Day: November 22, 2015

No, You Cannot Borrow My Mobile Phone Charger

Assorted Poems, Some poems

Help yourself to whatever you’d like from my larder:
my stilton, my sherry – or my port, if you’d rather –
but no, you cannot borrow my mobile phone charger.

If you want I will read you an ancient Norse saga,
or dance naked in public to Radio Gaga,
but no, you cannot borrow my mobile phone charger.

Make me learn all the speeches of President Carter,
force-feed me quinoa until I grow larger,
but no, you cannot borrow my mobile phone charger.

You can beg all you want but I’m not going to barter
because no, you cannot borrow my mobile phone charger.

Poem, revised draft

Assorted Poems, Some poems

I had to write this poem again.
I left the first draft on the train
and now it doesn’t look the same.

The original was a paean to Love,
to Truth, to Beauty. It soared above
the everyday and all that stuff.

It would have healed estranged lovers’ rifts,
stilled the sands on which time shifts
and stopped the world before it drifts

further into quagmired crisis,
ended famine, toppled ISIS.
Employed ingenious literary devices.

I tried my hardest to recall
its words and rhymes, the rise and fall
of the carefully cadenced crawl

through the English language.
But it caused me pain and anguish
for there was little I could salvage.

It certainly didn’t end with a line like this.

How’s Wally?

Assorted Poems, Some poems

Paranoia stalks me
through the streets,
the park, the fairground,
the crowded beach.

I try to make myself
hard to see
because I think someone
is after me.

In a stripy shirt,
bobble hat, glasses,
I hide amongst
the unwashed masses.

Why they want me
I do not know
but I keep on moving;
I must not slow.

So I wander lonely
as a cloud,
choose the company
of the crowd.

I pray that there
will never be
a Malthusian
catastrophe.