Poetry dump Movie review for Sweeney Todd: Sweeney slits throats, Mrs Lovett cooks stiffs, Pirelli's shaved close, Judge Turpin damns kids. The Beadle's shriek-whistle, Sweeney's tipping contraption, Meat pies and their gristle, All give satisfaction, But it's not for the queasy. I'm slightly reserved about Johnny Depp Who impersonates Sweeney Like a man unpossessed. Without any depth. Fear and Loathing in London,  Scissorhands in a slasher,  Willy Wonka with vengeance, Jack Sparrow with razors.   His singing is honest  His acting's quite fine  But the role's painted on him  It's not from inside.  The pacing is spot on,  The visuals astonish,  2 thumbs up to Tim Burton  And 3 thumbs to Sondheim. 6 POETRY COMPETITION CONTENDERS  WRITING WITH LIGHT   A shadow in a shadow in my eye,  A glimmer on the edges of my sight,   Quiet colour in the palette of the sky,  Spirits which suffuse and are not bright,  Sparse images be signs to mark the way  For silent powers to infiltrate and burn  And fascinating ghosts to illustrate  The threads which crowded surfaces inter.  Discern, discriminate and then discard  Glare to draw lucidity from light  By speaking sparely in my photographs             About the numina of dark and light.  Then irridescent animalia gleam  In darkness and illumine dark in me. THE JOURNEY  - I, the father, you, the son,  Through man's small soul,  A needle's hole,   The journey to each other has begun.                         - Into an empty room I am become,  Announced, anointed, prophesied,  To walk in desert, death beside,  I, the world, and you, the sun.  - Be wWorldly, otherworldly boy.  Be l And lithe, be and blithe, beloved son.  Be grave, be graceful as you run  Across rocks to Calvary  - I have run into tomorrow.   Passion rises like a tide  And Death rises with a rhythmic stride.  Father, be near me now.  - Be quick, be still, be overcome.  Being still forever run  Across the world into the sun.  The journey to each other has begun.  STALINGRAD SNIPER  This city has the name of the boss,  Steel city, iron cross.  Myself alone, a living rock,  Unstringing Germans shot by shot.  Steel city, wire rope.  Who enters here abandons hope.  God's bureaucrats are in my scope.  How many divisions has the pope?  A quick quietus as they hear me  Is my gift if they come near me.  They cannot touch me and revere me.  Let them hate me if they fear me.  I hate their life. I hate their death.  I hate them and their dying breath.  I hate the hate itself. Now rest.  I'm dead.You're dead.We're dead.They're dead.          Sail in stealth in ghostly shrieks  Across the Volga and the Styx.  Ruins recede. Sight is thick.  Steel city, jagged brick. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU                                                                           My photo shows a big grey sky, Woods at the end of a railway line And where people were divided by SS. In trees exploded ruins lie. Cold grief hangs in the summer air And cold revenge for taking where Demonic things were done. There's Not peace, but cold suspense of war. There's not words becoming men To speak the adequate revenge. In space made by appeasing man Evil is because it can, But come the man, come the power, Come the angel, come the hour. A MOUNTAINEER FORESEES HIS DEATH Awake on Everest I smell the wind. A dragon wind invades a dream of death, Piles stones around my head and rips my skin, And makes me stone, who smelt his lonely strength. Transfigured in the dream's geography I walk into the circle of the sky, Into the clouds which are my family, Into the wind where fatal dragons fly To fall into the centre of my self, To choose an angle of repose in air, To balance in delight this life this death To choose this final place because it's there, Clad in what I am, essential,I, Bone,stone,Mallory.   A FAMILY BIRTHDAY IN WINTER IN DEN HAAG  Bourgeois Valhalla, brick  Benoordenhout               Is rich with emblems and foreseen memories,    Haunting herons, giant forest owls,  The spirit selves of Grace and you and me.  In dark and darker days and neon nights  Sinisterly zoftig  'sGravenhage  Summons shadow armies to the sky  Signifying something is to change  Or has changed and memory plays tricks.  The cold flares up. The wind dies down.  Their patina is frozen from the bricks.  The darkest days are crowding round  And in this spirit time and place  A cackle for your birthday bursts from Grace. ======================== THE JOURNEY 25 Dec 99  - I, the father, you, the son,  Through man's small soul,  A needle's hole,   The journey to each other has begun                         - Into an empty room I am become,  Announced, anointed, prophesied,  To walk in deserts, death beside,  I, the world, and you the sun.  - Be worldly, otherworldly boy.  Be lithe, be blithe, beloved son.  Be grave, be graceful as you run  Across the rocks to Calvary  - I have run into tomorrow.   Passion rises like a tide.  Death rises with a rhythmic stride.  Father, be near me now.  - Be quick, be still, be overcome.  Forever rest, forever run  Across the world into the sun.  The journey to each other has begun.  WRITING WITH LIGHT   A shadow in a shadow in my eye,  Spirits who suffuse and are not bright,  Quiet colour in the palette of the sky,  A shimmer on the edges of my sight,  Sparse images be signs to mark the way  For silent powers to infiltrate and burn  And fascinating ghosts to illustrate  The threads which crowded surfaces inter.  Discern, discriminate and then discard  Glare and draw lucidity from light  By speaking sparely in my  photographs             About the numina of dark and light  And irridescent animalia gleam  In darkness and illumine dark in me.   STALINGRAD SNIPER  Steel city, iron cross.  This city has the name of the boss.  Myself alone, a living rock,  Unstringing Germans shot by shot.  Steel city, wire rope.  Who enters here abandons hope.  God's bureaucrats are in my scope.  How many divisions has the pope?  A quick quietus as they hear me  Is my gift if they come near me.  They cannot touch me and revere me.  Let them hate me if they fear me.  I hate their life. I hate their death.  I hate them and their dying breath.  I hate the hate itself. Now rest.  I'm dead.You're dead.We're dead.They're  dead.          I sail in stealth by ghostly shrieks  Across the Volga and the Styx.  Ruins recede. My sight is thick.  Steel city, jagged brick. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU                                                                           My photo shows a big grey sky, Woods at the end of a railway line And where people were divided by SS. In trees exploded ruins lie. Cold grief hangs in the summer air And cold revenge for taking where Demonic things were done. There's Not peace, but cold suspense of war. There are no words becoming men Finally to solve this war Or speak an adequate revenge. Come the man. Come the hour. In space made by appeasing man Evil is because it can. A MOUNTAINEER FORESEES HIS DEATH A dragon wind invades my dream of death. It piles stones around my head and rips my skin. It makes me stone, who smelt his lonely strength. Awake on Everest I smell the wind. Transfigured in my dream's geography I walk into the circle of the sky, Into the clouds which are my family, Into the wind where fatal dragons fly And choose this final place because it's there To fall into the centre of my self, And choose an angle of repose in air, To balance in delight this life and death And clad in what I am, essential, I Am bone, I am stone, I am Mallory. - ICELAND What I learnt in Iceland - Rhubarb's a stem and not a fruit, Prunes and muesli make you toot, But snorchestras will drown out wind. Allegedly (I'm not convinced) Box jellyfish aren't jellyfish and Greenland is further east than Iceland. A Minister of Elvish Matters Defines the routes of roads and detours. Dottirs and ssons of Irish slaves Kill foxes, whales, whatever moves. But there's a certain charm in grimness, Tax evasion, drunken primness, Real men who smell of fish and semen, Strapping horses, strapping women. Volcanic science, Car-mangling giants, Fire and ice, I think it's nice. GRAPPA IN THE BLOOD From a modern hotel on a Norwegian fjord : "Sun in the eyes - grappa in the blood" Confessing to flies - sweating a flood Last sheet of bogroll - face in a flush Losing your balance - life in the bush These are a few of Finn's favourite things And these are the gifts that Namibia brings. Nature is calling - life is a passage Don't poo-poo our offer - don't pass by our package But pass us your Euros to tour the turd world With the dusty delight of relieving yourself At the Norechab No-Star No-Plumbing Hotel (Ask your guide about spiders and scorpion as well).  BUY  GARRY A DRINK                                                                             Buy him a drink to light and death  To choke him with his dying breath  The light to light his way to night  And death because there's nothing left.  Spill the dregs on canvas skins.  His duty's done, descent begins  Through light to death and death to light.  So spin the wheel and spin him as it  spins.          TOUPEE  OR NOT TOUPEE  Toupee or not toupee.That is the question.  Whether 'tis nobblier on the mind to plant a rug  Of curls and curlicues of artificial hair  Or to take ointments 'gainst the curse of slaphead  And by anointing end it ? To shine, to comb  No more; or with a wig to strike a pose  Against the moulting of a thousand natural locks  Which make a hairdo - 'tis a flocculation  Devoutly to be swished; to dye, to streak.  To streak, perchance brylcreem.Aye there's the rub.   ACADIA  Acadia, Mansell, Bernard, Beech,  Sauveur, Penobscot, Valley Peak,  Pemetic, Sargent, Dorr, North Bubble,  Gorham, Champlain, Connor Nubble:  I banged my head on icy tracks  All for the sake of Cadillac.  Imagine my concussive shock-  We could have driven to the top.  Goddamn.                                                                  RIGHT ATTENTION                                                   Look relaxed, relax your look,  Smile quietly under shining skies,  Stand loosely where the others walk,  See straight into averted eyes. AUDEN in NEW YORK In a dive on 52nd street The English Wystan Auden sat. Erotic dust was what he knew, But not the Proletariat. Collective Man he'd never met. Imperialism, Democracy - Big, windy words and cheap to speak In exile from his poetry.   SLICK WILLY A smooth politician from Hope Played greasypole games with his soap. Fairy Liquid was fancy For Ronald and Nancy Slick Willy Palmolives his stroke.      GOODBYE, MATHILDE On Scheveningen beach flies up a kite. Mathilde Schnauzer walks at Kirsten's side, The three of us parading at high tide, Examining an unexamined life.   A double rainbow draws a double line Above a progress comic and sublime, Tiptipping thru the world duchesa-like And constant in inconstancy of time. Time comes to join the circle round her life,         To circumscribe the flirt, the appetite For plumcake and the smelly world outside. Mathilde smells the sea the sand the sky. She came and went and what is left behind    Is essence of an unexamined mind . Don't look too close there is a proper time To let the mind evolve and just be quiet. The kite describes the unexamined wind. The tame is a veneer for what is wild. A child sees her. Mathilde leaves your side, Tiptipping silently towards the child.  HELLO, GRACE 22 June 2001 We turned around and there was Grace,           Colliding from another place, From inner into middle space, Event horizons in her face, Nothing from nothing,  Grace from grace. We turned around and there was us, A fusion made without a fuss With charm and stangeness, down and up, Fertile fundamental stuff, Nothing, nothing, you, me, us. Guide our marriage and our child Simplify our laws of life. Define our triple interface With the fundamental force of grace.  GOODBYE, HARLEY                                 Harley Hauschildt take this kiss      To catty nothingness or bliss. If bliss,  know Kirsten's man like this; He knows a cat for what it is. Be leopardlike in afterlife. Bait dog with tailtip in its face. Look straight with your unweeping eye. Unblink at fidget human gaze. Manhattan's numbered dawns and days Light human and unhuman ways. Mathilde, Tonto, Kirsten,  Mark Still move here in the light and dark. When I lie down, confused, to die, May some unsimpering cat come by To calm me with his touch and murmur, To care and not to care, a brother.                                 PLUMCAKE "I value the physical sensation of sexual intercourse  about as highly as I value a piece of plumcake"  - Shaw in a letter which I gave my mother-in-law. I will not meditate on sex, I'll meditate on something serious: 'Plumcake's' the thing in anglo-sax. 'Pflaumkuchen' makes it sound mysterious. If you are sick in life or love And love's untruths are hard to take, Book Gerti for a belly rub Or better still a piece of cake. Her cake's a better bet than sex. Its sultry scent seduced my nose. I tasted pflaumen and I went To places you don't want to know. Some sing of Sachertorte's charms And Belgian chocs for melting hearts, But give me Kirsten in my arms And Gerti Hauschildt's fruity tart. I won't compare one with the other, The sensual cake made by the mother, The daughter's fruity love-baked kisses. My soulfood isn't GBS's. So, Gerti, here's a yellow letter. Shaw's brain still fizzes on the sheet. It's lightly given. please remember Free spirits have their cake and eat it. (Or have the courage to throw it away).    ANIMALS                                                              Spiders, snakes, dry-humoured bats, Octopussies, even cats;  Mark and Kirsten dig these critters. Bats with batty ears and whiskers, Spiders orchestrating webs Everywhere with eyes and legs, Snakes the poison jewels of life, Cats-the fat that scratch and bite, The thin-the cat that walks alone, The thinlyfatcat danger prone. Octopussies, muscly boys, Are passive, active, paranoid. An octokiss or lippysuction Is a kind of fat reduction. And if you want an octohickey Tender suckers splotch you quickly. Octos, pussies, bats, snakes, spiders; Mark and Kirsten dig these critters, But man which names himself the wise- It can be hard to like these guys.  ANNIVERSARY                                                       22 June 2000                                                A year of you a year of me Until our uneternity. Unbound and bounded, bound and free, We are the same deliberately. It changes and it stays the same, A ceremony and a game, A crystal in the entropy, The will of you the will of me. You know me and are known by me And own me and are owned by me. Be still. Recall you married me By drifting sand and drifting sea. Two rings will ring us two in one,  A symbol, but a simple one.  Speak simply when you speak my name. Love changes and it stays the same. PRESENT 10 Dec 2002                                                            My simple present to my chosen bride As we decide to act out chosen lives Is a thought experiment to set aside Resentment by defining where it lies. Define a line. Call it ‘now’. Define our hurt and love on either side. Give love alone the transcendental power Of moving back and forth. Let hurt abide. The line divides what’s been and is to be, Which make a mental dance with what is now, So in this psycho-choreography Old damage is delineated out. Why do this? To choose the thing I am And turn our wounded steps to loving dance.     ON LOCATION                                                     Down mean Manhattan's streets I sauntered          Into a girl with size 10 feet.     Appropriately Attired it flaunted     Its credibility in the street.     Hair-Steven G, white pants, white top; West 10, pm,  NY, NY. Manhattan woman in its pomp And image-poacher,little I.           My Canon's crosswires stroked its face. The autofocus hummed and whirred,  But with a meaning moan this Grace Stared and glared and hissed these words: "Please stick your tripod where it hurts. Keep trucking,  mister, cease to bug me. Some day I'll drool about your work. Today the camera doesn't love me. My picture's mine not yours to take. I'm just not in the mood for smiling. My hair's not soigne' or my face. My feet aren't copasetic either." It made a face to make me stone. It snarled and spat and clicked its teeth. I shut my eyes and snapped this Gorgon. I stole the face but missed the feet. What's this to do with Gerti's birthday ? Not much, except to make you laugh. Teach Kirsten more snaphappy ways And make her safe to photograph.  ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY to my unborn child 10 Dec 2000 Piscis, avis, chimpanzee, As DNA is debonair Insouciantly swim in air To you, but on the way to you is me. What will I to you ?  This above all:  Let me be true to me in you And you to your own self be true, Then we cannot be false. English, Jewish, German, American cells, Deoxyribonucleic tides Sedately twine and gently slide Till starstuff turn angelic in our girl.   KIRSTEN'S BIRTHDAYS 10 Dec 98 On my 1st birthday I was naught Is what they thought. At 1 I wailed,my legs grew long, My will grew strong. At 2 I grew. At 3 I grew. At 4 I knew I was a girl. At 5 I had a memory, a history,a ponytail.  At 6 I saw sex is a bore. Then 7 came and I forgot. Pflaumkuchen kicked in strong at 8 And after that I grew a lot. My hair was summer-white at 9, My skin was summer fair. I swam in leafy lakes at 10, I ran in leafy air. 11 made me self-aware, My reproductive power was there. 12 brought self-love, 13 self-hate. The years will now accelerate And 20 birthdays more have come. At 33 I'm growing young. I swim again in leafy lakes  And go again in leafy air With my lover who delights  To look upon my yellow hair. My lover wishes this for me In 20 years I'll younger be. He wishes this for me and him In leafy lakes we'll always swim.     FLYING TO AUSTRALIA                                                   10 Dec 99 Here it is - a flying kiss With nearly supersonic lips, A jumbo splat, mid-air attack To make your flying arms go flap. Between Australia and UK Your birthday vapourised today. It vanished  in the sky behind 10 December 99. Your present disappeared as well, So here's a rock from Hotazel, A Kalahari healing stone, 2 billion birthdays underground. So if your bones ache in the dark, Remember rock, remember Mark. Hip hip hooray for Wesselite 3 cheers for me that you're my wife.    PRESENTS 25 Dec 98 Bless these little cotton socks.                                                  May they save your feet from shocks. May they save your feet from pounding On the  paving stones of London. May they make you blithely walk On the sidewalks of New York. When the wind would bite your toes, Crossing Tower or Brooklyn bridges, Never fear how cold it blows Because I lined these socks with kisses. Bless these Japanese binox. May they zoom where eyesight stops And eyeball alligators' eyes. May splashing dolphins make you blink. Be beamed high up by this device To lunar seas and Saturn's rings. But when you put away these lenses Look to see who looks at you. See in my face the evidences Of sea and sky and stone.                                                                 COSTA RICA A New Jersey girl loved her toes so She waggled her foot-fruit a-go-go. From the side of a boat in the jungle They dangled. Alas, she had bungled. Croc teeth left one little toe solo.   ECL Experience Compression Laboratorium they fuck you up your mum and dad they may not mean to but they do they give you all the faults they had and add some extra just for you but they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one anothers throats man hands on misery to man it deepens like a costal shelf so get out quickly while you can and dont have any kids yourself. philip larkin   it fucks you up your sexual drive you know it will it always does it gives you all its sleepless nights and adds some nightmares just for fun Ersatz & Satzer arent for real but Minipix and anal probes will take us to a better deal it hurts at first but later glows the sharks are circcling all around white-tips, great whites,hammerheads. the hammerheads are winning now but Minipix will get ahead all around us in the sea theres photoluminosity if you think thats obscurity go swim at night at half past three they call them needs theyre really wants me-me me-me me-me me-me de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum and so on to infinity   but dont devalue words with slush keep them polished up and sharp some day youll need words without mush to stick them in some others heart   ECL, Direct Report, betty,craig,dawn,greg and scott water words and whisky words on one hours sleep dont mean a lot. WIP/SCRAPS MARK and MARION She has tarried to be married And been skittish to be British We hope she’s chuffened to be Uffened BECAUSE IT’S TOO LATE NOW. Ethics I do not know and do not care  if right and wrong are absolute Or tangible like earth and air The same applies to lies and truth The same applies to beauty too For sean and daniella in namibia We wandered in air and wandered in dunes And a rocodile river beneath a ghost moon Giant herons and snakebirds watched as we went To etosha sossusvlei fish river and then Orange river and norechab south from the north And back in a circle, Daniella and Sean, When you travel alone or you travel together May your journey be charmed on the road to each other. 10 dec 2005 goodbye 2005 hello what's left of life goodbye sprinkles hello wrinkles goodbye shenanigans hello quadragenarians goodbye pheromones hello senior moments goodbye cigarettes hello senior sex goodbye 39 hello slow decline goodbye 39 hello goodbye goodbye the life when you were bad 40 is so old it's sad the wrinklies and the crumblies beckon and soon the zombies too I reckon still teasing keeps you young at heart your elderly admirer, Mark