To Do List

• I make a To Do list,

collated from the past:

a Fish and a Rusting Barge;

and from the present, a long list of essentials,

bullet pointed, to be prioritised,

including words wise now not to use.

• The gap between bullets is so important

but unfairly placed

way down the machine gun

trail, past a blank page, and a wish.

Someone will surely write some of those,

so I have this poem to write about a fish –

a really ugly fish, but until I begin

and find a way to properly explain

the colour of ugly rust – I must leave it. Bulleted.

• In favour of what is less urgent.
• (Next includes bullets of unused words.)

So, far down, and also urgent, it is all about Harry,

a lockdown story so extraordinary,

but the fish, the really ugly fish,

has just sloped by, flat and feigning elegance.

Top fins are never ugly, cutting

the dense shield of water – neither

was famous Fat Mary, the fish at dusk, concealing

an underbelly the colour of…........rust, slinking through the flotsam.

• Then there is a list of poems – all Tarot cards,

which wait and shuffle like discarded side salads.

poems containing loops of inedible nettles

and cabbages, all coming up roses. (Never mind

the catastrophe of the vegan lasagne  - layers

and layers of gloop with no bite, no crust.)

• With Harry, it’s a long and incredible story of lust,
• until shortly, when who knows they may love and marry,
• so quickly, before she leaves tomorrow, Harry

has fallen, via lockdown Zumba and Zoom

with a match/flirt/fling/Fin from Belgium,

which is exactly

where I ought 

to begin:

5/2020

:)

https://www.abctales.com/story/littleditty/list

https://www.abctales.com/story/littleditty/captain-toad-and-fat-mary