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Simple man
How do you rest
Explain for me
I don't know many of you
This world makes you scarce
Is sleep a kind of adventure
I feel I've missed its meaning
Release from cares, or is
It simple understanding
That leaves you with your ease
I grasp my cow, it's tiny scowl
so when we think, despite the sink
you grow your toes, in desperate throes
and pretend they're not so fowl.
If when we turn, without a burn
and tackle every scullery
we can skip on vile skullduggery
and see a daisy crimelord spurn
I grab your foot, with a smelly curse
and try to make it relevant
so give up verse, and then traverse
Some broken glass, and raise an undead revenant.
I started out on the sea, the sea,
with a fleeting image, jostling for you,
the first attempt, was a rude raft built
of wattle and clay by memory formed,
and it did not float, and I paid with salt.
I made my second essay out of the headlands,
into the bar, and assailed you with words
of the ocean, and mythical men
to tease you and lure you from the stars,
to tug you away from your rocks so far,
far flung across my sea,
Only one drink is needed
to make you more prone to
insomnia nights
daytime television
asking your friend for the car keys so you can drive to rural
Montana
going to the casino high on ephedrine,
and betting it all on black
To getting married young
shotgun weddings
and beating your wife
looking for half-gone nostalgia
in the walls of synthetic paradise (MOA).
They singers,
must be good
never heard
but get out of the dungeons
into a lightened world
sing praises yet unheard
of those birds'
empty walls would love to hear
from singers poets like you
come out into the open
sing never worry
they all sang a million times
before they were heard
you also will...
come out from the darkness
to broad daylight
this is just a mad world
SILENCE
Yes the silence of a dark night
makes it an eerie experience
Mona Lisa smile
With eyes seemingly mobile
Aspect to beguile
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
There across the street from me
a window, curtains seldom closed
living room displayed for all to see
all within fully exposed.
An old couple living their lives there.
They have company...maybe once a week.
Her head is white, his almost bare.
Though no voyeur I sometimes peek.
Their T.V. by chance faces the street,
their chairs and sofa in plain view
through that picture window clean and neat
showing all, in that room, they might do.
Here is John Masefield himself reading. It's in the second half of the Sea Fever track at 1.08 mins in
http://www.deezer.com/track/33600551
To hear it you will need a deezer account, but it's easy to sign up for one.
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,.
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Why it Alludes
Born in the hour of death,
scanned life
since birth with near fatal disease,
then malaria, many times quietened by quinine
and small pox none survived,
but,
I’m a sole living example.
(of living survival)
Now how many accidents could have been victorious
who can recount
my desolate memory has seen many landscapes
I escaped.