2021
Midwinter Maiden
Virgin snow a new made bed deadens sound surrounding mounds of hidden hills like covered thighs a sheet white maiden with ebony platt lies still as a frozen lake in her glass snow globe sarcophagus while wizened dwarfs look on with heavy heart their beloved one delicate as a snowflake with fairest hair on smooth bare skin of folded arm hand over hand on clavicle and crisp white linen nightdress with filigree hoarfrost lace pale face cold as ice with blood red lips like ripe rose hips in tangled thorny hedgerow and a tinkling musical box of falling icicle chimes with the bitter low moan and bite of winter wind and the tingling of frosty fingers and toes and deep footprints in the snow and the black figures of skeletal trees in bright low January light Snow White awaits the kiss of spring the spring of life this midwinter maiden awaits her prince and the sap to start to rise yet now still so still and beautiful she lies.
The wrongful death of Lisa Montgomery
In the dying days of Trump’s regime
It seems he was getting more extreme
Rushing through a few last minute injunctions
To execute death row inmates with lethal injections
While pardoning some of his convicted cronies
And Twittering another load of baloney
So here’s the sad story of Lisa Montgomery
A life of pain, deprivation and misery
Everyone said she was wrong in the head
Wounded so deep, though her wounds never bled
Maybe she did what she did in despair
Maybe all she needed was some love and care
When a young girl she was abused by her stepfather
Gang raped by his mates, pimped by her mother
Beaten and bruised, yelled at and scorned
As though they wished she’d never been born
When her mother discovered what they’d done in her bed
Rather than pity, she yelled and held a gun to her head
At age 11 Lisa took refuge in the bottle
And by her mid teens was dependent on alcohol
Depressive, bi-polar, with an injured brain
The beatings and deprivations drove her insane
She married young to escape from her home
But her husband abused her, same old syndrome
He cheated and beat her and left her unloved
She so desperately wanted a child she could love
Within five years she had four to care for
But he took them away when he left and divorced her
It seems all her relationships ended the same
Husband number two caused her even more pain
Year on year she became ever more delusional
She claimed god talked to her, though that’s not unusual
Except he spoke through the dot to dot she had drawn
She and god devised a plan to steal an unborn
And though sterilised, she claimed pregnancy again
And prosecutors said the plan proved she was sane
The crime itself was particularly gruesome
She befriended online another young woman
Then strangled her when visiting the young wife
And did a bloody c-section with a kitchen knife
Although she tried to deny the crime
It was pretty obvious it was her all the time
Yes to help, yes to therapy, yes to incarceration
But not the death penalty in the worlds ‘freedom’ nation
Where was the help when she needed it most?
That wonderful system of which the president boasts
Where was the welfare state, I’d like to know
When a young girl was raped, and left naked in the snow
A country where healthcare and welfare are sold
only the wealthy can afford what all should be owed
To dole ‘get out of goal’ cards freely to mates you like best
And leave nothing but debt in the community chest
To appoint how many right wing judges for life?
And leave the poorest of poor in misery and strife
Where welfare depends on the colour of your skin
Or to the simple lottery of your kith and kin
Hers was indeed a terrible crime to commit
But the state was surely also complicit
And although it was a tragedy for Bobby Jo
The mother of the stolen baby, and her family also
An equal tragedy the life of Lisa Montgomery
And a vindictive president who showed her no mercy
Dad's Saw
Clearing my Dad’s bench
I see a saw
Hardwood handle, varnished
Brass rivets, polished
Steel blade, etched, oiled
A row of carefully set and sharpened teeth
A saw for life
Snug in it’s wooden box
Secured by it’s buttons and knobs
Though sharpening the saw was a chore
By the door In B & Q
In a bin by the checkout queue
On offer, two saws for a tenner
Moulded plastic handles, orange, fluorescent
Sheathed in cardboard
Built in obsolescence
Use once and throw away
That’s how it goes today
Swings and roundabouts
Requiem to the Ash
Ashes to ashes
Slashing and burning the sick trees
The chainsaw’s teeth bite
The Dust beneath
Dutch Elm disease
Who remembers
How they used to grow
Majestic sisters of the hedgerow
And the American Chestnut
All gone
Four billion
In less than a generation
What might follow Ash and Wych Elm?
Poplar
Juniper
Whitebeam
Scots pine
All under threat or in decline
And what of the oak?
Acid rain
The urgency of a high speed train
Only us to blame
Three score years and ten
As Mayfly to the millennia of Yew
And then
All the species that co-depend
Symbiosis
Genus
Genocide
Uprooted us
Gasping for breath
On our knees
Loss of habitat
Dying back
For lack of trees
Winter Wells Walk
I’m soggy, I have a soggy doggie, the lane is very boggy, it's gone a little foggy and I feel a little groggy but it's bloody muddy lovely when I earn my chocolate toddy
Another winter Wells walk
Right-i-ho
Let’s go
A winter walk in slushy snow
Into Wells in wellies and mitts
Getting muddy and throwing sticks
For the doggy dog
In the foggy fog
Nellie’s smelly
She’s rolled in shit
Dreadlock tail and straggly bits
Into the sink when we get back home
Wash her belly in a lather of foam
Stretch out fully by the fire
Lick the fur until it's dryer
Dreams of squirrel, mud and bog
Doggy dog dog dog dog dog dog
Imbolc
The cycle and the circle
An ancient song to sing
The slow return of spring
Though low this seasons sun
Still, an age old tale is spun
The turning of the year
The music of the spheres
The megalithic stones
Maiden Mother Crone
Triple crowned reign
Her virgin self regains
Sat on nature’s throne
The seeds of summer sewn
Crocus, snowdrop, Daffodil
Herald the end of winter chill
In St Brigid’s bright domain
The sacred and arcane
With winter on the wane
The cycle and the circle
We gather once again
Stationary
The late arrival on platform 2
Is the 1953 legacy service from Victorian England
The ghost train of short term gain
That cost cutting come tangle of bramble
The sweat and muscle of a million navvies
Produced a puckered line like scar
The embankment a welt across the levels
The engine shed a tyre shop
The station masters house a stationary place
And suburbia spreads like a stain
Mass produced housing estates eat up the green
Though no slow train for the new commute
Just cars, truckloads of tar
Donations to interested parties
Billions more for a high speed line
To get to a meeting 20 minuets faster
No local connections
Bypassed this time
The car was better by far
The train had it's hay day
Lost the tram, got the jam
And that's where we are, no more to say
Choking on the smoke of 40 million motor cars
Down the track, regret, hope for a backtrack, comeback
But the sleepers were used for raised beds
The trackbed sold back to private property
The goods shipped to articulated lorries
Squandered flexibilities and political brutalities
Unimaginative policies for short term realities
We Miss the train, too soon departed
Those People
Who were the people who ran the camps
Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau?
Not you and I, we weren’t there
And the piles of dead catterpillered into mass graves
Who were those people?
Not us, we were nowhere near
And who were those people
On whom the bombs rained
In Dresden, Coventry, Tokyo?
It wasn’t you or me, that I know
We weren’t born then yet
We can’t be blamed
For the actions of the great un-named
So who were those folk
Who cast their vote
The ones who believed the lies
And then turned a blind eye
The ones who gave their lives
Gladly, for king and country?
The ones who killed, the ones who died
Yes, those people we don’t know
They were, they were, they are
You and I
Those people
Womoon
One small step for man
The Man on the moon
What does he know?
It’s only rocket science
Left more than a footprint though
No moon mom nor maid mothering maybe
For moons immemorial
Womenkind have clocked the Luna phases
The cycles of fertility
The undulations of the tide
The swelling of a pregnant belly
The swollen breasts
Milk white and veined
Nurturing the generations
The children of the stars
The origin of the world
And the elders,
Wizened and dry
Hard as bog oak
Full of wisdom
The knowledge of the ages
Healing herb and poultice
Pockmarked cratered face
Deep dark side hidden
From generations of subservience
Chastity and whalebone torture
The Inquisition’s slaughter
Mother, grandmother, daughter
The sacred womb
The woman in the moon
Full Moon
A Glimpse of bare buttocks
Pale as moonlight
Aglow in the dark
A late night party girl
Squatting to pee
A brazen full moon
Rosie red
Bare cheek
Moonlighting maiden
A peeping Tom’s delight
I pretend not to see
Not politically correct
Though why I’m shy
Being often caught short
Tucked in behind a tree
Ignoring passers by
Brazen it out
Stare at the moon
Probably far less PC of me
To turn such like to poetry
Momentous Momentum
The metallic mirror-water marina polished to a coppery sheen by late low sun - planished by breaths of wind, a million little depressions in constant flux
A flurry like a sprite brushes across it's surface
The plop of a duck ducking under leaves concentric gold rings and bubbles
gone then bobbing up again close elsewhere
The op art patterns of railings undulate and shimmy in the surface - a vertiginous squiggling Riley, Hockney, Twombly
The inverted reflections of trees, though almost perfect, are more mysterious even than their real life counterparts - another world
Beyond that line of trees the scar that is HS2
The cute coot builds her nest of plastic detritus in the crescent of an old car tyre boat fender
The sheen on the water is diesel
A cormorant hangs its oily black wings out to dry
In every eddy flotsam of assorted discarded bottles, balls, bags, food wrapping, amid green weed and the handle of the inevitable trolly sticking up above the surface
The heavy metals we put in this river, the chemicals that run from farms, the rubbish blowing in the wind, collecting in the water, the yellow scum that blows from the weir
In the air the constant sirens of emergency and the noxious fumes of traffic
A swan near Paddington sits on a nest built around a flashing bollard
The boat responds slowly to the hand on the tiller, while apparently so calm and slow on the straight and narrow, a crisis can develop so fast, navigation entails constant vigilance
Winched from the water by crane the boat is iron heavy, an immense static object, yet in the water the lightest touch, a breath of wind even, will get it slowly moving, a step will set it gently rocking, momentous momentum
2022
Private View
It’s only art - Mr arty farty’s at the party in black leathers and a beret
Chunky ‘Brains’ spectaculars in a fetching shade of cherry
He lectures that the texture of the concept’s context is conjecture which sounds like baloney and best to dismiss all this as phoney and Dr clever but un-together is insubstantial as feather spouting loads of crap and blether about the artist’s credibility gap, and all that spat - it’s only art - Miss sexy tanned injecty with Angelina Jolie lips totters high heel with overblown silicone balloons for tits and all the botoxed bits and a slinky black bare back number that’s so skimpy it sticks - Leaving little to the imagination - unlike the artist, whose work is just sublime, according to a mincing bender of indeterminate gender, who is only here for the complimentary wine - it’s only art
Archeological
Prolific
Them Neolithic
Standing stones and
Mounds for bones
Slabs laid with such skill and care
5000 years, and still they’re there
Murder most foul
The oldest bed that’s known
To have belonged to just one family
Is an old four poster bed
From the Castle known as Berkeley
In the valley of the Severn
In the shire known as Gloucester
Where this bed has seen some service
In it’s long seven century story
And in this very castle
Lived this country’s last court jester
Known to entertain the courtiers
With his fool’s marotte and gesture
He must have been a merry bloke
With tinkly bells and banter
A silver tongued fast talker
And England’s last official joker
The queen, Queen Isabella
Had a lover Roger Mortimer
And maybe hanky panky
In that very bit of furniture
So she turned against her husband
And that led to merry murder
In that very castle Berkeley
In that merry shire of Gloucester
They incarcerated King Edward
Known as Edward of Caernarfon
He was involuntarily sequestered
In that castle’s musty dungeon
They left him there to fester
In pestilensant seclusion
But he was a constitutional monarch
With a kingly constitution
So they came for him in dead of night
Or so the story goes
Pinned down by a table top
Or smothered in bedclothes
They stuck a trumpet up his fundament
And hot pokers up the horn
Twirled around his entrails till he ceased to make a moan
To leave his embalmed body with no outward sign of harm
Some say it was a substitute
Who took the assassins poker
Maybe the king made his escape
In the costume of a joker
And Sir Roger later arrested
For plotting evil deeds
Was hung from Tyburn gallows
And left hanging there for days
Girls I Knew
I ended my relationship with Dignity and Grace - they found out about one another…
Ring of Brodgar
A ring of stones stands like a circle of ancestors, gathering together
And here our ancestors gathered in circles, proud and strong as a ring of stones
And we hold out our hands, and we join them
For Jim, for Jon, and for Carly and Gita
Ours not to reason why
I survived and I thrived at Prestonpans
Then slept through the bloodbath Culloden
My pals and I were searching out food
Sore hungry and cold as rain rained and snow snew
Full bellied we slept, as our comrades were slain
slaughtered, run through, in the blood and the rain
Soaking the moor between the stone walls.
I survived Prestonpans, and the rout of Culloden
Went back to my clan in the highlands of Scotland
Ready and willing if the call came again
And the call came again
But I died in my troop train, at Quintinshill junction
On route to a troop ship in Liverpool dock
On route to the Dardanelles campaign, I was shot
by my captain, trapped, as the flames engulfed me
No further got than Gretna Green
And think only this of me
That I should die by fly bite
By the island of Skyros
The three goddesses of Moirae decree
That I die of septicaemia
Never mind the irony
I drowned in the channel, on route to Passchendaele
Where I might have sunk in the mud of the battle
I sank to the bottom of cold Scapa Flow
A rating among many aboard Royal Oak
Holed by a U-boat, afloat in safe haven
The block ships left holes through which they might go
And they did, and I died
One never can know
Or Liverpool bound with barrels of gun cotton
Many we drowned, off the Old Head of Kinsale
No one will tell me if Churchill’s complicit
How quickly we sank, how thickly the veil
I got my ticket home from the hell of Gallipoli
A first class wound on that HMHS
Just my luck, that mine that we struck
And I drowned just as quick, off the island of Kia
With Britannic I sailed and sank
My lifeboat mashed by the still churning propeller
I might have sailed safer on the Mauritania
I survived 4 long years in trench and in dugout, saw all my pals die, blown to beef, torn shredded on wire, gassed chrome yellow, gagging, blue, or slowly green of gangrene, yet I outlived them all, to die in 1918 of Spanish flu
If the call comes again, and it will, and I will join them for sure
I can’t tell you why, but can tell you what’s more
I might die in my bed, or washed up on some shore
Mine not to reason why, mine just to do and die
If the call comes again, the more fool I
For glory they say, we wend our way to war.
Imprint
I might write reams
Dreams given rhyme
Given time
But the paper is a plane of snow
Nothing shows
Nothing grows
Nothing flows
Not even the track of a fox
imprinted
Remains
Rain washes them away
Beneath a leaden sky
With sleet on pane
I lie, dormant
Awaiting spring
And that urge that my print
May sustain
Winter Solstice
The year turns fast
The present is so quickly past
Another year older
Reflecting on a year gone by
The weights I’ve carried on my shoulder
The duties and the chores
Mine and yours
The things I meant to do
And haven’t quite gotten to
The songs unsung
When I didn’t have a voice
When I had the choice
I said nothing
Too late
Missed the boat
Missed the date
Time span on
Time and tide
And here we are at Yuletide
What I wish to say
On this shortest day
Is look ahead
All the possibilities
Where might I be
What might I see
From the top of the hill
A year from now
What might I regret
I didn’t do
And might have
But was too Tardy
Remembrance and intent
Learn and grow
Setting
This is the setting
The sun is setting
The setting sun is silhouetting
A shoreline of trees reflected
In a mercurial pond
Of planished polished bronze
Mirroring sky blue pink
To blushing bruised purple green
Yellow to red and black and back,
Tempered, blued, imbued with all the colours
And a flash of Rainbow trout pirouetting
To pick a fly from a milling cloud
A splash and plop caught
In the corner of an eye
Ripples slowly undulate
Lapping the pebbles
A toad croaks
The rumble of a jet subsides
The ripples ironed out
Dense evening air heavy
with drifting incense scent
Settling round about as a cloak
As a vapour trail spreads like watercolour
Wet in wet
Pat fell flat
Pat splat
And Pip went lean
The man on the stair
Was never seen
The cat caused a flap
But the man wasn’t there
Jack cracked his crown
As he flew through the air
And his lady love combed
Her pre-Raphaelite hair
Red king, mate to check white queen
There’s blood on the mat
And they all fell down
Horses for courses
And all the kings men
Flat as a pat-a-cake
The marriage bed
More dead than alive
And all hearts ache
Daz's Feather Duster
Strap yourselves in ‘cause in the next few weeks you’re in for the ride of a lifetime
The spike protein that is in the vaccine has been put in the water tables and the food chains of the world for four and a half thousand years by dark extraterrestrials to which the Aryan Brotherhood and the crowns of Europe are descended.
The Black Pope runs everything followed by the Aryan Brotherhood followed by the military industrial complex and Pentagon followed by MI6 followed by the crowns of Europe, that’s your pecking order, and all that lot basically are controlled by extraterrestrials.
And it’s all AI controlled, your Bezos, Soros, Gates, all AI controlled, they think they’re in charge, but they’re not - well no - you can see video of Bill Gates talking and then he suddenly starts to twitch, that’s his download.
And there is a battle between beings that are alive that extends right the way through to creation right now and we are at the bottom of it, and I think it’s rightly done up there, and we’re the last piece of the jigsaw and the light can’t land until I’ve tidied up.
I go to the base of the tor in the mornings, and I have got to go back up there at about 5.00 with my feather duster, and basically plug in, and see what needs taking out.
And it’s quite interesting that the spike protein, before I started tidying up, there was 5.4 quadrillion litres of spike protein strangling the earth, shedding from the vaccinated at one to five litres a day, shedding from the vaccinated, the vaccinated have been made into machines that make this shit and you see your spooks of the world, your MI6’s and and CIA’s and Mosad’s they’ve been getting six of these injections a year so I mean they are literally programmed robots.
I don’t know if you have heard of the MK ultra programme, they can basically make an innocent person pick up a gun, shoot someone, put the gun down, and not even realise that they have shot someone - it’s all AI controlled.
Bill Gate’s dad was Hitler’s chief bodyguard, would have been the fourth reich, and mr Putin is going to the west ‘wake up you are in the fourth reich, I’m not the demon everybody says I am’ and neither is Trump, everyone that gets tarred and feathered is a good guy, like Musk, Putin, Trump, they are the good guys in all of this, but unfortunately the Aryan Brotherhood own all the press and the media and paints them as demons. ‘Oh no’, mr Putin is going ‘wake up wake up you are in the fourth reich wake up’ which is just about the truth of it - the fourth reich.
Operation paperclip, that’s quite interesting to google, all the scientists from Nazi Germany were taken into America and they just bought their way out of trouble and this is the result, shocking, but they own everything - two thirds of every supermarket shelf kills ya, there’s a thing called complex cinimentarist, there were 11 things taken out of the food chain after the 2nd world war because they were dangerous and killed people, 7 of those 11 were re-introduced into the food chain. A list of things that kill you include emulsifiers, so if you look at emulsifiers, they are in most things, and raising agents, wheat kills ya, that will be banned soon, what else kills ya? oh potassium sorbate kills ya, there’s a whole laundry list - at least half of the e numbers kill you, and it’s all been done on purpose.
And it’s going to take a little time to get out of the food chain but it is going to have to get out of the food chain.
And you see there’s bigger victims than even your spooks because your LGBT, they’ve been spiking every major town and city in the western world, in the water, with female growth hormones, steroids and amphetamines, creating LGBT’s. And your Ellen, Ellen’s a fake, she took three quarters of a billion dollars to claim to be LGBT and to support that particular movement because it’s divide and conquer, they’ve divided the world, I mean, they divided the world 2000 years ago with their bible then of course they put in the bible 2000 years ago to be anti gay, and then they created loads of gay’s and it’s divide and conquer. JC and his friends, they failed because they were too nice, so they made themselves maniacs and now they don’t have to be maniacs because the light and the dark are at one, and you see a lot of these planets are looking forward to coming down and selling their stuff ‘cause you see a lot of these planets have never got paid for helping us.
Google is interesting - earth size objects around the sun - there are 16 satellites bigger than earth that were built by the andromodens to stabilise the earth to stop us dying from corona mass injections, and they never got paid for that, so they can’t wait ‘till all the shit dies down because they are going to build a two and a half thousand miles an hour maglev to go round the earth, and they would get paid trillions for that, and that will be their payback ‘cause they never got paid for helpin’ us, but they’re amazing engineers, and the light are queueing up, the light and the dark are queueing up to sell all sorts of stuff and I am particularly looking forward to buying a ticket to see four and a half high skateboarding rabbits, I mean, they’ll sell out, and all these beings from other planets are queueing up waiting to come and sell their wares and put their shows on, and the dark ones too ‘cause the dark and the light are as one so instead of the dark basing all their economy on death they are going to base it on life now, and will be invited to come here and do stuff which will be really good.
And I was cleaning up at Stonehenge before this, with a railgun - Stonehenge is a rail gun and this is a feather duster, sometimes I need a rail gun, sometimes I need a feather duster.
My rail gunning is probably done for about a week and a half so I’m on the dusting phase now and when I need a rail gun I’ll go back to Stonehenge, so yer, Stonehenge is about 38 percent more powerful than any other sacred site on earth. It wasn’t built as a sacred site, it was built as an ego trip and it’s that strong - very useful for me, whereas this is… that’s a very masculine energy and this (the Tor) has very much more of a feminine energy to it, so obviously it’s a a little less harsh when it comes to clearing up.
I’m Daz, take it easy!
Elephant
When my love was young and elegant
A wedding vow we did incant
Enchanted young and confident
I gave my love an elephant
But my love became belligerent
The temperature refrigerant
An uncomfortable Development
My feelings then ambivalent
That promise felt less relevant
The bonds between us thin and scant
The wrinkly grey old elephant
Sat in the room malevolent
What once would be irreverent
Now seemed to be irrelevant
I wonder if we can't recant
She, me, and the big white elephant
Lush
It's blackberry picking season
But for what perverse a reason
Is that berry like a peach
Just always out of reach
Like a girl glanced from a car
The forbidden fruit afar
The grass is always greener
Until you’ve properly seen her
Then she’s just like any other
And she’ll turn into her mother
And those clumps of fruit up higher
Once I’ve scaled the thorny briar
Are nowhere near as beaux
As they looked from down below
Molly's Jug
Not that you were special really
Never that much of a looker
Slim, brown, smallish
But precious, one of a kind
I loved you hanging round
That is
Before I knocked you down
And you fell into pieces
On the day the king was crowned
Not that you were precious really
But you were to me, a precious memory
Of Molly, who kept you on her sill
Then after the funeral, on my sill still
Still life with jug
Memento Mori
Molly’s jug
Awakening
It’s a school field trip
And this arrogant young shit
With a head of bleached curls
Says he knows all there is to know about girls
And I’m thinking ‘you don’t know what you don’t know mate’
I’m stressed as a taught wire about to break
Having to teach these crustaceans
The next session is sex education
I don’t want to be there, neither do they
It’s a warm day, dry, bees buzz and a bird flys by
But the bees are bullets and the bird’s a drone
We’ve wandered into a war zone
lots of shooting and shouting going on
I dive at a ditch to retaliate, but I have no gun
and can’t see a thing to shoot at anyway
All very scary
And then, what the fuck?
Above me a line of military trucks
I break cover to reach the safety of the convoy
To get me back to school
But I’ve left the boys, and fret that they’ll tell on me
For not teaching them PSHE
Feeling like a fool
I head back up the hill to find them
I pass Claire, manning her domain
A cornucopia of bric-à-brac
spilling out onto the track
And it starts to rain
The boys are still up the hill, so I’m ok
Though I see I’m wearing a dress
And no underwear
My pants were grabbed by a pair of mice
Whilst I was chatting to Claire
Not nice, not fair
I find the pants, but chewed to a string
A mouse still munching on them
I can’t pull the string clear of its tenacious teeth
In my thin flowery dress, with nothing underneath
I worry the boys may ridicule me
So I jump in a stream and swim
To get away from them
Careful to hide my bare skin
I abandon them to enjoy
A warm summer day
Boys will be boys
then I’m teaching a 6th form group
A general studies sort of thing
There is another clear stream
A cat swims underwater like a fish
I skim some plates
But lose my phone
And there’s an angle poise lamp
That they want to purloin
I find a place on the bench to plug it in
It doesn’t need a lead for some reason
And it illuminates the gloom
A group of teachers are coming soon
So I need to vacate the room
they have a session to teach
I wonder if it will clash
Can they find another place
I cast an eye around the space
Then I notice I’m bare from the waist
Just a long T shirt
No trousers, no skirt
I think I should find some before I teach
A Korean girl with cheeks like a peach
Is sitting on the a bench wrapped in a shawl
she has been modelling for us all
And I’m aware
That her shoulders and breasts are bare
I wake with a start
Prickly skin and standing hair
Relieved that my phone is still there
The rest of the dream
Like a leaf in a steam
Floats slowly away
As I rise to the day
Deliveroos
Too many deliveroos
What a sad todo
Come back Postman Pat
With your penny black and smart peaked cap
Before an old postie in livid livery
Now what I get is a mad mass delivery
To lick Queen Vic
And slap her on the back
Of an idyllic postcard scene
Or a family snap
Then post it through the slot
Of a scarlet pillar box
Send it on it’s royal way
With the very loyal Royal Mail
Cast iron next collection asap
With a black domed top like Pat’s peak cap
Now there is a dozen white vans
To replace that single postie man
Two dozen tweets a day
To say that all’s ok
Multiple delivery drivers vie
To u-turn in our drive
Never mind a letter
They’ll even post my supper
Burgers for tea from the Amazon
One click acquisition
Without shifting my position
On my couch potato
While Jeff Besos and his mates
Blast off into space
Leaving his delivery drivers
To scrape a barely living
Come back postman Pat please
All is now forgiven
Androgyny
Androgyny
Sometimes I can’t tell
But why the hell should it matter
If this stranger is this or that gender
Same or other or same
Can’t they just be
A beautiful being?
A human
As me
Like a robot I’m programmed to scan
Is this stranger woman or man?
A hint of nipple, triangular crotch
Where are the mounds that matter so much
I look hard to see
Though dare not be seen to be
Is there a hint of breast on that flat chest?
I don’t want to stare
Is there a hairy chin behind that curtain of hair?
What might or might not be hidden, between those legs
Beneath that androgynous dress the wearer wears
A scrotum sack and penis or a vulva is my guess
All these whys - why should it matter, what’s my agenda?
A passer by passing by on the street
Did I imagine a wiggle of hip
For just a moment I hesitate, a he, a she, a them, an it?
And yet no, just like me
A baggy skin full of wants and needs,
desires and hurts lusts and greeds
all that embarrassing stuff I keep hid
Or not, may be.
They should just be them
And I’ll just be me
Homogeneous
Androgyny
The Fall
I fell in a river
When I was small
I fell in the mud
When not so tall
I fell out of a tree
Knee high to it all
Then I fell in love
Falling in love
Bruised like an apple
Falling in love
Was most painful of all
I felt open and tender
And pierced to the core
By that stupid arrow
From Cupid’s bow
I so wished to impress her
Well actually, undress her
But it struck me dumb
Tongue-tied and numb
Red cheeked I mumbled
Crumbled and stumbled
A bumbling clown
I tried to be suave
I tried to be cool
But took on the persona
Of a gooseberry fool
So I fell out of love
Climbed back up my tree
Bloodied and blue
But awaiting to see
If the next passing maiden
Might not fall for my zeal
Then I could fall all over again
Head over head over head over heal
Smells
Summer solstice walk
Warm scented air
Acutely aware of smell
Grass, fresh cut, creosote post, pine
The delight of honeysuckle
Entering the olfactory long before the optical
A woman walking by
Leaves a lingering artificial scent on the air
Pink as lace lingerie
Like a cloud in the sky
A stain spread out behind
I much prefer the strong pungent much or silage
A passing car belches fumes
Like dog fart
Or fox poo
Fills the country Lane
A blue fog
Hot engine oil
Tyres
Tarmac
The bed or roses
In a tended garden
Words
Sun
Moon
Stars
Blood
Snow
Blow
Glow
Mud
Green
Pristine
Love
Hate
Tales
Entrails
Zong
My dad was but a young lad when he first put out to sea
Signing his indentures with a shipping company
Crossing the Atlantic on a rusty merchant ship
A hold full of bananas on the long round home bound trip
He told stories of his travels, that I learned upon his knee
The adventures and misadventures of his many years at sea
Of cockroaches in the cargo and of captains who were drunk
Memories enough and more to fill a worthy seaman's trunk
He told stories of the tropics and of icy northern climes
Long hours of tedium spliced with the most exciting times
Watches on the salty bridge, where they kept a constant log
Running short of water, running into fog
A story I remember well was one he often told
About shipping green bananas in a refrigerated hold
He spent hours chucking bananas, overboard they'd go
For if a single bunch went ripe, then the whole batch they would throw
And in latter years the two of us would visit exhibitions
To marvel at the model ships and maritime acquisitions
There’s a painting done by Turner we once happened to chance upon
'Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on'
And that’s the tale I want to tell, the whole point of this song
The story of a slaving ship that had the strange name 'Zong'
They were running short of water, and in the doldrums held
So just like bad bananas, they jettisoned their load
They took the cargo from the hold and hurled them overboard
Pregnant women, children, the young ones and the old
And when safely back in England, they took their claim to court
For the indemnity on their cargo, the insurance money sought
My father was a pacifist, and when World War Two began
They were arming all the freighters, and he refused to fire a gun
What do we owe, we many, to the few who took this stand?
With all the nationalism now I think we still don’t understand
The metals in our smartphones, where it comes from, can you say?
Exploitation in the Congo, and those who drowned in Morecambe Bay
With refugees from conflicts lost in choppy seas
or suffocating in containers bringing goods from overseas
What do we owe, we many, to the few who take a stand
With all the nationalism now I think we still don’t understand
Personal Spaces
Cars whizz by on the tacky tarmac, kicking up the muck, past a sacred Neolithic site, eyes set in the road ahead, no time to stop and sightsee today, people in their air conditioned personalised spaces - tinted glass, can’t even see their faces - but I can feel their pique as they have to pass me and my bike by. Why is a guy in his car faster to rage than a passer by pedestrian? Wide boys racing by in souped up coupe, in an oily black cloud of soot, with a horn on the back end to make them sound horny, and baseball caps worn the wrong way. Then at the stones, a bus load of tourists on tour, all snapping photos by the hundred, to mark that they were there, and maybe try to take ownership in some way, this is my photo. And there is a man with an oversize telephoto Lens, like a tumescent phallus pointing. I lie in the grass, in the sun, in this circle of ancient stone, feeling the earth beneath me, and I feel at one - knowing that the driver, the lads, the tourist, and the photographer, they are all one too
Sans Gill
A Man with a hump up a ladder
Banging off Ariel's todger with a lump hammer
Gill himself had already done so
As a man at the BBC
Thought it too big for all to see
Would we also remove Gill Sans from every PC
To be totally PC?
A world Sans Gill
Because of his Girls
Is that what we want to see?
Autumnal
Autumny Slump
Humpty dump
Lumpy frumpy
Rumple tump
Rumpty thumpy
Grumpy gump
Jumpy bumpy
Crumpy mump
Xmas Bling
crazy thing
xmas bling
what the Christ
kiss and kin
gift wrapped crap
consumering
crazy thing
xmas bling
Hibernal Solstice
Dawn short to dusk
Midwinter’s day
The sky awash in tonal grey
Smudged graphite grass
Bare charcoal tree
A crosshatched hedge
A winter frieze
Stone cold stone
Blown wind makes moan
Grey patches, the remnants of the snow
And a smattering of coal black crow
Sun rise, sunset, Midwinter yet
Red embers glow in an old iron grate
Glow alike a sunset sky
But warm and dry this December date
Withdrawn, within
The wheels a’spin
And all that can Hibernating
Thick curtain drawn
All comfort bring
revel, rejoice
Awaits the spring