Dream On
Sleeping is our right,
It is our patriotic duty –
And ev’ry dream is freedom,
And our freedom is to dream…
Sleep, my fellow patriots,
For sleeping is our beauty –
And dreaming is our industry
In which our twilights gleam.
Category: Short Pieces
Upward Spiral
Upward Spiral
A snail upon the concrete, half way high,
Just scaling up the slabs to the broken-bottle prism
That shards into the crown that lacerates the sky –
It’s breaking up the straight lines, a bauble on the brutalism.
The Travelcard Shuffle
The Travelcard Shuffle
Every morning, all Summer long,
We shirtsleeve masses struggle aboard
The dawdling trains in the hungry platforms,
Like some suburban zombie horde.
Then staring out at rusty sidings,
Ragged lots, and the empty sweltering sky,
As the weaving rails must dance and join,
And the shapeless buddleia bushes go by.
Unhappy Feet
Unhappy Feet
New shoes, old pains,
Blister time is here again –
Old feet, new shoes,
Welcome to the blue suede blues.
No Biography
No Biography
When I die, don’t worry who I was,
Don’t carve my name at Poets’ Corner –
I hope my rhymes still cause a fuss,
But let no stranger be a mourner.
When I die, let me die and be done,
Don’t raise blue plaques or rename streets –
I’d love to think my words still run,
But they weren’t written for receipts.
One-and-a-Half
One-and-a-Half
Rhythms march in syllables,
They count both on and off the beat,
But syncopated signatures in words
Can never fall as neat –
They last too long, or maybe
Not quite long enough to find a home –
They fuel our fire and flour our fear,
To foil and foul the metronome.
Trees in Threes
Trees in Threes
1.
Alda Oldman the alderman
(Or Alda the Elder, as she is called),
Once planted an alder (or was it an elder ?)
That stands so bold (or stands so bald ?)
2.
Linda Limey loves her lime tree –
Maybe citrus, maybe not,
But looks sublime in Summertime
When limelit in its limestone pot.
3.
Poplar black and willow white,
I think that I have got that right –
But easy to confuse them, each,
Like copper birch and silver beech.
The Scream
The Scream
Never mind the drama queen
Who’s posing by the railing,
As camp as a jellybean,
Just wibbly-wobbly wailing.
Never mind the sky of red
Or bay of blue-macabre –
Like Jupiter is overhead,
As streaky as the harbour.
Never mind if we can’t find
What makes the screamer crazed –
The couple coming up behind
Seem perfectly unfazed.
Shot Star
Shot Star
A country comet, blazing through
The skies of peace and status quo –
Your portents wasted to the blue.
You shout your name and on you go,
With not a trace of plague or coup
Or sparks beyond your pretty show.
Hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs
We’ve seen them all on ev’ry wall
In Egypt – carved in profile style –
But here’s a game to try and name
The most – Let’s see, it’s been a while…
The eye of the Sun, I know that one,
The wavy lines that mean the Nile,
The ankh, the egg, the owl and leg,
The feather, sphinx, and crocodile,
The scarab of course…and was there a horse ?
The slug-like snake, that’s worth a smile…
The goose (or duck)…and then I’m stuck…
But the walls stretch on for mile on mile.
