Life eats life, and that is the law

 

I love pouring olive oil

In and out of bottles,

Because it is liquid sunlight,

I love drinking red wine,

Because it is the blood of Christ,

I love eating black pudding,

Because it is the blood of the Pig.

I love eating the liver of the lamb that died for me,

Because it is bloody.

Life eats life, and that is the law

I eat cheese that is alive,

I drink beer that is alive,

And death will eat me,

Render me down

And feed me back to more life

GLOBALISED

 

 My toothpaste comes from Romania,

 My bed comes from Vietnam,

 My coffee was packed in Spain,

 My hand sanitizer originates from Utrecht,

 But my headache pills are British,

 Handpicked by loyal yokels,

 In the paracetamol orchards of Devon.

 I am about to eat some Polish garlic sausage,

 I have just eaten some French jam,

 And sadly,my international consumption

 Could be threatened by a container ship,

 Which is as long as my street,

 Loaded with containers.

 That are full of containers.

 And is jammed in the Suez Canal.

 I need more vaccine from Belgium,

 To ward off infection by a virus,

 Allegedly originating in Chinese bats.

 In fact, I am so globalised that,

 I am becoming spherical in shape.

 Nonetheless I remain.

 Stubbornly almost monolingual 

 And forced to inhabit

 A xenophobic island.

A SADISTIC SALAD RECIPE

 

A SADISTIC SALAD RECIPE

I love torturing vegetables

I treat them worse than the KGB, the Gestapo,

Special Branch or the CIA.

I imprison them in a dark cold fridge,

Then I roust them out brutally,

Screaming things like

“Where are you?

You can’t hide at the back of the shelf,

Come out, you mangey tout!”

Some I seize, and throw immediately,

Into boiling water whole.

Some I slice with sharp blades,

Then hurl them into an oily bowl.

Some I skin, and some I scrape,

Some I even eat raw,

But none escape my greedy teeth

And my ever-chomping maw

THE REGULAR SEASONAL ORGY IN DOLLIS HILL NW2

 

The garden plum tree

Is provocatively starting to dress

Its long slim smooth erotic limbs

With white blossoms.

So, soon it will all kick off again,

Hormones, pheromones, bird song,

Lots of colourful visual, oral and olfactory action ‘

Frogspawn, nectar, courting displays.

plenty of thrusting, budding and flowering.

I'll peer out of my kitchen window,

Like a pervert,

Using my binoculars

To zoom in on the best bits;

But sooner or later I’ll have to go out,

With secateurs and shears and a rake,

To tidy it all up,

Because we can't have

This kind of thing going on,

Unregulated and unrestrained.

After all this is suburbia.

 

SHEILDING

 Waiting for my vaccine,

Waiting for a jab,

Scuttling around my lonely flat

Like a homeless hermit crab

Watching bollocks on the box

About unshaven actors

Fighting inner demons.

It's all a load of cobblers

Pissed up, pissed off,

Locked down and  burned out,.

Gazing through the window

At the birds  down there

Feeding on the feeder

at least They can fly  away.

Lucky little bleeders

I have another drink and.

Wonder what I see?

A spirrel or a quarrakeat?

In the garden tree

do I see a sedge harrow?

A coldwinch, a pood region

Or a fartling?

I don't know.

I don't care.

I wander round.

From room to room

Not going anywhere

Waiting for my vaccine,

Waiting for a jab,

Rattling around my lonely flat,

Like a homeless hermit crab

 

presents and parcels

 

Once presents and parcels were special things

Only arriving on certain occasions

Carefully wrapped in layers of paper

Secured with sticky tape and string

By your friends and your relations,

Then opened to reveal objects of delight,

On days of celebration.

 

This is how It was long ago  

Now in middle class utopia

Traffic jams of delivery vans

Clog the crescents and groves of suburbia

Each vehicle driven

By a most miserable man

Overworked and underpaid

By the number of drops he does

A pittance for each delivery he has made

 

Meanwhile nearby the High Streets die

Shops coffined up by shutters,

Their doorways once carefully swept,

Are now niches where are rubbish collects:

 

And in Bleak Fields

Where motorways intersect

Large sheds have been erected

Computer governed inside

And roboticized

Here goods are packed and selected

With lorries streaming in

And the vans streaming out

Tons and tons and tons

Of stuff is moved about

And delivered to destinations

Where packaging is ripped off

And thrown away

As we build an all-consuming future

Living on top of garbage hills

Unpacking endless artefacts

Of course, this can last forever

Surely our planet cannot be finite,

If our demands are exponential

BIRDBRAIN

In winter,

The interlaced, Interlocking, leafless,

Limbs and branches and twigs

Of two plum trees

Look to me

Like the nerve connections

In a vast wet wooden brain,

As I sit and stare air up at them,

In a thin cold December rain.

After I have loaded

The feeders  with seeds and suet,

Many small birds begin to fly in.

Landing in in the treetops

Then dropping, hopping and

Fluttering down

Coal tits, blue tits, great tits

Dunnocks, robins and goldfinches

Make indirect, differing routes

From perch to perch 

Nearer and nearer to the food.

Bobbing and turning their heads,

At every stage along the way.

Checking all around for predators:

Because there must be a catch.

As even little birds know

That free lunches are fictitious.

So, they work their ways,

Round and down the trees

Until they're placed

To make rapid dashes in, 

Quickly pick and grab,

Then immediately escape

To eat elsewhere  

The price that they pay for suet and seeds

Is that I watch them 

And compare them

With the starting sparks of ideas

Or initial perceptions

That somehow stick and then begin

Hopping and moving in impulses,

And by intuition,

From neuron to neuron,

Building metaphors,

Shaping ideas,

And then, maybe making

Something like

This poem.