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.

shampoo bottle promises

Washing my hair,

I bellow like a mastodon,

Might have done,

And read

The promises written on my shampoo bottle

“Win Epic Trips And Thousands Of Prizes!”

It alleges.

I don’t really believe these pledges

But recycle the bottle,

And use them to make dreams,

To get me through thirty minutes or so,

Then I recycle the dreams too,

And dream of something else instead.

A great bustard

Unflustered,

A great bustard

Strides with its flock

Along a fold in the land of

The high Iberian plains.

The flock walks with all the dignity of hidalgos,

Immaculately plumed in

Beige, russet, black, white and grey;

As befits the heaviest flighted bird

In the world.

The flock proceeds with long-legged strides,

Each one in the slow procession

Will pause, from time to time,

To peck grains or insects from the ground;

Whilst others look around

And if a human comes too close,

Or if the flock so decides;

They may all take flight,

Flashing bright white underwings

Across the wide sky

To another fold in the plains,

To begin the procession again.

fat balls.

CLOCKS GO BACK TODAY

November’s nearly here,

The bones of the street trees start to show,

There’s a cruel sharp cold edge in the air,

so I sit on my suburban front doorstep,

handling my fat balls.

But the neighbours don’t phone the law,

For I am not a weatherproofed pervert,

But the respectable owner of half a house

Who is unpacking and storing lumps of suet,

To feed his garden birds,

Through the winter that now begins,

But these birds aren’t really mine,

They’re not even my feathered friends.

I pay them with food hung from garden trees,

To brighten the air above,

A small, bramble-infested, eden.

CHIP SHOP FIRE

CHIP SHOP FIRE

A wall of searing flame

Roared through the “Happy Plaice”,

The saveloys were turned to ash,

The pasties brightly blazed.

What should be crisp and golden

Was charred and burned to black.

Fire almost cooked the owner,

Just like the doner kebab,

which had sat behind the window,

for just as long as he had;

but he escaped the inferno,

he ran across the road

to stare in consternation,

as his life’s worked combusted,

in a sudden conflagration.

His tears were salt and vinegar

And he cursed the firey fate,

 that burned his rock and cod,

and overcooked his skate.

Streams of water from firehoses,

Could not assuage his pain,

but he bottled up his grief like tomato sauce,

and vowed he’d fry again.