A piece of empty, barren ground overgrown and patched with nettles, broken bricks and sunflowers. This is where they come. Stepping deftly from the shadows they nudge the grass aside and find a place – Manxies, Marmalades, and haughty Siamese, rag eared warriors and plump eunuchs, queens and catlings hissing, spitting, rowling till peace is made and boundaries agreed. Then one by one they settle, preen, consider solemnly through yawns, the flicking of an ear – the language of cats is ancient – little said but much intended. Pollen glitters on their fur like gold dust. By sunset they have gone, returned along the paths of beaten grass to milk in saucers, meat from tins - the clumsy, awkward love of human kind.
Great Jarb
You wouldn’t believe it, would you ? I mean…soup. I would never have thought they would sink so low…so very low..lower then I’ve ever seen. And the police ..they’re just doing their jarb…they do a great jarb…heroes…all they got is…what ? Guns…tear gas..police dogs…helicopters…tazers… and THEY got soup. They throw the soap at the cops…right. And that tells me something. I just worked this out. If they’re throwing soup at the cops that means that they ain’t hungry…they got plenty of soup at home… they can afford to go out into the street and throw soup at the cops…..some of it in tins.
Some of the soup is in bags. They have these special bags. Waterproof. Soup proof. So it doesn’t leak. I worked that out too.
And the guy who was accidentally shot… he turned his back on the cop….how disrespectful is that ? What else could the cop do. He fired a warning shot…well..seven warning shots…into his back. It wasn’t the cop’s fault. The guy was broad built, you know.
I worked all this out myself. Anyone can see I’m smart. You gotta vote for me. YOU gotta
The young man of great wealth
I did everything he asked of me. Modest in all my dealings, I killed no-one slept with no man’s wife, spoke truth and thought on heaven. Then he said “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.” A blow across the face could not have hurt me more. My life of cautious virtue sacrificed ? It would be self-murder. I turned my back on him. Years later, comfortless, my good deeds sour on my tongue, I sold up did as he had asked and went in search of him. I found nothing but a tomb and women weeping.
My Time
“I want to spend my time with you”
written in Tippex on a broken house tile stamped out on a blank sheet of snow drawn by a finger on some foggy window scribbled in the back of an exercise book whispered in the darkness of a flickering cinema turned into a song by Ed Sheeran printed on T shirts, birthday cards, pencil cases stolen by politicians The answer tapped out on an Iphone “My time’s my own”:
Junkyard
Down the dusty, data-blown back streets
of my computer’s hard drive lies
the dumping ground –
the place
where failed poems go to die,
and fragments too, which make me feel
embarrassed or ashamed –
lines leading nowhere, overgrown
with lush, excessive, choking adjectives;
a rusting heap of mis-matched metaphors;
a rhyme scheme spray-canned on a pock marked wall.
And that’s not all
that festers here –
a ballad that would put a saint to sleep;
a cinquaine that’s correct, but deadly dull.
The place is full
of junk.
Yet often when I’m stuck
I wander here
to browse the trash
(it’s happened many a time.)
I pick up some soiled phrase and rub it
on my sleeve
and sometimes – you won’t believe this –
I see a gleam of gold beneath the grime.
the dumping ground –
The Fetler
Buffalo shoulders and thighs like oak trees, head the size of a Halloween pumpkin - candle flame flickering behind his eyes - and teeth like a bandsaw. He spoke no tongue but Yorkshire, spat pity at anyone who lived south of the Potteries. “You have my condolences” he hissed. Shop steward at the hospital he fettled beds and fought the central heating, mended trolleys, door hinges, broken washers, until there was nothing left to fix and so he bought a boat a wireless, and a coastal chart. Led by Radio 4 he reached the North Sea rigs then back again to Scarborough. He sold the boat and went all academic learned Medieval Latin, grew himself a beard, could translate every tombstone in the Minster, shrugged when everybody thought him weird. He was bored again. A weekend stroll would put him straight - forty miles across the North York Moors - and back in time for Monday. Mountain Rescue never found the body, just his boots the laces neatly tied
In the Beginning
In The Beginning there was GetGo
And God saw that it was good
and it was
except for a few glitches.
There were no problems
only challenges.
We rolled out The Garden of Eden –
a tough job but we went
at pace and scale –
all authentic, all blue-sky thinking,
and at the end, or rather “ The Beginning”
we were good to go.
God had a helicopter view
of the whole project.
My only regret was the ears –
We out-sourced them –
young angel, bad with deadlines.
In the end it was his Gran
who made the lot by hand.
No. That was not the issue.
It was Adam.
Got out of control, didn’t he ?
Went for the low-hanging fruit…
It wasn’t fair to put the blame on him, though –
It was all baked in at the start.
God was vexed – but still.
It is what it is and not
the end of the world.
and Beelzebub is offering a juicy contract
In the Outer Hades.
MH17
They fell out of the clouds like stones, smashing the sunflower fields, splitting, spilling on the hard summer roads. Their lives fell with them – letters, clothing, photographs, sunscreen, lipsticks, bags of sweets, passports to witness who they were and what they had become. They will not rise up, bones whole, flesh healed, brushing petals from their clothes. They will not wander this strange, sunlit land, looking for their children. There will be no kisses no reunions. Nothing more can happen.
A transport of delight
When I was four I fell in love
with trams.
I loved
the shape – a double decker cigar
the glossy cherry-and-cream paint job
the trapeze on top to catch
electricity from the wires.
I pondered
how it could have two fronts and two backs
I thrilled.
at the way it crashed and swayed
from side to side
the bow wave of sparks.
I envied
the conductor
with his rack of tickets
and his rude stories
the driver like Ahab,
braced against the roll,
grasping the brass safety handle
like the butt of a harpoon.
I loved
the screech of grinding steel on steel
the rumbling electric growl
and climbing down the iron steps
back into the world.
A new start ?
I haven’t been on WordPress for a long time and I’ll tell you why.
To start with, I was ill. Every bone in my body ached and went on aching. And I was tired. I would go to bed at 6.30pm and wake up (after a bad night) at ten o’clock the following morning and …yes… I know what you’re thinking… It wasn’t Covid. I have the test result to prove it. I was like that for eight months, and then I started creeping back into the world.
I started to write again and discovered….that I couldn’t write. My mind was a complete blank. I sat there in front of a pad of paper, with a pen in my hand and I could think of ….nothing..zilch.. zero. After a while I managed to squeeze out a couple of possibilities…. And couldn’t start. I didn’t want to write.
I’ve been writing – poetry- stories- even a film script – since I was ten and now I’m 76. This blankness had never happened to me before. It was quite frightening.
There was something else. When I had a look round the internet I noticed that things had changed – everything was shouty, superficial and, to be honest, deeply boring. Much of the material I came across amounted to two bald men fighting over a comb.
I am feeling better now. I have written half a dozen poems – they are are not good poems but at least they are poems. Maybe I will come back some time in the future… I don’t know.
Thank you for reading
A Terrible Fear of Cheese 