The Chandos

This pub is London's unfriendliest scene

The decor – brown and corrupted maroon

Stacked chairs, like a junk shop or lumber room

A pool table's violent shade of green

The locals display their team's tattered flag

It’s a faded badge of hostility

Fierce pride. Grimy authenticity

Everyone hating them is their bag

A giant screen dominates every angle

Raptly, they watch inarticulate men

Prod a small white ball, gracefully

Around a vivid green rectangle

For Christ's sake don't tell them.

It’s a kind of poetry. They would kill me

Sullen Sid

For Alberto

He is from Galacia where they love fish – eating them. This miserable shop (my closest chippy) fascinated and constantly disappointed him

Sullen Sid waits silently for trade

Today's day-glo special – battered hake

Business is less likely than a police raid

Once, he pulled a huge carp from a lake

Poor Sid, it isn’t much of a life

He fills the fryer, sings the same song

Endures the moods of his trouble and strife

His motto – the customer is always wrong

Now they don’t come. Like a bitter old toad

He’ll blame everyone but himself

Curse the bright new chippy down the road

Lug more pickled onions onto the shelf

The spent fat, the plump carp, his grumpy wife

Poor Sid. It isn’t much of a life

Bus stop Venus

Clothing Giant H&M Defends ‘Perfect’ Virtual Models

Posed on an unseen beach, you casually

hook a curved thumb into your waistband.

The sapphire sea shades into an azure sky

your arms are dusted with fine white sand

your poised limbs’ artful informality

and the perfection of your symmetry

make you a Photoshop Aphrodite –

a vision of carved mahogany.
Your swimming costume hints at what is not
visible more than what it reveal to us

you are a living statue. God, you are hot!

Your half-closed lids are ambiguous.

Only £3.99 for your top!

You're a Venus for the bus stop.

Snowdrops

Close to Bosworth field, I finally arrive

Woodlands, a muddy farm track, a gate

At the village of Croxall a lowering sky

Broods over the manorial estate

The church beckons me. Am I going home?

Faded and creased like an old diagram

England is written in its soft grey stone

Perhaps it will tell me who I am

I seek meaning trying to disinter the dead

From the old graves, where the past is frozen

Nothing. Sometimes the past cannot be read

Snowdrops smother them – a white explosion

I seek consolation from their beauty

The ancient village is lost, so am I

Rockstar

For Fergus

On a weekday night, in this obscure place

they roar for you and queue for beer

beauty’s habitual tropes, your satyr face.

But, clearly, you do not want to be here.

You know how to dig gold with your pick

to capture an audience. You do now.

With each soaring chorus and fast lick

the crowd indulges you, recalling how

you straddled the world from club to club –

your audacious bends, your famous sustain.

In each hall, stadium and, now, pub

you grimaced, as if in rapture or pain.

You sought beauty with your profanity

assuming greatness was your vanity.

Syrup

For Jack S

Your songs flowed like syrup from the stage.

With your emollient inanity

You raised the stakes of vulgarity

A bad taste champion for a vulgar age.

There was a ready market clearly

For you trite songs. You would always give them

Your trademark, a clumping rhythm.

You possessed a redundant fertility.

There was a cruel hardness behind your eyes

Even your street-waif look did violence.

Apparently, you were beastly to your band.

This, frankly, comes as no surprise

For it was merely a pose, your innocence.

The worst cruelty comes from the bland

The Paper Moon

They are demolishing the Paper Moon
Its thin walls were fragile, after all
Moving slowly to oblivion
The fatal touch of the wrecking ball.
Soon they will be stripped back to air
Leaving, merely, a residuum
A faint echo of our evenings there
Nights of moon-drenched delirium.
A smudged thumbprint of reflected light
All the time, she was haunting our skies
Like a shadowy ghost, vague and white
The begetter of our mysteries –
Occasions of revelry and song.
Happily, the real moon will go on