John Whitworth: Three Poems

Wittgenstein’s Beetle

My mind is like a beetle in a box.
I open up the box to see it go.
It scuttles up and down and to and fro,
Telling me everything I want to know.
You have to be a hedgehog or a fox.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
My universes are unnumbered clocks
And every one displays a different face
For each exigency of time and space,
Another person and another place,
Another bastard set of building blocks.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
Beached and benighted by a paradox,
Our age has lost the concept of degree.
I grieve for it myself incessantly.
If you weren’t you who would you wish to be?
You love the freedoms, can’t abide the frocks.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
Pull down your knickers or pull up your socks.
It’s sex or standards and I don’t care which.
Now is decision time (the rest is kitsch)
And plans for getting seriously rich
Despite portfolios of falling stocks.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
Is it Christ’s blood or whisky on the rocks?
Is it the answer or the seventh clue?
Is it the angel or the bugaboo?
Who would you wish to be, if you weren’t you?
Is it the upsurge or the aftershocks?
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Throw out those bloody clocks!
But yours and yours and yours are just the same.
We’re on a losing streak. We play the game.
The whole thing’s fucked and nobody’s to blame.
They’re digging down behind the hollyhocks.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.
They sank the blackened bodies in the docks
Which previously were given to the flame.
Who went is clear, a good deal less who came;
It all comes down to claim and counter-claim,
A neat solution, if unorthodox.
My mind is like a beetle in a box.

John Whitworth

Doctor Donne Likened to My Cat Jack
(The beautiful opening couplet is from
Peter Ryan’s remembrance of Izaak Walton’s
“Life of Doctor John Donne”.)

Oh thorny, glowing, twisted heart
That walked the London streets a while,
Teach me to work your subtle art
And coax the sweetness from the bile.
Teach me my soul to recognise,
That wandering, sportful, wayward twin.
Teach me to see without my eyes.
Teach me to feel beyond my skin.
Here, in the coffin of my bed,
I cogitate on this and that,
God and his Angels at my head,
Warming my footsoles, Jack the Cat,
Soft fur-ball connoisseur of purr,
Who knows the thinginess of things,
Jack the divine philosopher,
Observer at the courts of kings.
Say Jack the Cat is Jack the Lad,
Cavorting with the muses nine,
And Jack the Priest, who tames the beast,
Turning the water into wine.
Sprucely, sure-footedly he stalks
Up Ludgate Hill to Old Saint Pauls.
O listen to the talk he talks
As kites foregather on the walls.
Watch, as he steps fastidiously,
Neatly evading fire and flame.
His glowing, twisted heart is free,
And Jack the Poet is his name.
                       John Whitworth

Dark Thoughts

The numbers are unnumbered of the beasts that shun the light,
And they have a superfluity of teeth.
They are waiting for the triumph of the overarching night
To eviscerate your tender underneath.
How they pullulate and populate the landscapes of your dreaming,
How you feel them in the darkness of your soul.
And you hear them as they rustle through your wilderness of seeming
In the sightless lightless kingdom of the mole.
Some spectacular diseases of a provenance perverse
Have been suppurating through their carapaces,
And the fetor of corruption has been getting worse and worse
As they jostle in their subterranean places.
When the lights go out for ever on this poor benighted sphere,
They will clamber from their burrows down below.
They are coming with a drumming and a humming, do you hear?
They are coming and you’ve nowhere else to go.
                                             John Whitworth