PLAY ON
Ensconced here in contemplation
Your presence overwhelms me
Arms outstretched, yet never chiding
Even knowing my ways were wrong
Burning both ends speeds up damnation
I can see that now;
Lust living in the wings
While the songs sang themselves
And courage dredged from the bottle
While the melody lingered on
Music was my life
But you changed it all;
Your song will still be nectar, Lord
When all this is gone…
from my new collection; http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
OLD ACQUAINTANCE
I see they have sent him down – again
A two stretch this time
I sold a typewriter for him once
And got six months for my trouble
(he got three, but swore it was my idea)
Then there was the time he
Asked me to burn his house down
‘Two hundred quid’ he said ‘easy money’
‘The insurance won’t twig it’
(when I declined, he did the job himself)
After that we lost contact for several years
He removed his wife and daughters to another town,
Where he was just as big a bastard – to them –
And to the world in general
Drinking, gambling, big-mouthing and beating,
Mostly his wife,
Till she put a slit near his throat
With a carving knife
Left to his own devices
He hung misery about him like a shroud;
He went to Knock for a week
And returned a changed man
Flowers from Interflora, presents for the girls,
Flannel for everyone else.
She relented of course.
They don’t speak much about him in the town now
A nudge and a wink
When his wife appears;
‘She must have known what was going on…
Doing that with his girls….
And she had him back!’
taken from ’67’, my new book of poetry, now available @ http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
PIGS AND J JUNOR
This island, this septic island
Adrift in a sea of indifference
Towed along by other entities
Once fearful of its wash
Hear the battle-cry from every tower block,
Every street corner every public bar,
Every private club
It is the cry of the wastrel, the cry of the vagabond
The thief in the night, the rapist, the pick-pocket
The whore,
The low cur, the high roller, the insider,
The asset-stripper, the banker and the bounty-hunter
Ask not what I can do for my country
But what my country can do for me
You have fouled this planet with your culture
Profaned us all with your arrogance
You value dogs more highly than children
And leave old soldiers to freeze in empty rooms;
Single mothers flaunt their skin-tight jeans
And ‘gentlemen’ still peer down their long noses
Where the only good Irishman is a stupid one
Or a dead one
And the only good Black man an unemployed one
Or a pimp
Wouldn’t you rather be a pig?
SEVEN A.M. IN THE SMOKE
‘No surrender’
The motorists’ battle-cry
Echoing through the smog and fumes;
Furiously-pedalling cyclists
Sinisterly masked
Towing technology in their slipstreams
Legions of static transporters slowly going nowhere
Human perambulators
Reeling them in one by one
Phantom headlines flashing before my eyes;
FOUR PEDESTRIANS MAIMED
BUT HE GAINED TWO CAR-LENGTHS
Onwards to the asylum!
SAYING IT IS THE HARD PART
The secret is to be casual;
Matter-of-fact words can
Sometimes inflame the senses;
Not straight away, perhaps,
But later, when the hurly-burly
Of conversation has had time to sink in
Maybe the trick is not to be seen saying it;
‘I love you’ is such a difficult phrase
To force between clenched teeth
see more poems in my new book of poetry ’67’.
http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
CLUEDO
Courage is all it takes
To say ‘I don’t love you anymore’
Instead of all this rigmarole
About finding yourself
Looking back now
I can see the clues;
Stupid of me not to notice them;
The KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign
In the middle of the bed;
The HIS and HERS towels in separate rooms,
And the YOU INSENSIBLE BRUTE!
Scrawled on the bathroom mirror
(that should have been the clincher)
But then, love is blind is it not?
Most of all to those who are
Its one-sided recipients
taken from my new book of poems ’67’, now available as an ebook and shortly as a paperback; http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
CATS AND QUEENS
See this gawping society that we live in?
This catwalk full of nobodies
Strutting their stuff
Even the ‘bit’ players are gurning
To uncaring audiences
From the back of TV sets
(Hello Mum! Look, no hands!)
It’s all very well for us cats
To look at Queens
But these people nowadays
Will gape at anything
One day, soon maybe,
Women will outnumber men;
Will Queens look at cats then?
SKATING ON THIN ICE
Now there’s a pastime for you;
Young enough not to know better
We taught ourselves how to,
And sometimes paid the price
We carved figures of eight
Figures of three and five too
While Hopper McGrath kicked a hole in the shallow end
With thumps from the heel of his shoe
But nature had the last laugh
And slid him into a clump of nettles
And the breath laughed from the rest of us
Like steam from the spouts of kettles
Cracked ice, grass-crunching like apple-munching
Shiver-me-timber dancing
The old farmer prancing
And helter-skelter
For the school-yard shelter
Nowadays skating on thin ice comes easy
my new book of poems ’67’ is now available as an ebook, and in paperback soon. http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
DAREDEVILS ON DARTMOOR
Slowly, torturously they climb
Like some lumbering hippopotami
Up the rugged inclines
Spaced far apart
For decency’s sake
Their tinted windows
Glinting ominously from afar
At every vantage point,
A jutting rock formation,
A nestling valley far below,
Their mechanised progress
Becomes infinitesimal;
While flashing cameras eagerly
Gobble up the awesome landscape
From behind safe windows
And frame it forever
For some glossy album
‘I have been on Dartmoor’
They squeal delightedly,
The irrefutable evidence
Flickering in Technicolor
On their living-room walls
my latest book of poetry available from; http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
67, my first collection of poems is now available as an ebook by Tin Hut Tales, and will be available as a paperback in about two weeks time
http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
JUST WALKING
Walking…just walking
Away from the hum and drum
Away from the hub and bub
Away from the whine and grind of this rusty city
Couldn’t take it, they will say
Well, let them
This place isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
I saw a man today selling boxes to homeless people
Business was brisk
Did you know that the stone from the Pyramids
Would build a wall round England ten feet tall?
They say John the Baptist was gay
Funny the thoughts that come into your head when you’re walking
There was an old woman who lived in a hovel
She didn’t have any shoes but no one cared
She fell down one day
The hospital put her in a trolley for a few weeks
Then sent her away
Back to her hovel, her piss-stained bed, her broken radio
Her clock that didn’t tick, her bare cupboards, her solitary chair
Carried her up three flights, stood her in front of a walking frame
Said ‘take care of yourself, dear’
The whole fucking world anaesthetised by indifference
My Writing Life 