10 x 10
 

Ten lines of ten syllables - oh, and ten minutes to write them.


THE FIRST TEN

Eleventh of April, 1902 -
a nascent record industry strikes gold:
the first ten tracks of truly great music
set down on a sunny spring afternoon
in a suite at the Hotel Milano.

The recording fee, a hundred guineas,
a tenor in the summer of his youth
throws off the songs, mistakes uncorrected,
stuffs the banknotes in his coat and strolls off
with his friends. Into immortality.

No one's found this drill and amusement remotely interesting but I've bumped it up 'cause I've thought of another one:


BASE TEN

When pounds, shillings and pence went decimal
in 1971 they said, ‘Oh,
it will be much easier to do sums
in base ten.’ It is true, long division
of the old money could be a bugger.

But then the idiots could not foresee
that one day we’d all have mobile phones with
calculators, making long division
of old money a piece of piss. I miss
the tanner, florin, half-crown, ten-bob note.

The Perfect Ten

Come, poets, praise with me the perfect ten,
Aim of toxophilites and dancing men.
Ten digits on our hands to help with sums
Despite the opposition of our thumbs.
Alas the lacking lurking in our lives -
What if we lost this double bunch of fives?
Then we should face the agony of art
Deprived of its most potent, perfect part;
Occasions prosody alerts us to,
When only a pentameter will do.

Modified Regrets: Age With Its Stealing Steps

The other day I got the sack at last.
A job I had been doing twenty years.
On Tuesdays I would take the car to Deal
Out by the coast and teach a class of folks
About my age. What would I teach them? Well,
Creative Writing is the phrase they use
The guys who used to pay me – poems and
Stories I called it when I had to call
It anything. And we enjoyed ourselves.
It wasn’t quite the sack. It sort of stopped.

So sorry...

Poor John! You knew that it was coming but
that doesn't make it easier to bear.
You're cracking on. Another door has shut.
All you can do is crack on you don't care.

I know a couple of that company;
they're going to miss their weekly fix of fun.
(Some of them sent their homework tasks to me -
I'd get them tentative, return them done!)

Although such sidelines don't pay megabucks
you'll feel the lack of it. Recession sucks.

10-10

10 10 until we do it once again.
Dial 9, an outside line, I ring the wife.
I’ll buy her chocolate; After 8 will do.
The 7 Deadly Sins is on the box.
6 years I’ve lived the travelling salesman’s life.

High 5 I won the Salesman of the Year.
Sometimes I have to wonder what life’s 4.
3’s company, but 2 will do tonight
(no 4-play, please, I’m British through and through).
A quick 1 at the Hotel Paramour…

10.00 GMT

Americans are snoozing in their beds
dreaming of what the world is coming to.
Australians are standing on their heads
because they're upside down; that's what they do.
The Scandinavians are far away
luxuriating in the midnight sun.
Everyone's night is someone else's day
and we are wide awake and having fun.
Hurrah! The Brits are here, the Brits are here,
playing in secret on Eratosphere!

What a saucy chap you are, Philip.
Nice ones, Ann, but you're a rhyming pentameter junkie!
It's so sad that your class has ended, John, but at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you were an inspiring mentor to me and lots of other East Kent writers and poets.

Forgive me...

It was the ten-minute rule what done it.
The pentameter comes easy. Sorry.
I was just having so much fun. Four Brits
playing a sort of crazy word-tennis
all by themselves in the early morning.
And, if I may defend my addiction,
I was only trying to polish up
what would have otherwise been only words
counted arbitrarily on the palm
of one hand by the fingers of the oth

Ha! Vunderbar!