PAPA’S TRIBE
The wives and mistresses
All mealy grins and doughy skins
With their ever-wet holes
And their second-hand sins
Watching as the mirror butterflies their faces
Twinned with depthless images of themselves
Wronged women staring back in anguish
Each flopped vacuously on vacant shelves
Leftovers or left behinds
None are sure of which is which
All of them are certain of one thing though;
It’s one of the others
That is the biggest bitch.
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GONZO MOMMA
Too weird to live, too rare to die
I guess that’s a creed
Old Hunter would swear by
Though he would have a drink first
Or maybe three
Then try to figure out where
The action might be
Before smoking some ‘stuff’
‘Cos he knew plain whiskey and gin
Would never be enough.
Then, perhaps like you, he would
Upheave everything and pack
Screaming all the while;
You can kiss my ass
I ain’t never coming back
THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
He lay in the box quite comfortably
His waxen face staring into infinity
Looking much better in death
Than he ever had in life.
It was all that I could do to peer
At him through slatted fingers
From the back of the room;
The ever-present smell of tanning
And leather aprons absent now;
More than forty seeping years of it
Scrubbed away one last time
His moped – a natural progression from pedal power
When his legs gave out –
Lay discarded in the coal shed
At the back of the house.
(No driver you see, and mother still had the shopping to do)
He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,
And turned over his bit of stony ground endlessly.
In summer he clipped sheep slowly
With a machine bought by post from Clerys,
Carefully stowing it away in its box
When the shearing was done.
The clay pipes he sucked on – their broken stems
Held together with blood pricked from his thumb –
Were redundant now
And his three bottles of Sunday-night Guinness
Would stand corked under the counter evermore.
Who would dance half-sets with her now?
My mother enquired of no one in particular,
The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him
Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.
He lay there with a smile on his face
Knowing it was over
And I never got to know what was on his mind.
We put him in the ground
And sadness trickled through me
Like a handful of sand through my fingers.
Later, everyone stood around
Eating sparse ham sandwiches
While I stood there, dry-eyed;
He was a great man they all said
Slapping the back of my overcoat;
Sure he gave forty years to that tannery
And what did it give him?
I wanted to shout to the throng;
A gold watch and a tin tray
And both had his name spelled wrong
HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY
MADAM LIFE’S A PIECE IN BLOOM
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.
You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But he’ll trap you in the end,
And he’ll stick you for her price.
With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;
But she’s heard it all before,
Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.
THE SINGULARITY
The singularity or
To be more precise
The technological singularity,
This thing for techno-utopians
Looking for immortality,
Is it real?
The singularitarians are banking
On it being so,
Seemingly willing to stay alive
For long enough,
By fair means or foul,
To benefit from this man-made God
That grants transcendence.
Artificial intelligence rules
They hope, despite
The doomsayers and techno-dystopians
Who claim it will malevolently bring about
The end of the world.
The end of civilisation as we know it
History and Hollywood are on their side;
Frankenstein, Skynet, the Matrix
Are their testimonials
When AI exceeds human intelligence
Everything changes
A smart AI breeds a smarter AI…and so on
Ad-infinitum, perhaps,
Leaving human intelligence without comprehension.
Driverless cars
Automated financial transactions
Language translation systems
Already better and faster than humans,
The list grows bigger daily.
Who needs humans, really?
THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
Old women with polished perms on fat heads
Men tinkering with diseased cars
Dogs taking their owners to the park –
Where they converse with their friends
And crap indiscriminately.
The Postman, the Milkman, the Gasman,
Two door-to-door leaflet saleswomen
And a posse of Jehovah’s.
A stray cat or two
And twenty five chimney-stack pigeons.
Then there are all those aerials-
Like one-legged storks-
Looking down on the patched-up pavements.
Where have all the front gates
Absconded to, I wonder?
Frightened away by all the leering
FOR SALE signs
Constantly peering over their shoulders?
I guess that must be it.
JOE ORTON lived in Islington with his lover Ken Halliwell and wrote some of the finest plays of the 1960’s; LOOT, WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, ENTERTAINING MR SLOAN. On August 9th 1967 Ken beat Joe’s head to pulp with as hammer, then ended his own life by swallowing 22 nembutals
WHO WOULD BE A WRITER?
My Writing Life 