The cheaper sort

At the moment things are hot

They’ve made me lose my job: what rot

Oh the rank indignity

Sajid Javid who is he?

How dare he dish the dirt on me

I said to him just wait and see

The plebs’ attention span is short

All they want is fags and sport

Give it a week, or maybe two

And they’ll have over things to do

But no, he wouldn’t wait a bit

He’s stitched me up that little git

I said to him, what’s all this for?

We’ve heard this bolshie talk before

All that ghastly tenant power

We tarted up their sodding tower

Sprinklers and a fire test!

They’ll be wanting gold bars next!

Designer labels, super cars

Fine cuisine and cocktail bars

They are plebs, why should they be

Living in royal K and C?

Lazy beggars on the lam

Send them up to Birmingham!

I was at the Treasury

And Cambridge University

You don’t get to the PM’s door

By wasting money on the poor

So why all the sodding fuss?

More for them means less for us

I need my rural liberty

And life in Surrey don’t come free

Ski-ing is my favourite sport

The shares this year are falling short

That’s why I did it with no thought

The cladding? Use the cheaper sort

Accountants

They must have an interior life. 
It is one of the mysteries of the office.

Church on Sunday, a new car, a pet dog?

They reveal less than a goldfish.

They are strangers to emotions.
These people don't do words.

They prefer columns of numbers.
Their seeing eye merely records.

They are like Easter Island statues.
Don’t ask them about East Enders

Who put them here, and for what purpose?

We know why. It's to torment us.

Primly superior to those who
blurt out words, or who cry after a skinfiul
they are frozen in some Biblical hell –
a year zero, where feelings are sinful.

A clay pipe

For Chris

As news of the invading Dutch fleet 

travelled slowly across the city 

the pipe was snapped by one who is long dead 

and forgotten. A remnant of history.

Sluiced from a storm drain into the river 

bowl and stem were touched by eels

layered in an invisible jeopardy

a shifting pavement of slime and ships' nails. 

Years passed. New outrages were observed.

The man who blew out lungfuls of air 

died and was buried somewhere.

At night, the sky thundered with war.

His tiny act went unrecorded.

Each tide brought new whispers and rumours

until one bright London morning 

I found his clay pipe stem, on the foreshore.