polishing silver with a barrister's sock.

A poem to commemorate 'National Cod Latin Day'.



Sitting in the kitchen
underneath the clock
polishing silver with
a barristers sock

Citing habeas corpus
weeping into legal hose
Shouting: "This is cruelty,
as everybody knows.
 .
Her lordship muttered sternly
"Sedebat in lecto cat.
Just polish the bloody fishknives
Sic biscuittus disintegrat".

A divorcees prayer

You will hate me when this is over
But not as much as I will hate you
Yet I will hate you with affection
While you will hate me with spite
Because you really hate yourself
For once loving me

Any chance of a shag?

Regarding the Killer clown craze, I first posted this on my poetry blog in 2009:: The secrets of magic

The secrets of magic

Things started getting out of hand when the dog got run down in the street out side our window. She had watched it happen and when I got in from work she was standing there in tears. I held her for a while then took her to bed.

I’d first seen her in Stanley Park one afternoon when a bunch of us were sitting around with guitars, playing whatever came into our heads and generally fooling about. A number of kids had congregated to catch the mood and catch the sun, she sat away from the others under the shade of a tree; long thick hair the color of new pennies burning against almost white skin. She wore a green summer dress and red Converse.

I knew she was there but not really there until Gus came along in a daze, stood among us and announced Kurt Cobain was dead. For real! Shot himself in the head and was dead! I looked at her then, alone under that tree; tears running black from her eyeliner. I told myself she needed comfort only really it was me who needed her. So I went to her and held her. She sobbed into my white t-shirt.

We practically stayed like that for the rest of the day, talking about Kurt and singing his songs. Then somebody played ‘In Memory of a Free Festival’ on his boom box and after that the only thing to do was go home or someplace else.

She came back to my place.

We ate pizza and listened to Nirvana CD’s while she cried some more. She laughed when I told her she looked like a clown with her make-up running. We kissed before she left me knowing I would see her again.

Soon we were living together and making plans. Sex wasn’t that great but I put that down to anything I could think of except the truth. I wasn’t going anywhere near the truth back then.

After the dog I started to find more ways to make her cry so I could comfort her. During the day I would make up sad stories to tell her at night. And I would buy her eyeliner and mascara, the cheap stuff that ran, and encourage her to use it.
But I should never have told her about the clown.
.
They found her on the sidewalk, crumpled and broken, except for her face, which, undamaged by the 30 foot fall from the window, she’d made up like a clown’s. Bright red mouth – I’d never known her to wear lipstick - and thick black weep lines running from her eyes. She had cropped her hair. Gelled it so it stood up like a fright wig.

Just like Bepo the clown who at my 8th birthday party led me into the cellar to show me the secrets of magic.

The Notting Hill Promise

They primp and preen like birds of paradise
mimic the sounds of endeavour and success
only to lead me to a bower
lined with tinfoil, bindles
coloured straws
and bottle tops.
they talk of synopses and story boards
and wish upon a shooting script

sniff and blow into a napkin from E and O or the Electric

they talk of dialogue in monologue
they talk of accents gravely and acutely
and the real star is always 'ME'.

Their body of work buried under a drift of new blown snow.

A raddled would be rock chick
on hands and knees
in the ladies loo
hoovering up cocaine
from
a piss stained floor remarks:

'I despise you losers who have to work for a living'
as she mentally remortgages 
daddies inheritance
to reinvest in her habit
and somewhere nearby
an imaginary cameraman smears
a pound of Vaseline
on an already forgiving lens.

In the bars they tell me
'it will never happen
you are one of us
and we never succeed.'

And that woman
somewhere between the Priory and oblivion
quotes Raymond Carver and the things we talk about 
when we talk about love
and I misinterpret self interest
for interest
in a real world that for her
no longer exists.

And i gently humiliate myself
through the floorboards of embarrassment
and then despair
and get drunk
and do a line
and join in, start the rotting process

'Material all' I tell myself
in that padded place called denial.

And life has become nothing more than material
for my obituary.

Urinal song.

I love the sound of piss on zinc

Donna's sleepy tales

of rain on Trinidad tin roofs

that she told me as we lay

in a Gloucester park how

she reeked of passion

and coconut oil

The downpour

on the corrugated school bike shed

where Mandy and I

traded tobacco smoke laden kisses

and held our own geography lessons
discovering America

The rusty dutch barn

in which we made hay

and then hasty crop circles

in that hay

and planned al fresco escapades

in the ripening wheat

Come the sun

Of the beach girl

dancing naked

save a transparent plastic mac

the deluge

drumming on the upturned boats

as I drowned in her exclusive proximity

Before realisation that

it was the breaking of our 'summer'

30 years have leached out all but

the salty memory of those monsoon kisses

that creeps up my spine

At the sound of piss on zinc.

Dreaming of tigers. Daddy what's it like to die?

Daddy what's it like to grow old and die?

It is like going to see the tigers.

Imagine it is a lovely sunny day and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

We get into the car and drive to the zoo and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

We get our tickets, you are half price and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

Daddy I want to see the tigers.

I tell you that the tigers are at the other side of the zoo but we will get to them eventually.

But on the way we see giraffes and eland
springboks and hippos
chimpanzees and wallabys
sad bears.

And you forget about the tigers.

We see seals and penguins
aardvarks and zebras
macaws and owls.

And you forget about the tigers.

In the insect house a butterfly lands on your arm momentarily and you forget about the tigers.

We see wolves and rabbits
dogfish and catfish
gorillas
ants.

And then we see the tigers and the tigers see us, they have been waiting.
You smile and yawn.

It is a lovely day so we go to sit in the park nearby
lie on our backs looking up at the sky
searching for animal shapes in the clouds.

We close our eyes and drift off to sleep

dreaming of tigers.

Trump is not mad. He is just scared.

Jan Nieupjur writes:

As an amateur alternative psychiatrist I am often asked: 'Is Trump mad?"

The answer is of course no. Trump is not mad, he is a narcissist with an ego the size of Texas. Initially the idea of running for presidential office was planted in his brain by his ego. I doubt very much that even Trump would have thought he would be taken seriously as a contender... He probably saw the whole thing as a short lived attention grabbing stunt.

Donald Trump is a three year old child jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool, pretending to be swimming, screaming inwardly, while hoping someone will fish him out.

Trump is not mad. America is for allowing Trump to get so far out of his depth.

Alphabet rain.

Today I burned my poems
a bonfire of my own vanities
words sent skywards
on vortices of their own hot air's making

Some caught in nearby trees
others falling upon the Westway
the majority fly skyward taunting
a million empyrean chimps shakespearing

at their keyboards.

I imagine abstract condensing
amid cumulus then
falling Burroughs like
as alphabet rain forming
nonsense puddles in foreign fields

Or circling vulture like
over a carcass

A stabbing on Portobello road.

We have had a killing on Portobello Road. A 17 year old was mercilessly stabbed to death by another teenager in broad daylight. The killer killed his victim, killed his own future in the process and killed all hope for the victims family for whom my heart bleeds. The killer killed all hope for his family...How can you live with that. The killer killed any justification for allowing children to discipline themselves.
The killer should be handed a copy of 'Lord of the flies' to read in his cell as should his parents as well as the rest of us.

The reason for the killing, from what I can surmise from talking to kids and locals, is that the poor boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time while the undisciplined children of the neighbourhood went out looking for someone to blame for their miserable lives armed with knives. They picked on him rather than picking on their parents.

I am a step parent of sorts to a 13 year old boy. He hates me because he sees my desire to protect him as a desire to control. If he listened to me he would realise that all I want to do is help him survive this mad world. Survive this mad world in order to do all of the shit he wants to do without getting stabbed.

Stabbed by the kid sitting at the desk next to him.

I do not know the victim or his family to whom I can only offer tears, tears I openly shed on Portobello Road this afternoon surrounded by schoolchildren standing at a loss at the makeshift shrine.

Do not blame the children. This is bad parenting.

Why immigrants matter.

As a 10 year old in the 1960's we lived on a fruit and hop farm in Kent. The house was surrounded by hop gardens ( even now I can remember my awe at first standing in a hop garden among the serried majesty of it all), cherry orchards, strawberry and blackcurrant fields. In the farmyard were barns and working Oast houses.

In late summer working class London families would descend upon the farm for the hop picking. They stayed in a row of small brick and corrugated iron huts alongside the lane that led to the village. Often 3 generations of a family would be there to work in the fields and in the sorting sheds. It was their summer holiday and it was a tradition that went back years. The kids were obviously taken out of school because I remember them, armed with pen knives, ambushing us on our way to school with offers of 'You want a knife fight'.

A number of factors put paid to that tradition. Cheap air travel allowing for 'Spanish holidays' and child labour laws being two of them.

It was in a time before the influx of much needed European migrant workers to facilitate the harvest. It seems that it had become 'Infra Dig' to the English.

Now, having looked on Google Earth I see that the hop gardens have gone, the cherry trees have gone, the blackcurrant fields have gone, and with them no doubt the ubiquitous red birdshit that peppered everything. The farmyard has gone save two of the Oast houses which have been converted into a substantial home, The pickers huts have gone. My part of the 'Garden of England' has become arable farmland and grazing. Bland.

Two years later, on the edge of the fens in the shadow of Ely Cathedral, farmers arrived at  school prior to harvest (here it was sugar beet and other root vegetable country) to drum up a workforce for the fields. I have mixed feelings about those days spent in a beet field armed with a 12 inch machete, decapitating the earthy beasts before lobbing them into a slow moving trailer. I was 12. Later in the season, during the winter holiday, the task would be to cover winter carrots with straw to protect them from the frost. My testicles have never recovered.

At that time we lived on a pig farm where I learned to castrate piglets and shoot rats in the feed bins. Both skills will now serve me well in dealing with Farage and his mob.

Child labour laws ensure that all of that is a thing of the past.

It was in a time before the influx of much needed European migrant workers to facilitate the harvest.  which had become 'Infra Dig' to the English who continue to list 'Cider with Rosie' as a favourite book.

Much of our 'homegrown' food  is now brought in from the fields by these migrants, they are essential because no-one else will do it. Every-one demands cheap produce in the shops, even the racists clamouring for  said immigrants departure whilst they book their retirements in Benidorm.

A message in a bottle from Britain.

I am 61 years of age

In the last few months of my life I have watched

Cameron lie his way to becoming the worst prime minister we have ever had

The ruination of my country at Cameron's hands.

Watched Boris Johnson buffoon his way into the hearts of no-one but into a shitty pit of his own making

The labour party tear itself apart for a lack of faith in Corbyn's integrity

All Corbyn has been saying is "This is what we could be".

Everyone else is saying: ' As a nation we have low self esteem, for fuck's sake please help please help please help someone with some integrity'.

EU to fund Brexit and Cameron's move to World Statesmanship.

According to my man in Paris eating croissants and flirting with waitresses the EU has had a whip round and come up with the necessary funds to give Britain the heave-ho pretty damn quick.

£150.00 is the figure being bandied about as the amount that David Cameron is demanding for a speedy exit from his embarrassment.

Cameron of course wants to move on to World Statesmanship PDQ.  Following the snail trail laid down by Tony Blair.

Rumour has it that Cameron and Blair will soon be found hiding in moist ground under the same rock. Cameron has ensured that that rock will not be Gibraltar.

Senile British geriatrics say NO to continence.

114 year old Jan Nieupjur tells me that, when that Farage bloke called in at his care home in Frinton, all he asked him was: 'Do you want to be incontinent'?

Jan told him no he did not whilst dreaming of running naked through a  summer meadow with a beautiful young flaxen haired girl without the inconvenience of his colostomy bag slapping against his belly.

I thought I was voting to get my youth back says Jan. I thought I was voting to get Mandy O'Morford to give me that long ago promised peep at her front bottom.

I now realise that all I was ever going to see was a cunt called Nationalism.