Captain Toad and Fat Mary

Mr Toad in his green, narrow boat

rode the River lanes as if on broken horseback.

 

Super Trouper searchlight streams

a film from long ago - the Cut,

canoe - a fire (and a madman

looking for another madman) port side;

 

engine purrs, dogs awaken,

‘Alarum! Alarum!’ Not drowning, Toad,

just woken - waving from the porthole

starboard side, Apocalypse mistaken.

 

When Toady's sober and the party's over

he'd take the tiller from here to Dover

(If rivers were less locks and longer)

instead he pootles up and down, 

the Super Trouper beams 'til dawn.

Our Captain scans the banks for harm,

engine purrs...dogs howl

5AM 'Alarum!'

5/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNWsuzsXccY

Fat Mary was an ugly old trout

as old as Loch Ness and seen as often, less,

by the throng from here about.

 

Fishermen do not want her - they sail away, up anchor

when they discover she was born with teeth, a smile,

a humped back like a whale, surfacing

occasionally, singing Brahms.

 

Fat Mary was legendary. You could look and look

and never find her – and now, all these years later

if patient enough, and honest enough – quiet enough

brave enough, from a widescreen window

she will leap, thinking she’s a dolphin and landing like a bomb,

singing an Ode to a Hummingbird, caught in the beam of a Super Trouper

by Captain Toad’s green boat.

https://thesublimeblog.org/2019/03/06/ode-to-the-hummingbird-neruda/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t894eGoymio Brahms lullaby

A crash of stumbling beer cans, a can of worms,

a peg leg, the scratch of an old 78 – and in the lullaby

under the water, Mary knew whisky

made Toad’s hate elongated, his verbs

barraging, thronging the slipstream.

Mary a bird? A wife, mother, chick, bomb, hen?

She bubbled – he’d been feeding the coots again!

 

 

Dear Mary, you never knew how to.

The others had if only you knew cinnamon sprinkled

on their Rice Crispies. Two doting parents,

an extended family network

of various species to tell you

you were cute coot. You are hungry,

You are angry.

 Are you sad? Who are you?

II am Hans Christian Anderson.” and he spits in his spittoon.

“Those stories are for grown-ups, Mary!'

 

Mary wrings the soft petalled top waters through her gills.

Until dusk, she was glad he was off balance.

Ancient fish need time, an underbelly the patina of

experience, twirling the flotsam petals

side-stroking the blind. Toad would cruise

for water when the moon was blue

and Mary must catch a ride.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eJiZutTZMk

Moving on song. Go Move Shift

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeZmPDdFPE

Cover your eyes

5/2020