Ode to the English

We have an entire language
at our command,
such heights of precision
and specificity

and yet we blather and blunder
and blandish with bland
the towers of language that people
our cities:

We cloud them with 'dooberidoos',
'whatjumacallits' and 'whatsits',
replace exactitude with 'thing',
'thingymabob' and 'dohick'.

We are known to be charming,
polite and enquiring,
but behind the disarming
we are fearful, mystified little shirelings.

We are tied up in history
like flies in a web,
the future a lame mare
with one crippled leg.

We stumble into eternity
with a mouthful of teeth,
spitting and seething,
with arms outreached.

Oh, God or Queen or Country,
save us from ourselves!
We're beery, lairy - O Blighty!
What's becoming of your once mighty realm?

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time,
I had a muse,
a sort of female Endymion,
an Arcadian shepherdess.

But I tore myself
from that world
and all its ambrosia
of illusion.

Now I've got the real thing:
not the sort of thing
that's words
clothed in flesh,
brought into a world of sorts
by a wordsmith's brush,

but a thing
entirely woman,
entirely human,
who seethes with anger,
quivers at my touch.

Mrs P.

Now even
the most mundane
of tasks
are a muddle for her:

she chews her oral pills,
she's incapable
of using the kettle,
and now the commode
is seeing use.

Soon, she will be
unable to live on her own.
A life will come to an end,
a new existence shall start
as her daughters

put her in a home.
They will shed a tear
and remember their mother
as she 'used' to be -
as she will never be again.

And Mrs P, she
will maybe cry,
and maybe throw some
mean words, keen punches;
or she will try.

But soon it will be better,
as she looks out
on a perfect morning,
a birdsong afternoon,
the visage something entirely

alien to her, as she
lives her past in the present,
projects the present
into the future,
and her days all haze 

into one.

Goldfish

Some people
are like goldfish:

they only swim
in one direction,

their brains mute
to possibility.

At the end,
maybe they realise.

But by then
it's too late

and then they die.

Paper Heart (Poem for My Future Wife)

It's only been
eight months,
and already
I know we will spend
the longest time together:

maybe not forever -
and I mean eternity -
but maybe long enough
to keep liking one another,
and raise a family.

Only eight months,
and already
count the times
your paper heart
has crisped with my touch -

gone 'crispy', you say,
in your foreign way.
And see how
our bed is now
a bed of cinders,

and not a love nest.
The girls before,
I would have written
sonnets for them,
waxed lyrical how I adored

them, my adoration
reaching out to them
like the two arms
of the shore.
But now I have more,

much more - and
it's real. So soon,
we will be married,
and not so soon.
And every thing will

be carried, every coin
tallied, between the
two of us. And
we will move through time
like smooth stones

through water, and
maybe one day
we'll become the stream.
But until then, my darling,
rest - dream.

Luminosity

Every moment
is an epiphany.

The pen can be a razor
or a torch:

you could be #Collins
or #Bukowski -

every moment
scored.

The Art of Capture

First, you most be open
and alert as 
a fox,

recognising the right moment 
when you come upon it.

You must act quickly.

Next, you draw your camera,
aim it lightly as
a paw placed upon the ground.

And in a sudden spasm of
awe and terror, you must
force the shutter:

click! click! click!

You have captured the moment
like the jaws of a fox
around a chicken's neck:

no need to shake it,
no need
to break it.

The tender press
of a hunter, the gentle
surrender of prey.

Never has murder
been so perfect.

But move on, go!

You must act quickly.

Some Home Truths

If you think
the universe was
made for you, then
let me offer you
some home truths:

the carrying capacity
of this planet
is 1.5 billion -
the only reason
we are here
is because of oil.

So the next time
you invoke God,
and remark how he toiled,
for seven days,
count the million ways
you are lucky even to breathe.

We've overcome disease,
we've overcome the soil,
the only thing we haven't overcome
is ourselves, our stupidity
a massive black balloon,
so beautiful in the sky
until it climbs too high.

You could say, O! if it were white!
Yeah, guy: like some Romantic fable
will put us at the table,
instead of staring at the grave.

Poetry cannot save the world,
but it can save you from yourself.
And maybe you'll save something much 

dearer, once you realise

you never held the dies.

Because Earth is not a gambling table,
nor is it even a cradle:

no metaphors can out-metaphor
the stupid luck of your even being.
So when you're ready to start seeing,
stop burning the oil: burn down the doors.

Ablur

It's amazing how two things can blur:

you take a brain and a drink

and everything slurs.

You take a century and a century,

and they just glide into each other,

future to past, past to future,

edgelessly, and seamlessly.

You see a plane in the sky

and close one eye, close both,

hold it, then open them: see anew 

how a baby would see

at four months,

or the the brightness

of a balloon

when you were two.

You take a body and a body

or two hearts, and soon

it's impossible to see

where one ends,

another starts.

You take two hands, pressing

but they stay firm:

they don't melt into each other

like chocolate, or

dissolve like dirt.

But in spirit,

they press through

each other,

like water, like air,

and yet they grip firmly,
always holding
each other there.

Starlings

The sky

is a white noise of birds,

bubbling over with starlings

their wings flitting with

the tiniest change in

a single bird's position.

They pop in and out

like particles in the void,

they murmurate in a murmuration

speaking the voice of the wind

as it mutters gently

and unintelligibly

in the fraught

cold winter sky.

The Ending (the Never Returning)

The vultures are wheeling in the sky,

carrion before they carnivore
the carrion they adore.

And the tree branches are curling
in and around fingers, long before the

grasping, long before.

And the sky is unrolling

like a sheet of lead, and everything's

grey, everyone's dead.

And the land is hollow, pock-holed,

the wind howls, and has forgone its hallow,

the holy now only

in remembrance's marrow. But no one

remembers the Sparrow, jocular,
and the Robin's wing sunk

in that last, final spring.

Interstellar (White People in Space)

There's a place called Earth
93 million miles from the Sun
and it's full up with humans,
O boy they're having fun!

And on this planet
known as Earth
that bears this human race,
we launched white people
into space....

And now there are white people in space,
white people in space.
Get aboard this ship
and put a smile on your face.
We got white people in space!

A man called Democritus,
in Ancient Greece, said
'Earth is not the centre of the universe -
it's the Sun around which we sweep.

And thousands of years later
a man called Kepler said, 'Hey yo!
The Earth goes round the Sun!
Did you catch that, Galileo?'

And then hundreds of years later,
in 1969, Kennedy said,
'Let's go to the Moon -
then everything will be fine!'

Aldren and Armstrong
(not forgetting Michael Collins)
went up and said 'Wowza!' -
but after Gregarin.

But humans are like milk cartons -
they leak all over the place.
And now we got
white people in space!

Yeah, white people in space.
White people in space.
Climb aboard if you're white -
even black people have a place!
Yeah, white people in space!

And now the Chinese and the Indians
are at it. Landing on the Moon
and sending probes to Mars.

But we all know the stars ain't yellow -
they're white! And space ain't brown -
it's black! Mr Patel, it's such a shame
to have to cut you down!

Space is ours, and space is white!
Come with us, my little darlings,
and you'll all be all right. Come with us,
or we'll leave you sleeping in the night!

We've buggered up the climate,
we've buggered up the seas.
We bugger up everything -
we're a bloody disease!

Our societies are run by crooks,
our economies favour the rich.
And none of us reads any books 
unless those words are beamed as pics.

And we think we're all separate;
I tell ya, we're a waste!
But sod it, hop on board -
we're heading into space!

Because we're white people in space.
White people in space.
Come aboard, little darlings,
and let us save the human race.

'Cause we're
GOING
INTO
SPPPAAAAAAAACCCCEEEEEEEE!

A Few Lines for Dickhead (Fertiliser)

He always used to say,
Life's a piece of shit - and then you die.

I guess he was just an irksome fly
lingering around the scent
of putrescence.

Drawn to the darkly side of reality,
lingering there in some diseased banality.

I always used to say,
'Life's like a pair of tits:
when faced with the squeeze
you can eat it up or split.'

But, in reality, life is what you make it.
I'll only be in flight if I put my wings on right;

you can call experience fertiliser,
or you can call it shite.

A Verse for Jeffers

When man is ruling
with an iron fist,
it's time to become a little
anti-humanist.

A (Not So) Simple Truth

Either everything's Holy
or nothing is Holy.
And if the only thing Holy
is your Holy Book,
then you, my friend,
are wholly
a holy crook.