Saturday 20 September 2014

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.

Friday 19 September 2014

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


Thursday 11 September 2014

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.

Tuesday 2 September 2014

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.