Tag: 1950s

Jack Kerouac’s Orange (An Origin Myth) by Cáit O’Neill McCullagh


By Robert Garnham

Jack Kerouac’s Orange (An Origin Myth)

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it
and thinking about it … depending on your mind to exist! By itself it’s a no-thing …
it’s seen only of your mind
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Like Jack Kerouac’s Orange
I am awake for you baby
baby taste this flesh, smell
smell the myth of limonene
this orange wants to be seen
see me, hear me, touch me
make me become.

Make me a some-thing baby
baby don’t you feel the want
want to feel how it is
how it is to be empty
empty & awake & a no-thing
nothing unless of your mind?

Spilled out like squeezed sea
sea squeezed from an orange
a sodden orange from a Spanish ship
shipwrecked & empty & a no-thing
nothing except for the mind of a poet

‘thinking about it it’s really mental
things only seen of your own mind’.

But Jack got it wrong baby
I am not your orange
you may have me
in your mind’s eye
thinking about it & me
& all that existential baby

& you may say you saw me
saw me only & only me
& only of your mind

but it was me who was looking
baby I was looking at the apple
& it was me who was awake
awake & looking at the apple
it was always me baby
baby it was always me
who took the first bite.

Cáit is a straying archaeologist. At home in the Scottish Highlands, she makes films and writing with folk hoping to assemble good ways of living in this queasy world. Poems have been peeling from her since January 2021. This is one of her first. You can find her tweeting @kittyjmac.

 

You liked me enough to give me a geranium, by Robert Garnham


By Robert Garnham

You gave me a geranium.
I said,
‘You know I’m not into salad.’
You said, ‘It’s a houseplant.
Not even you could kill this’.

But it was your way of saying
I love you.
The geranium sat there in passive,
Filtering C02 and judging me,
Reporting back my foibles and transgressions,
Taking photographs
When it should have been taking
Photosynthesis.

But you looked at me,
Your eyes as dopey as a spaniel,
And I forgave you your hardy annual.
‘When will it flower and bloom?’, I asked.
‘When will it light up my room?
When will its scent take to the breeze,
Provide pollen for the bees,
Put me at my ease,
Probably make me sneeze,
Each one of which is
One eighth of an orgasm,
That eight of these
And I should think of you?’

That night I trailed my fingers through a box of
J. Arthur Bowyer’s Syncho-Boost Houseplant Compost,
And it reminded me of you, Pete.
The geranium made me complete, Pete.
My life so recently deplete, Pete,
Of love,
Now suddenly filled like the pot,
This upturned cranium
With the roots of the geranium,
Need I explainium?
Sorry for being a painium.

Because you liked me enough
To give me a plant
And I liked you enough
To keep it
Pot it, plant it, deadhead it,
Water it, feed it, treat it for greenfly,
I even gave it a name, ‘Dirty Liza’,
Because she liked her fertiliser.
Every time I looked she was there
And still alive because I still care
And even though you eventually
Disappeared
Like the pests I treated,
Like the greenfly,
I never did
Glean why
You gave it to me to begin with,
Suffice to believe
You liked me enough
To give me a geranium.

Robert Garnham has been performing comedy poetry around the UK for ten years at various fringes and festivals, and has had two collections published by Burning Eye. He has made a few short TV adverts for a certain bank, and a joke from one of his shows was listed as one of the funniest of the Edinburgh Fringe. He was recently an answer on the TV quiz show Pointless. Lately he has been writing short stories for magazines and a humorous column in the Herald Express newspaper. He is the editor of Spilling Cocoa. In 2020 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His website can be found at https://professorofwhimsy.com