Wednesday, December 18, 2019

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.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

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

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

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.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

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?

Friday, September 06, 2019

'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.

Friday, August 09, 2019

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.

Wednesday, August 07, 2019

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.

Sunday, August 04, 2019

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.



Saturday, July 06, 2019

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.

Tuesday, July 02, 2019

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.

Monday, June 24, 2019

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.





Wednesday, May 29, 2019

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.

Wednesday, April 03, 2019

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.



Monday, March 25, 2019

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.

Wednesday, March 06, 2019

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.

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

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.