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.
DRIVING WHILE BLACK
Don’t drive while you’re black
‘Cos you may get stopped on the way back
From wherever you have been
Doing bad things to country and queen
Never drive when you’re black
Looking for white people to attack
‘Cos that’s a crime too
Though it’s okay to drive when you’re blue
Driving while black
Means you could get shot in the back
For turning left or failing to stop
By some trigger-happy, non-black cop
Some other ‘crimes’ while being black;
Smoking while black
Learning while black
Walking while black
Shopping while black
Eating while black
In fact almost any damn thing while black
UNTITLED
I wonder what they will say of me when I am gone?
It was him that penned those lines, you know
The ones about choking the chicken.
Ah, poor Katie Doyle never lived that one down!
And the lies he told in that Altar Boy book he wrote
Just as well his poor mother wasn’t still around…
Then there was that tale about the Kray Twins
How he walked and smoked with them
On remand in Wormwood Scrubs if you don’t mind!
How they didn’t seem nearly as bad as they were painted
In fact he almost said they were kind!
I wonder what they will say of me when I am gone?
Perhaps they will say nothing
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
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
PLANET OF THE APPS
Your smartphone speaks to you;
‘Hey, why not download our cool new App?’
Then up pops a dialogue box
With text that looks like an escapee from MySpace
Welcome to Appworld.
Steve Jobs is to blame really;
He was the first to realise
That since smartphones
Were actually small computers
They could also run App programs
And so the Apple App store was born
Now there are fucking Apps everywhere
For every fucking thing
A world awash with the
Smartphone and Tablet App
A couple of million at the last count
And most of them are fucking crap.
If there is an App graveyard
Somewhere out there in the digital sky
The majority of those Apps will be deader than the dodo
Long before you and I.
I have posted this poem before but I think it is worth another reading
HAMPSTEAD GIRLS
A better class of person
Adorns the Hampstead
Red-bricks and glass
Whether lounging in the chic-lit bars
Or just lolling in the grass
Hampstead ladies in particular
Ride their bikes with elegance
And sip their foamy cappuccinos
With practised nonchalance.
On the pavements and in the cafes
There are no sightings
Of the culturally bereft
Even down-and-outs
Lean quite boldly to the left.
John Betjeman could not complain
Or call on Hampstead Heath
For bombs to rain
Nor suffer scorn like poor old Slough
Who he had deemed
Not fit for any humans now
Those air-conditioned bright canteens
In Hampstead’s glades will not be seen
And there’s plenty grass to graze his cow
Hampstead Heath’s as green as Ireland now!
XKCD?
What does XKCD mean?
Sounds like a disease
Or a secret organisation
But perhaps it’s an acronym
Or is it just a word
With no phonetic pronounciation?
Maybe it’s just a stupid comic.
BIG BANG THEORY
‘Sorry sir, there is no more room for memories
The past is full up’
Just lately it seems to be turning out that way
Which, when you think of it, must make sense
How much history can be shovelled down one hole
Before it overflows with past events?
And what of the future,
Did it all start with a big bang in the past?
If it’s true, like they say,
How long can the present last?
Before the Expanding Universe swallows
Up all of time?
And nothing more can happen
Because something or other
Has crossed the dividing line
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
My Writing Life 