Pears

 A weary old pillock

Drags laden shopping trolley

Up suburban hillock.

Trolley contains two pairs of pears,

Four pears, to be exact,

Recently purchased, packed

And cellophane wrapped,

In a nice little tray,

Which will be thrown away today;

After it has been shipped

By muti-national fruit traffickers,

To Dollis Hill from far South Africa.

But the shopping trolley

Is not the only place

Where there are pears.

They are all around

The plodding pillock’s feet

Each step must be

Carefully and precisely placed,

As pavement pears are lying there,

On the ground, rotting and rotten,

Half-eaten and brown.

The tree that they fell from

Seems forgotten by its owners,

Or maybe they have never known

About the fruit that it has grown.

So, the pavement pears are

Unharvested, and to humans, waste

Whilst rats, birds wasps, and flies

Were wise enough to eat and taste.

On a world that starts to fry

Transporting pears for thousands of miles

Seems unwise,

While those homegrown

Just decompose.

TRUE ENGLISH ROYALTY

 One bright summer’s day

After a month of cloud and rain,

The world has rotated again,

So, it is the day for Princesses to fly.

But these fine ladies will not take to air

In private helicopters or personal jet planes.

No servants will ply them inflight

With caviar, canapes, or champagne.

They will not emerge through palace gates

In coaches, limousines or cavalcades;

They’ll crawl from pavement cracks

And holes in the ground

To make their desperate escapades.

Most won’t survive this first and last flight,

When their thin wings glitter like jewels in the sun

Predators see them and eagerly eat them.

Those who remain can fall back to land.

And if jaws don’t grasp them

Or feet don’t stomp them,

The lucky survivors, the last pretty Princesses,

Will lose their wings and make it to refuge

Beneath stone slabs or compost heaps

But once burrowed in safely, they will not sleep.

They’ll build cities of workers

For thousands of children

The reign of the Ant Queen is long, dark and deep.

A view from the suburbs

 Sitting inside a London front door,

Waiting for groceries to arrive

Or for inspiration to descend from the sky.

Instead, a seagull flies by

Honking to itself.

Further off cranes

Raise and lower massive steel limbs,

Blinking red hazard lights,

Like Martian war machines.

H.G. Wells may have seen them

As seeming aliens,

But they’re just another part

Of the constant re-invention

Rebirth, construction and destruction

Of this inexorably expanding megacity.

Is a vast pulsing heart,

Or a growing slime-mould,

Spreading out towards the seas?

Going on and on

Until the end

Of the Great When?

I saved a suicidal spider,

 I saved a suicidal spider,

Which was poised to plunge

Into the torrent of steaming water,

Swirling in my kitchen sink.

I intervened with a piece of cardboard

To prevent its dive

Over the sink’s brink.

 

Then I was smug,

And I savoured my smugness.

I saw myself as the great godlike,

Arachnid saviour.

Until realising that, most likely,

There was no saviour for me,

Or the billions of my species,

About to be swept away in floods

Or scorched to death in droughts and fires,

That we ourselves created.

We have always prayed

To some god or gods,

To anything or nothing.

But if he, she, it or they are there,

They might not care,

Or might think it only fair,

That the consequences 

Which we’ve engineered

Finish us off for good.

Furthermore, we only have two legs each,

Unlike our eight-legged successors,

Who will scuttle over our ruins,

Not remembering us at all.

 

TANGLES

 Thank god or whatever, or whomsoever

Presides over missing objects,

That I never said what I thought

I was going to say.

Now I know that I was wrong,

All along

The thing that I had thought was gone

Hadn’t gone at all.

It had concealed itself behind a door.

But in my confused brain

I thought it had been deliberately taken.

I believed that to be

The only possible explanation.

What a sad shambles,

Mentally I thrashed around as if

Caught in kraken’s tentacles,

Or as if I had fallen into a prickly patch

Of brambles.

Until I composed a cold polite speech

To address the whereabouts of

The thing that I had thought was gone.

But I never uttered

This mistaken accusation,

Because the gone thing reappeared

From where it had aways been.

So, I didn’t have to seem

To be more of a drooling fool than I usually do.

Smoke

Tobacco and marijuana

Smoke hangs, swirls

and curls in a sun beam

those who have inhaled it,

then blown it out of lungs again,

look at it with young wonder,

thinking that it means something.

Years and miles further on

Sunlight shines through

Smoke from a chimney

Making dapped patterns

On the tarmac carpark below.

One person watches this

Another is gone.

Smoke only means this for a moment.

Cerberus hellhound

 In July 2023

Cerberus hellhound

Breathed on Europe,

With one of his three heads,

Burning green trees to ash,

Turning fertile soil to dust.

But in smug Brexit Britain smug Brexit Brits were smug

Sitting staring out to sea

From urine perfumed promenade shelters

Trying to discern

A horizon between grey and grey 

And thinking about fish and chips,

As squalls blew in.

But don’t let Cerberus

Get a whiff of that,

Or he will lift all three of his heads.

And he will

One day.