Steve Spence
Captain Dampier Makes Notes About Wild Flowers
It is almost impossible to give any
sense of the violence of these storms,
yet we all know pirates who put off going
to the dentist for longer than they should.
He took me by the arm & dragged me
into the depths of the ship without any
regard for protocol. I would like to have
had a bath, a proper wallow with soap.
There is a kind of inevitability at work
here, yet the more mirrors there are,
the more glorious is the intimacy of the
room. The timing is clearly suspicious.
He’s the total outlaw, a pure pirate,
yet he combines his grisly trade with
a passion for botany. The boys
surveyed all this then looked out to sea.
Abruptly there was a blinding flash as
the question of taxation began to raise
its ugly head. Social hot-spring bathing
is very much a part of pirate society.
One of the snakes had seized hold of its
own tail & the image whirled mockingly
before my eyes. ‘But I don’t really like
chicken. I prefer manufactured meats’.
Their relationship seemed to develop
as if life were imitating art, yet he was
interested in knowledge & its practical
application. Taxonomy rules, okay!
Once they had drunk of the elixir, the
pirates went off to build their sand castles.
They didn’t know how to dance, so they
just stuck their hands in the air & waved.
As the mainstream of youth culture
floated downstream, the pirates paddled
against the flow. Their experimental
findings may not seem very surprising today.
Page(s) 47
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The