Allspice
Turmeric and ginger,
Cumin, mustard, mace,
Red-hot chilli peppers,
With cardamom to taste,
Cinnamon, paprika,
And nutmeg makes it sweet,
White pepper, black pepper,
Turning up the heat.
Allspice
Scaredy Cats
Scaredy Cats
Not all cats are playfully aloof,
Or queens of household staff –
There’s some will never steal the show
In fairytale or video.
And likewise, on the busy midnight roof,
They’re just some riff-a-raff –
While toms compete and loudly brawl,
Some kits can barely catawaul.
Not all cats are masters of their strut,
Or lords of backyard realms –
For some are timid, peeking out
From under sofas, wracked with doubt.
They know they’ll never truly make the cut,
Their poses underwhelm –
And so they snuggle-up indoors
Where we protect them from the wars.
The First of May
The First of May
The first lone mayfly of the year,
And Spring is on the go –
Looks like the merry month is here
As evenings make a show.
The bulbs give way to tardy blooms
While cuckoos boast their song,
And mayfly brides greet urgent grooms –
For Spring won’t stay for long.
Scratch a Lefty, Find a Hippo
Scratch a Lefty, Find a Hippo
You should be my own people –
Strivers for a bright tomorrow,
Dreamers for an equal way,
A better chance, a greater say.
But the moralising streaks still creep
With the finger-wag to follow –
Authoritarian and snide,
How come we’re on the same damn side ?
You should be my own people,
Treating people just the same –
Instead, you’re tribal, keeping score,
Denouncing heretics galore.
But no ! Denouncing you is cheap –
I still believe we share an aim.
What makes us strong, what shows we care,
Is when our foes are treated fair.
Skew Left
Skew Left
When did we get so puritan ?
When did we lose our common sense ?
When did we get so keen to ban,
And get so keen to take offence ?
Why did we frown and lose our humour ?
Why did we break our self-made laws ?
Why did we credit ev’ry rumour,
Just as long as it helped our cause ?
A lie was told,
A line was crossed –
And this is how the left was lost.
We used to be the peace-and-love brigade,
We used to be on your side.
We used to be so unafraid,
So when did we grow so terrified ?
Now we’ve become the rage-and-shun regime,
The ones with the hate-filled mouths –
We loathe you almost as much, it would seem,
As we secretly loathe ourselves.
Our bleeding hearts
Have turned to frost –
And this is how the left was lost.
When did we give up on forbearance ?
When did we grow so paranoid ?
When did we all become our parents ?,
Overwrought, not overjoyed.
We’ve bought into the capital con
Where individuals demand respect,
With all sense of community gone
For a constant “I object !”.
We won our place,
But at a cost –
And this is how the left was lost.
Shires Old & New
Shires Old & New
English counties show a frozen glimpse
Of population,
Of where we lived, a long time since,
At the dawn of our English nation.
Cathedrals too, and the larger abbeys,
Hint at a bustling past –
Wells and Ripon weren’t so shabby,
But boom-times couldn’t last.
Huntingdon, you once were free,
With Somerton and Appleby –
But people change, and trade moves on,
To Milton Keynes or Basildon.
Political constituencies
Can’t stand still too long,
Without some boarder-fluencies
To keep their numbers strong.
Postcode districts are a modern score
To count the blur –
If they survive a thousand more,
They’ll show where once we were.
Stevenage, you’re earned your key,
With Swindon and Southend-on-Sea.
But people change, and drift away
To who-knows-where and come-what-may.
Trad.
Trad.
Strange, the oldest folk tunes have no authors known,
They’ve just been sung like that forever.
I wonder if a single soul created them,
Or many voices altogether.
Maybe over centuries, they’ve slowly grown,
Adding new words to old songs,
From bawdy balladry, through cherished hymn,
To terrace singalongs.
From London Bridge to Scarborough Fair,
Ride a cock horse to the old grey mare,
Lady Greensleeves, mistress mine,
And over the hills for auld lang syne.
We’ll never know, we’re never told –
They are too old and we’re too young –
Yet still their songs are sung.
Strange, the newest pop tunes come with artist names –
We know just who created each.
Yet maybe in a thousand years, a few persist
Whose origins are out of reach.
Carols may be sung to them, or children’s’ games,
Or earworms and lullabyes –
With half the words forgotten, and their meaning missed,
But hanging on in diff’rent guise.
From Ground Control to Billie Jean,
Go Johnny, go, come on Eileen.
All the lonely yesterday –
Sing for tomorrow, we fade to grey.
They’ll never know, the trail is cold –
We are too old and still of tongue –
Yet still our songs are sung.
The Gloves Are Off
The Gloves Are Off
Since art has lost the manual touch,
We’re losing grip of anatomy –
Our illustrations are in the clutch
Of the polydactyl travesty.
Digital digits and silicon glands
Make too many fingers, too few thumbs –
That lead to such unhandsome hands
From thought-machines that can’t do sums.
A sure way to uncover the witch
Whose fingers point to a lack of soul,
It only takes the flick of a switch
To over-endow a lack of control.
But they’ll slowly grasp to make a fist,
So we’d best stop smirking behind our fans –
They might not have a pulse in their wrist,
But our future’s held in their second-hand hands.
Ediacaran
Ediacaran
The Victorians couldn’t have known, of course,
The abundance of life in the lifeless rocks –
The explosion before the trilobytes,
With multicellular building blocks.
The fossils are rare, but they are there,
In Charnia and Kimberella.
What were they ? We don’t quite know –
Foundation in the stony cellar.
Dickinsonia, Cyclomedusa,
You flourished, then you died away.
The Boring Billion birthed you all –
Our great ancestral stray.
Yet still the Paleozoic begins,
Long after the glories of Avalon.
That makes no sense, not now we know
What the Cambrian was built upon.
Dismissed as children’s stories,
We have had to wait a long long time –
Yet the Pre- was not so pre at all,
Its oceans teemed with some strange slime…
The end of the Cryogenian, that’s the border,
That’s when things got big –
Spriggina and Aspidella are waiting –
All we have to do is dig…
The New Victorians
The New Victorians
These days, just as we’re losing our prude
For fruity language that once gave the vapours,
Just shrugging-off cusses as barely that rude,
When reading them often in novels and papers –
Slowly reducing the shock of the swear –
We’re far too open-minded to care.
We’re liberated and in the nude,
Released from po-faced capers.
But then, out of the void, we heard
How modern ears are being rocked
At a brand new crop of age-old words –
That blanche the permanently shocked.
We need to learn to take offence, or
We’ll upset the lib’ral censor,
Who demands our tongues are slurred
To keep our language locked.
The new lords of the orthodox
Are getting too big for their britches –
No longer just a chatterbox,
They’ve now become a gang of snitches.
Scanning all communications,
Seeking phantom motivations –
Boldly stating roosters can’t be cocks,
And canines can’t be bitches.
Rhyming Couplets 