IDLE MUSINGS
Right now,
I do not need the demon lover
Or the secret longings
Which call me from the deepest shadows.
I only want lies…
Sweet and sensual lies…
Easing me into peace.
Or make them truths if you so desire
But tell me nothing
That…
I do not need…
To hear
NOISE
Decibelisation was old
When Dresden’s china charred the ashes
When the war to end all wars
Turned Flanders fields to mushy poppies
When Cromwell’s convoys rattled on
The cobbled streets of old Kilkenny
And still,today, those echoes throb
When walking down a quiet lane, I hear
The rumbles of some distant noisy mob.
MILLENNIALS
Millennials are cool
Millennials rule
When millennials go to school
And when millennials get sick
They stay at home
Because they are not thick
Unlike non-millennials
Who do deserve some stick.
Millennials are never sad
Though they are sometimes bad
The way millennials can be
Because they have history
On their side.
Millennials are mostly bilingual
And sometimes nonwhite
Millennials are never racist
And they seldom talk shite
Millennials deserves some veneration
Because Millennials come bearing gifts
From the silent generation
IN 1963
In 1963
When Philip Larkin wrote verse
That nobody thought was twee
Christine Keeler was the girl for me
Though Mandy Rice Davis
Could just as easily ‘save us’
In 1963
Henry Cooper knocked down Mohammed Ali
Otherwise known as Cassius Clay
And Mr Profumo
When asked ‘who do you know?’
Said: ‘Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP’.
(with apologies to Philip Larkin)
EINSTEIN’S EYES
Einstein’s eyeballs
Are in a jar
In a safe deposit box
Somewhere in New York
His brain is somewhere in the vicinity too –
not altogether in one piece admittedly –
A bacon slicer was allegedly utilised.
His wish was to be cremated
And his ashes scattered in a secret location
But if it happened
It was minus the aforementioned parts.
‘Having his eyes means his life was not ended’
He’s not dead because I have his eyes’
So says Henry Abrams
The current keeper of those genius eyes
(though rumours are that an auction is imminent)
‘He’s not dead because I have his eyes’
How creepy is that?
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HIT ME WITH YOUR SELFIE STICK
In the deserts of Sudan
And the gardens of Japan
From Milan to Yucatan
Every woman, every man
Hit me with your selfie stick
Hit me, hit me
hit me now you selfish prick
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me with your stupid stick
Hit me slowly, hit me quick
Hit me, hit me, hit me
With your stupid fucking selfie stick
(With apologies to Ian Dury and the Blockheads)
HOCKNEY
High in the Hollywood hills
In the shadows of Sunset Boulevard
Hockney is dabbling again.
A copy of Mulholland Drive rests against the studio wall;
Outside, the land drops away;
A jungle of exotic palms and ferns
With a swimming pool at the bottom
Not much used anymore.
He doesn’t go out much these days, he says;
‘I go to the dentist , the doctor, the bookstore
And the marijuana store
And that’s about it.
I’m much too deaf to go out
I don’t really have a social life
Because socialising is talking and listening
And I can’t really listen any more’.
Okay David,
But really, the marijuana store!
I wonder if it’s the one on Venice beach
Where the aged musculatorians of Muscle beach
Tramp with regularity to the nearby marijuana clinic
To see the marijuana doctors,
In their neat green cross uniforms,
Who will prescribe some medical marijuana
For forty bucks
Or thereabouts
To anybody who needs it.
When I’m working again I feel thirty,
And when I smoke I feel like Picasso, he says
Yeah, David, okay
But that’s not the work
That’s the weed.
DRACULA AND OTHER NIGHT CREATURES
Nights when we were young
We raced the wind;
Banshees in our wake
Dracula lying in wait.
We had left him oozing blood
From the stake wedged in his chest
In the Rainbow Cinema.
But with vampires you could never tell
Hair slicked back, stiff with Brylcreem,
Newly perched on our Raleigh three-speeds
(with dynamo)
We explored the world,
Our winkle-pickers pointing the way.
This is a poem about my father.
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
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