Isle of Wight, April 1989
On the day before my ninth birthday and a weary-long birthday it was I still wanted to be an oinkpig, a flatfoot, a copper, so I could stop a traffic line, punch asinine citizens instead of clocking-in cards, shout, point, ignore criticisms and crack witticisms like “Knock Knock, who’s there, Irish stew, Irish stew in the name of the law”...
Toylet
When I was a boy I owned a small toy, perhaps you could call it a toylet...
My First Love, 1989 – 91
I was nine years old when you exploded onto my road long flaxen hair blue eyes from Kensington, although you said Hammersmith, to look less posh...
Maturity
(Ghazal): I don’t much desire Maturity. You seem a vain liar, Maturity. You poke out of everyone’s Sunday Bests but I’m not a buyer, Maturity...
Christmas Aunties
(Shoygrian stanzas): Auntie Elsie, not quite a Chelsea pensioner but can’t see too clear or mention a fight in a local car park without waxing vocal about men a lot and not relaxing, says aardvark when she means ardent, bless the workings of her head, and sergeants instead of sardines...
The End of my Street, 1995
Pubescent chin abuzz with wispy bumfluff, I scratch my head at the poster outside the old tavern...
Sitting in a Twinkling Shack
(Sapphic Ode): I’m sitting in a twinkling shack or palace, call it what you will. Porcelain angels glint and crack on the windowsill...
Inside a Mosque, aged Fifteen
(Rhyme Royal): “Welcome to our mosque, young man! And help yourself to curry!” sang a gleeful, red-bearded gent as he stretched out his hand...
Youth, London
(Clogyrnachs): Youth’s a time when magic bounces through the heart, a heart that trounces all things monochrome. Life bubbles like foam and you roam in flounces...
Uncle Eddie
It was in the late sixties as London was swinging and Eddie, my uncle, his flared trousers flinging pet dogs across pavements of silvery ice, his sideburns as though he was on the phone twice...
Luxor Massacre, 1997
(Dalit): Sixty dead tourists blotch our view of the pharaoh’s temple. I blame the West...
South-Central Walthamstow
The war memorial’s slashed in brash Cyrillic-esque graffiti: “Da Shapka Krew runs tings” and slits your whistle-throat entreaty for peace in a pebbledashed circus where defaced, de-souled banditti give a blindfold knife-thrower sort of show down South-Central Walthamstow...
Limericks
There was an old churchman from Limerick who believed his behaviour was chivalric, for he only would force himself on a horse in the boundaries of his own bishopric...
Fuck Off, Shitty Free-Verse Poet
Fuck off, shit slam-poet soaking up at the bar, convinced you really know wit, convinced that you’re a star, applause in ears as you stand cocktail in hand, full of cocky tales that entail your hand on your cock, or your clit, with your Mockney or Jafaican accent turned down now that you’re off the stage, to reveal you’re a slightly-posh clown who affects proletarian rage...
Chicken Caesar
A plump gherkin swims round a jar, as chips crackle. Pasties malinger and saveloys shirk. Gristle and sinew are scraped with a rattle off skewers. Through lack of hard work, thistles continue to flourish, they lurk in untiled nooks. The misted wall is panoramic Istanbul...
It Seems that I’m a Dinosaur
(Shakespearean sonnet): It seems that I’m a dinosaur with spiky tail and drooling gnash, I thought that life was meant for more than marketing and swiping cash...
Tips for Getting Published
(Ottava Rima): Feed the masses on their leather sofas juicy murders, shrewd detectives, blood, feisty women sleeping with their chauffeurs,spotty kids with magic wands, a flood of swoon-inducing swanking Casanovas...
Eavesdroppings
(Haiku): I listen, concerned, to the crows...
New American Century
New Pearl Harbour! Well, fee fie fo fum, I smell the vile scheming of neocon scum bombarding with their bottomless money-bags, their aerodrome dreams and battle drum, flogging dead dinosaurs with false flags...
Whoopsadaisy
Once upon a peculiar time, above New York and its glittering wealth, there loomed a lucky-numbered tower that could fall over all by itself...
Baa! Baa! White Sheep, Have you any Cool?
You suburban kids who flash around in falsetto stripes with your shoulders back and forth like gutter ghettosnipes as bold as packs of couscous, booming great stereotypes, down Conifer Cul-de-Sac, you summer-in-Sorrento types, what’s this fighting posse-speak, this sinister sermon-slurring? You’ve got white rosy cheeks like Reichsminister Hermann Göring but kiss your teeth, “Don’t diss me, chief, is it cos I is blond? Or cos I has a patio, some French doors and a pond?”...
Stanley
(Haiku): In your two-inch blade you see a sparkling sceptre...
Prolefeed
Bingo. Pop stars. Gossip. Tits. Implants. Nose jobs. Hairy bits. Champions’ League. Transvestite vicars. Pics of duchesses in their knickers...
The Royal College of Fishwifery
(Rondeau): At the Royal College, which upsprang at the turn of yestercentury’s clang, we teach the girls fishwifery, we lead them from the periphery in a glorious petty niggling gang...
Security Guard
Laryngitis is the unexpected explanation for why I sit at midnight wearing a woolly hat and five pairs of pants on my head...
Clerihews
Adolf Hitler was peeved that Germany was littler than Russia. He didn’t invent the walkie-talkie. But proudly, he invented the marchie-shoutie...
Nick’s Girlfriend
My mate’s got a girlfriend I’d flush down the U-bend if I had the chance. She’d be killed at least. This Ingrid or Astrid who makes my cock flaccid, this moussed-cowlicked Oxford-voiced wildebeest tries to impart me commands not to fart in the house that I’m paying to rent...
Habits
(Kouta): “Don’t fart around me, it’s rude!”...
The Morning I Woke Up Having Forgotten I was German
I woke up at eleven feeling conquered by French absinthe and lacking recollection of events that weren’t too distant, inside a ferny wood that seemed to me more like a labyrinth...
Ode an den Dönerkebab
Döner, schönes Götterfleisch und Tochter aus dem Schwarzen Meer, Lamm von Gott, dein fettes Reich erweitert sich nach vielem Bier...
Ode to the Doner Kebab
Doner, Flesh of God’s high Helm and Daughter of the Black Sea Shore, Lamb of God, thy fatten’d Realm is widen’d after Beer doth pour...
Sharp Cockneys
Some people inform me that I ought to be a geezer, I should be a street-talking bandwagon-seizer who says “Football, birds, Kentucky Fried Pizza, look at me, I’m a geezer-of-the-geezers-on-the-streetser who keeps his trousers in the freezer...
Contemporary Limerick
There was a young artist from Chelsea...
David’s Dad
Iachi da, Dafydd, boyo! Seen much of your Dad of late? He’s sixty-five now, isn’t he, or do I exaggerate?...
Southall
Men of every desh and stan are lolling round and chewing paan or swigging frothy Lal Toofan down Southall way. Gusts of curry tempt like decoys, wooden gurus guard like sepoys round a pub where bumfluffed tea-boys spill Earl Grey...
Salman Rushdie Chokes on a Kipper
Circa Nineteen Sixty, dining hall, Rugby Public School. Fork clangs on floor as Salman Rushdie, still hair on his head instead of a price, chokes on a kipper...
Eels
(Lu-Shi): The sea licks the sky clean and new and flat. Chewy eel-chunks stew in a jellied splat...
Climerihewicks
Benjamin O. Zephaniah, past drug-test, beyond breathalyser, imagined a world free from bigotry’s squelch, in which all Negroes spoke Welsh...
Nothing to Offer
I thought that tenderness might be, perhaps, an attractive quality, that women would be pleased to find a man whose heart is well-inclined...
John Bevan
(Saxonic couplets): There’s a strand of string stuck to the fast-spinning blade on the ceiling of the Dutch beer-house down Deptford High Street, it’s stretched in the slipstream and follows a forethought and forenamed pathway while the blade keeps out dry heat...
Sexy Marlene
(Muyaka stanzas): The girls are drenched in slutty vogue, in miniskirts, bobtails, the like. Each boy’s beard is that of a rogue, his tie not just kipper but pike, dapper from fedora to brogue...
Herefordshire Birds
It’s not the first occasion I’ve been wrenched from the concrete splodge to which I clenched, I’ve often tramped the bramble-scattered banks of duck-jammed Roding, Ching and Lea, which quench the forest with their murky snaking tanks...
Theft on the 15:33 to Penzance
(Skeltonics): Here’s cause to complain, I was robbed on a train near Salisbury Plain! After flushing the chain I returned to my table where an Auntie Mabel in moth-eaten lace with heart-monitor face was parked in my place...
Canine Glares
Although he is a handsome creature, poodle bitches still glare proudly at him. Tail in any case an ohmmeter needle, genitals a pendulum, Llewelyn, my Alsatian, skips along beside my shins...
Prig Culture
To prove that you don’t care about the colour of our skin, we must answer umpteen questions on our racial origin. You don’t ask if we’re from long lines of shipbuilders or miners whose lives are not as marginal as folk from Indochina’s now all that’s left is liberalism, intellectual minimalism sneering, “All is jingoism, Eurocentric gringo-ism, fish-and-chips-and-bingo-ism! I’m a pink flamingo-ism, I can speak the lingo-ism!” What a load of dingo jism...
No Warm Arms
(Cywydd Llosgyrnog): When the gang vermin, thrashing hard, had left me fit for the scrap-yard...
Sex Shop Gwawdodyn
(Gwawdodyn): Clitoris-flicking in the school dorm...
The Reincarnation of Byron
The grit of the city alighting in eyeballs, confounding the warden, the basher of Bibles, the sergeant who mounts like a svelte caballero, each one of them locked in the pose of the scarecrow, he watches the moment of gritty-eyed stasis from up in a scimitarred, stuffed-wolfed oasis...
Horse Nectar
(Spegafk): I chuck my feelings here and there like nectar snuck into a trough where horses come to pluck a pear and kill their thirst...
Victor
He’s on the floor. Sprawled across three quarters of the room, but he’s on the floor. Fat as a Volkswagen Beetle and clad in tuxedo and shirt and cravat, he’s on the floor...
Empath
(Tanka): Problems losing weight? I do indeed empathise...
Opsimath
(Kyrielle): I twist and twist and twist for yards then leap like those in leotards down on the grass, limbs all splayed wide. I’m far too old to learn to ride...
Job Centre Gwawdodyn
(Gwawdodyn): I said, “Jobs are just there to annoy.”...
The Ballade of Armageddon
(Ballade): The planet ricochets to prophets’ chants and I am forced to only half-mistrust what Nostradamus fished from out his trance and revelations bishops have discussed. Does everybody think they’ve got it sussed, shrugging with dismissive looks askance? And worst of all, as this would be unjust, what if the world expires before my chance?...
Chaucer
(Cleriku): Geoffrey Chaucer, though dead as a saucer...
The Dungeon
He said, “Alf, this is Anna, she comes from New York” and I thought my retort was so witty and maverick. I smiled, “Hello, Anna. I’m Alfie, from London. We must get together and invent a fabric.”...
Miss Willoughby
At half ten in the morning I watch Miss Willoughby’s lick-me legs dash behind a desk...
You Seem to Think I Ought to Give a Fuck
(Keatsian sonnet): You seem to think I ought to give a fuck what some limp-wristed Guardian-reading ponce has been programmed to think and sneer and cluck about the bigotry that he so achingly wants to find in some cold corner of my brain...
England in 2006
(Shelleyan sonnet): Babies in “I love al-Qaida” hats are pushed by Nike-shod girls through undersexed throngs who chant of drowning us in vats of burnt dismembered flesh, their muscles flexed, their blameless treason tying Britain in plaits...
Leyton
(Shoygrian sonnet): Hemisphere-straddling town beside the Lea, that gulfy erstwhile Saxon-Dane frontier King Alfred fished in, catching condoms, tea-bags, shopping trolleys, cans that once hugged beer...
This is Not my Empire
What if the shaman-shooting, pygmy-robbing, Irishman-selling, continent-carving, child-hanging, Brahmin-flogging, farmhand-conscripting, peasant-starving, chimneysweep-buggering empire could redeem itself by stopping a jackboot-and-toothbrush-moustache-wearing fellow-Saxon who drowns nations in gunfire – with no help, no over-saluted Mason-Dixon apple-pie-chompers around for two years to (what’s that, Jim-Bob?) “bail it out” – from chalking his blue-eyed battering ram and, as Lenin’s cue-ball head careers clattering to the ground, rolling over the blood-stained carpet and under the Nazi fruit-machine (lemon, lemon, Göring’s face)...
Enough Knowledge about the British Isles to Fill a Leprechaun’s Sporran
Up a heathery mountain in Edinburgh City I gallivanted, gazing over the Firth of Forth to Fife, when I met some Californians (what a pity), a tam-o’-shantered hazy surfer dwarf and his wife who inquired of me, “Hey, man. What d’you call this pretty little stretch of water here? Is it the English Channel?” My answer lit up their tooth enamel...
To a Bagel
(Burns stanzas): Little puffy girdling bagel, all lonesome in your see-through cradle, what shall I smear across your navel, peanut butter? Some jam scooped up in a sturdy ladle the size of a putter?...
Rural Dreams
Six a.m. A pub in the countryside of my mind. More like a sitting-room. Metre-long bar, one pump. “I’ll have a pint of that then, I suppose. Do you have any jobs going at the moment?” The tangerine-faced landlady replies, “Only for pole-dancers.”...
De Dodo Dodo Dodo De Dada Dada Dada
(Rondel): Has anybody seen the dodo? Has he made an exeunt? Perhaps the puffin spiked his cocoa in a jealous, scheming stunt...
Gandhi
Gandhi, Gandhi, where are you going to run to with your mucker, Nehru? Churchill won’t come near, he thinks you’re a buccaneer, but he can’t resist your smile. How he really longs for you, Gandhi...
Lo! How the Powerless are Falling
(Olwyn): Peterloo, the Jarrow marchers, typhoid, Tyburn, People’s Charters, endless jibing from the rich once knit us in united stitch. We stood in the indicted air and tens of thousands gathered where our folk were browsing for a chance to wake from Empire’s smacked-out trance on gassed and shellfired poppy fields, on muddy ground, with blood-strewn shields, but failure found us, we were captured in the end by Blair and Thatcher...
To Lucy K
(Swannet): What goes up must come down, as proved old Isaac, and though you purred that I made you chirrup and chortle more than any other living mortal, it came down shattering in your room of lilac...
Smack Your Bloke Up
(Caudate sonnet): If I growled, “You are asking for a wallop, for me to thrash your face into a pulp, now shut your bagel-hole, you vole-brained trollop,” so my marshmallow of desire should gulp, the sisterhood would gather for the lynch since it’s a sin to turn your lover victim, to reduce your sweetheart to a flinch...
There is No Limit to What People Contradict
Is this a pondered-over scheme to drive me mental, part of some theory that’s long and continental? My mind’s a home. D’you have the licence to evict? There is no limit to what people contradict...
Broken
(Spegafk): Blown away from mankind’s shore by mankind’s drone, I lounge around like plate-shards on the stony floor of a taverna. Broken. Thrown...
For a Woman to Notice me
For a woman to notice me I have to wear the right collar, flash some Yankee dollar, roast an armadillo in some esoteric pasta, memorise the plot of every movie ever shot with well-informed opinions on each director and actor...
It’s Alright, I Don’t Expect You To
It’s alright, I don’t expect you to take the rocks life throws, and throw them back, and keep on throwing till your biceps bulge and all the rocks are gone. Instead, you’ll slack and whine, “Back down! There’s nothing we can do!” You just retreat and never dare attack...
Silence is as Painless as Suicide is Golden
It hurts and pains deep inside through the early morning fog to see visions of someone to be, when someone is withheld from me. Silence is as painless as suicide is golden but my eyes still see many changes, if I please...
Poker
I could have helped you spin your straw, like Rumpelstiltskin, into gold. I could have set your poet’s mind on fire, on greatnesses untold...
Mind Games
(Wordsworthian sonnet): Your love burned like a toy and hobby shop in the first flush of an insurance scam. With you a partnership is not one gram to do with love, but “How far can I flop, turn, river, baffle, push before you’ll drop?”...
Thirteen East
Cloaked in a haggled-for tricoloured tent of a hammer-and-compass, Stasi officer’s cap back-to-front on history-drunk head, hands bent into “East Side” and “West Side” gangsta-rap gestures and watching the concrete-faced Russian Embassy guard caress his Kalashnikov...
Last Watchtower, Potsdamer Platz
(Doppelspegafk): She cowers there among the office blocks, her hour shovelled up and, scraping-knifed, devoured by a taste that flips from sweet to sour. Friendless, wilting, concrete flower...
Hamburg
Ich wanke, meine dicke tasse beinahe leer von muckefuck, dann mache mich gefasst. Hier kommt die kunterbunte fahrt. Der ankertätowierte kaufmann flitzt in eine gasse, möwen schlucken brezelbrösel und erbrochenes wie saat. On every doorstep thrusts a tottering, conniving wretch, fatherless and cold-armed, barcodes carved into their flesh...
Sonnets for Women’s Feet
(Pushkinian sonnets): Each day with spiking, smothering longing, like drunkards yearn for fat-soaked meals, I yearn for comely ladies donning a lack of cloth around their heels...
Muslimerick
(Limerick): “Girls’ ankles inspire criminality, wrap them up!” said the mullah with gravity...
Grenwegian Blues
Greenwich, you gorgeous and big-statued suburb of indigo, orange and furlongs of green, where arsonists kindled a riverside hubbub with boat-lovers stoking the billowing scene. Who did it? Some landlubber band who’ve decided that mankind can never do anything good on the ocean? Oh, poor old ship cruelly ignited, Cutty Sark, fashioned from Grenwegian wood!...
Alfie is one Psycho Ex
(Chant Royal): When I sat across your street in a tutu, ululating, waving chunks of ostrich-meat at people and impersonating Lenin through a megaphone in a disabled parking zone...
Girl from Nibiru
I had no idea you were a giant lizard who fell to earth in a fiery ship, I just thought you were quirky. And so I let my heart let rip...
The Boot’s in the Other Groin
(Cinquain): “Slap me and I’ll boot you in the minge,” I warned, and watched the moral know-it-alls all spit at me...
Oh my Darling Borderline
In a mood swing, far from amusing, all dosed up on fluoxetine, between neurosis and psychosis, lived my true love, Borderline. I felt as awkward as any fool could when my pretty porcupine rolled up and clenched. This prickly wench was my true love, Borderline...
Women are All Frail and Dainty Creatures
(French sonnet): Women are all frail and dainty creatures. They all pick daisies, cuddle puppies, sew their frilly frocks of pink and indigo with all the love their endless patience nurtures...
University
(Rustavelian quatrains): Behind the birch-nudged swan-abundant lake where wool-swaddled campers poke rice, beside the field where many a mad-eyed rabbit scampers, ten concrete ziggurats bloom with youth in acronym-splashed jumpers, whose still-married parents grin with pride and send plum jam-stocked hampers.Youth that had waxed among thatched rooves and church-run music festivals where eighteen-year-old virgins blow balloons in merry vestibules and pass round paper plates of local-grown chicken and vegetables, who’d never shout “you fat gay cunt!” and punch you in the testicles...
The Day the Beach Filled Up
The day the beach filled up Dunthorne munched liquorice, wiping sugar into corduroy...
Sovereign House, Norwich
Why would the Queen need a building that looks like a mutant slug had mated with a spaceship, in Norwich, to store her paper clips?...
Temptation
I see you people as a test from God, whichever features this vast God might boast, to see if I can earn my spot in heaven or once again, samsara on burnt toast. I’ve begged you for a moment of humanity, I’ve begged you till I can’t beg anymore...
I Need to Talk
I need to talk about the pain of isolation from mankind. You want to talk about the size of your ex-boyfriend’s Mum’s behind...
Does Anybody Know a Cheapish Hitman?
(Spenserian sonnet): Does anybody know a cheapish hitman? My mind has been invaded by vile slugs, by members of an oozing, squelching, shit clan who threaten like a pack of Mafia thugs...
Attention Deficit Disorder
(Terza Rima): I sit out here in No Man’s Land where humans are an alien race whose minds I cannot understand. My zigzag brain cannot keep pace with all these transdimensional words you spray across my helpless face, that drone like fifty hummingbirds from your anaesthetic pipe and turn my brain to lemon curd...
To the Middle Class
But those were not our empires and those were not our wars, dear middle class. That Tony Blair, he wasn’t ours, but yours. Those weren’t our plantations and those were not our slaves, but those were our grandfathers butchered in their muddy graves...
Climbing a Himalaya in Trainers
Hashish to hashish, monk to monkey, Sherpa Tenzing was no flunkey, but I wish he was here to offer me a rope and a yak burger...
Kathmandu’s Like Walthamstow
(Gzha/Doha): One has mountain-margins, lumps that poke the ether. One protects its people flanked by wood and river. Kathmandu’s like Walthamstow, a sprawling home-from-home...
To a Firefly
(Payar): Twilight-beacon, fluorescent like some robot wasp, flashing...
It’s not Dead, it’s Reincarnated
(Tripadi): Nearly six hours east of Greenwich, in a field of rice and spinach, squats a village by the cratered roadside. Mangoes are borne with expertise on heads that yell in Nepalese, “Your cow is standing on my bananas!”...
Help Save the Mentally Healthy
Help save the mentally healthy! Spare some change for the non-deranged bluffers neatly arranged and suffering under the smothering weight of their strange mediocrity, oblivious to danger in their earplugged hypocrisy and their boring office shoes and shirts, ignoring obviously bruised and hurt hearts because society told them to...
Lash a Mind Sure
(Ghazal): Arsonists howl, “Apostate!”, hate from the bowel, “Apostate!”...
Eighty-Three East
Five hours until my train so I buy some soothing cream and repelling powder and stand smearing rubbing pouring throwing them over my bullseye-peppered arms and chest next to people snoring on blankets or eating out of clay bowls with the hands they don’t wipe their bottoms with...
Indian Train
Outside, the bearded monkeys frolic, stooping, by the dozen, and fix their eyes on me like I’m some half-remembered cousin. Bullocks scratch their heads with their hind hooves and scrawl their musings on air with tail-end swooshings. Indian train...
To a Flying Cockroach
(Ovi): Big-winged scampering rakshasa, am I slave? Are you my master? Get out my room! Faster! Faster! Antennaed bhanchod...
Archaeologists’ Workroom
(Wayra): Toothbrushing mud-clumps into reddening water...
The Nature of Advice
If a five-pound sack of King Edward potatoes falls on your head from an upper-storey window, there’s no point seeking advice from someone whose left foot was reversed over by the back wheel of a taxi...
Colombo
Come, heavenly bombs! Destroy Colombo! Come, America, if you’re more than mumbo-jumbo, grab your spear and longbow and erase this city! Come, America and your English sidekick, come splat kapow, ’cause History’s cyclic, the world is morally hierarchic and tyrants are shitty...
Christmas in Belfast
On Falls Road tinsel drapes, cloth hunger-strikers embolden...
Attempt at Homosexuality, Late Twenties
He slunk in, past the Bruce Willis-sized picture of Bruce Willis and its neon-bulb satellites on his wardrobe door and poured me a large white...
Oh my Darling Ketamine
Stuck to a mirror and growing slimmer, bordering on a perfect line, pale and powdered, mystically shrouded, was my new love, Ketamine...
Prayer, 2006
(Ottava Rima): The sun was smiting London as I perched on steel among the dust-specks of creation...
Kavanagh-Joycean Villanelle
(Cento/Villanelle): Alone, awake to hear the sweet harps play, where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, by such and such is happiness thrown away...
118 Hampton Road, Bristol
It shot up my nose like a lemon-juice-tipped broomstick and as I coughed for water and rumbled for the toilet, the thought swept across my brain that I should never trust drugs with numbers in their name. Minutes later, in a dungeon-black cubicle and a state of war with my belly, as my tinnitus blinked away in yellow and green in the corner of my left eye...
The Stokes Croft Riot
Black flags fly from the free-shop window. Below, a girl who eats no flesh cradles rolls of rat-cage mesh. A burst of Caribbean lingo. A metal sheet across the door of what was once an anarchist bookshop. Workmen whistle on the rooftop of a cobwebbed Polish store. A waft of cider pressed from plums. Dreadlocks held in place by pencils flow beneath a Banksy stencil of teddy-bears with petrol-bombs. A mother and three freckled children munch on processed Cornish pasties. A bunch of banjo-strumming crusties eulogise an ancient pilgrim...
Epiphany
(Coleridgean sonnet): The mirror yields its bumper crop of sport. Banknote-nosed and blindfolded we sink, then scrape like fat kids round a skating rink...
The Eviction of Yasser Aziz
Gelled black hair, gold chains and nylon shirts, aftershave that blasted out in spurts, he looked less like a squatter than a wristwatch salesman, one whose haggling power hurts. But he was first to scale the nursery wall, deck out the singing-room and reinstall some life there, as he sparked his spliffs and pissed Scotch into midget toilets, bounced his ball, conjured memories of loud bazaars where camels drag their furry reservoirs, trimmed the suburbs of his metropolis-frizzed crotch and dreamt, below the tissue-paper stars, of tits...
Why do you Stalk through the City in Orange?
(Triolet): Why do you stalk through the city in orange, shitting so much and so much among dented beer can and empty syringe?...
Acid Trip, Woods Near Clifton, May 2011
Of all the endless possibilities that exist in the universe, of all the places you could potentially be anywhere along the multi-dimensional and perhaps infinite spectrum of reality, I know where you are right now. You’re in the Co-op supermarket on Aberdeen High Street. Not too far from the fish fingers...
Flight from Society
(Pushkinian sonnets): Our cash-poisoned world was designed for the dullest of philistines rubbing their hands at their sales with cash-kissing glee in their moated, portcullised towers of power where blandness prevails...
Scalar Wave
(Tanka/Wayra): The morning sun robes our field in heaven’s rich love. My unshackled mind cavorts in the pulsating electromagnetic glow...
Rachel
In a Bristol heavy-metal beer-house, sentences slurred, too blonde too undark I thought for an average iron sort of maiden or gothic bird, you asked if I was married and then, when my guffawing buried the question in shovelful on shovelful of don’t-be-absurd and planted a cross above it, if I had a girlfriend, if I was homosexual, and if you could kiss me. I replied no, no, yeah alright then and leaned over the bar, quickest bond I’d ever made, perk of the job like a company car I supposed...
expansion
die eiche blüht in tausend zweige de eik bloeit in een duizend twijgen the oak blooms into a thousand twigs...
The Mouse and Like-Button
Visit the Mouse and Like-Button online pub for a frothing pint of ale and a steak and kidney pie with a wall of reinforced glass between you and the other patrons for that authentic Internet conversation feel...
The Virus of People
I mustn’t protest against slander and slight, I mustn’t retaliate, stand up and fight, I mustn’t defend what I know to be right, that’s obsessive, aggressive and wrong...
Everyone’s a Mirror-Puncher
Everyone’s a mirror-puncher. You smack and smack and smack that glass until your knuckles rupture in a crimson lake...
The Cerne Abbas Giant
(Cornish sonnet): “God preserve us! Who is that immoral bounder on the hill, wielding that club, no top hat upon his head, nor laurel, his chalky heathen member physically excited?”...
A Year in North Hackney
(Flagofk): Brauer and Spitzer was the shop above which our hours were filled and our patience was drained by a shower that trickled like a chinchilla’s penis, towers of china chores, a backfiring toilet and cowering mice behind the toaster...
Being Mistaken for an Art Installation
(Lu-Shi): Warehouse gallery, evening. Strange girl heaps two slug-plump lines. The eternal waltzer swirls...
In Ketamino Veritas
(Sapphic Rubaiyat): Come, kneel beside me in the circle, something’s just about to sparkle through our minds and strike us dumb or madly vocal. Come, bow your head down to the mirror. Those rolls of banknotes now, it’s clearer, are meaningless, for you are God, with such an aura!...
Penny Waterfall
(Shakespearean sonnet): It some-times at the mome-nt that you spit, “It’s true! All it can do is pilfer!”...
Welfare State
Were the two world wars a joke or a figment of my imagination? Did our great-uncles not choke for the segment of the tragic nation that sprawls across the wealth pump and showers in its outgush? Did they limp through a swamp so their great-nephews and -nieces could be airbrushed out of the oil-based fresco of celestial economic growth for being the refuse and faeces of the new empire?...
Tae a Bagel
(Burns stanzas): Wee pluffie gustie girdlin bagel, aal lanesome in yer see-throu cradle, whit sall ah sclatch athort yer navel, peynit butter? Some jeelie howked in a stuffie ladle the girst of a putter?...
Dalriada
(Burns stanzas): For Mac’s sake, drap this balaclava bombs guns pikitweer palaver! Wid ye Picts an Gaels nae rather quit this theatre an ilk o ye become a grafter for auld Dalriada?...
I Don’t Blow Them or Anything
“I don’t blow them or anything”...
The Ballad of Bobbie Black
(Ballad): When Jason found you on the floor beneath an avalanche of pills and booze, his heart still cracked from Infidelity’s punch cracking once more, there were those who gathered for the lynch...
Dear Jason
(Caudate sonnet): Dear Jason. Please forgive me for the news that I must jab you in the eyeball with. I hope it doesn’t leave a bloodshot bruise. I hope that you’ll still sing and fight and live...
New Year in Stuttgart
Under the net cast by the cloud-scratching blinking outclimbed and outshone world’s-first-television-tower as fire-engine rather than police-car sirens howl I close the window and peer at reds greens yellows crashing fizzing whooshing, at children running around among burnt-out shells, at cackling students dodging flames and permanent blindness on the street corner...
The German Language
(Heinean stanzas): The German language is a mess, or as they’d say, a “through-each-other”, but sometimes, when you blindly guess, you stab the proper word without much bother. They’re literal little dumpling-chefs, the Germans. Gloves to them are “hand-shoes”. Moustaches are called “string-beards” (if they’re on the way to being like Fu Manchu’s, as oft they are in Germany, whose handlebar-hirsutest suburbs heave with hairy men who’ll flee from razors, mumbling Swabian plumbers’ proverbs)...
Le Perroquet
(Wyattian sonnet): I longed to peck at umlaut-seeds way back in youth, or slurp the upturned question mark, but orders from some shrugging oligarch meant crumbs of croissant were the only snack...
Let’s Use Toys
“Let’s use toys in bed!” my girlfriend said, and I felt like a king with a new castle...
Red Squirrel, Stuttgart, 2013
Dizzy loofah-tailed ginger rat bounding suddenly through the Swabian morning across a mossy garage roof, can it really at last be you?...
Rotes Eichhörnchen, Stuttgart, 2013
Schwindlige luffaschwammgeschweifte rote ratte die plötzlich durch den schwäbischen morgen über ein bemoostes garagendach springt, kann es wirklich endlich du sein?...
Barriquewein
Gesprochenes Deutsch ist nur ein geräusch, es leckt aus meinem kopf...
Playing the Policeman in Woody Allen’s ‘Death’
Is he supposed to be an Irishman? No, I just chose to play him like that. My idea. Is he supposed to be as gay as a fashion designer on poppers? No, again, all that was just my own interpretation and not a textual must...
Op U Tree
(Ryuka): Rolling On the Linoleum Fearing...
Thankyou, Germany
Thankyou, Germany for making me feel human at last, for making me feel needed at last, for throwing me into a room full of dental braces, acne and correction-fluid-sloganed pencil-cases armed with a paperback and an unused English degree...
Vienna
Vienna, du nabel der Lady Europa, was für ein schöner nabel du bist!...
Please Don’t Call Me Racist!
I’ll sneer that working-class folk smell of mammoth’s farts and cannot spell, while claiming I’m left-wing as hell, just please, don’t call me racist! I’ll never think outside my box, my words will all be orthodox, I’ll suck a thousand black men’s cocks, just please, don’t call me racist!...
Toothache, Braunau-am-Inn, 20th of April 2014
In Salzburg they splash their most famous son across T-shirts and hats, he smiles boyishly from a million postcards, they name chocolates after him and then erect monuments to those chocolates in the town square. It’s not the same here. My tooth hurts...
Anarchy in Germany
I am an antichrist, ich bin ein gestörter geist, I want to cross the road and I know how I’ll do it, I’m going to ignore the red Ampelmann, because I want to be Anarchy...
In the Port of Saint Petersburg
In the port of Saint Petersburg wavy-haired mathematicians exhale vodka and sanctions-ringed cares and caviar and smoke-circles and vodka, questioning the nature of consciousness, until they lose theirs...
Fifty-Nine North
(Pushkinian sonnet): Under a frolicking-cherub-ringed ceiling, on a starless, tsarless night...
Under the Ice-Cream Onions
What in Bog’s name is this I asked, smotting down at a shoddily razrezzed almost-square of oven-paper. It’s a serviette Svetlana said, fumbling a thimbleful of moloko into her chipped chasha, a Soviet serviette...
Svetlana
In Stuttgart you gave me Georg Trakl and said, “This is how you paint with words”. We made each other’s lonely eyes sparkle, a sparkling that was years overdue, but that blank canvas Berlin was beckoning me, and a dacha was beckoning you...
In Memoriam: Cousin Dez
March 1945 Aunt Wendy, in her second month of life, lay cot-bound in a flood of dreamy peace until Great-Grandma plucked her from it cooing “what a gorgeous girl you are” and so forth, scooping Wendy off to the back kitchen where floral teacups gleamed with housewife’s pride and saucers sparkled. How my auntie wailed at being wrestled from her blissful dreams!...
Please Don’t Call Me Sexist!
I’ll say that compliments can hurt you and men should all obey a curfew, believe in nothing but my virtue, just please, don’t call me sexist! I’ll claim to praise the female shape is just another form of rape, I’ll liken Mozart to an ape, just please, don’t call me sexist!...
ich bin berlin
so many new dead ends as you stood there growling back turned unmoveable unreachable untouchable you cut me off from myself...
Feminazi
Don’t try to prohibit me from saying ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ if you can toss ‘tosser’ at any man you wish to cut and hurl ‘wanker’ like a fast-castrating boomerang at any bloke who doesn’t eat your sour and half-baked meringue...
In Memoriam: Frank Tröger
I landed in Berlin with a bag of furry mushrooms and a tube of Russian haemorrhoid cream. You said, “My uncle Frank, he needs a bit of company, a comradely ear as his life floats downstream.”...
Berlin, October 2015
(Shoygrian Rubaiyat): Gesundbrunnen. Healthy spring, well well. But there pukes across the chemist’s wall in sick letters, “Germany must die!” The streets itch with doubts. Perhaps it will...
Autumn Homesickness
(Haiku): Autumn homesickness...
The Day After Bataclan
The lakes of Parisian teenagers’ blood were still being mopped from the concert-hall floor and corpses levered out of their wheelchairs and stretchered, blanketed, out of the door when the cry came over the Internet in full-throttle hipster smarm from George Soros’s quisling squadron, “This is nothing to do with Islam!”...
Baizuo
(Lu-Shi): The Chinese call him “baizuo”. Englishmen call him a cuck...
Die Rinkslechten
Ich wasche mir die hände rein von rechten und von linken. Beide sind scheissbomben die nach faulen klischees stinken...
Roosevelt
(Cleriku Rondel): Roosevelt froze and felt a nasty nip, chopping, tear through the winter air...
Wake Up, Children
(Nibelungen stanzas): Wake up, children, wake up! And wipe away those dreams. The time for sleeping’s over. Your world’s not what it seems. Wipe away that guiltpride, those virtue exhibitions, the smug, myopic slogans, the “I’m leftwinger than you” competitions...
Free England
There once was a time when we mucked out the swine for we stuck and combined when we could. We sucked on our limes and we struck up our rhymes to the crimes of Fawkes, Turpin and Hood, but now we’re pushed round on a merry-go-round of American merits and lore. Free England! Free England! Come get your free England, free England with every world war!...
Give War a Chance
Roll up for our slide-down-the-banister culture! Roll up for our Rohypnol-canister culture! Soap operas, happy shoppers, clock-card punchers, power lunchers, convoys of Jonboys, call the jobless ‘bloody spongers’. Comatose and plump, compliant plumbers never conjure plots to come and plunder through the Commons with their plungers! All we are saying is give war a chance...
The Arab Slave Trade
The harem throbs with limping concubines. Their sisters wait in chained and shackled lines. The sheikh inspects and cups each quivering breast, checks for severed pleasure, decides which one is best. For thirteen centuries. Not two or three. Thirteen. Good evening, Mister Historian, and where on earth have you been?...
No Man’s Land
Deep into the New American Century whose cannons glare at Persepolis, Tiananmen Square and the Kremlin...
better dead than racist
better my daughter gang-raped than i be called racist better my nephew dismembered by a speeding truck than i be called racist you are a racist racist racist racist racist you have a phobia a mental illness something wrong with you because i said so now shut up you racist racist racist racist racist...
Clerihews 2
David Icke insists human consciousness is reaching a spike in the face of a million projectiles like “He’s just a nutcase who talks about reptiles”...
The Last Time
The last time I was home we found a beached jellyfish beside Brighton pier. You said it felt like a wet bicep as you carried it over the street and dumped it on a public telephone. Then we planted twigs in it and a plastic spoon...
The Modern Eunuch
The modern eunuch doesn’t prance through banquet-halls of kings and queens, but around the trendiest bars and galleries in a pair of skinny jeans. The modern eunuch never doubts that “Feminism” means “Equality”. He gave both balls to be accepted by the nutcracker-wielding sorority and won a blow-job for his trouble. Nodding along to what he’s been taught, he indoctrinates himself with such gusto he’ll never beget an original thought...
No Thankyou, Germany
Dear Germany. I’m not sure how to say this. There isn’t a way to keep it quick and painless. You know Kraftwerk and Rammstein were always on my playlist and I gorged on your sausage even though you weren’t the sanest or politest beauty I could’ve gone for...
Exile
(Tanka): Silver-shirted crows perch nest flap round mighty trunks of skyward-thrusting rusting smog-begrimed khaki. A forest of grey oblongs...
Angeln nach Revolutionären
Ich angele, ich angele, ich angele nach Angela Merkel anhängerinnen und anhängern, rotzige fotzenknechte die trotz eigener natur ziegelstur greifen zu ihren explodierenden hundepfeifen...
East Oceanian Zombie Apocalypse
Leaves were all hurling themselves from the branches and nights in the empire were starting to nip when its cardboard borders came fluttering down and the carnivore carnival let rip...
humanity, twenty-first century
the way you find women attractive is sexist the way you don’t find women attractive is sexist the way you look at women is sexist the way you ignore women is sexist the way you urinate is sexist the way you ejaculate is sexist...
To ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’
You were the first book I read in German, almost the first book I read in English. In my heart, the first book. I read you, expecting spaceships or something, pre-loss-of-virginity, post-Cold War, and in my heart, I shook...
Ampleforth’s Lament
Downspreadingchestnuttree where I selled you and you selled me I sit ginredded penning words of unjoy, crimethink speeding throughmind, the sexcrimethink of a oneful boy...
The Frontmove of the Lightbrig
A halfkilometer, halfkilometer, halfkilometer frontwise in the unhill of Death rided the six hundred. “Frontwise, Lightbrig! Frontmove for the guns!” he sayed. In the unhill of Death rided the six hundred...
Bigbrothertown
Walked those foots in plusold time on Airstrip One’s green bighills? Was the courageful thoughtcriminaldestroyer seed on Airstrip One’s plusgood fields?...
Sexcrime Sonnet
(Shakespearean sonnet): My sexcrime, speak! How plusful longer must I unproceed in unlight anteholding your doubleplusgood breasts repeatwise?...
Yellowflowers
I walked highfloatingcloudwise oneful when speedwise I seed plusful yellowflowers. Nextlake, downtrees, moving in wind...
Slough
Come, plusgood bombs, fall on Slough! It’s ungood now for persons. There’s unplusful cowfeedful grass. Come, Death!...
To Winston
October, Nineteen Eighty-Three? I mind unstrongwise dates. Notebook frontme, telescreen backme, I think our doublefates, Comrade Winston, facecrimefriend, and mind you’re on my side. I pen these crimeful words for you that can’t be rectifyed...
To Postsummer
Yeartime of fog and plusgood plenty! Good comrade of the olding sun, withspeaking it how to bring fruits onbranches roundhouses and bend mossful trees byapples, filling all fruits inwise with growfulness...
God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols (Politically Correct Version)
Hypothetical Deity, administer non-chauvinistic physical protection strategies to the Queen! Constitutional Monarchy is in many respects similar to a Fascist regime, but only metaphorically, as it would be ideologically undesirable to...
A British University Student Reacts to the Dalai Lama’s Statement that there are Too Many Migrants in Europe
Who is this fascist Dalai Lama prick? This ungoodthinkful racist xenophobe, this far-right chauvinist thoughtcriminal, spreading hateful hate speech round the globe? Dark skin good, white skin bad. Some people are more equal than others...
good citizen mantra
world war two vet gen doubleplusracist doubleplussexist oldthinkers commit natcrime our antirightpop antiwhitepriv antimalepriv antiwhitemalepriv socjus demos doublepluscourageful it’s only rape if a white man does it...
Kissing the Hand that Stabs you
When freedom of speech hides quaking under the prayer mat in the machine-gun thunder, when the Mona Lisa is a khalif’s plunder and there’s Jew-blood splashed on your trilby...
Hindu Genocide: a Footnote
Mahmud of Ghazni swept Afghanistan empty of Buddhists...
Brexit
Goodbye, Bankerland, oligarchic orgy club, Slav-spanking lebensraum, yellow-starred Beelzebub. Hello, Democracy! Goodbye, Fourth Reich sweeping nations into coffins, England is more than a bureaucratic province and once again, we’re free!...
UKIP Clerihews, Written by Liberals
(Clerihews): Nigel Farage may well have won the referendum and put this country in charge of its own destiny, but I’m still right and seventeen million people just aren’t very bright. Raheem Kassam...
Pint of Liberal Tears, Please, Barman
Pint of liberal tears, please, barman! The endless circling droning sermon from the slippery as a salmon two-faced million-mouthed demon is silenced with a trump, trump, trump. Those crisp, delicious, sweet, drought-quenching tears are pumped out in mind-bunching unison, in perfect harmony...
Antifa, Just Die
Antifascist Fascists, anarchist Nazis, establishment rebels, state-funded army of globalists burning down your own back yards with your “Old white people, just die!” placards...
Europe Awake!
(Petrarchan sonnets): Europe, awake! You have no cause for shame! Today is not the day for disavowals and slanders of Le Pens, Fortuyns or Powells. The Khalif robbed the Spaniard of his name and left the Greek, the Slav, the Magyar lame the day he rumbled, twisting, through your bowels...
Sonnet for Ebba Akerlund
(Wyattian sonnet): Sweet, deaf great-granddaughter of the Viking, Ebba, curse the Lord, you could not hear the jihad-lorry as it thundered near...
Sweden
(Pathya Vat): No fat empire, gas chambers, slaves. No crater-graves carved through Iraq...
Have you Heard the Rumour Going Round?
(Ballade Supreme): Have you heard the rumour going round? They say that all these truck attacks we get, these elbow-scattering bomb-blasts that abound, these prawns or pawns that (quote) “slip through the net”, that (quote) “were not believed to be a threat”, are waved through by the secret-service line...
Irregular Symphony
(Vrakefp): I must, and I have had to for a while. Jason. Brother in conquest. Will we ever? We were going to, once upon an old life. And now we seriously should, as we were supposed to, like we can and could and since voicebreak have been able to...
To Poland
(Rimas Dissolutas): Where’s the West? I’ve lost the West. All I can hear is “Smash the borders! Fuck our culture! Take our rights! Please, gag us! Jail us! Ban free speech!” Churchill’s realm is thus possessed by scum who’d sacrifice their daughters for multicultural delights that taste as sweet as toilet bleach. The tyrants trade, as few protest, their peoples, who had squeezed through slaughters, their nations and their age-long fights, for thirty silver pieces each...
Oil on Titan
And did great claws in ancient time slash upon Titan’s pitch-dark hills? And did huge towering lizards roar through Saturn’s moon’s subzero chills?...
Winter Solstice, Twenty Twelve
(Rubaiyat): Winter Solstice, Twenty Twelve. The hand strikes downwards to dissolve five thousand years of history as it loosens the consciousness valve. As wrinkled Mayans grin the Fifth World rushes in, growing from a whisper to a clattering din. Edward Snowden is the first to whisper...
The End of my Youth
(Shakespearean sonnets): It was back in the dazzling years in which Saturn was locked on his screeching and slicing return and I had allowed a young lady to flatten and paralyse me with refusals to learn the primal rules of human conduct. I hadn’t realised at the time (and so I just floundered and gasped like a landlocked squid) she patrolled a borderline. In other words, Lucy was a nutcase. One minute she loved me, the next she would say that I was a silence-deserving cuntface for standing up for myself on the day that she suddenly snarled she should give me a smack. Some said I was wrong ’cause I answered her back...
The Shoygrian stanza, Climerihewick, Saxonic couplet, Spegafk, Shoygrian sonnet, Olwyn, Doppelspegafk, Flagofk, Sapphic Rubaiyat, Shoygrian Rubaiyat, Cleriku Rondel and Vrakefp are all poetic forms devised by the author.
