Clive James, “Windows Is Shutting Down”

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes,
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

Opal Sunsest: Selected Poems, recently released in paperback, cherrypicks from Clive James‘ two previous collections, The Book of My Enemy and Angels Over Elsinore, and it includes “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” and many, many others poems. But here’s one that isn’t in Opal Sunset, oddly enough: “Opal Room, Wallace Collection,” read by a man who goes by Tom O’Bedlam:

3 June 2010 | poetry |