My father's clothes (part two)

Why do I dislike so much to dress smartly
Could it be, perhaps, to piss you off?
You barely noticed me anyway
My big days, it seems, were not big enough

Carefully, you avoided the foreground
There was no sense of occasion for you
And yet, often, when I am slopping around
With no shame, splattered with paint and glue

I am touched by our strange similarity
Waiting in the wardrobe, you are still here
I can breathe you in, step into your shadows
Your slowness, the language we did not share

Our arguments have faded into history
You would not have noticed the irony
Of my reluctance to wear smart clothes
You only had one suit, dad. So do I.

I can hear your slow, patient voice
And remember what you showed me
When I am touching a piece of wood
Your clothes and books, boxed up for charity

The Age of the Unpleasnt

What hell is this, from whence came these towers?

Who toppled them? A poisoned land is ours

The neutered Lion prowls his rusty cage

Aroused by blood, the horrors of our Age

A rising tide of pestilence and war

Sniffing blood he makes a muted roar

The puffed up chump displays synthetic hair

The riled Eagle strokes the angry Bear

Defend our Sacred Land, the idiot calls

Draw the shutters down, raise up the walls

Give up your life, for it is Nature’s law

the weak must pay the price; the rich need more

Unleashed the pumped up chump spouts sloganry

Rousing the mob with spray tan tyranny

He'll trade in death, unsheath an iron claw

Who will defend the stateless and the poor?

This tyrant rules a cruel menagerie

His toxic dream, reversing history

Hipsters (Watson's General Telegraph)

Like cowboys in a realistic western

you meet in this faded saloon
whose decor is artfully distressed.
to practice your low-light revolution.

In form, you are the new Edwardians.

Like explorers on some Polar expedition

your favourite colours are brown and black.

Your full beards are back in fashion.

Who would have thought that our grandparents’

furniture would come back to haunt us?

Their antique artifacts, like sepia ghosts

are echoed in the way that you dress.

We learned to wear their coats

but there was brightness in our rebellion.

We tried to drive away their darkness.

We plastered the walls that you stripped back.

‘Fast’ Eddie's story

This guitar rasps like a smoker’s cough.

It was always in our house, see

and everyone who came in scraped some varnish off

didn’t they. Well, one day

it disappears; it gets half-inched

They put a story in the newspaper

about how it’s been pinched:

‘Local pop group looking for guitar’.

This bloke phones me up about the ‘reward’.

He wants a hundred quid – frigging liberty.

Next thing, someone’s on the doorstep, this bird.

That’s how it came back to me.

This guitar sings to me like Leda’s swan.

Next week, it’s going back up the M1.

Fixing a door

Recalling blue lights flashing
I sandpaper your plaster and wood
returning to health your leper’s skin
as if repairing you could make things good.
You were the protector of this house
your scars are an accurate record
of each choatic entrance and egress –
they are a route map of discord.
I will scrape and polish the front door
as if smoothing out each impression
will reestablish a sense order
hoping to restore harmony within
and to rehabilitate a failed guardian.
You kept danger out - or held it in

Pret a Manger spicy burrito wrap

Bland, content less, homogenous

food from which the life has been beaten

food that has no soul

rendered lifeless by repetition

food that merely whispers

and that has no mystery

food like a spread sheet

designed by a committee

food like a vague memory

whose colours are washed away

food that that casts no shadow

and that has no history

no guitar plays, the square is empty

a ghostly horse wanders by

Come dine with me

In such good company

The art of conversation can thrive

The food was excellent  –

well-chosen and in season

For this reason, I am giving you a five

I have eaten gazpacho before

It’s somewhat passé, don’t you think?
A bit gauche, a bit nouveau riche

At least there was plenty to pour

For this reason, I am giving you a four

For you, talk does not flow easily

Your talents are not culinary

Your menu, frankly, did not rise above the ordinary

Beans on toast, I mean … really?

For reason, I am giving you a three

I did not say anything

But there was a hair in my stew

Your conversation was awkward

Your cooking atrocious

For this reason, I am giving you a two

You greeted your guests with a gun

Three contracted food poisoning

Another decided to run

For this reason, I am giving you a one