Overnight poetry blogging

Yes, the timestamp is correct.  It's almost 3 am and I'm wide awake.  I always get in this kind of state, where I'm exhausted during the day and wide awake at night.  So I thought I'd try the old standby of blogging myself to sleep.

At the end of my first year in Oxford, I went to a lecture by Michael Swan on language teaching.  He was very interesting and funny, and at the end he shared some of his poetry.  I Googled his stuff tonight and found quite a few of his poems that I like, and will share here.  Enjoy!

Your Poem

Your poem
is rather heavily made up.
It has thick eye shadow
and is plastered with lipstick.
Your poem
is wearing a cantilever bra
and a skirt
with a split
right up to the armpits.

My poem
is not made up at all.
It has flat heels
its hair is cut sensibly
its fingernails are short.
There is nothing flashy about my poem.
The clear light of sincerity
radiates from its eyes
(which are set
rather close together).

My poem
is somewhat contemptuous of your poem
but I have to admit
that yours is the one that gets the men.
(Mine once got asked
to a folk concert
but the guy
didn't turn up.)

We Tried to Tell You

In a shabby pub
down a back street
late one evening
I found my old maths master
sitting at a corner table
crying.

Not a pretty sight,
an old maths teacher
weeping into his beer.

‘Let me tell you this,’
he said.
‘It does not add up.
It does not fucking add up.

Two plus two
is a random number.

The angles of a triangle
make 37 degrees,
or 460, or minus 11,
or nothing you can determine.
Circles bulge.
Squares don’t have enough corners.
Parallel lines
all meet
or do not exist
or go where they bloody feel like.
The x axis
does not come on the same page
as the y axis.

There is no geometry
that fits our space.

You get on the number 4 bus for the station
and when you arrive
it is flight 968 to Istanbul
diverted to Manchester
and you have to walk back.

Time leaks out of the clock
and scampers off sideways.

One woman
is three women
or no woman,
not necessarily
in that order.

You bastards knew all that
didn’t you?
You knew it all along,’
he said,
knocking over his beer.

‘We tried to tell you,’
I said.
‘We tried to tell you.’

Lost in Translation

This poem has been translated
from a language
that is no longer spoken
in order to give it
a wider readership.
Inevitably
it has lost something
in the process
the original is written
in hendacasyllables
with a complex internal rhyme scheme
and is about something completely different.