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The Lark

The Lark shares fictional short stories and poetry

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POETRY

Plurabilities

I’ll lose my Bermondsey stutter before it’s too late

2 min readAug 4, 2026

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Photo by Elly Ch. on Unsplash

Gracehoper jigs ajog,
hoppity skippity croaks Mr Frog.
Shhhhh! Finnegan’s not Awake!
Worra slob!

Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
whine like a man who’s out of time
casuistry and sophistry cling together perfectly.
Poetry’s more about wine than whine:

A true poet makes the difficult easy
turns water into wine in a half-truncated line,
caesuras soar, in a breeze of time:

Pull out his eyes! Oh! pull out his eyes!
Apologise! Apologise!
I will not apologise

I will never apologise.

The certainty of their zeal; these empty-headed
authoritarians of race or religion or of accent or class.
Don’t like being offended? Piss off then. That’s that!
Spit in the face of all the stupidities
of the human race.

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John E Marks
John E Marks

Written by John E Marks

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot

The Lark
The Lark

Published in The Lark

The Lark shares fictional short stories and poetry