Stanzas 4 and 5 cracked me up.

Ha! Ever considered a flamethrower?

Writing about writing - it must be fucking good to be at least a bit interesting.

Much of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children is about mango pickle. You must have picked up on the same vibe.

Cardiff's no better. Some nasty connotations there in 'kebab meat gorged by kebab meat'. Line 6 - 'black scab'? Pretty cool, very patriotic. I share your sentiments.

I know of someone who had half their teeth knocked out while playing rugby; this poem made me think of that.

The off rhythm doesn't seem to work well with the upbeat poem.

You must dance like the whitest man on earth.

Hey Mandy--the NY Times had an op-ed piece on Indian mangos. It called them "the King of Fruit, Indian masterpieces that are burnished like jewels, oozing sweet, complex flavors acquired after two millenniums of painstaking grafting." Looks like they'll be headed our way as part of the new nuke/trade pact. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12jaffrey.html Yum.

Hope Martijn liked it.

Great lines, I thought you were going to build on the rhymes in lines 1 and 2 (loved 'trophy or catastrophe?' by the way) but it works well as it is. Now, I have a very strange reading of this. It made me think of fried eggs. 'Naked' - skin-coloured shell...'deconstructed motion' - the way an egg rolls...'bucked' - 'clucked'...'morning's flat' - in the pan...'sun slap through brocade' - yolk through shell...'oddball artifact' - speaks for itself. Really, the more I think about that reading, the more I realise how weird I am. Hmm. Speaking of oddball artifacts, for two days now there's been half a potato with a small paper flag saying 'King Edward' sat on top of a car on my way to uni.

How nice of you to repost this as backstory to/inspiration of "Anal Beard." But an itchy pudenda is no laughing matter, sir!

Another fine addition to the 'ranker compendium of feculence. And a welcome change from God blah.

Hmm...I don't really know what to make of this. I think Caducus nailed it with stanzas 1 and 6, something about 'hot dog...he does not eat' sat uneasy with me. The last stanza seemed very 'message-y', which I'm not a fan of in poems. Stanza 4 is good though.

Fantastic opener, the first stanza was favoured over the second (nice as it was, it lacked the nostalgic edge that stanza 1 had). 'Gathers light from my last youthful days'...beautiful...one of those (many) things that makes me want to get out of the city again. Anyway, you may or may not read this; either way I'll post my apologies for various stupid rants in the past - they served no purpose other than to fuel my conviction that I was the greatest poet on Earth and above criticism. So there it is; I think you're a very good writer and shall read through your list of poems as I should have done already. Peace?

'Suck a sonata from you', I wasn't convinced by, and perhaps soul and skin could be switched? Other than that, very pretty. It felt like it wanted rhymes!

Ain't really pickin' much up from this but the "hot dog" stanza cracked me up.

'Damp yellow light' works beautifully, and the bank clerk's grin similie put a smile on my face! The continuity across lines 7 and 8 felt odd, somehow - personally I'd try and avoid using 'That needs' at the start of the line; but then again it would be pretty awkward to twist around effectively. The loose rhyme scheme suits this piece, not so distracting that it detracts from the imagery, but enough to make itself known in the background. Top class.

Sure it's hair? Sounds more like a case of amoebic dysentery.

Unlike the sepukku from you previous post, here the Chinese font makes sense to me. It should be longer, though. The ending comes a bit too soon, I think.