I should call you, I should really,
I should call and ask how you are,
I should see if you are O.K.
and fighting the fight as well as the world
but I am quite scared that for whatever
reason, I will find out you’re fighting me.
The role of dastardly villain does not sit well
with me, I cannot twirl my moustache
and talk of plots in soliloquy to an audience of one,
rather play the heroine, the damsel tied
to the tracks and the locomotive
Breathing fresh blustery
April air as I admire the view of
the rusting Iron Men dotted
along at intervals and in which
fixed steely glazed eye
turn their gaze to wind farms
and the Irish coast
over horizons and the seabed
churning as a lost shoal of fish
dance beneath the waves
of amber under relentless sun
to come it is hoped in Summer
I look inward
and reflect upon the amber hue
of disappointment, of days passed
and slept through memories,
Navigating the Tube,
the Underground from over ground,
by map which is quicker
than the journey
you plan to take
was once a joy, as it lead to
days out at Queens Park Rangers
or Arsenal or even down to the
Hammersmith Odeon to see you play, however
now I will be stretched for time
and it is only because
I have to get home
that I contemplate the Sunday dawdle
and the Thursday evening madness, otherwise
the bus, so I can see the route
And war in Panama is brewing,
wouldn’t it be good
to see casualties of the V.I.P
taken down by their greed
and own monetary insanity,
let the bloodletting begin,
squeeze the leech
pump out its spew
and let it leave its head burrow
into the veins and through the one
way streets of blood clotting
agents, let the blood be cleansed
and maybe perhaps Panama
will be the first to fall
in the new revolution,
let Panama fall
and maybe the circus
There was a scent of snot filled contempt
in her young squeaky voice,
the type that grated against the ears
and made the natural defence
of wax crumble in alarm,
erect, proud and sniggering
“I don’t care”,
she squealed
with a high pitched whine,
“who they are, I don’t listen to anything
that was made before I was born,
it is immaterial to me,
you’re all weird really, why can’t you listen
to something now and hip?”
With that she snapped her fingers
I mention you in a question
posed by a journalistic poet,
a man with his own band
and space in a city filled
with endeavour and I believe
that you made me the person
I am today,
a little wary
a bit private
but open one hopes
to the grill and pleasant e-mail
that connects you and I
to where I am now.
Without you I know, it meant nothing.
without time in your bosom
nurturing me, even when
I raged against everything
It is cold out here in the April night…
for the Spring brings round
once again the thoughts
of bitter, distant feeling
and the detachment
from those I once held so dear.
In winter I can hold off the tales
of chilly formality by stoking
the fires of resentment,
my own poke in the gas filled grate
of which I would never
speak out loud.
In summer, the lazy days
in which the sun burns
down and turns the river bed
I gave up the drink
because I found
I was too good at it,
in the end no amount of Scotch
could take me down
but a small sniff of Brandy,
could truly screw my head apart
as I found one afternoon
in Oxford.
I could dive bomb with Dublin
water and sink the black
on the pool table all night long
but a sniff of Brandy would lead
to all sorts of problems.
Richard and I could drink Gin
whilst playing snooker, one night we barely
A dash of cinnamon
injures the air and the coal black
taste of Parsley, a green
and pleasant memory
of white sauce dancing,
now lays sterile, dead
upon the plate where mouldy
residue starts to grow, reach maturity,
the sweet lament of honey
and the poison tip of angry ochre
sweats in the glass jar, awaiting Time
and thyme again
to carry out the nefarious deed
of putrefying the steak, of leaving dissatisfaction
with the entrée and the mode of entry
for the serrated knife;
A maverick with moustache,
whiskers like crinkle cut oven chip
all oiled marvellously into shape
and the eccentricity
to see Time melt away, is still
a conformist if they don’t believe
in anarchy, that the rebel without
a cause and who only talks
of days when revolution can be painted,
is only in truth
neither individual or machine,
the Salvador Dalek
of the artistic world.
There is no insanity to this work,
it is no one of a kind
to find