House arrest

 

I could go out, but downstairs scares me

It’s a frozen tundra with gun towers

And barbed wire – the gulag archipelago

I know it’s a gross failure of desire

 

To see what’s outside. I simply don’t want to

The bars are imaginary by what can you?

You see, I have lost all volition

I’ve made my house into a prison!

 

It’s been like this for years and years

In fact, ever since I retired

Visits from the family on Sunday

Tea, cake, awkward conversation

 

I might get myself a new tattoo

Bird, jail, choky, the clink, jail

At least I can get email

I’ve made my house into a prison!

 

The geraniums on the window-sill

Are struggling to be free

They don’t know its winter

They have no seasons, you see

 

They are pushing out flowers

Like tiny red fists. Bless them

I admire them. That’s ambition

I’ve made my house into a prison!

 

Hope is what keeps me going

Home-made hooch, colour TV

Sunlight glints on the horizon

I imagine walks to the museum

 

Flowers. My favourite tree

I know it’s the human condition

I’ve read Sartre’s existential exposition

I’ve made my house into a prison!

 

The fall

Like a blushing timebomb it parachutes
when its time is up. It is dying already.

Its brittle skin and ice hardened arteries
map a spiral of luminous decay.

This show of futile gallows defiance
should be a warning to all of us

and yet we praise the dissolute beauty
the sang-froid of its gaudy silk waistcoat.

This hostage to gravity has lost its grip.
After the fall, its final ignominy

is to end up as sullen pavement slush
an inconvenience, a broken hip

Semi-shade

 

Happiness is fading as the nearly sun
throws its half-light across the garden.
Invisible pressures form our horizon
like the bars of an open prison.
This seeping greyness will persist for days.
The sun came out briefly. It’s raining now.
We have a word for it – semi-shade.
Many words. it is our Eskimos’ snow.
Our only certainty is ambiguity.
How do we feel? ‘Oh, not bad’, ‘you know’.
Shipping forecasts map our moods –
‘New low moving across Southern Faroes’.
Summer is a friend who promises to visit
so fleeting that we might miss it.

No net

for JJ

 

In the shadows before caffeine and light

Strange creatures assemble in black coats

On the wrong side of the city, at night

 

Bending the darkness with their sweet notes

They astonish with their lines and chords

They lend us poetry without words

 

They are the rule-breakers, almost foolhardy

See them skip recklessly across the wire

Throw shapes with their shadow puppetry

 

Or pass their bare skin through the fire

We admire the illusion. Is it trickery?

Fortune favours those who are brave

 

They know, with mathematical certainty

When to push, when to hold back with their art

Their artistry has no boundaries

 

We’re not like them. We could not scale the height

Of these sky dancers. See them gamble with eternity

In deep cellars, where candles are burned

 

They are the poets of the cold, thin air
They fill the darkness with their luminous sound
They need no net. They know that one is there.

 

 

Tomorrow

 

Tomorrow sharp showers will break like pencils
A popstar will die. The rivers will flow.
Light will break. Two friends will argue.
Trees will burn – they are plotting against us.

The weather map will turn pink.
A shamed film star will be cleared.
Rivers will ask us questions.
A lying person will be truthful.

The flames reared up. We cut down trees with chainsaws.
The mountain exploded. The soil blew away.
We sealed the borders. The airports were closed.
A country starved. Some deaths will not be mourned.

Bojo Maximus

 

Write a column, buy a pup
Sign a treaty, rip it up

Look serious in A and E
Like you're making history

All that's decent you can shreddit
Shift the blame and take the credit

Increase deniability
By lying with sincerity

Play the joker have a laugh
Posing for a photograph

There was no party, wasn't me
I was in the lavatory!

For a country based on greed
Eton boys are what you need

Tug you forelock, bend your knee
When you give your vote, you see

Getting rich is the first rule
Not for you,for me you fool

A poem of two halves

That summer I upped my skills, big time
My similes were giving me grief
So I hunted down fresh imagery
Like a spear hunter on a coral reef
 

Each morning, in the dark, was a victory
knocking new poems out of the park
My rhyming couplets were legendary
 

See, I had an awareness of the wider game
Allegory, allusion, alliteration
Litotes – he plays for Leicester City

I was flying, bruv. No one could catch me
One day, a scout knocks on the door
And asks to see my mum and dad
He says he’s heard about this lad
 

Who is subverting poetry, could he have look?
Maybe there was a place for me in a new book
It was a really exciting anthology

I still have to practice my keepy-uppy
To get to this level, you don’t go gently
Now I am driving a brand new Bentley