SCOTLAND FREE
Bonnie Prince Charlie tried and failed
At Culloden his protest stalled
And Cumberland his forces mauled
For him there was no other chance
He ran the gantlet back to France.
Now Scotland has its chance again
You had it once, a nation then.
Independent, free, no tyrant’s yoke
For Scotland freedom’s not a joke
Fight like a fishfag, Union be damned!
Your hills, Your lochs, your lives, your land.
WORMWOOD
Wormwood isn’t here
The sign said, rather waspishly.
It wasn’t the Wormwood I remembered;
Scrubs Lane on a wet Sunday
The outback in West London
No buses, no cars, no people
Just limp grass, acres of the stuff
And, oh yes, the finest redbrick edifice
Victoria’s henchmen could construct.
No rotting bodies in here, my friend.
Not Newgate, not by a long shot
Though debts must still be paid
And some may still get laid
Lord Alfred Douglas lay here,
As did Charles Bronson,
Keith Richards, Leslie Grantham.
And George Blake
Scurrying along in his traitor’s gait
Till the day he pole-vaulted to freedom
More or less
Before waving goodbye
To his English life,
His liberty and his wife
And all those Wormwood scrubbers
A brilliant poem by a great poet.
SAID JONATHAN AMES
I shit in my pants in the south of France.
Said Jonathan Ames
And once I dropped my load
In a bin bag down the old Kent Road
As well as shitting some bricks
When I tried sky diving as one of my party tricks.
I feel much better now.
THE WEST WING
Yeah
Watching The West Wing
Sometimes gave me goose pimples.
Though why they call them pimples
I can’t quite figure out;
I mean, how can you tell that under all them feathers
The goose actually has pimples?
You might just as well call them moose dimples;
Which would probably be just as accurate
And a lot easier to see than goose pimples
?
This is a little poems by Yeats about Constance Markievicz and her sister Eve Gore-Booth
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring amongst the ignorant
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 VOCAL MINORITY
They are everywhere
Anti-austerity
Anti-Tory,
Anti-fracking,
Anti- social
Anti-war
Anti-peace
Anti-establishment
Anti-disestablishment
Anti-Christian
Anti-magnetic
Antichrist?
CHASING THE RAINBOW
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.
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 