Frogmarch myself to what I sort of know can only end in tears for me. If things are going too well, time to get low, and laugh if things are going badly.
I’m in two minds as to whether I’ve got a split personality or not but it’s just trying to prove a point I’m clever when it’d be easier to admit I know jack shit.
I must confess I don’t want to own up. The day I tell myself the truth will be the day I lie. I want to be a good person and the spirit is willing but gods don’t talk straight and duck the big why.
Say 10 Hail Marys and 10 Our Fathers. Keep the faith. Don’t think too much. Listen to good music. Try to not lose touch.
(or Why the ruling classes won’t ever let anyone else rule)
Got a pill for every hang up. Got a hang up for every pill. Being clever dicks with cannonballs, their blow-up knights in bouncy castles are delivered by Royal Mail in letter bomb parcels to detonate on University Challenge just as Ian Dury buzzes ‘What a Waste‘ thus undermining any chance another class could ever take their place.
As you take after who you’ve become and school teachers, in detention, chew gum the headmaster sends it to someone who is off the hook with nothing better to do.
Looking out over what he couldn’t see he table-spoon-heaped salt into his tea. Gull-shrieking Up the pool! and Come on you reds! he dropped his load on plank-walkers below in their bunk-beds.
It meant so much more when we didn’t stand a chance they said back in Dunkirk after France as did Mr Crow, gazing up at his astrological star in his feathers and tar, adding
We’ll never get to the bottom of this ’til we get to land and a little bit of bliss. Never had a truer word been spoken since their scabby anchor had hit port authorities and broken.
So, as Mr Crow in his nest wondered what was for the best scurvy took its toll on the crew where nothing could be done except by those who knew what to do.
If children ruled the country there’d be a crowned head and a crayoned in face all smiley blue, yellow and red.
Chocolate dripping down its mouth. Neck as fat as a rhino’s as long as a giraffe’s. Superhero and heroine health would burst out of its breastplate with a felt tip logo of choice for a laugh.
They’d be twenty starfish arms long and short and ten octopus legs hanging down to a brown seabed in a sea as dense as yoghurt and a purple sky above with orange stars all around.
If children ruled the country the body politic would swing from ecstatic happiness to sudden moody and its little out-of-tune people would nursery rhyme national anthem sing.
Let’s give as much as we can as long as we don’t have to dip into our pockets ‘cos we’re no longer a fan of scroungers, or their hand-out pets.
Let’s face it, nobody likes being in the red says a redundant Father Christmas-to-be, during the hols. Every soldier who comes home dead is no present for those wrapped up in New Year polls.
So, let’s get together for one last effort not talking turkey so no-one gets hurt. But, as usual, in someone’s house The Nativity Scene gets cordoned off as evidence against somebody’s spouse.
Christmas Trees I stick ‘em up and take ‘em down Like evergreen wedding gowns, Birthday wishes and wakes, Séances, siestas and wide-eyed somnambulist fakes. I protest on sleepwalking marches And plant big oaks, fickle firs and laughing larches. If you’re not bright and brilliant, Be thick and resilient.
Merry Black Mood Xmas Walking with Christmas Past, Present and Future, The ghosts I used to be with have disappeared While those I know or will are to be feared.
Last night, I went to midnight mass To put a cross on my Big Mistakes confessional form. As the others took the host I felt like a guest, like the most distant soulless.
If you really want to know, There’s nothing to know. There’s something going on six-foot underground Signing autographs as a ghost writer’s shadow Looking for the nobody you lost and found.
You’ve got your rock ’n’ roll hat on Stuck in the lift as an act of defiance. Messed up in a moment of madness When common sense seemed like rocket science.
Calm down, there’s some way to go to obscurity. Finish the bottle, and take a fall and a bow. Things jump out and scare you stiff when you’re jumpy. You’ll find out in the morning, and how.
Viciousmas Circle
Looking at the Xmas masses late minute shopping or shoplifting Class acts busk entertaining the classes as they freezewrap up begging to those Xmas gifting.
A Santa Claus round every corner ready for a conveyor belt of cloned kids hides behind a beard for a shift yawner and can’t wait to get some Xmas cheer to lift drooping eyelids.
Messages fly around from social media nests wishing loved ones a slurring sleigh of a day while stalkers and drunken pests get doubly dangerous or bussed sexting away.
As the religiously forgotten celebrate the birth of their saviour advertisers remind consumers of deadline dates for not-to-be-missed-offers til next year.
Sometimes, my favourite poems are the shortest and simplest. These two are maybe my favourites, also because others have commented on them. ‘The Plate Spinner’ especially: I have friends (in Weymouth and Cagliari) who know what plate spinning really means in metaphorical terms! Read here by Johnny Morris. ‘Land’s End’ read by myself reminds me of home and Devon, and gave me an opportunity to try to put on a pirate accent! Moony plays a blinder! The collage to this poem is one of my favourites and again a popular one with friends.
the plate spinner spins his plates but he’s let things slip a little of late his life in pieces at his feet that magic touch that filled the seats a helpless helping of butter fingers now all washed-up he takes a bow what a shame what a pity this inconsequential little ditty.
Land’s End
You’ll end up a bad ‘un; No going back but on what you’ve done.
It’s a risky game. You play till you drop; A few hundred metres onto the rocks.
You’ll hear the gulls and the sea-spray crushed but will you jump even when pushed?
When The Beatles released ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/Penny Lane, the idea was that they would write an album about Liverpool and their childhoods. I’ve often gone nostalgically back to my childhood, and here are two examples. ‘1964’ is a poem that was read beautifully by Johnny Morris* in a ‘posh Liverpudlian accent’ during a poetry evening in 2008, and one of many poems about my childhood written 2003/2004 to mark my 40th birthday. ‘Rainy Old English Way’ is a poem from 2015 that would bring a softer autobiographical side to the single!
*see other examples of him reading my poems on the blog
1964
The year of my birth. Space-age infancy, I landed on earth. I weighed in as a lightweight With, what the father would state, The hands of a boxer! Cassius Clay conquering America. The Beatles, planning their first U.S. tour, About to meet him for a photo-call.
The parents had tied the knot Just five months before I lay in my cot. The everyday story of every-night flings And what inexperience usually brings. She was eighteen, he twenty-two. Neither, I guess, had much of a clue. The Swinging Sixties had sort of begun. I want to hold your hand had hit The States No.1.
One of the earliest photographs shows Me in my pram, not yet in the know, In an Oxford garden, giggling away. A rented room they struggled to pay. She held the baby, as he worked late In the catering trade, with a lot on their plate. I doubt if she noticed Ray Davis happy. Probably too busy changing my nappy.
Every name under the sun She’d been called (for what she had done). Her father had flipped at her deflowering at first. That the man was a foreigner had made it much worse. They were in love or so they had said But a shotgun, for sure, had been at their head. A far cry from The Social Revolution They were shouting about on Wilson’s election.
As for his family, what they thought when they knew Their Catholic boy had one coming too, Must have been a much bigger shock; The very first grandchild conceived out of wedlock! But, as often happens, everyone rallied And, by the time I was born, everything tallied. So, I got my chance to live in spite As Lennon was published In his own Write.
On February 1st, a Saturday At 11pm or so they say Out I popped for my first night out Jaundiced, of course, like a lager lout In a hospital taking its name from Churchill Where the embattled mother lay feeling quite ill. Her war had been won, a special occasion As the pop world awaited The British Invasion.
Yes, that is me, the blue pram isn’t the pram though! This collage was for my poem 30¾ – another example in the same ilk here.
RAINY OLD ENGLISH WAY
Waving off grandpa and grandma from the back of our car painted pub signs swing like a wood-creaking wind-wing as autumnal photos fall-float nostalgia.
Now I’m an adult at the airport too lazy to get too deep in thought. Twiggy whistling trees referee playing-field football posts growing on stilts for rugby while outside a coach kaleidoscopic window flutter raffle tickets no-one bought.
Back then, the rain was lashing down on the streets of a splashing town. Being who you were when you were at home Gazing at a big cloud in monochrome Where watery shillings drip-dropped on puddles of half a crown.
In 2016, I wrote a collection called ‘Moonsville’ when I wanted to get gothic, Victorian darkness in! After having watched a documentary on Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The whole collection had a darkness to it cos I liked a fact that in the documentary it said that there had been a summer of darkness one year in Britain! These two poems are maybe my two favourites from ‘Moonsville’. The first influenced by a song I love by Siouxie and the Banshees called ‘Carousel’ and the second written after David Bowie’s death, and a couple of lines dedicated to a great friend of mine, David Trist who had died suddenly in 2015.
ON A CAROUSEL
Morning mourners come to terms with their birth. Toddlers clamber up shoes piled up in the corner of the room; Start school, risk getting into trouble or not, do their homework, and love most things that go crack, bang and boom.
Later and well before, flower bulbs are lobbed into the sea. Seeds rain down on seaworthy upside-down roofs. Everyone needs money, or something to get something, a currency As wine bottles twirl round daring them to tell truths.
Over time, flesh drops off bones as skin gets torn. Brains bubble and boil in jars hidden away in treetop laboratory hideaways. They retire or die before, expect the unknown, finish their days. The only thing for sure is running away to the fair will be frowned upon and, even contemplating it, will be treated with scorn.
PIONEER 10
Far out and far off Messengers send out messages for others far away. Above a head shouldering that flaming blame A heart bursts below on a planet of anonymous fame.
After your death, going back home isn’t quite the same. I count down blast off to your return. All of the papers mentioned you ‘cause you were headline news. All the night stars tonight have the sky blues.
A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 