pollarded plane trees

The pollarded plane trees of this street

extend shorn, branchless limbs.

In rows, these trees stand,

Like giant injured pleading hands,

Imploring for light and warmth,

Which is denied,

By the wet slate grey sky.

But from the top of one tree,

A red-breasted king sings.

So all may know, from the magnificence of his song,

That this is his domain,

Where all who hear,

Are subject to his reign.

Cock robin swells his breast and proclaims:

Winter will end.

Spring will come again.

cephalopod.dreams,

I mostly really like my dreams,

Though they can sometimes be

Fearful, surreal and odd

But,  I really want to know

What it’s like to dream

As a cephalopod.

Yes, my desire is to know

What it’s like to dream

Like an octopus, squid or cuttlefish

Which each have nine brains

And that is the reason why

I have this impossible wish.

Each tentacle of

These maritime beasts

Has one mind of its own

To direct its actions,

To process its emotions

To understand the world.

So one mind could dream of catching food?

Another of meeting a mate?

Another of dodging predators?

Another of having fun?

And another of learning from schools of mackerel

Beneath the light of a watery sun?

Would it be like changing

TV Channels with remote control,

If there’s a nightmare on one,

Just change to two

So calm can be restored?

Or is it a complete cacophony,

Fear, love, wonder, desire, despair

All together at once?

But my one brain’s all alone

In its own bone dome

Ruling a nervous domain

Imagining cephalopod dreaming

And worrying about catching trains

Flick a thumb down,

Flick a thumb down,

Strike flint on steel,

Make flame.

Light the dry leaves,

Suck the smoke into lungs.

Tobacco is a treacherous weed,

Which does not get you high,

But just makes you need,

So ignite, inhale,    

Repeat thirty times a day

For thirty years

Until eventually

You unchain yourself

From the treacherous weed,

But you cannot escape free

The cycle powering lungs

That once got you up mountains,

Now won’t even let you reach

The end of the street

Unless you often stop

To wheeze, pant and cough.

And someone in Brazil

Flicks a thumb down,

Strikes flint on steel,

Makes flame.

Lights the dry leaves,

Burns a forest,

And this whole planet

Sucks the smoke into its lungs.

SMALL GREAT GRETA

Which drop of water will be the one,

That trickles down from the melting glacier,

Into the ocean

And raises the sea level enough to breach

The flood barriers of the City?

And which tiny pebble,

Freed from the ice will roll,

Knock two more pebbles to motion

Then knock two more which

Then move a rock which knocks

A boulder to roll down

Taking more with it until

Whole hillsides roll over

Airports, railways, roads and towns?

And which schoolgirl

Can move a few to join the cause,

Who then move more, and more, and more,

Until there are millions in the streets

Saying ‘stop your greed,

Mend the damage that you have done,

We will not let your stupidity

Wreck our only home?

'Lung Function’,

They call this place 'Lung Function’,

But, that’s not what happens here,

As we sit around wheezing and waiting ,

In uncomfortable plastic chairs.

We sit around coughing and wheezing,

As our lungs will not function in London,

Because we’ve been breathing the air.

Form Explorers

English Nostalgia disease.

I’ve got maladies and ailments,

Some are chronic, some sporadic,

Some hang around, some come and go,

But when I see the past through a golden glow,

It’s worse than diabetes, or arthritis in the knees.

I have contracted English

Nostalgia disease.

I want to go back to the glorious nineteen fifties,

When all foreigners were either,

Traditionally quaint,

Or inherently shifty;

When all Englishmen were

Calm and rational, always just and fair,

And if anyone said otherwise,

They pretended not to hear.

Curing this nonsense illness is difficult to crack,

Whenever I think it’s gone,

It comes creeping back

And I want a no deal Brexit

And to get the empire back.

English Nostalgia has infected

My whole culture;

And it’s not the only one

To contract this xenophobia

To want the past to be the future,

Which makes no sense because,

It believes in a past

That never ever was.

light

When our eyes can see,

But we are blind,

Once night has left the day behind

Our other senses are then made sharp

To navigate a world of dark.,

Since we are neither owls nor bats

Imagination fills the gaps

If a leaf rustles, or if a twig snaps,

It must be a predator on our tracks

So, we light fire and huddle near

Then make more light to frighten fear,

We light buildings, buses, streets and trains, 

We want it to be bright day again,

Or even if it was grey with rain, 

At least we could see. 

So sometimes now we miss stars and moon

But we might never see either soon

Since we're burning fuel to make more light, 

Burning fuel without foresight,

Wounding our world and we can't put it right,

And unless we find an answer to this,

Our final road will be brightly lit.

URBAN SEAGULL and THE SUBURBAN FOX

URBAN SEAGULL

I am an urban seagull,

Who’s never seen the sea,

Born on the roof a megastore,

Next to a motorway;

I’ve laughed and cried at the city,

Since I broke out of the egg,

I can laugh when I’m flying,

I can cry when I land to stand

Perched on one leg

On a lamppost or window ledge

But never in a tree

Because,

I am an urban seagull,

Who’s never seen the sea,

Some say I am a herring gull,

But I’m a gourmet

Of dropped take-away

And my feathers shine bright white

From all the cooking oil I’ve eaten.

When hot air spirals upwards

From sun-baked tarmac below,

I ride the thermal with all my mates

And higher than higher we go.

At the apex of the spiral

As I circle in the sky

A far-off glint of water

May catch my searching eye

But I just soar above the city

And I don’t let it bother me

Since I’m an urban seagull

And I don’t know what it could be.

THE SUBURBAN FOX

If you get up early in summer,

You may see me, lazing

Sunbathing in the first rays

Of the day.

Lying, yawning, content, alone

On the lawn that you thought

That you rented or even owned,

You maybe imagined that

It was part of your home;

And I’ve been living here all the time

Making my bed

Under your garden shed.

This whole street of

Discreet little Englishperson’s castles

Clenched tight by suburban arseholes

Is not your land,

It’s mine

I hunt across it in my own time,

And you seldom see me

Unless I want you to

And I show myself so you can clearly see

The true owner of the territory,

The urbane suburban fox,

My compliments, that’s me.

We are the bald monkeys,

We are the bald monkeys,
From a planet in the milky way.
We rush around in our tin cans,
From place to place to place.
We can make machines of wondrous power,
And also vast heaps of trash.
We'll kill wild forests and elephants,
We'll turn our planet to ash.
We are such curious creatures,
We always want to know, 
So we cut others up to see how they work,
And when they're dead  we know.
We think that we are so intelligent,
But don't seem to realise,
That there is no planet b
For us to colonise.
So unless we treat earth and it's life,
With care and with respect,
The oceans will rise and erase us,
As a failed experiment.

If swift

If swift was I

I’d fly screaming,

Sleep on the wing

And fly dreaming.

When it got too cold

To Africa I’d fly

But I’m earthbound

Growing old

Whilst in summersky

Swifts fly

Until they die

Flying.

the Americas,

When I went to Bulgaria,

They thought that I came from America;

Maybe because of the blue denim jeans,

That I wore.

I had a pair since I was nine, or, maybe, before,

Because I wanted to be a cool boy,

To look like a cowboy,

As I galloped on my imaginary pony

Across the tarmac prairies,

Of a west London school playground.

I would put two fingers together

And make the ‘peow-peow’ noises,

Of a television gunslinger’s six-shooter

America had colonised me, culturally.

Then after the TV westerns, the music got me:

Although I preferred the cynics and the critics,

To the romantics.

Steely Dan, Little Feat and Frank Zappa

Blew my small island mind.

But now I know

That it was always just the.U.S.A.,

And mainly the Anglos;

But, there are many more Americas,

With many different dreams,

To those pouring out of

My stereo speakers and video screens.

lucas plan

Factories in Willesden and Birmingham,

Not where you’d go unless you got paid,

To build parts for bombers and tanks,

For this is where these were made;

And those who made those weapons knew,

What the things that they made could do,

To men and women like them.

But then again,

You must sell what you can sell,

To pay for food and a roof as well.

The system that sets a worker’s price

Isn’t ever kind or nice,

And in the case of Lucas Aerospace

Compassion had no place

In such calculations

So redundancies were the fix

Applied in nineteen seventy-six.

The workers’ unions would not comply,

 ‘We can still work’, they said, and they asked why

They couldn’t now make machines

Not intended to kill and burn

‘We could design the blades that turn

With the wind to make clean power

Devise car engines that make fewer fumes

We could be building kidney machines,

Be saving lives not taking’.

And none of this was just wild dreams

Because they built the prototypes

Of socially useful technology.

But Management refused to see

And only words and sympathy

Came from Labour and the TUC.

So, it all amounted to a might have been,

But one that some still remember

To remind us that we could have seen,

Instead of planetary destruction driven by greed,

A world where workers control their work

And produce for human need.

ODE TO A SUMMER COLD

My nose is running so fluently,

Discharging a tsunami of snot,

Words cannot describe it,

Except for the words that I’ve got.

It’s a deluge of slimy mucus,

A tidal bore of nasal scum,

And there’s gallons more to come.

It is an unprecedented nostril event,

And I find it very strange,

Perhaps I am a victim,

Of internal climate change.

Could it be that my brain is melting,

From the heat of my poetic inspiration,

I’ve had writer’s block for weeks,

So it ends my bardic constipation,

Now it’s all come out in a flood

That I’ve put down on paper;

But when I come back later,

There’ll be a serious issue

Because instead of a majestic masterpiece,

I’ll just have heaps of wet tissue.

Total Gardening

If you have the money,

Why not spend it creating

Your very own miniature totalitarian state,

In your very own garden?

Surround and secure your territory

With hedges, trimmed into regular

Rectangular configurations.

Install wrought iron gates to control all migration.

Only allow grass to grow in designated lawns,

And nowhere else;

Ensure each blade of grass is exactly cut

To a uniform length;

And that every one is of the same

Species and colour.

Astroturf is not an acceptable substitute,

Because it would not involve

Making living things submit to your will.

Arrange other selected pure-bred plants

At precisely equal intervals in borders

That are made in accurate geometrical shapes

Only squares, paralellograms and triangles will do.

Use fire, iron, chemical and biological means

To eradicate all intrusive plants, insects,

Invertebrates and other creatures

Install automatic security lights and video

To enhance surveillance.

The sky may still be unruly,

And the weather unpredictable,

But just ignore them and gloat,

Over your New Horticultural Order.

POSH GAMMON

I like to lie in bath of luke warm water,

Reading The Spectator.

It’s so well written, it’s so right wing,

It wants the empire back,

It’s for people who own things.

And when the mad Russians come,

And The Spectator says they will.

And drop their naughty bomb,

I’m going to die in my bath,

Reading the Truth,

When the fireball rolls,

I’m going to boil like bacon,

Charred paper in my hand,

The last leisured remnant

Of a dead civilisation.

AUTOBIOGODRIVEL

I started to write my autobiography, then,

I sneezed, and sneezed, and sneezed again.

I blew out onto the page words and memories,

And, probably, tiny particles of my brain.

So, I have assembled this miscellany,

From the stains that remained.

I am an unpleasant peasant pedant,

And an excited observer of ants,

A wiper of damp patches;

I miss the taste of postage stamps.

Once I had a god-given omen,

An eagle’s feather floating down from a clear sky,

It fell at my feet silently,

And I just walked on by.

I stack volumes on shelves,

Suck up dust with a machine.

My only traditional is breakfast,

But I am averse to beans.

And not one word of this matters,

Or means very much at all,

As I’m an atom in an atom in an atom,

On a cosmic billiard ball.

GENETIC DETERMINISM

Sitting on the shitter,

Wrestling in my bowels

And in my brain,

With constipation

And existential exasperation:

I seek enlightenment from the pages

Of a scientific publication

And the words inscribed

In this in slim tome

Seek to educate its readers

About the human genome.

Why are we bipedal?

Why aren’t we hirsute?

How can we make tools?

From where did we migrate?

And why do we uniquely,

Unlike our cousin apes,

Make this thing called language,

With which to communicate?

And the scientists say,

As scientists tend to do,

That it’s all down to a gene,

One they call Fox P2.

So I go out into the garden,

To digest this information,

In a suburban situation;

When a urban fox passes by,

It gives me a foxy look,

With its foxy eye

And as if the give the science

A feral peer review

And show that the research was accurate,

This canine decides to micturate

So it was then that I knew,

That the genetics were all true

This confirmed,

When the fox peed too.

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

It fell all day yesterday,

It’s falling again today;

Filling the ditches and dykes in February,

Filling canals, rills, rivers and becks;

Turning puddles into ponds,

Turning ponds into lakes;

Eating away at shorelines,

As it causes waters to rise,

like ants eating into a cake.

It washes streams out of polar icecaps,

Setting glaciers free

Breaks through coastal defences

And ever expands the sea.

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

It drips, it leaks, it drizzles, it lashes it pours.

It takes land and makes mud,

it takes mud and makes swamp,

It takes hilltops and makes islands,

It makes landscapes into seascapes

And it will make a planet for all the whales,

From the planet of the apes.