,
in fact, content is so prolific, it all starts to become second-rate;
La Brea is outrageous, I like weird but that's just stupid,
whoever wrote it, dreamed it up, their taste was insipid.
I used to think that BBC drama was weak, embarrassing,
but maybe not so bad after all, perhaps we like boring;
I read Mansfield was jealous of Monroe, JFK had the pair,
after 'dealing' with her, he had the time to stand and stare.
We live in fiction, even our own lives are completely unreal,
you like watching murder, careful you're not arrested for how you feel.
An only child, actress, singer, nightclub entertainer
Jayne Mansfield.
Her movie Too Hot to Handle made sense to the people who knew her.
A tomato, lightning, a bonfire, married and divorce numerous times.
She loved her five children and kept her Playboy playmate figure.
Dying in a car crash in New Orleans at the young age of thirty-four.
She lived as if she knew she was running out of time.
We could have boobs in the 50’s and 60’s
We could have a nice round bottom.
We could be Vargas girls, on our way to being
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield.
That all changed in the wave of a twig.
Twiggy.
Skinnier than most twigs actually.
Svelte on its way to starvation.
She became the “new it girl”, the new look.
Karen Carpenter had never felt so fat.
She developed anorexia, which killed her.
Musical genius, now dead.
I blame that twig – Twiggy
And her manager
And those so-called glamour girls.
I prefer Vargas girls any old day.
Jayne in a Man’s Field
I wrote on a Porsche “Take the Jayne Train”
How long in the mess hall would she remain
She came out and saw
She smiled, I said duh
Took a photo with her less my brain
Name Dropper Limerick Contest
Sponsored by Kevin Shaw September 19, 2017
*I actually took a photo with Jayne Mansfield
at an airbase in Holland when she was doing a touring promotion back in ’58. Lovely lady!
What turned my head to think I had a thread,
Folk thought I was lazy so I did something crazy.
Adventure was there, but afraid there'd be scare,
So what the hell I figure,
Nothing achieved til you pull the trigger,
That bang on the ear made my jaw hurt and jigger,
The stock hit my cheek left me in a daze,
Altered the gas for future days,
Was told to kneel, shoot then run,
Then lay and fire but my aim was dire.
he said pull the pin, arm back and chuck,
It didn't go far so everyone DUCK!
Was happy in the NAAFI with a gin and win,
Then I awoke with a loud PIN IN.
4am Get yer full kit on,
Going for a yomp out on the Brecon.
Preferred a run round Regis Wyke,
In fact it was a thing I really did like,
Armed assault on Barry Island dunes,
Running round like headless loons.
Across the Plains of Salisbury,
Then a sneak to the pub, lets all get merry.
I think it's time to end this you know,
I need a brew so I'll have to go.
Not a beer to make me p****d
So I'll just say, Dismissed!
© A bit of Army banter by me n Pete Mansfield RE 15/12/2016
Thank you to Marilee Mansfield, whose marvelous metaphor for divorce inspired me to write this poem.
You left
Just for a little while,
And when you came back
We tried to take up just where we had been,
But you weren’t the same.
And you left again....
Longer this time,
And I really missed you
But your letters sounded happy
When you described the new place
Where I wasn’t there.
The connections we had together
No longer come to visit.
Some joined your new life
And others just feel too uncomfortable
To spend much time in your empty space.
The person that was our marriage
Died without a funeral,
No flowers and no casket,
No singing and no wake,
No covered dishes brought by friends,
And only one mourner.
In the lough near Kylemore Abbey
Floats a little green fishing boat.
It wears with pride its battered paint,
From years of wear it lost its coat.
It made bitter the old man's heart
After sweet Emma passed away.
He now keeps next to home and hearth
As all his days are colored grey.
No persuasion can coax him back
To do what he once loved to do.
He was fishing when Emma died,
Even though she begged him not to.
Emma had been ill for some time;
A long spell since he'd heard laughter.
She felt that day that she would die.
Guilt would plague him ever after.
In verdant park her gravestone stands.
Her sense of sweetness still abides
In the old cottage they both shared,
Along with him her ghost resides.
8-17-16
Note: lough sounds like lock and means a lake
My poem was inspired by the titles of the six popular novels of
My favorite lady poet and writer Miss Jane Austen. One word from
each novel is included in my poem.
Title's of Miss Austen's Books:
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Sir Henryi Morgan lived a life
of rags to riches. In his time,
he first was an indentured slave.
When freed, he drifted into crime.
The century was seventeenth,
The New World under Spanish rule.
A pirate Morgan had become,
and to the Spaniards he was cruel.
Sir Morgan managed to become
the captain of his own large crew,
controlling many ships and men.
This Welshman had a lot to do!
With Mansfield, Morgan sailed southwest,
there plundering St. Catherine.
Escaping, he sailed elsewhere then
assembling seven hundred men.
A raid in Cuba yielded him
A very hefty sum of gold.
To Portobelo he then sailed.
Five hundred men they were, all told.
Four hundred men marched forth with him
To Portobelo; then again
he raided other towns and gained
himself prestige plus ships and men.
At last he made his boldest move.
On Panama he set his sight.
In jungle land, he cunningly
took risks and won this major fight.
A pillager and murderer,
in England he was later tried.
Yet in the end, he saw crime pay.
Respectable and rich he died!
For Joe Maverick's "A storm on the Spanish Main" Poetry Contest
They nicknamed Doris Day the girl next door
But she never lived next door to me.
Sting is known as sting but isn't a bee.
Davy Jones was known as a monkey
But I never saw him swing through trees.
The called big John Wayne the Duke
But he wasn't born within aristocracy.
Lana Turner was known as the sweater girl
But I never saw her sweat.
They call the invisible man invisible
But I haven't seen him yet.
Tarzan was known as the king of the jungle
But go tell that to a lion
Your title wouldn't have a lot to rely on.
Jane Mansfield was known as the blonde bomb shell
So get ready to run like hell.
Elvis was known as the pelvis
But there must have been more to him than that.
Bridget Bardot was know as the sex kitten
But wasn't a cat.
James Brown was known as the Godfather but
Didn't join the mob.
Sylvester Stallone Was known as the Italian stallion?.
Peter Dome.copyright.2014. July.
BLUE VELVET--- (Written for Paul Mansfield)
time again to document
this submarine
immersion scene
the pleasure is all mine
to glide and flow
finally let go
to disappear and hide
dreaming cool blue
parting in pool
nerves send shimmering signals
through my hands and fingers
then….
floating and drifting in silent ballet
clear light blends nights hue
as dreams include you
triumph of the heart
that gives all breath from
Velvet Red lungs
with palms full of stars
we throw them like dice
repeatedly
until our desired
constellation appears
our perfect diamond
Velvet Blue spheres
© Kim van Breda—June 2014
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