Some Recent Things

For some reason I'm in the mood to just put some of the things I've written lately on here. Why not, eh?

Some small, some bigger, not all of them are even finished, I'm just in a giving mood ...

Some haikus

When the sky crashes

We consider ourselves still

The unbeatables

_________

A pound coin buried

Half a foot beneath a beach

Never to be found.

__________

The expectation

Of imminent collision

In each taut sinew.

___________

In spite of it all

They think they are the adults

Cleaning up the mess.

___________

As the real storm nears,

I refresh, to exhaustion,

My life in fomo.

__________

.

Some others

THIS USED TO BE VALHALLA

Dripping chandeliers

shine alcoholically

on ghosts of grayscale

signed staircase photos,

Support act to drawing pins

and artless rips, likely

By young punks who now

work for Help the Aged.

They earnt their infamy

Punching out bravado

 with that tightness

 forced by limitation,

Then the hottest on the

unread pages – You were here!

I was there, for a while,

at least, grimacing

love and understanding,

Cigarette to attention,

lost in the pissy

thrill of it all.

The barstaff baffled

At the revolving door

Of subcultures only

Distinguishable

By t-shirts and beards.

Before, a cinema

or a bingo hall,

its brief glory of feedback

and wild overappreciation

the enduring shadow.

__________

IMPOSTORS

Squirrels scrabbling for their share of havoc

squabbling over November’s pear droppings,

swiping harmlessly, half-heartedly bare-

toothed; louche staring contests in undue warmth,

a neighbourhood show of animal strength

fooling no one, a merry tango’s menace

stripped; demob happy acrobats each

back flipping glee and uncommon freedom.

A back window, patio, a lush lawn;

Unlikely summer sun gate crashing,

Spectators sharing actors’ wide-eyed wild

Relish; none of this is at it should be.

Hey there, little dancers, get off our land,

Laughingly empty threat warmly ignored.

___________

MAN OF KENTISH MAN

This county, at its best, is blue and white,

Off white, and grey. The power bursts across

The stinking fields, strawberries and the ilk,

The fizzing foam of history, the plod

And pound – the passionate red of gangster class,

The waves of pride, unique and purple sky,

I’m told, you never quite know where you are,

An idyll and a sewer, port and storm.

The empty ferries bless a wedding, light

And free, a shrunken relic put to task,

A wry observer, stripped of anger, steeped

In sorrow not its own. This county’s been

Under attack from every side so long

No wonder would dare cross its borders now.

___________

Some polemic ...

LIBERTY

Give me your orange, your white,

Who look like me and think like me,

The none-too-poor and none-too-bright,

This Koutoploutoleukandrocracy,

Who’ll usher in the long, dark night.

______________

There are more stupid white men than ever

Though that goes against some intuition

Political correctness has not gone mad

And thumped them to a sweet submission

Stupid white men still shout the loudest

Whine the longest and feel the wrongedest

They puff their chests out, take the best seats,

Feel they feel their sleights the strongest.

___________

LITTLE ENGLAND

England is a hot head with a cold, cold heart

Losing the fierce rows inside his slow, slow brain

Anglia is a glum man doing its sums wrong

While the sun sets on its empire of dumb umpires,

A club of toothless vampires.

England’s disconnected from its own high mind

Grabbing empty air where was a fair hand out.

Furiously bluffing as if nothing

Speaks of power like a creaking tower

On a cliff, weakening by the hour.

England, little England is now free, set free

Loosened from its moorings by its small, sad hate

Britain, a beast baffled, easily rattled,

Lost the battle, lost the raffle, in a

Baying dog pack’s dinner.

England is to Scotland David Brent to Tim,

Melchett to Blackadder, Wilson’s Mainwaring.

Britain won a greatness from its failures,

Saving graces in its late years; random

Cultures reared in tandem.

__________

THE BUMS LOST

We lost every row from a certain point on;

It was painful to see all our plastic troops falling.

We became bleating fodder for gloating deniers,

And history was written; we lost every round.

The final bell rung, and there’d been no haymaker,

We’d lost every round and limply cried fix.

Are you bored of yourselves yet? They asked almost kindly.

The seats have been folded, you lost, go home.

They wrote every line from a certain perspective,

planned each precious peak and planted each trough.

They knew how to cover and claim back their losses,

To redirect blame to the wild or the weak.

They knew when to sit on their hands and do nothing

Watching us forming precise human pyramids,

knew which feet to tickle and which mind to blow.

They deserved the win, if truth must be told.

Divided and conquered, we folded eventually

And skulked off to rot without shaking hands,

Exhausted and bitter, we shunned the prizegiving,

Made no excuses, just picked at our wounds

Ignoring the scolding of beneficent victors

The bums lost, Lebowski, your war story’s done.

Our work here is done, this world now is ours.

The world sighed, and died … we lost, who won?

____________

Like Benjamin Braddock at the end of The Graduate

The Brexiters, professional wrexiters,

they have their fun, they fuck and run

They tell us

You lost, stop whining

Like that was the end, when it's just the start.

Let them revel briefly in vampiric victory, their sham

Stand with the common man,

Oh man, those Brexiters,

Proud, in control, without a plan.

___________

__________

Some more self-indulgent ones ...

THE EXCHANGE

The last worthwhile effort 

was to the table outside the Royal Exchange

that warm September,

a triple Bells still two pound ten,

A pilfered St Marys walker obstinately

Transformed to a wheelchair

For that one short block from Star Street

The unstringed pins managed no more,

And whichever poor sap had to push.

They could have it back when you were dead,

You said -  Not long, a ghoulish smirk.

I saw you between life and death that month,

An unexpected performance artwork.

Still you dabbed at the crossword and

knew Carrauntoohil,

1038 metres, I chirped delighted,

Very much your son,

Though there you more readily erred once or twice.

I ticked the boxes I needed to alleviate

The idea of tragedy.

I summoned my sister, relayed my uncles,

Asked my mum if she wanted one last viewing (she’d seen enough).

I turned you into a completed man at the last

And we filled out a church and drunk dry a pub

As if you were a champion.

As if you’d achieved your stated aim …

Dignity … I mean, really … well, ok, if you insist,

I agree, that’s in a few vested interests.

I’ll do better. I see now why you matter.

I’ll tell myself

I can fuck up a lot and I’ll still do much better …

By certain measures.

I suppose, by some, you lucky fucker,

You were a champion of sorts.

__________

_________

This is the best way I’ve found to sum it up:

Before I had a child, I worried that, if I ever had one, it would be a burden on me, on my wife, on the world, that it would stretch valuable time, patience, resources.

Now we have a girl, I worry every second of every day that I am the burden, that I will let her down, leave her with hang-ups, that the world is a burden on her – I see all these trials and troubles the world is going through, the manifold dangers of global meltdown, only in terms of how they might prevent her from having the fully glorious happy life she deserves.

My sense of common humanity has temporarily deserted me. If the world staggers on as a serviceable entity only so long as it gives my girl the chance to live a long, good, happy, life, and not a day more, I would take that.

__________

The Day of the Girl was just like every other day round here

Where the girl is boss

But this is an island, it seems, of thugatrarchy

In a sea of sleaze

And we were told not to say “As the father of a daughter”

Which is fair enough

But everything I do and think now is defined by the daughter,

How can it not be?

The Day of the Girl was just like any other day, I expect,

Where the girl’s not boss

And the odd alpha man paid the mildest lip service

To changing his ways

But mostly he thought his ways didn’t need changing

To the way of the girl.

___________

LOOSE CONNECTIONS

I am kept alive by loose connections

Vulnerable to thunder and to lightning,

Striking each new era with new fear that

Time itself’s the only thing that’s tightening.

I’m too scared to tell you I keep seeing

Tapestry on tapestry unwinding

Faster than synapses send the charge that

our book needs updating and rebinding.

I spend my life looking for connections –

Nick, Vincent and Dylan scores a hat-trick,

Draws me back to Liam and Odetta,

Draws me home to Mary and to Patrick.

Far away, uneasy bonds are loosening,

Vast and fatal monoliths are drifting.

Superman, a shadow of his past self,

Has no urge to lift what now needs lifting.

___________

THE START OF THE GREATEST CHILDREN'S STORY EVER

“Hey chimpanzee”, he said to me

as I swung light from tree to tree,

“Oh, won’t you throw your muck at me

Like any mucky chimpanzee”

“Oh no, good sir, I must demur

And point out where you blithely err

You’d choose your words more wisely, were

We not split by this river”

So, hear me now, for you should know,

A chimp would not so calmly show

You which way does the river flow.

I am not chimp, I’m bonobo.

A chimp’s a rowdy finger-biter

A give-your-mum-an-awful-frighter,

A bonobo’s a friendly blighter.

I’m a lover, not a fighter.

Some snippets

I side with the plagiarists and dopers

And sympathize slyly with the no-hopers

Who sell their scant talent to gamblers and fixers.

I reframe the deeds of previous heroes

Who justified lying with sweaty bravado

And recast themselves as tactical tricksters.

__________

Thank god for the silliness of ashes

Blowing in the mourners’ laughing faces.

__________

How we bank best the time that betrayed us –

The songs our friends played us,

The tapes our friends made us.

Now we divest of the objects that chase us,

The memories that place us,

The acts that disgrace us.

How we regret all the friends that betrayed us –

The ways that they played us,

The slow fade that made us.

__________

We have become a parody of an obscure work of philosophy

From 1973

___________

In your spiteful prime, no man outdid you

At the game “is what cunts say”

__________

Some days I can’t get to the end of a line without it becoming a different line

And a different moment in a different time

___________

Spare your outrage, I’ll spare mine,

Share your sadness, I’ll care less.

___________

39 is a strange one

The oldest bit is the ankles

___________

Smiling and kind, stupid and blind

___________

I looked upon a monolith called Kasigau

Every morning with a menthol cigarette

in my steady-sunburned sweaty fingers

eighty further miles from home

desolating its parched plains

with such clarity of purpose.

______________

Some sentences I wrote one afternoon to practice sloganeering

Arcade Fire are the new Coldplay

Bounty is the John Terry of chocolate bars

Roger Federer is the Radiohead of sports stars

Wayne Rooney is the primary receptacle for a nation’s self-loathing

We are all climate change deniers

Dave Brailsford is Bernie Madoff or Warren Buffett

Andy Murray is Gordon Greenidge but not Viv Richards

Frank Ocean is the Emptiness of the Best Intentions

Super Furry Animals are Marvellous Creation’s Jelly Popping Candy

If Brexiters aren’t racist, how come so many of them are racist?

Feudalism lives on

Of all ancient and inhumane punishments, even the most liberal of us might consider stocks for the ringleaders of Brexit

Jason of Orange was the last great pop star

Mike Teavee was hard done by

The golden age of the beard was 2003 to 2007

Bearing in mind nearly all racism in modern Britain is bubbling under the surface, it’s astonishing how many racist things you hear people say

Even now, the £35m Liverpool paid for Andy Carroll is the worst signing ever

The world is run by American golfers

They still think they’re the adults

The Sound and the Fury is the real pace of life

Nearly all the websites I come across that don’t allow adblockers are business websites

Andy Murray’s self-evisceration is a nation’s conscience

Of all sport’s “characters”, tennis characters are the worst

The Americanism I have most trouble dealing with is when a band takes the singular – eg Arcade Fire is the new Coldplay

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