John Carey: ‘Lamentatio’ and ‘Pro Forma’

Lamentatio

My fine-motor skills were never much
to scribble home about and they’ve started
to let me down less gently than ever—
mis-dunk of biscuits in coffee, typos

and skewed alignments in emails. My eyes
and ears too are, if not stuffed, not what
or even as many as they used to be in
terms of utility. I’ll soon be prone to falls

and prone longer after them. So it goes.
I’ve got my affairs in order slowly
with the help of a solicitor, all the cheaper
for having nothing to spend his money on

and older and more decrepit than I.
Now I’m all dressed up and nowhere to go that
I trust to be there without a heritage order. If it
weren’t a laughing matter, it would only upset me.

John Carey

Pro Forma

A poem, I’ve been told, should stir
the pilomotor reflex, make hair stand on end
like a voice behind you: “Got a light?”
at the station exit at midnight
or a sudden scurry of bait-fish
at dawn off a beach at Tumby Bay,
a poem whose every vowel is coloured red
like a stop-light. But even the most
populist master of comédie larmoyante
or grand guignol needs a cage of structure
and a measured dose to put you far enough
under to have your buttons pushed without
a struggle, at the mercy of the unbidden.
You need to send a spine up the shiver.

John Carey