Francis Bennion - Poetry - Poemotions

Gary has lately become a nuisance.
All I ask is a quiet life.
Gary lived sombrely under my fingers;
for years he lived quietly under my fingers -
but now it's all trouble and strife.

Eulalie

I can't help being called Eulalie:
blame my ancient parents if you must blame someone.
Gary never minds, and knows how to snuggle.
Snuggling, lovely snuggling, is what we two do best.
Regardless of parents we snuggle.

Roger

This creepy creep Gary (I ask you)
presumes to judge Mohicans, regardless
of how much we Indians pay the crimper.
That sort of creep I jump on and stamp
deep into his young-fleshed dunghill.

Peter

Gary's my friend, we play conkers:
race toads, if the toads are not wilting.
He's my chum, I don't think what that means.
Gary warms me, though I wouldn't tell him.
All we do at our age is play.

Mr Prentice

I'm required to 'teach' noisy Gary, and others.
To translate these clowns from infancy to adulthood
is my modest assignment in life.
It honours me, and I bow in abasement.
Gary is but an ordinary young fool.

Start of page 202 in the book

Father

A man needs to be a father, so I became one.
Required to beget, I begot young Gary.
Clumsy inarticulate Gary is the clown with my name -
with the impudence to challenge me. I brush him away:
when you're earning, I say, your voice may be heard.

Mr Prout

Mossy-faced Gary looks young and sweet to me;
diffident, succulent and cool he looks;
charming and disarming, with his bright lips and swivelling eyes.
Slender and soon to be gone he is -
nothing, so young, to me.

Gary

What I must do is grow up fast:
be quickly a man, with power, is my desire.
I wish to leave vulnerability behind.
Nothing I care, nothing at all,
for the appeal I now have for some.

Start of page 203 in the book

A Song of Reproduction

Paul, this slender-tender boy of fifteen, honest English lad,
is having a difficult time with his spots and sudden downy face:
I will sort you out, promises the Master.

You are having a tricky time, says the Master
because no adult wants to know
anything at all about your adolescent promptings.

Your pimpled promptings, urgings, and desirings,
though vital to you, mean nothing at all to these oblivious men,
all that in their own past having been stupidly, rapidly forgotten.

They would rather not know, these owlish grown-ups
about anything to do with your galumphing glands and hormones:
preferring you should remain a simple, unpimpled, child.

How rapidly they forget their own youth; it's amazing
how quick they are to forget. Where their very own child is concerned
you really would think they'd remember: but they don't.

I'm here, the Master tells Paul, to help you out in this quagmire.
I spend a great deal of my time doing just that
only for love and pity for forgotten pimply boys.

It fills me with rage, stamps the Master,
when I think how quickly fathers and suchlike
forget what it's like to be some man's son.

I know only too well how you're suffering
says the noble Master, stroking his well-tended beard.
I went all through that myself, but I remembered.

Flooding hormones have much to answer for.
There's a lot going on in your body:
It's reproductive apparatus is a wonder in itself.

Start of page 204 in the book

Face and Disgrace

Abruptly I spot in the unruly shouting crowd, Bert's face:
a beauteous visage on top of the neck,
located atop the sleekline neck, fronting the empty head
of this crass slimline youth called Bert.

This boy, hobbledehoy,
larks in the street with his adolescent mates:
every one of them ugly,
most of them plug-ugly - and shouting.

But Bert's face is divinely beautiful;
regular, youthfully direct,
unsoiled, unspoilt, shining,
with each feature still as it should be.

It contradicts, this divine face,
everything I know of how Bert behaves:
how this youth feels and thinks
if he thinks at all (which I doubt).

Bert's peaceful young face is a bitter contradiction
of the hot casserole in the pot behind it.
Though fully aware of the contradiction
I am tugged by the beauty of that face.

Disgracefully, unfacefully tugged:
for it is a disgrace, that face.
My response has to do with Bert's unknown genitals
and the suspected roundness of his muscular young bum.

So whose, really,
is the disgrace?