Remembering the Stamford Arms SE1

Welcome to the ‘Thirsty Bear’, your hosts

Of what used to be an alehouse or tavern

Exiled the former customers – their ghosts

Linger like the shades in Plato’s cavern.

On the new menu, sausage of wild boar

Replaces crisps and toasted cheese and ham.

The ice blue walls and iPads I am sure

Are contemporary, yet I am

Nostalgic for the former boozed up nights

The bloke from Loaded who used to hold court

The booming television and the fights

To get to the bar. England on Sky Sport

The gassy beer, the time that Bonehead played

The rowdy nights whose memories don't fade.

Sicilia

I traced my life through fields of chipped stone

Glanced up at the white-tipped volcano

The sun blazed from a hollowed out dome

The blinding light furrowed my brow

Like a harrow and pricked my skin

Tending fields of lemon and pistachio

The scented dark was a balm from my sin

The pitiless heat and the cracked soil

If I could, I would go back there again

Back to a life scooped out from toil

I would find refuge in scent and shadow

I would tend olives and press oil

I would tread the fields of fire and snow

If I could, I would go back there now 

Terza rima

My grandfather was from Bronte in the east of Sicily. He was a hairdresser but I guess that other ancestors toiled on the fertile slopes of Mount Etna, which broods over the island like a great black giant

View from a train window

En route to Kidderminster on a grey day

I hear my father talking to me still

Give up now. Your puny efforts will fail

Left over life is merely time to kill

The spirit is willing, the flesh frail.

The flat midlands fields and clumps of wool

Ask a question of my humanity

Everything in nature shouts ‘fool’

‘Why bother?’ they say, ‘all is vanity.’

It is the voice of Ecclesiastes

‘Your efforts are merely bluster and bluff’.

But in the fields are hidden mysteries

Simply to live and breathe are not enough
Surely it is better to rage and cry
Than just to watch the spinning world go by?

Going to a poetry gig, oddly. My dad was the world's biggest pessimist.

Elvis is not dead

Playing endlessly, like a looped show

There is a another world in my head

A place of memory. I often go

In black and white, where Elvis is not dead

The theme from Z Cars is heard clearly

And the unctuous TV host, Hughie Green

Says ‘I mean that most sincerely’

Like a cracked ghost, oozing through the screen

Before the new Wembley stadium

Music didn’t used to be so loud

Tarby plays the London Palladium

A blurred white horse holds back the crowd

Shielded from daylight in a downtown bar

Jimi Hendrix straps on his guitar

Bigger than Elvis

The papers follow where he goes
They like to write about his clothes
He rides the crest of every breaking wave
He's a god the critics rave
A shaman for the modern age
A poet and a story teller too

In his mind, he is a magus
He's bigger than Elvis in Las Vegas
A poet and a story teller too

He hung out with a stone age tribe
To learn their language and their vibe
They inked him with an elegant tattoo
He can play the jazz trombone
And juggle balls of blazing foam
When he was young he joined a circus crew

In his mind, he is a magus
He's bigger than Elvis in Las Vegas
When he was young, he joined a circus crew

He has a chick to clean his house
She's half his Muse and half a mouse
Her total admiration fills his day
She sits in silence by the stage
And watches as he struts and plays
They're very much in love most people say

In his mind, he is a magus
He's bigger than Elvis in Las Vegas
They're very much in love most people say

The romantic imagination

In a pouring out of melancholy
Beethoven's frown filled the small room
Like rain. His pastoral story
A repetition of antique gloom
Go for a walk, please, mother said
And so, having finished the Sunday roast
We would trudge through snow or mud
My father loved drab places the most
I would have said no, if I could

To his bleak weekly panorama

Of a winter walk through a dark wood

Or to Tchaikovsky's sickly melodrama

But I was a kid, I had nowhere to go

His manic depression cast a long shadow

On feeling pain in Sainsbury's

Self-service machines are speaking to us now

Soothingly; they never argue or shout

Only plodders are using the checkout

The grey-haired nodders with nowhere to go.

At least, they are not in a tearing hurry

Their pace is infuriatingly slow

They fumble with pills, talk to the radio

Stumble to Wetherspoons for a curry.

Today, I am travelling down their road

I ignore the machines that stutter and blip.

Are you collecting your nectar points, sir? No.

Why not? Because I am more than a bar code

You cannot interrogate me from a strip

I feel pain, I walk in sun and shadow.

Note: with a shocking toothache, en route to the dentist, I pop into Sainsbury's in Forest Hill and discover that Blade Runner has arrived – machines are talking to people in Lycra running shorts buying bags of tangerines. I am averse to the self-service thing (I don't know why), so I shuffle behind some elderly coin fiddlers and force myself to smile and not to be impatient, thinking that I am closer in demographic and attitude to them than I am to the treadmill pounders who are shopping a la Ridley Scott. I almost pop into the gloomy, cavernous Wetherspoons over the road, for a pint of bitter subsidisded by the British Association for Decrepitude but, realising that I have to go to work, I stop myself in time.