NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING
BORN TO MISS
You see I came to everything too late
I missed the first train
I missed the last bus
I missed the sixties swinging
The Stones and The Beatles singing
I missed On The Road and Happy Days
Woodstock, Bob Dylan and the hippy craze
I missed the signals
That women give
Carnaby Street and I Want To Live
I missed double sixteen
More times than I can remember
And I missed the Lewis effigy-burning
Every bloody November.
THE CROWD SHOUT OUT FOR MORE
I never thought I’d say
That Ireland is to me
Just another piece of ‘real-estate’ today;
The place where we murdered rabbits
On nights both windy and dark
Giving them that old one-two
With a rigid hand behind the neck;
The place where we captured hares
For coursing in the glen
The blood coursing wildly through our veins
As Morrisseys lurcher
Swept them up from behind – again
The place where Mass was said
And Politics pled
On Sunday mornings
Outside churches
While inside, the sermon was read;
The little man was important then
And favours done, or causes won.
Were little enough
To cause much concern to anyone
Not any more
Now that the greedy guts hold all the floor
And all you hear is rampant cheers
And raucous shouts for more
And more…
And more…
And more…
CYCLISTS
Why do they cycle in the middle of the road,
Or hog the white line,
Go when the lights red
And sometimes stop when they are green,
And steer with their knees
While their hands are doing something obscene?
HEMINGWAY’S HEAD
Hemingway?
You know I always thought
He had a Romanian head on him
Romanian, how so?
Well, It had that bloated look to it,
And Romanian heads always
Look soggy, I think
Hemingway had it in spades..
‘Course it might be the drink, too
He could never pass a bar,could he?
Or it might be that time he landed on his head
In those two helicopter crashes he had
One after the other, the same day I think.
Split his skull open
Exposed his innards to those African parasites
Who knows what damage they did,
Rampaging around his grey matter.
He never said much about it afterwards
Though that twinkle in his eye
Often looked more like a twitch.
PUT YOUR RED DRESS ON
She was wearing a noir velvet coat
Of a dubious nature
Passed on from its now vanished previous owner
The cold beauty of winter was dying
The girl with the coat was in the corner crying
Drawing her long cigarette to her swelling lips
In a kind of slow motion enunciation
Her demeanor was shouting out
What about emancipation!
She is a vision to be imagined
Wrestling with snow-white sheets
With sad music permanently on repeat
Wailing a song of love
About her lover not long since gone
Then she casts her coat aside
And shouts to the throng
I’m going to put my red dress on
2nd edition now available on amazon; paperbook & ebook
LONDON HIGH-RISE
The graffiti spreads like muck along the walkways
In the lifts and on the stairs;
BOLLOCKS TO THE POLL TAX
TANYA SUCKS and CORINNE FUCKS
The stench of urine everywhere
This calcified menagerie
Bakes hearts as hard as concrete
Solidifies old attitudes, buries hope
Deifies ignominy
Here, echoes of hollow laughter
Ghost through the floors
Children play high-rise hopscotch
And stilettos click rhythmically
Along tuneless corridors
Another circus of misfits
Adrift in the maze
Cocooned in captivity
In this graceless legacy
Of the stack-em-high days
****************************
PARTING
The sun also rises over concrete
Over this puff-adder sky
And the pricked-up chimneys
Looking like piss-horns in the stark morning
There are no shadows yet
On this marbled plain
So tender in years
But so sparing with love
I shiver at the bus stop
Admiring this proliferation of granite;
So cold, so hard,
So like you….
DEMO
N LOVER
Right now,
I don’t want the demon lover
Or the secret longings
Which call my name from the deepest shadows.
I only want lies…
Sweet 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.
I published this one before but I think it is worth repeating.
PRIVACY IS FOR PAEDOS
We have come to the end of privacy
Our private lives have been winnowed away
To the realms of the shameful and secret.
Someone, somewhere, state, press or corporation
Is watching.
Everybody knows about the Facebook newsfeed
It’s like a sausage – everyone eats it
Though nobody knows how it is made.
We are being manipulated, surveyed, rendered
By intelligence that is artificial as well human
Driven by complex mathematical formulae
That are invisible and arcane
Where corporations feed on the private lives of their users
While governments play fast and loose.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear
Oh yeah?
Sex and shitting were once the only pastimes safe from the Internet
Well, not any more, baby!
As Max M found to his cost
Though defecation was a bit too much
Even for his eclectic taste
Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft
Facebook can quite easily draw a map of your soul;
Tell us what you like and we will tell you what you are;
We can now tell which of your friends are gay
And whether you may be leaning that way
We know how much you have in your bank, your tank
And where you will holiday next time round,
When your wife will get pregnant – and by whom
We know every thought inside your head
Whether inside or outside this room.
If you want to keep a secret
You must hide it from yourself
Privacy? There is no privacy anymore,
Anywhere
Privacy is for paedos.
My Writing Life 