MUSTANG,MUSTANG
Mustang, mustang
Born of the wilds
Your Spanish blood
Coursing through America’s hills
Your equine face
As innocent as a child’s
Mustang, mustang
Flightier than the birds
Free-roaming the range
Living symbols of the pioneer spirit
That infuses the genes
Of all free-galloping herds
THE MEANING OF LIFE
At the forefront of knowledge
Is the edge of uncertainty
Where reality is really
Only a projection of information
At the rim of the universe.
There, black holes loiter with intent.
They seek to break the sacred laws of physics
Which, as everyone knows, state
That information cannot be destroyed.
This is the point of no return.
All the information that ever existed is here
And black holes are held at bay – for now
What is inside is not inside
And what is outside is not outside.
We are merely holographic projections
Rendered flesh at this event horizon.
Asimov, of course, knew this
Way back when computers
Were not ten-a-penny.
He knew the truth, or guessed
That the universe is one vast computer itself
And we are merely its slavish programmers.
Though not living out purposeless existences,
As some believe,
But proving that life does have some meaning:
We are the way for the universe to know itself
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JOINT ACCOUNT
Of all the joints in all the world
I had to wind up with this one.
Creaking and croaking
It pains when I am smoking
It pains when I am walking
It pains when I am talking.
I wonder if I should use some WD-40.
I bet Bogey never had this problem.
Émigré
To the other side of the universe
I emigrated
I wanted to see how the other half lived.
Well…I needn’t have bothered;
The services are no better
The trains are never on time
The postman never rings twice
( I know – he should always ring twice,
But I think he was a bit confused)
And there’s a bloody bus on top of a roof,
Just like that one in Bexhill
Hunter S Thompson at work
UNTITLED
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.
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Pett Level,Winchelsea
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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My Writing Life 