Today's manifesto

PM says security services can’t always prevent ‘self-starting, sometimes quite random’ attacks like siege of Lindt cafe

Our efforts in this regard will never cease
I am now proud to announce … the war on peace

From today, let the drums beat loud
Let our hearts swell to the baying crowd

Non-violence is boring. Instead
Let us be locked in spasm of hatred

There will be no place for tranquillity

Let our watchword be hostility

Let us put an end to tolerance

All I am saying is give war a chance

There are no easy answers – fact

But a permanent aggression pact

Will ensure maximum production

And a permanent disruption

Of out-dated civil liberties

Of compassion and civilities

Hark, the enemy is the gate!

Remember, war is the health of the state

His life

That was his favourite guitar.
That was the place where he sat.
He would play at night, usually a 12–bar.
He shared the sofa with his cat.
That was where he parked his car.
He wanted to be warm like all of us –
he tried not to be like his father
to be secure; to push back chaos.
Like him, he looked for a bargain.
Sometimes, when watching TV
he would drift, gently, into oblivion.
See where it is hollow, the old settee.
That was his wallet. He had no wife.
Those were his things, his habits, his life.

Ballad of Orpheus

Orpheus strolling with his lyre
Sees a notice – poets for hire
Interviews in the library 

He thinks that’s just gig for me 

He hopes they’ll like the way he sings
He buys a plectrum and some strings
Feeling chilled and pleased as punch
He goes to Wetherspoons for lunch

An hour later he’s back inside
He didn’t have an easy ride
Churning round inside his head
Are the words that they had said

It isn’t that we don’t like you
There’s just no call for what you do
By that we mean your style of rhyme
It isn’t hip-hop rap or grime

You need to cover urban stuff
You’re not edgy or rough enough
Buy a leather jacket mate
Pretend you’re from a tough estate

The juice of Dionysius
Soon befuddles Orpheus
He sits and broods depressively
And breathes the smell of poverty

He had outplayed the Sirens' song
But now his music is thought wrong
He must tell Eurydice
That no-one likes his poetry

He decides to pawn his lyre
Or better, burn it on the fire
No-one wants to hear his tunes
The lonely man in Wetherspoons

Dressed to impress

Basking through winter skies

catching the sun, your metal skin

has the angular thrust of a shark’s fin

poets should celebrate your glories.

Rising on stilts above an agora

your pleasing palette of orange and green

seems to reconfigure the street scene –

you are a temple to Athena.

As if this were ancient Alexandria

you are home to a million stories

a towering knowledge repository.

You are a magnet, a cynosure.

Dressed in your coat of verdigris

you impress, you are Peckham library.

Thunder

Thunder frightens us; it works, dear deity.
It is like the crash of artillery
and the flash – an arc of petulance
is a whiplash across the bruised sky.
Our lives had been so orderly
now we dance to your howling tune
as furniture tumbles across the lawn.
A storm shows that you can still be angry.
You know how to put on a good show
you design its light and sound so artfully –
in your wrath is a great theatricality.
Perhaps it’s a covenant, like the rainbow
or a warning against complacency
each damaged town a test of ingenuity.

The Lord Nelson

The palms of Queens Road parade raggedly
as if in some listless Mediterranean
of pay-day loans and fried chicken
bruised concrete, a pale yellow sun.
Trafalgar Street leads to the Old Kent Road
where each pub could have been Henry Cooper's gym.
You can almost smell his aftershave
‘splash it on all over’, they called him.
Through the frosted glass of The Lord Nelson
like a sallow ghost, see the faded potman
his fingers twitch for a cork-tipped Rothmans
he is shadow boxing with Charlie Chaplin.
The pub seems trapped in an eternal night.
No-one would enter; not even in daylight.

Rye Lane

Sleek and red the sixty-three

bicycles and vans converge –

Peckham’s traffic mingled in

Cacophonous proximity.

The noisy vendors’ thrust and glare

flows to the pulse of Africa.

Beauty is on offer here –

false eyelashes and human hair

mobile phone accessories
scrawny chickens and breadfruit

the ocean’s harvest, fresh and dried

the emerald of the library

giant yams, cassava root

the church that tells us Christ has died.

Abacus

Using algorithms and calculus

juggling with equations like Euclid

it draws a map of our loneliness

it knows what we desire, what we did.

Peering through our curtains at night

it knows what we have done, where we have been.

Stuttering in patterns of light

it seems to read our minds through its screen.

We know that there’s something divine in us

that we are the flame to its spark

that it is merely a computer –

a grey box that glimmers in the dark –

that we are divine, we contain godliness

but that it is a glorified abacus.

Philip Larkin and the Sex Pistols

Larkin straps on his Gibson SG.
It's his chosen weapon of attack
for the blistering riff of Mr Bleaney.
He looks at Johnny Rotten – a flashback.
How he had coveted that first LP.
He wrote a letter; Johnny said join us.
That day he left the university.
He went down to London on the bus.
Steve Jones is toast, says the NME.
Larkin brings to the band a new energy.
Punk’s gain is a loss to the library –
each slab of noise is a sonic elegy.
Cookie scowls, from John a cheeky grin.
One, two, three, four … Larkin counts them in.

See him swaggering down the King's Road.
Smile like a fool, pull out the organ stops
he has finally killed off work, the toad
Philip Larkin is on Top of the Pops!
The night of his first gig, in a pub
he threw a punch at Generation X
next thing, he's playing the 100 Club
and buying his new trousers from Sex.
The grey mornings in Hull are forgottten
Marr had Morrissey, Eliot had Pound
Lennon had McCartney; he has Rotten.
There's a tender savagery to their sound
they'll go straight to number one – see how.
Phil's the business, he's ex libris now. 

The Sex Pistols had outraged the country.
Thanks to their vile anthem, God Save the Queen
and their foul-mouthed ranting on TV
they were more outrageous than Benzedrine.
Larkin, the gentle former librarian
with his horn-rimmed glasses and tortoise stare
had become, ipso facto, their guardian
he had pleaded with them not to swear
but a national sense of moral outrage –
a gift, surely, for those who write or sing –
meant that they were rarely off the front page.
To Philip it was most embarrassing.
He was sure now, he would play softer rock
he would set up a new band, with Glen Matlock.

The hell raisers

Always up, watch them as they gurn and preen 
looking smart in their neat slacks and blazers.
They lurch at us, drunkenly, through the screen
like dinosaurs. They are the hell-raisers.
They create havoc on late-night TV
they are our clowns, our holy fools –
they spin and weave for  us reliably
and drive their cars into swimming pools.
See how, in their narcissistic self-harm
they always go too far, try too hard.
They are sad clowns; all of their charm
seems touched, like Yorick's skull, by the graveyard.
To absolve us of our ordinariness
they are not like us, they are famous.

Recipe

Take a grey November day

add a late Romantic symphony

season with crimson poppy.

Watch as it bubbles nicely

let it thicken slowly around you

like a childhood Sunday

congealing like a glutinous gravy

as you listen to Tchaikovsky.

It’s good but you are not finished yet.

In order to perfect your recipe

sprinkle a final garnish of regret –

an unfulfilled desire, a memory.

The last dance at the school disco –

the one that you did not go to.

Jazz pigeons

They’re not gloomy, like crow or raven.

As twilight falls, just before dark

their self-confidence is craven.

Jazz pigeons have invaded the park!

These hooligans in fluorescent suits

are far too colourful for round here.

In a hungry cloud they strip our fruits.

Our birds are dowdy, like our beer.

Shocking in their bright green livery

they are hanging around the station

like a gang of Mods on a bank holiday.

Their raucous squawk is a provocation.

Who will liberate the English streets

of these foreign intruders, the parakeets!

Feather and fur

You are a slippery customer

you know where to go, what to do

You are the ultimate outsider

the king of the pavement crew.

Swaggering like you’ve won the lottery

you have shadowed us for years

gnawing bones in the cemetery.

When we left the wood, you followed us here –

our golden predator. You saunter

as bold as brass across the lawn

then melt, like a dream, into the air.

You are our spectral visitor at dawn.

We seek you at night, but you are not there

Your remind us of what we once were

Jazz club

Those who like a place that's mellow
Will appreciate the gentle throb
Of our ambient cocktail piano
We’re opening a jazz club!
We won’t be a restaurant or a pub
Those who are in the know
Will love our vibe, our free-form dub
Each hipster, musician and boho
For local artists we'll be a hub
They’ll appreciate our poetry
They’ll pay top dollar for our grub
And mix with gangsters and royalty 
We’re gonna create a hubbub
We're opening a jazz club!

Work

The same journey. The same journey each day.

Every morning, a parade of sensation

on our odyssey to bus stop or station.

is imploring us silently – run away!

Daily we are welcomed by the same face

into a lonely world of stationery

Why do we live in this kingdom of grey

On the starting blocks of the rat race?

As each new season comes and goes

we walk blindly from Friday to Friday.

Spring exposes the blossoms of May.

The trees on the common change their clothes.

Without our days of work where would we be?

In the terror of nothingness – mere anarchy.

Take a line

Take a line as it coaxes you

into an argument of structured time.

Watch the line and follow

its careful patterns of rhyme and half-ryhme.

Observe its precarious virtuosity.

You can harness it like Aristotle

there is a pleasing symmetry

In Shakespeare’s trick – thesis, antithesis –

but Petrarch’s dance of sextet and quatrain

is the holy marriage of thee and four –

the poetry of two times seven.

Watch the line plunge and come back again

as it turns to magic a prime number

winding precipitously to heaven.

Last night

Last night it was whisky and tartan
Alex was king. We partied for hours
We were blood brothers, we were a clan
The air was blue with our saltires
Last night we re-opened the shipyards
We popped Champagne, we ended the truce
Last night, the future was ours
We were Robert the frigging Bruce
This morning we woke to a cold, grey dawn
We'd been stiffed by dough-faced Cameron
By Murdoch, by pin-striped businessmen
By bankers, by Edinburgh again
By Miliband the wee little clown
We burst the balloons – what a let down

The new faces of 1958

 












The future is beckoning them

from a bedsit in Notting Hill Gate.

They'll smash colour, like an atom.

They’re the new faces of 1958!

Have you seen the Jackson Pollock?

It’s taking Whitechapel by storm

like Tommy Steele and his caveman rock.

With a Ginsberg howl, they’ve all gone freeform.

Being shocking and new is their riff.

They are excited about Mark Rothko

they’re taking a waltz on grandad’s quiff.

They loved This is Tomorrow.

It's strange how things comes back again.
Rita Ora is the new Alma Cogan.

Moon

You’re the shyest guest at the party

Your changing face has many moods 
You charmed the guests on the balcony
You lit up the old house in the woods
You whipped the sea into a frenzy
You taught Orpheus to play the lyre
Without you there would no poetry
I bathed my face in your cold fire
You’re the witch doctor at the carnival
You gave us fever, you gave us rhyme
You linger around the hospital
Without you, there would be no time
Always invited you don’t always come
You’re mysterious, the zero in the sum

Oh you think you are so good 
No-one asked you to pass by
With your vampires and fake blood
You make wolves howl and babies cry
Like some moth-eaten Svengali
Carefully, you coached each Muse
You’re an embarrassment, a cliché 
At Knossus, you ran the sacred bulls
You float, like an anaemic flower
In your fortress of selenium
You are passive, you have no real power
Your religion is delirium
Though you merely reflect the sun’s light
Some are led by you to dream or fight

You are known in the local nick
And every other police station
For inspiring each lunatic
In this inebriated nation.
Look what you did to poor Odysseus –
You gave Circe the potion for his wine.
In order to make a fool of us
You turned all of his men into swine.
As you creep around the sky at night
Staring down with your owl's eye
You like to make us argue alright
But, if I were to use as an alibi
The fact that you toy with us for sport
My words would simply be laughed out of court.

The age of barbarity

 For AJ

You with your radical innocence
did not ask for this daily display
of stupidity and error
this war that is not really a war –
our conscience has been privatized.

We have replaced the old terror
with a new state of anxiety.
our words have lost their power
through the currency of lies.
We have been infantilised.

Here, we are remote from the horror.
You love your silver scooter.
I follow you carefully to the shops

Your eyes as dark as the deepest pools 

draw mine from the pavement and road

 

Mornings with AJ

The radio tells us of sun and showers.

It talks of the Yazidi genocide –
a kaleidoscope of global powers –

and a famous comedian’s suicide.

Reflecting upon ‘British values’

I cross the giant’s kingdom of Sainsbury’s

to buy your Snickers and vinegar fries.

It’s a dilemma. What on earth are they?

When should we act and when turn aside?

You are far more interested in toys

than the slaughter on a mountainside

or the tortured comedian’s woes.

To the bipolar blink of light and dark

we wake and sleep. We walk across the car park.