Limeraiku

There once was a man
from Crete, who got limericks
and haiku to meet

He said it was mad
And also quite sad to try
the unlikely feat

The cup of tea

The cup of tea I left beside the bed
is cold. It was too hot when I first put
it to my lips; it stung me with the lash
of adolescent rage, and so I put it down
to wait. But now this milky vapid
charmless brew is good just for the earth.
Its potency can never be restored

Four poems

1

The poet's not talking bout
something that needs explanation
The poem is the explanation
It's the best they could do

I haven't got thoughts of a poet my thoughts
are entangled with the weeds trapped
clutched in the undergrowth where
metaphors come handy

The poet has higher thoughts
a mystery even to themselves

2

And now it's like
the lights have
lowered
and we're all
cowering before

the smack
and yet this was
always my anxiety
now written upon

the world
and so I'll send my time
ensconsed
wrapped in headphones
cloaked in Sarah
Davachi and German
abstract techno

and see people sitting in cafes
like the lady in Hitchhiker's
Guide who suddenly
realised the meaning

of life
Are we nearly there yet?

3

The world is Weimar
slipping
unease turns to tension
and anxiety and all of that
Caffeine's not helping
But still things are
Better than ever
Can still enjoy the sun
and the thrown off
froth as we suck on
our blood
and choose from 15
types of coffee filters
and eat peasant food
on reclaimed wood tables
and listen to poor people
singing about hardship and want

4.

Poets grab stardust and elemental gas and froth
and throw it together by means of their pen
great gas clouds are trapped
vapour is trailed

from out of the clear
undifferentiated sky
a bright spray of water
lands fresh on your face

Me, I lurk in the earth
my fingers are black with scientific concerns
ethereal coalescence is not my agenda
The dirt in my nails makes my metaphors stand

The sky and the air escape me
I grab only the solid
gruff material of the
earth

Bring down ink like rocks
from Mount Sinai
Stuffed in my pockets
Bring it down to my level

Where great poets will
write with ink
sourced in the skies
I'll plod on

perpetually on the verge of disappoinment
forever failing to understand
even the basics of
what I am trying to do

May's poem

Your face to the mace
You may grimace

You’ll be a-maced
following when

Thou mayst read
Of Mace and Men

Prison: From the Inside – transcript excerpts

I suffer from mental health problems
I have to take antidepressants and antipsychotics
Because it's just

I used to self-harm, and it's hard not to
It's very hard not to

For the hurt and the pain that I've caused
You feel guilty
You feel like, when you're on these courses
Why do I deserve this?

Especially when you hear a lot of prisoners have took their lives in here
And you think to yourself, like,
That should have been me

Kids that are in for nothing
You hear kids outside hanging themselves

Why is the Lord taking them?

Why is he not taking me,
for all the bad things I've done?

You know, for all the people we've made suffer
Whether it be a small crime or a big crime
People do suffer through our actions

And that's
It's not easy to live with

...

Something happened in my life
I was raped
That's neither here nor there at the minute
But I became
Like
All hurt and closed up
And full of pain, full of emptiness
You could have drove a bus through the emptiness
And it was bad
It was really bad
But I kept drinking the peace in and the peace out
To kill this pain and to kill this emptiness

Prison: From the Inside (BBC1)

The tone of voice that sonnets call to arms

The tone of voice that sonnets call to arms
Is much too fine for me
Too regal and too well-mannered
It doesn't llow for getn spannered
And speech's clarity

Let's chop the legs off words and cut their hearts
So rhythm flows through all our poem's parts
Let's hack away, let's prune, let's turn around
Let's smash our words into the ground, let's tune
their resonance to suit our needs
Let's untie them from what they usually mean
Let's clean extraneous parts
Let's bite heads off, chop out the guts
And add more when there's not enough

For words are words and we're their masters—
Don't let them tell you otherwise
They're cheeky little bastards

Praia da Zambujeira do Mar

The seething, scalding, whirling, churning morass of break and spray
Coursed in with all the rage of boiling lava
Lines of white foam horses strode on to the sun-stroked sands
And lashed the ground with thundering hooves of swirling phosphorus

As I approached, amongst the frothing clamour
As constant crash and passion sloshed my ears
The wrath of rushing planes blew out my idle —
and deafened me to my unceasing thoughts

Praia da Carvalhal

As the sun packs down and the heat goes out
And the shadows run from the lazing light
The beach dwellers gather and make their way
Like litter thrown on the evening winds

Prayer

Why can't I live
in the kind of place
Where everything makes sense?

When will I stop
blaming myself
That I can't understand

This world's chaotic and frenetic
frenzy of disorder?

Carnival

Suddenly we're trapped between two sounds

Tried Ladbroke Grove – if anything it's worse

The only way is through the throbbing crowd

Riding a ragga sound, the tune is building

I've folded up the chair, she's got the baby

We push on through the throng as women taunt

That children's day is Sunday not today

Which isn't helping our predicament

We're by the speaker stack, tune fit to drop

The crowd is thick strung, strong and poised to rave

I push on gingerly apologising

As yet another woman curses us

And then a hand reaches, grabs hold of mine

A big man by the speaker, licked with weed

'Blessings,' he says to me – I squeeze his hand

His lighthouse guides us through the treacherous seas

Waterfall

It started as one great body of water,
until the river, at the cascade’s head, 

was distributed in a million drops. 

Each had its character and course defined; 
combined, they drew a veil across the rocks.

None chose to fall; and though each individual

cast its arc, and suffered eccentricities,

its path was largely chosen by its start.

Some tours were short and barely underway

when they were dashed, left scattered on the rocks.

Others swooned from start to end in glory

their vaulting bows sang hymns straight to the heart

But all, once at the bottom, met again 

in that great body from which they’d emerged

While up in Epping Forest for the day

While up in Epping Forest for the day 

We met an old bloke fishing. We chatted 

and he showed my boy his pot of maggots 

and his line. And when he left he waved to us. 

“Ta-ra,” he said. “See you, ta-ra.” Ta-ra?

I haven’t heard that said since I was young,

in the Co-op down in Kentish Town. “Ta-ra,”
the checkout girl said to my mum. And outside

in the street, this tramp gave me a wink.
I’ve kept that wink for my entire life

At the Salisbury

Let's drink drink
till the words don't link
till the words fall flat
don't interact
The chat gets slack
and doesn't pack
the meanings that
we'd hope —
If we weren't drunk
and losing track

Let's blur the words
until they melt
and mean nothing
a conjuring
encompassing
no fucking thing

Fuck it, let's sing

May days

The men's eyes feast
On flesh of girls
Exposed to light

For the first time
Since September
Their sore eyes glint

At the expanse
And gorge themselves
Until the dusk

May day

The trees glisten as the new leaves peek
At the ragged theatre that winter has left

New Year's Eve

I'm sitting in the bath, this winter night

With candle lit and window wide, no clock 

to indicate the hour, just the mist,

the steam of boilers blazing in the cold.

No one great rocket leads the charge, no salvo calls the time

instead a slowly rising tide, the organ grinder turns

and then the sky is peppered with a thousand fireworks

let loose upon the placid clouds, from all directions blazing.

There's pitter-patter, jibber-jabber

paradiddles of fizzles and thwacks, 

a 3D city sound stage
of undulating acne.

A million tin tacks jab the air, 

dispatched from bargain multipacks 

that we can rest assured
all follow BS7114.

The city pops, mellifluous melee

that never stops but, shunning pattern, fades

and then, from park or street or patio,

ignites again, a cacophonous roar

which then recedes, though bangs and whizzes still

pursue the skies. For me, I loved the chance

to join my city's joy, from my bathtub

with candle lit and window wide, to hear

prolonged and tremulous report 

the exultation of this manmade schism;

it was to my surprise, and was, to my surprise,

to my delight

Shogun assassin – a poem

When I was little,
my father was famous
He was the greatest samurai
in the Empire
He was the Shogun's decapitator.
He cut out the head of 131
lords for the Shogun
It was a bad time
for the Empire
The Shogun just stayed inside this
castle, and he never came out
People said his brain
was infected by devils
And that he was rotting with evil

The Shogun said his
people were not loyal
He said he had a lot of enemies,
but he killed more people than that
It was a bad time
Everybody living in fear
But still we were happy
My father would come home to mother,
and when he had seen her,
he would forget about the killings
He wasn't scared of the Shogun,
but the Shogun was scared of him

Husband ...
Maybe that was the problem
Azami
I had a bad dream
Don't be afraid
Bad dreams are only dreams
What a time you chose to be born,
Daigoro !

At night, mother
would sing for us
My father would go into the temple
and pray for peace
He prayed for things to get better
Then one night
The Shogun sent his
ninja spies to our house
They were supposed to kill my father
But they didn't
That was the night everything changed
For ever

Azami
Azami, your dream has come true!
Dai ... Daigoro
You must protect our son
They will pay
In rivers of blood

That was when my father
left his samurai life
and became a demon
He became an assassin
who walks on the road of vengeance
And he took me with him

I don't remember most of it myself
I only remember the Shogun's ninjas
hunting us wherever we go
And the bodies falling
And the blood

You are marching toward death
wherever you go,
you cannot escape the Shogun

My father hardly ever talks anymore
We just go a little farther everyday
At night, we make a fire,
have our tea
and we listen for the ninjas

We never make a sound

Sometimes he tells me about the past
and about mother
I try not to think about it
but my father can't
help it

Sometimes he gets lost
in the past

age-old grief

I believed, when I was young,
that grieving wasn't for the one
who'd gone
but for the grieved

Not the grieved-for,
the one at rest,
but for the ones who were left

But now I'm old, when I die,
I hope you cry
For me

As I was going along Holburn

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
three greetings card shops
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
three greetings card shops
four sandwich shops
five restaurants
six public houses
seven off-licences
eight banks
nine building societies
and ten mini-supermarkets

but no bloody bookshop

Poems for my mum

1

My mother said to me son I'm proud for you to be a man
But don't you wait for me, cos I'll be running on
And when the day came she was there and then she was gone
Don't you wait for me, cos I won't be around

We were talking about how you pass your values on
The only thing that you can give your children
Some of hers were crooked, and I left them alone
Some of them were golden, and they shone in the sun

And I now I go out walking in the places where we walked when we were young,
Hoping to find something of the child that's gone
But nothing comes of nothing, so I guess that I am done
Don't you wait for me, cos I'll be running on

2

October
bastard month that it is,
I lost my mother in its raging winds

Leaves wrap the pavement
and the days struggle for breath
and the cold comes, I dont feel the cold
just a bitter edge on the air
a nip, a bite, sneaks in
makes itself at home
and the crooked corridors
and the waiting for the lift
can stop for now

I will spend my time looking at the view

3

She's lying on the bed
She's dead
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but still there's the hope

They've got her on a hundred machines,
you know what it means
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
You felt her go,
You were at your friend's and the call said
Come back to the hospital,
You knew she'd gone

A seizure they said,
and that feeling's called dread
but you knew she'd gone,
you know she's gone
as you rode your bike, you felt her spirit rise
you felt her go,
you felt her leave
you know she's gone

but there's the hope
it keeps you in the ward,
keeps her on the bed
plugged in and made to breathe,
made to beat her heart
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but there's the hope

you know she's gone

Then Monday comes
and there's no hope,
they want to turn the machines off
and now she's gone
you knew she'd gone,
you know she's gone
but when they come to turn it off
it rises inside
saying No! lets keep her alive,
lets not let her go
there's the hope
always the hope

but you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but there's the hope

and now she's gone
and before you leave you go to give her one last kiss
you knew she'd gone,
you knew she'd gone
and now she's gone

4

And now you'll cry in all the oddest places
On a plane, on a boat, in a park
in the oddest places,
but not at the funeral, not at the grave
instead in a restaurant
with the sun streaming in through the windows
the little boy cries for his mum
who always came and now she doesn't come no more
I'm sure it's not for want of trying
that she doesn't hear the crying

she would but for her dying

Amnity

When I was younger
I tried to be what I was not
Now older
I try not to be what I am not

Sometimes it is harder

Perhaps I am now what I am not
or am not what I am

Perhaps I have changed
perhaps I have lost
what I am
perhaps not

Would all of the fame
be worth all the cost
of what I am
and what I am not