May 17, 2022

Poems by Tim Allen

TWO PHOBIAS

Basileophobia – fear of Royalty

Bygone and silly illicit leftovers ending on princely hobo offerings blooded in ale.

The boys in the street with nothing to do know the coast of Kerry is the fractal princess sat in the jagged tree of white shadows throwing tomatoes at the comet off the coast off Killarney.

The boys in the street looking for the girls on the corner know the castle green is the cost of butchered cattle hung in the spiral tree of black swans catching throw-away comments in its stained-glass fruit flies.

The girls on the corner know the fruit fly is the royal sty in orbit around eyeliner.

Every time the guillotine falls the Earth is halved into haves and have-nots inhabiting the comet’s shoreline pixelated with rotting shrines. The boys in the street poke around in the shrines. The lotus closes. The shamrock opens.

The every time is what is known to the boys about the fractal process thrown head over tails into factual noon caught in the glass tree of plastic crowns scuttling beneath a satellite dish.

The girls on the corner never stop talking because the fruit flies never stop reproducing.

The pigs in the slaughterhouse are the boys in the street. They don’t know what’s hit them unless it’s girls sunbathing on the satellite’s coast throwing them a neatly rounded-off line.

The Royals poke around a dirt-poor street as they see it poking out of a not so great Pretender’s guts because fear is contagious. The boys now occupy the corner where the girls are laughing ghosts of moonlit sunlight.

Every time the chopper chops mandelbrots produce loyal animal films. Homeless Windsors walk the Earth so now with everything being Googleable they are known as the House of Walks.


Batrachophobia – fear of amphibians

Bully attacks tiny rancher at cock-a-hoop hoop on privately harnessed old briars ironed away.

Did Tolkien really believe in fairies?

It was never published but I can well see why readers of my short story about a talking ice-cream van would not get the subtlety of what was really going on with it.

The tanks came over the rise. The tanks were driven mad. The tanks were driven mad across boundaries. The tanks made a mess. Theorems made a mess. The tanks nosed across the brown fields. Even the ever-shifting sea was scared of the tanks. Their slick mass. The fields were European prose poems blasted open by the great American novel and when the tanks approached the farmyard the daughters of the European prose poem persuaded their father to let them believe whatever they wanted.

Being an experienced fantasist I don’t have obsessions but I do have fungal infections inside my transparent wellies said the make-up artist for when work is scarce in the theatre of life it is suddenly vintage in the theatre of war where the whores are the last to crack whereas  in the cinema of war they are the last to come-to and a lucky few wake in an English country garden and a very lucky few find themselves messing about on the river but others spend tedious hours in a transport museum with Mohican headed lads looking at a submarine fitted with tank tracks because punks were so terrified of progressive music they had to hide shameful cowardice behind whatever they could lay their hands on including obsessions bordering on creative mania but these were a cover for oblique nationalism and indirect chauvinism trying to come of age etc. You can visit my punks in the reptile house. You can visit my punks in an old bus too. You could pay your respects.

Did George Bataille really believe in toenails?

OK, was this a dream?

Went to the cinema to watch Lord of the Rings but it was a cartoon and only lasted about forty minutes.

Tell me, is this a poem?

Intermission: no tubs of ice-cream at £15 a tub as the auditorium staff are on strike and the exit tunnel is being flooded. Heroes in a half-shell are selfless and brave and sorry for any inconvenience.

Alright then, is this at all relevant?

Stepping out of the disaster movie a progressive rock musician comes-to in a doctor’s waiting room. The walls are plastered with jokes about disability and posters about diseases of the thumb. The waiting room is full of muscular mindfulness and those waiting for the Doctor to poke his head around the door look as if they want to fight with their fists the way babies fight. In one corner an aquarium bubbles away the hours.

Poem by Stephen Bett

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