Europa Poets' Gazette No. 70, February 2010

It’s a summer’s day and the crickets are chirping in one continuous sound similar to a jet-engine’s whine. The dog is asleep at my feet and the television rambles on about some indigenous tribes in South America. I’ll be bowling tonight. This is the only way I can tell whether I can concentrate. If I bowl well - all is well. Never mind.
We’ll have some greengages soon. The branches of this tree are pliant and the possum has just eaten every leaf of another plum tree and has killed it but finds it hard to balance on the greengage because if it falls off, the cat is waiting underneath to scratch it. I’m giving the tree lots of water and liquid fertiliser that makes the fruit grow and then I go down each day and feel each plum whether it’s soft and if it is, I eat it. I could do this all day. What a wasted life.
I’m writing two booklets. One is made up of children’s poems that have no meaning, only sound like music. A bit like the Jabberwocky. The other is filled with short-short stories and I seem to procrastinate with that one.
On this page are another two of my philosophical sonnets. I haven’t published the book because I can’t find the sheet with my ISBN numbers. I will, don’t worry, eventually.


From Joe Lake’s Philosophical Sonnets:
First Cause
As everything on Earth must have a cause
Then this first source could be a deity
But here we cogitate without recourse
For what was there before this entity?
If God, omnisciently has always been
The cause and therefore all creation’s birth,
What would it mean if God Himself is seen
As not a beneficent ruler but its curse?
Aristotle thought the world goes on
With no beginning spirit in its dance.
And deity? There never has been one
For life is chaos at creation’s chance.
If everything has; then God has a cause,
But it’s much more likely that He never was.
On Being II
Our lives are drawn towards a central core
To reproduce a substance into life
And here to form and open up a door,
The first beginning of that human hive.
We congregate and mingle and we make;
Constructing structures that sustain the cell
To reproduce from blueprints in its wake
And stimulate to feed and know and tell.
Yet soon enough the wheel grinds to a halt
So that the substance must be dissipated
Where Being and its essence may be culled,
Decayed into its parts, disintegrated.
But other templates rise to build these blocks
To make a different substance from these stocks.
© Joe Lake