Songwriter’s Lament

The least of me is always on the outside.

My dull side always faces to the sun.

The finest thoughts are hidden in the shadow,

the tenderest moments somehow never sung.

Try as I may to face and force the issue

and show the world the contours of my mind,

the subtleties are faded in translation.

The meanings are misplaced by word and rhyme.

Maybe in our unheard conversations

we’ve found the answer we sought all along.

The price to pay for being fully human

is that we’ll never write the perfect song.

I guess it shows.

© George Phillips, 1973

Famous American Songs
by Gustav Koppé
in Cornell University Library
from Wikimedia Commons

Won’t You Stay

If you please won’t you stay dear lady,

And for you, I will sing this song

Cannot say the words will come easy

They’ve been hiding deep inside for far too long

I was once young and full of promise

But I’m not what I used to be

Too many tears have washed away my footprints

And I cannot find the way back home you see

Look at all the stars beyond my dusty windows wheeling

How beautiful they are as they go drifting on their way

To heaven or to hell, to sunlight or to dark unfeeling

Wish I knew….   Lady, won’t you stay?

© George Phillips, 2019

Van Gogh's Starry Night on the Rhone, 1888
from the Musée d'Orsay

Trombone

Slip and slide, that's how he plays it;

wrist and ride, he really slays it.

Ride and guide that shiny brass trombone.

Lazy notes, like sunset clouds 

drifting high above the crowd, 

a shroud of blues

fills the room 

with sweet sadness,

and they like it that way. 

Play on, shiny brass trombone.

© George Phillips, 2018

Sonny Rollins at the Stockholm Jazz Fest
Photo by Bent Nyman
from Wikimedia Commons

Objects

Small objects,

some round, some square,

some big lozenges,

others egg-like, or sculpted, or cut

in clever shapes

I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago.

Stamped upon their collective visage

are numbers, letters, trademarks,

symbols of authority, and other magical incantations

which inform the reader (should he or she possess

the requisite microscopic ability) of contents,

definitions, and the all-important DOSAGE,

an Anglicized word from a forgotten Mediterranean dialect meaning TOO (dos) OLD (age).

Too old to what? you may ask. Why, too old to see,

too old to handle, too old to count, too old to read,

too old to remember, to ask questions, 

to think, to hear, to dream.

Fear not, imbiber, these are but overheard baggage

when the symbols are empowered

and the magic begins to roll.

Oh, did I mention the effects, i.e., the enumeration of miracles

to be wrought, along with the after-effects, 

the collateral effects, the side effects?

To be taken with water. Do not drink water

when dosage exceeds the square root 

of the mass of the earth’s moon. In case of eclipse,

drink heavily any liquid that comes to hand. If unable

to read these instructions, signify by sending 

a long accusatory letter to your doctor.

If directions are followed,

relief is almost certain, unless

it isn’t, in which case, it won’t be.

Does this topic upset you?

No problem. Just take a pill.

© George Phillips, 2018

Adrenallrx
by FtWashguy
from Wikimedia Commons

My Lagging Heart

... beats in an uncertain, puzzled rhythm, 

slow to change, never in unison 

with the requests of its host.

Trapped in turbulence, my gut, 

shaken by heart’s dizziness, cycles endlessly from wet

to dry – from predictable to random, 

from motility to functionless churning.

My body’s sense of personal posture and location 

cannot itself be found.

Limb and trunk muscles exhaust themselves, 

each battling for supremacy, while my brain, 

fighting protein invaders, forgets to fuel the engines of movement.  

Inexorably, the machinery of life deteriorates, 

quietly losing 

a function here, a movement there.

My eyes miss bits of landscape, busily constructing 

what isn’t there from what is. 

My sleeper’s mind breaks out of its dream-cage and hijacks

the late-night hours with its own mad dance.

A sailor in a stormy sea, my spirit sags.  My soul prepares 

for eventual flight.  Sleepless, unhappy, 

trapped in a fool’s errand of untouchable symptoms

and unlikely treatments, I fall, then crawl 

towards the lamp that Hope lights 

at the far end of a dark tunnel.

© George Phillips, 2017

A light at the end of the tunnel
Photo by Thomas Quine
Kuching, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia ~ 2015
from Wikimedia Commons

Joshua’s Choice

If you choose you lose.

The chosen is yours but

What of the rest?

Did you pick the best?

When Joshua fit Jericho,

Think of the mess.

When the walls with great clatter

Begot fragments of matter,

Perhaps he frowned as he pondered his choice,

Thinking of his military budget

And the union demands of the horn-players,

And all that debris-clearing overtime for the deconstruction battalions.

He could have chosen ladders,

Or gate-busting rams to batter,

Or just shovels to tunnel beneath the dust-laden mud brick,

His men then springing up in the midst of the enemy

Like poisonous night-mushrooms after a rain.

But he took the traditional option,

Slaughtering every living thing within the sweep of the tumbled walls,

Not even selling the captured civilians at slave-auction,

Save Rahab the Prostitute. 

She must have been given many horns to toot.

Who can say?

Another choice might have yielded less suffering

And given Rahab

A day or two of buffering.

© George Phillips, 2017

The Fall of Jericho
Illustration from a Bible card published in 1901
by the Providence Lithograph Company
from Wikimedia Commons

Mouse

The mouse is dead.

I know this because my shoe,

And the foot it contains,

And all the weight of my body,

Now rest upon the rodent’s head.

Poor creature, his slowness and hunger,

And the poison I made available to him,

Drove him out of hiding,

Out into the middle of the room

Where a clumsy poet,  mind elsewhere,  with squinting eyes and uncertain step,

Squashed  him.

The odds of our unintended meeting are difficult to assess.

His  desperation is impossible to guess.

Looking with pity at calico  fur, motionless feet, 

Delicate whiskers, tiny eyes no longer sparkling,

I wonder who or what will step on me,

And when….

© George Phillips, 2016

Mouse, one month old
Picture uploaded by Roger McLassus
on Wikimedia Commons

Everything Has Legs

Not only animals can lope about!

Everything has legs,

useful, but often concealed;

static, but still capable of rapid movement;

unthinking, yet able to plan and execute.

For instance:

Cellphones

Never turn your back on a cellphone. 

Such a gesture will quickly be detected,

triggering unseen limbs to instant action.

Electronic sensors will seek out places of hiding

known only to the device.

Without being observed,

the malevolent little creature will hide in a nearby collection 

of computer-driven devices,

or seek out the darkest corner of your current location.

If autonomous features are available to this silicone snake-in-the-grass,

it will modify its own settings to make itself totally unresponsive,

and leave you utterly abandoned, 

perhaps in an unknown neighborhood, 

without fuel for your car, 

surrounded by unfamiliar structures

and unknown inhabitants who themselves

have been abandoned by their disloyal communicators. 

Yet another instance of uncooperative technology:

The Coat Hanger.

Surprisingly strong, ubiquitous, a denizen of every household,

an ancient form of “helper” device,

embodying no electronic content at all,

yet capable of causing wholly unexpected and endless frustration.

They normally live in closet spaces, some holding clothing, others bare and apparently available. 

Somehow these circuitless, detectorless, 

brainless creatures from our distant past know when they are needed, 

and respond in most unpleasant ways.

Having been observed in an available state, 

they deploy hitherto unseen appendages and move silently,

quickly to other more distant locations.  

They are also known to burrow into piles of clothing, 

and, if left alone on a large flat surface such as a bed, 

organize themselves into hideous tangles 

which can reach the complexity of the legendary Gordian Knot. 

It is said that Alexander the Great himself, 

upon encountering such a mess of metal and plastic,

refused to attempt its disentanglement.

Reduced to mumbling impotence,

he was heard by bystanders to observe in his frustration “…but they haven’t even been invented yet!”   

Shortly thereafter he died after tripping on a hanger 

left on the floor of his command tent by a careless servant.

There are many more amazing facts unknown 

to even the best-informed scientists.

Next time we bring you unprovable facts about 

computer detection of user identity and 

how machines  determine 

which problem is most disturbing to the person at the keyboard 

and how they then implement these problems….

And for your own safety, remember –

Everything has legs!

© George Phillips, 2016

Decorative lamp shaped from old wire coat hangers
Photo from Wikimedia Commons