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.