Poem
John Stammers
¿QUE PASA?
¿QUE PASA?
¿QUE PASA?
There is a little of everything in everythingAnaximander
Lavish rays of the flagrant sun cascade on the esplanade
or coruscate the way H2SO4 does spilt on a lab floor.
A grey (or ash) acacia sweeps its sombrero from its head
making like a ranchero on a talcum-white caballo
that clops along in the shower of solar-wind particles
whose slavish job it is to bombard the Earth from space today –
Hombre, esta muy bueno aqui, muy, muy bueno.
The terracotta soil of the area merely expresses
the downright red of an Andalusian hemipode,
its feathers drenched in henna,
or a post-nuptial bedsheet doused in chicken blood
that threatens a reprise
of the madness aria from Lucia de Lammermoor –
you know the one she comes out
with it all spattered down her front
and gets into Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that,
Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that.
You would rend the nails from your fingers
with the beauty of it, those exquisite trills
embedded in gothic death.
It’s that even here,
here in the epicentre of a chilli enchilada,
the ice cubes in the glass hold out against it,
little visitants of the cold realms.
© 2001, John Stammers
From: Panoramic Lounge Bar
Publisher: Picador,
From: Panoramic Lounge Bar
Publisher: Picador,
John Stammers
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1954)
John Stammers was born in London in 1954. His first collection Panoramic Lounge-bar (Picador, 2001) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award 2001, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A second collection Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador, 2005) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2005, and ...
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Poems of John Stammers
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¿QUE PASA?
There is a little of everything in everythingAnaximander
Lavish rays of the flagrant sun cascade on the esplanade
or coruscate the way H2SO4 does spilt on a lab floor.
A grey (or ash) acacia sweeps its sombrero from its head
making like a ranchero on a talcum-white caballo
that clops along in the shower of solar-wind particles
whose slavish job it is to bombard the Earth from space today –
Hombre, esta muy bueno aqui, muy, muy bueno.
The terracotta soil of the area merely expresses
the downright red of an Andalusian hemipode,
its feathers drenched in henna,
or a post-nuptial bedsheet doused in chicken blood
that threatens a reprise
of the madness aria from Lucia de Lammermoor –
you know the one she comes out
with it all spattered down her front
and gets into Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that,
Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that.
You would rend the nails from your fingers
with the beauty of it, those exquisite trills
embedded in gothic death.
It’s that even here,
here in the epicentre of a chilli enchilada,
the ice cubes in the glass hold out against it,
little visitants of the cold realms.
From: Panoramic Lounge Bar
¿QUE PASA?
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