Sunday, 31 August 2025

Five Poems by Jack Caradoc

 






Honk! said the Goose

 

 

The world is ending, 

ragged chevrons of geese evacuate, 

like crows flying backwards. 

 

The snow has fallen over and over, 

burying everything and everyone. 

Wood pigeons fan desperately, 

dive like kingfishers into drifts, 

in search of bread and scraps. 

 

The optimistic weather woman 

says a thaw is comingLightning appears. 

I hadn’t realised it was the Thor. 

Rime Giants fall like skittles in slush. 

 

I look up. 

Honk!  Said the Goose. 

 

 

 

Toad

 

 

She said I was ambiguous, which isn’t true. 

I can’t even swim. 

Ambiguous not Amphibious, you dolt! 

She snarled from the driver’s seat. 

She always had a way with words, 

(but not humour). 

 

Open to interpretation, she said. 

Interpreted badly I thought but didn’t speak. 

When she finally left, I was made up, 

like her stories, her name, her life. 

 

She was an attention seeking missile 

with no guidance system. 

Always inventing drama  

to make herself more interesting. 

 

Trouble is you can’t make a stone swim. 

It just sinks, unless it has  

an ambiguous landing craft.  

 

Truth? Well it’s a toad,  

which is to say it can never be a frog, 

no matter how much kissing is involved. 

I imagine her sometimes, warts and all 

Missing the joke and raging at someone else. 

 

I am amphibious about whether I care or not. 

 

 

Barbie Oppenheimer 

 

Monday, it was 1959,  

I was on the catwalk modelling ideals,  

moulded by other ideals and ideas 

of the patriarchy and capitalism. 

 
Tuesday 1945, it was before me,  

in the era of the baby dolls that 
they turned their faces to New Mexico  

and betrayed the hispanolas before  

they brought the cancer of war 
 
It took me 57 years before the brains  

that gave me this status looked beyond  

the colour of my plastic and they made  

me in their own image.  

Thinking themselves gods. 
 
Before that I was everywhere the same,  

everywhere identical, like newsprint. 

Like laughter imprinted on w.a.s.p. faces 

like an absence in a third world crib. 

 

Ker–ching! diversity is money not guilt. 

 
Now, I am become death 
She giggles, the destroyer of worlds. 
Her smile as bright as a thousand magenta suns. 

 

 

 

Moon Base Beta 

 

 

Not the one they all talk about, 

the one with the pretty girl pilots 

& charismatic leader in a silver wig. 

The ones with the gleaming uniforms 

& the state of the art everything, 

 

but the one in shadow that worked 

with spare parts and on a shoestring. 

Our threadbare uniforms in slightly  

mismatched beige, our ugly leader, 

our wigs, dark as our side of the moon. 

 

 

 

Invasion of the Silent

 

 

Our landing craft beached 

from the sea of onomatopoeia, 

with its sibilant waves hissing  

up over hackneyed shingle. 

 

Their distant similes like mountains, 

some rugged, some magnificent, 

some barely mountains at all. 

 

And the natives so ineffectual, so full of themselves, 

their egos unaware of what moved silently 

towards their noisy self regarding heads. 

Easy targets, they pleaded with redundant metaphors 

and conceited conceits, ever reliant on mere words. 

 

We began the slaughter.  

 

We raised our flags and statues, 

claimed it as our own for our 

empire of silence. 

 

They were dumb then. 

Devoid of inspiration. 

They fought us with form 

and without, their artless art, 

slingshots against lightning. 

 

We mounted their heads on their libraries. 

Erased their words from their geography. 

Cut off their trochaic feet. 

Shut their books forever. 

 

To the glory of our empire, from the real beginning,  

before the beginning of the word. 

From our formless, endless, utter void.




Jack Caradoc is the curator of The Candyman’s Trumpet PDF magazine And it’s live arm ‘10RED’ a monthly event in Edinburgh. Former curator of Dreich Magazine He has published many books of his own poetry and prose too.





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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