Barrow Boy
Gert yer lovely tumuluses,
Wattled daubs and timber trusses –
These will last for ages, stone or bronze.
Gert yer long-house, gert yer round,
An’ gert yer sacrificial mound,
An’ mint concentric rings without the cons.
I’ve swanky sarsens, blingin’ blues,
I’ve sterlin’ job-lot Sutton Hoos,
I’ve hoards of axe-heads – copper, flint or chert.
I’m good for grave-goods, beads and torcs –
So find me where the old roads forks
Fer tons of rolling earthworks, cheap as dirt.
Fingerfluffs
Ev’ryone makes typos,
Where a silly misspelled rush of prose
Is hiccupped in its fluency –
Careless hands work careless labours,
Jumping cases, catching neighbours,
Letters standing in for others,
Covering their brothers’ truancy.
For as our fingers run and leap
And waltz and peck,
Too busy to go back and check,
So in the errors creep.
Too quick they ran, too soon they leapt,
And where our eyes should intercept,
They’re mesmerized by finger-dances,
Only sparing random glances
At the all-important screen.
Or else they stare out straight ahead
To read instead the words unseen,
That float midair, as thick as flies –
The copytext behind the eyes.
But if we’re lucky, underlines in red
Will warn us what we’ve said
And give us chance to clean.
But otherwise, each error cries unheard,
Each mangled word and un-snipped thread
Is slurred by digits over-keen.
So ev’ryone makes typos,
Where our textual flows get bent and dented,
Letters get disoriented,
Weakening intent –
They may look careless and inept,
But these days we’re all quite adept
At reading what was really meant.
Dig
Turning the soil is Autumn work,
Ploughing, forking, hoeing the loam,
Breaking it up before it freezes,
Driving the moles from their home.
Airing the worms out, harvesting stones,
And mining the black to bury the brown,
Dredging the roots up, combing the waves in,
Leaving the fields quite upside-down.
Flying the Flag
Come and join the army,
Risk your life each day,
Occupying deserts
For below the av’rage pay.
Politicians praise us,
They’ve always got our backs,
But then they go and sub us all
A pittance, less the tax.
Come and join the army,
Buzz off all your locks,
See the world, then shoot it,
And spread about the pox.
Tabloids love us, lefties hate us,
Locals try to make us bleed –
So hire us cut-price killers
For the cost of chicken-feed.
Unbusyness
The office upstairs is pristine-abandoned,
Glimpsed through the lift-lobby windows –
Paperless desks and clutter-free intrays,
Silent printers sulking in rows.
Phones unringing, chairs unswiv’ling,
Three-speed fans no longer swishing –
Out of business ? But it looks so peaceful,
Like they’ve chosen to all go fishing.
They might come tomorrow, but probably won’t.
So what do they know that the other floors don’t ?
Second-Hand Elegy
Someone I sort-of kind-of knew, I learn has died.
I heard the should-be-sadder news today, a fortnight on.
It feels too late for grieving, so I haven’t cried –
I vaguely wish I could, but still I’m dry inside.
For truth – I feel removed, my slightly-closeness gone –
I know I have no right to, but I feel a touch denied.
But that’s alright, it’s just a touch,
And maybe they’d admit that they would only half-remember me.
I know I knew them not so much,
But let me dwell a bit upon their insufficient memory.
Bankrupt Holiday
Bank Holiday Monday –
It’s just two Sundays in a row.
Why must we clone the one day
Where the time ticks-by so slow ?
The world is closed by three,
As people lose their appetite –
And though we know tomorrow’s free,
We stay home Sunday night.
Then comes the dreaded day
When we have to do stuff, rain or gust,
We must not let it waste away
Without the National Trust.
But here’s a thought, I say,
When we need a break to stay ahead –
Let’s all take off a Friday,
And get two Saturdays instead !
Work is my Sunscreen
All Summer long
I’m working in a basement,
A windowless basement
All the Summer long.
It may seem so wrong
To not have a casement
To open in my basement,
When heatwaves prolong.
But free from the throng,
I’m happy with effacement
In my quiet basement,
Where I get along.
When the Sun beats strong,
I’m glad he’s kept adjacent
And out of my basement
Where he don’t belong.
Even Mao Zedong
Would leave me in my placement,
Would leave me in my basement
All my workday long.
Then home at evensong,
Still cool from how my day’s spent
In an air-conditioned basement,
All the Summer long.
Harvest Traffic
Country roads in Summertime,
Tractors bar the way –
Trailers towering with loads
Astride the hedged-in roads, all long-the-day.
Gathering the harvest in,
Kicking up the dust,
Making ev’rybody late –
Because the corn won’t wait, and so we must.
Scattering a constant shower,
Unintended sacrifice –
Stripped from golden fields,
Their yields are fattening the harvest mice.
And we shall gobble up the rest,
The bread and beer and morning flakes –
So patience, as we fume to pass,
And thank them by the glass and loaf and cake.
For that’s the price of country living,
Farmers have to move their grains –
They fuel, with slow agronomy,
The whole rural economy down twisty country lanes.
Déjà Fait
It could be as simple and routine,
As lining-up the keyboard, square,
The practised switch to light the screen,
The pulling-up of a chair,
Or nudging the mouse, that nudges the brain –
With a ‘ho-hum, there’s that feeling again’.
It’s not even deja vu, just a mild surprise
It’s just a slow ‘oh yeah’ as we realise
That we did this very action in just this way
Just yesterday,
And we say ‘but that was only an hour ago,
Or maybe two, but not any more…’
But no – we know, we always know,
We’ve had all twenty-four since we did it last,
Our days tick by so slow and skip so fast.
