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The Cook and the Cold

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

Cracks the rock, and cracks the ice
Where the snow-wurms croak,
And the hull, as in a vise,
There its timbers broke.

Once it plied the placid seas,
That gilt-ribboned barque,
With a hold of peonies,
And of spices dark.

But they glimpsed a glint of gold—
This them northwards drew
Through the climes where sea-cows rolled:
Captain, cook, and crew.

Late they’d dawdle on the deck
Dancing through the nights,
Each a wild and hatless speck
Under polar lights.

When asleep each man a purse
Dreamt beneath his bed,
Though they woke each morning worse,
Aching in the head.

Bitter were the arctic airs,
Bitter snowflakes taste
To the tongue of him who stares
On those frosty wastes.

Rail-like thin, cold they shiver
Months in sheet-ice trapped.
Craving their captain’s liver—
They his temple rapped.

Plops the old man in the pot,
Pieces, parts and pants;
As the cook unthaws the lot,
Of their trip he rants.

“No gold there is, not a flake,
Only inert lead.
But of me, they’ll say, I stake—
Least he kept them fed.”

So he piled the skulls in heaps
Of his ship-board mates,
Until, alone, off he leaps,
On his shinbone skates.

Still he glides a grinning ghost,
On those frigid floes,
Where ceaseless winds howling boast,
And the narwhale blows.

Every ship which winters fast,
Caught in twilights bleak,
Visits he from first to last,
Sustenance to seek.

When springtime’s melt frees these ships
Empty are their planks,
‘Cept for half-charred chunks and chips
Choking kitchen tanks.

Keep your prow in tropics sweet,
Keep its bearing true,
Or in storms of stinging sleet,
Cook will come for you.

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Flowers of Heaven

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

In came Hamilton, through the maze of trips,
And traps, fiendish puzzles where death balanced
On the outcome of doors or path chosen;
But he, veteran of precise landings
On hostile shores in his commando days,
The gauntlet ran with ice-blooded aplomb,
And obtained the ob…

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Electra Movie Camera image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA

Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos I-III

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

Do not trifle with stars or souls, he said,
My colleague of that research institute,
Our home for decades plus, since our ascent
Out of college to scientific heights,
Recruitment by rich states, with salaries,
And perks, and prestige seeming without end
…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos IV-VI

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

In the canteen, one evening after hence,
With brown-bagged booze we gathered, and toasted,
This clandestine celebration, our work,
The fruits of our own brave brains, and funding,
Of course, from the brutes who scabbered about,
With knuckled hands, and …

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos VII-IX

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

“You believed the news would somehow slip out,
Perhaps by a chamber maid, or cleaner
Of your floors and desks, who shocking beheld
The hairy Neanderthal, saw perhaps
Them in multitude, in their suits dressed up,
In a man’s clothing, with stick, and sli…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos X-XII

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

Who can say to what depths our censured hearts,
Our hopeful sight fell in the boredom of
Our internship, while aghast, and engaged
By video, the tide of destruction,
The complete wipe away and erasure,
Of a way of life, and its replacement
With what can …

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos XIII-XV

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

We appraised each other at this meeting,
In the cheerless canteen, my co-captives,
Amid the sheeted-off bunks, where we slept,
The sodden lounge of our aimless pleasures,
And the barred door, rigged with its shock alarms,
That kept—but who exactly did…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos XVI-XVIII

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

In later years, we saw him on his throne,
That’s how far we regressed backwards, to points
And locales in time when kings still governed,
And not even King Arthur types, but worse,
The kind who sit on thrones of subpar craft,
And belch into their Qu…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos XIX-XXI

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

I still see Herman there, perched forward,
Alert, on his throne, in clothes no longer
Of his complete ascent, the fascist robes,
The leather, the straps, the jaunty black hat,
The symbols of his seizure of power,
The sign of intent and unyielding forc…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos XXII-XXIV

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

But no he is not the remnant left bright,
Some few of us still are in our disguise
Of Neanderthalic antics and rags;
I am not the last, as I had measured,
Some others who in the days of seizure
Themselves examined, and nursed some bother
Or duty, hav…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos XXV-XXVIII

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

“I, I, I...” gut-throated the wasteland king,
As spasmed he on the throne, gripped in fits,
And slack his flesh had drooped, a substance wan
And dead, depleted and blank and shadowed
That sunken face, with eyes bulging upwards
Like glassy stones, w…

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Neanderthalic Antics: Table of Contents

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

Cantos I-III

Cantos IV-VI

Cantos VII-IX

Cantos X-XII

Cantos XIII-XV

Cantos XVI-XVIII

Cantos XIX-XXI

Cantos XXII-XXIV

Cantos XXV-XXVIIII

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Grooving One

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

That sickly sound, the hollow pop
When ball against the bat is crushed;
Into the sky its bounding hop
Has all my home-park crowd but hushed.
But not my heart, which crumpled sinks,
And deep the well of dregs sour drinks.
That lifting hit my catcher watched,
His even eyes before me knew
That surely I my slider botched,
But he a new ball to me threw.
How bloody slaughter makes us drip
With each infernal, four-bag trip.
So I will take what God’s washed clean,
And on His wily change-up lean.

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At the Brink of the End of the World

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

I

In the crucible of the stakes, he crawls,
While elsewhere, other monsters cast their bawls,
And the air resounds with preyed-upon shrieks,
Those who succumbed to this fortnight of freaks,
Of flares in the sky, of black and blood suns,
While scattered…

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Electra Movie Camera image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA

Empire of Shade

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

Skeleton houses erupt on my block,
Up through the pavement they shimmy their locks
And scatter the trees with leather and bone,
And hair mummified—O buildings that grow
With stuff of the grave: what thresher, what hoe
Has turned up the sod where gorged buzzers drone,
And w…

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One True Tree: Cantos I-IV

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

I

A nation there was of rabbits and hares,
A storybook land, neither here nor there,
But far from us, a mysterious coast,
Which cold winters freeze, and warm summers roast.
In burrows they lived, built snug castles too,
Fine cities, a harbour, where proudly flew
…

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One True Tree: Cantos V-VIII

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

V

His sword he had lost, that water-logged hare,
In the ocean he thrashed, and gasped for air;
The cold him assaults, if not for his hide,
His organs would freeze and shatter inside.
That vigilant squid did not let him rest,
But with cruel pinches his readines…

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One True Tree: Cantos IX-XII

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

IX

Caught on the threshold, the monks drag him in,
Robbing the hunters of prey they have pinned;
Their jaws snap in vain, the door shuts them out,
Howls of confoundment escape from their snouts.
Down holy-arched halls the monks bear their ward,
All full knowin…

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One True Tree: Cantos XIII-XVI

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

XIII

But in this tempest when all was thought lost,
As he with new health the shaken ground crossed,
And loose boulder dodged, and drooling wolf hit,
So back on their haunches he forced them sit,
Bright broke from the sky a shimmering beam,
All gloried in g…

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Electra Movie Camera image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA

One True Tree: Cantos XVII-XX

by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole

XVII

“By these royal ears rich tidings I’ve heard,
Not by fleet runner or messenger furred,
But through shrewd watchers who study the sky,
There calculating the motions on high
Of star and planet, their twinkle and turn,
Recording their rate of luminous burn,
…

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