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.