CONSPIRACY THEORY
The more heads the creature has
The dumber it is.
And that’s what a conspiracy theory is:
An exercise in stupidity
Until it eventually collapses
Under the weight of its own cupidity
Writing
OMG…I SLEPT WITH THE BASS PLAYER!
OMG…I SLEPT WITH THE BASS PLAYER!
Bass players are gross
Bass players give you a dose
They usually have long hair
And they’re always scratching down there
They just stand around looking dopey
And their voices are usually ropey
Then they pluck on them string…things
And the sound…omg…my head just whings
And then I look at the lead guitarist play
And I think, he can tickle my frets any old day
So to find myself waking up next to a bass-playing dope
Makes it kinda hard for a girl to cope
‘Cos nobody sleeps with the bass player innit?
Fuck it, I’ll do the drummer in the next bed in a minute!
THE ROUMANIAN
THE ROMANIAN
Kostas vendored hot air along with hot beer
In his kingdom ‘Ye Olde Crown by-the-sea’
His tales, though tall, always plausible
And intriguing to many more than me.
He had flown Russian Migs, no less
In Ceausescu’s secret armies in the past
Doing deeds that were less than chivalrous
Before the dictator breathed his last.
Sometime later he fetched up in London
With a wife who was other than great
And who spent his less-than-hard-earned money
At quite an alarming rate.
He took to his own devices
with his hostelry by the sea
and feathered his puffy nest
helped by others as well as me.
He repaid us with roubles that were rubbish
And dollars that were chaff
And then headed off into the sunset again
Leaving behind nothing but his knowing laugh
THE FUTURE
THE FUTURE
There is no present
Every tick of the clock is your future
And if you have no clock
Then every beat of your heart is the future
And if you have no heartbeat
Then there is no future.
THE SACRED THREE
THE SACRED THREE
To save,
To shield,
To surround
The hearth,
The house,
The household,
This eve,
This night,
Oh! this eve,
And every night,
Each single night.
Amen Amen
not sure where this poem comes from tbh, whether it’s one of mine or somebody else’s’
If somebody recognizes it, please let me know.
MAN OF STEEL
MAN OF STEEL
I fuse bits of metal together
A sculptor of steel
Inanimate iron
Comes alive in my hands.
Angle-irons, flats,round bars
Are my materials
I heat them, bend them,
Shape them and weld them
I can make anything with steel;
A strong frame
That will hold a skyscraper
Erect,
A steel hull
That can ride the weaves.
I can even make a fancy flower-pot stand.
3 PUNKS – an extract
3 PUNKS – AN EXTRACT
3 PUNKS
By
Tom O’Brien
A bare stage. A bar with some stools stage left. Some drinks scattered about. A screen to back with images of Punks etc. Spotlight no 1 on JOHN LYDON. Spotlight no.2 on SHANE MACGOWAN. Spotlight no. 3 on JOE STRUMMER. All three acknowledge the audience. Hold the spotlights for a few moments, then they all step forward and sing a verse each from 3 songs. John sings ANARCHY UK, Shane sings IF I SHOULD FALL FROM GRACE, Joe sings LONDON CALLING. All are dressed in the punk styles of their generation; Lydon wears an I HATE PINK FLOYD tee-shirt; Joe carries a guitar. It has a label which reads – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS ; Shane has a pint and a fag in his hands.
JOHN: I consider myself working class. And we, the working class, we’re lazy good-for-nothing bastards. We never accept responsibility for our lives – that’s why we’ll always be downtrodden. We seem to enjoy it in a perverse sort of way; we like being told what to do, led like sheep to the slaughterhouse, as it were.
JOE: I was born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, in 1952. My father worked for the Foreign Office, with the result I had a life moving around different places when I was young; Cairo, Mexico City, West Germany, before we finally settled in the UK. My parents were still posted abroad though so at the age of eight I was packed off to boarding school, along with my elder brother David. That was our home for the next nine years, seeing our parents just once or twice a year. I suppose that’s why I became so fucked up.
SHANE: I grew up in Puckaun. Back of beyond Tipperary. On a farm. My mother’s people. My uncle Jim used to sleep in the haystacks, ya know? He’d get pissed off about how overcrowded it was because there were about fourteen people living in the house. You’d be playing in the haystacks and you’d suddenly realise Jim was asleep in the hay, under the tarpaulins. It was either that or sleep in the same bed as uncle John – and uncle John used to fight in his sleep. ‘Fock yez, I’ll fockin kill yez, ye conts’. So uncle Jim got so sick of it he would sleep in the haystacks, and in the end he never slept in a bed again.
JOHN: I loathe the British Public School system with a passion. How can anybody have the right to a better education just because their parents have money? I find that vile. They talk with this sense of superiority , the upper classes, and they have it. They have all the right connections once they leave school, and they parasite off the population as their friends help them along. You never see that with the working classes.
JOE: Our school’s initiation rite involved a choice of being beaten up or lying in a bath of used toilet paper. I got beaten up! I guess it toughened me up, taught me to be independent, but there was always this sense of abandonment; having to pretend your parents didn’t exist. There was this ‘Lord Of The Flies’ feel to the all-male dorm and bullying was rife; it was a really brutal school and they filled you with crap.
JOHN: Because with the working classes, if you have any kind of success your friends, your neighbours, will turn round and hate you instantly. “You’re not working class anymore!”
That used to worry me when I was younger, but I couldn’t give a toss now. I regard myself as working class and that’s all that counts. It was similar if you managed to read a book – and actually understand it! Then you were a snob, a poof, or a sissy. Labels, that’s all they were. Meaningless fucking labels.
SHANE: (to Lydon) I remember the first time I saw you. You had long hair and wore a bovver hat. You were quite fat.
JOHN: Fuck off you seldom fed culchie.
JOE: That’s a Brendan Behan line.
JOHN: And you can fuck off too, Strummer.
SHANE: The next time you had blue hair. I’ll say this; it took some bottle to wear blue hair in Finsbury Park in those days. Chee…chee.
JOHN: If you don’t accept me as I am then don’t accept me at all, that’s always been my motto. I was practically unlovable most of my early life. I wouldn’t even let my parents go near me. From a very early age it was – “get off! Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!”
SHANE: I bet you fondled yourself.
JOE: Well, isn’t this cosy. Three old punkers livin’ it up.
SHANE: More like the three stooges, fuckin’ it up. Chee…chee.
JOHN: Wait a minute! What are you doing here, Strummer? What’s he doin’ here? He’s fuckin’ dead. (He looks around) Where is this place?
SHANE: Yeah, Joe, what are you doing here?
JOE: I thought you believed in re-incarnation, Shane.
SHANE: Yeah, I do. But you can’t come back as yourself, can you? A dog, maybe. Or a chicken. Chee…chee.
JOE: Maybe it’s all a dream.
JOHN: The question is – whose dream?
JOE sings a few lines from Bruce Springsteen’s THE RIVER and glides away
Now those memories come back to haunt me,
They haunt me like a curse.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,
Or is it something worse?
JOHN: Yeah, I fondled myself. But I never screamed as a youngster. That shocked my mother when she first heard the Sex Pistols. I had always been so quiet. She’d never seen that side of me. She probably thought she had raised a lunatic.
SHANE: And you proved her right. Chee…chee.
JOHN: Yeah. Had I not had my family I would have turned into a psychopath or something. Looking at how other people behaved I was definitely weird. I always had this sense of detachment…isolation… even when I was part of the Pistols this continued. I was never part of the group in any meaningful way. I came and sang my songs and then went home alone. I was never invited to any parties or get-togethers; I never felt really belonged.
Joe returns.
THE BAND
THE BAND
I was sitting at the bar
Strumming on my guitar
And twiddling with the knobs
On an old black radio
When someone shouted out;
Hey, That sounds like Dr Hook
Ain’t that right, daddyo?
I said, Mick, you’re just full of shit
‘Cos that’s The Band – laddyo.
And then I started on that old refrain;
Virgil Caine is my name
And I served on the Danville train
Till Stoneman’s cavalry came
And tore up the tracks again…
PLANTAGENET
PLANTAGENET
When the long tally is added
And all the castles are counted
And significant others such as
Kings College,
Cambridge
Eton College
Westminister
Are included
Then Plantagenets ruled.
But kingship was transformed
By weak Rulers
And compromises such as Magna Carta
And when the Hundred Years’ War is reckoned up
And the houses of Lancaster and York
And their internecine strife
Called the War of the Roses, is included
And their last Plantagenet king, Richard III
Dying ingloriously on a muddy Bosworth field
Only to be dug up,
A legless collection of bones
In a car park in Leicester
Some five centuries later,
Then the question to be asked is this;
WAS IT WORTH IT?
I WONDER WHAT THEY WILL SAY?
I WONDER WHAT THEY WILL SAY?
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
My Writing Life 