Two Poems by Phil Poyser

Ten Things to Do with Your Lover in Your Studio on the Cote D'Azure When it Rains in April

1.  Look out at the dancing palm fronds.
     See hairy tarantulas dripping venom.

2.  Make a cup of tea.  Share a croissant.
     Talk of baguettes and petits pains.

3.  Write postcards home, one pen between two.
      I sign yours, you sign mine, one "X" each.

4.  Read books, Paris Match, Le Figaro,
     ("Baghdad est tombe"), paper bag, cereal box.

5.  Snooze and drift away on a tide
     of tangled reveries in the lapping swell.

6.  Count the unfamiliar coins into piles.
     Count again to be absolutely sure.

7.  Make more tea.  Eat banana.
     Talk of local strawberries' succulent flesh.

8.  Watch the raindrops, erratic as hamsters,
     scurry to their gravitational destinies.

9.  Reflect on previous trips, lives,
     Universes, everythings, nothings.

10.  Play "I spy," "Hangman," "Hide-and-Seek,"
       Find yourselves (at last) entwined.
       Coming, ready or not.



St. Elvis Presley Precisely:  The Ten Commandments

1.  Thou shalt have no other teddy bear but me.  Please, please, love me true, I beg of you.

2.  Thou shalt put a chain around my neck and lead me anywhere, but graven images--no way, as I don't have a wooden heart:  unless of course it was something in Jailhouse Rock (though keep in mind what happened to Jael with the nail).

3.  Thy Daddy's name is "Big Boots," but don't take that in vain.

4.  It's Saturday night and thou just got paid.  But remember the Sabbath and keep it cool.  Good Shep.  Old Shep--thou ain't nothin' but a hound dog.  You ain't never caught a rabbi and you ain't no friend of mine.

5.  Honolulu, baby.

6.  Thou shalt not kill, even in "GI Blues."

7.  With little sister, don't, though I guess that's incest rather than adultery.  Nor with the girl of thy best friend, though that's not really what I mean either.  Whatever.  For if thou dost, thou shalt be down at the end of lonely street until the third generation.  It's called Heartbreak Hotel.

8.  Thou mayst burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from the old fruit jar, as long as thou truly repenteth and asketh forgiveness, but thou shalt not step in my blue suede shoes.

9.  There ain't no such thing as those "little white lies."

10.  "Don't, don't.  Don't, don't."  That's what I say, each time I behold you this way.  This you can believe, I will never leave you, baby.  Just don't, that's all.  Just don't.

The element, carbon, has played a pivotal role in Phil Poyser's life.  He comes from a family of miners with its roots deep in the area around the Nottinghamshire coalfields and his natal village of Mansfield Woodhouse.  His university studies at South Kensington's Imperial College of Science and Technology let to a career in organic chemistry (the myriad compounds of carbon), whilst retirement from the pharmaceutical industry in 2007 saw a move to organic gardening and the flourishing of his lifelong love of poetry:  a primrose path from C-reactive protein to C-reative Writing, so to speak.  No coincidence then that he's a member of Macclesfield Creative Writing Group and an active open-miker in and around the North-West.