Time To Be Great Again, My Lord

SPANNERS
by: Sippican Cottage

Sun’s beaming in the window,
There’s rumbling from the floor,
We’re swinging while we’re swaging
Boxes dancing out the door.

Oh how our muscles ripple,
We’re making twenty knots,
We’re alternating; current —
We’re glowing with the watts.

Pounding down the corridors,
With Bill of Lading piles;
Our output’s put the boss on ice
We’re blowing out the dials.

They count the beans but can’t keep up,
We’re cooking with the gas;
Our arms are made from tempered steel,
Our heart is made of brass.

That brass is rolled to make a tube,
The tube is bent just so;
And if we blow that trumpet, Jack,
The girls get all aglow.

The whistle blows at five o’clock,
It’s twenty-three skidoo;
The guys and gals that made that stuff,
Go out for dancing too.

They box the compass of the steps
Then swing from chandeliers;
They leave the clerks there in the lurch
Then kick it up a gear.

They pound the floor into the ground,
They swing and then they sway;
They’d drink to all their troubles,
But they’ve long since gone away.

They close the places late at night,
And walk home ‘neath the stars;
Arm in arm, exchanging charms
One’s Venus, one is Mars.

Mighty children spring from them,
To keep the flame alight;
They nurse them with acetylene,
And ultra-violet light.

They grow some whiskers when they’re old,
And sit down for a spell;
Their Ercoles will take their place,
And raise a little hell.

A Heads Up For My Readers. That Was It. Heads Up, I Mean. When I Say ‘It”, That Was The It.

In order to make my readers feel special without the inconvenience of riding on a short bus, and as collateral damage, maybe get my hands on some money and get enough food to forgo a little seven-year-old’s  bite marks on my wrists when I reach for the bowl of gruel, consider this one of my infrequent heads up that there are eight new, very highly discounted items on my “Ready To Ship” page over at Sippican Cottage Furniture. Last time I had seven items, and five sold in about five minutes because people are very nice to me indeed; so if you want something you see over there, don’t wait around. Now you’ve all got a seven-hour head start on the people that signed up for email marketing. 

Before I Am Old I Shall Have Written Him One Poem Maybe As Cold And Passionate As The Dawn

ALTHOUGH I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,          5
It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped ’twould be   10
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,   15
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,   20
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
  
Maybe a twelvemonth since   25
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,   30
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream:
A man who does not exist,   35
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’   40

-William Butler Yeats

Month: November 2010

Find Stuff:

Archives