Month: March 2016

Refugees

Assorted Poems, Some poems

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

Leap Day

Assorted Poems, Some poems

If every year had an extra day,
my life would have been played
to a different tune,
I’d have journeyed in space,
and walked on the moon,
or at least put up that shelf
in the spare room.

If every year had an extra day
my life would have come on
in leaps and bounds,
answers to Ebola and cancer
I’d have found
in pristine lab-coated white
not drab dressing-gowned brown.

If every year had an extra day
I really think
I could have been someone,
with bestselling novels,
songs at number one,
or remembered more often
which day Bin Day was on.

If every year had an extra day
my life would have turned out
a different way,
football grounds would fill
just to watch me play,
I would sculpt works of beauty
out of blood, sweat and clay,

and perhaps, just perhaps,
you would have wanted to stay.

World Book Day

Assorted Poems, Some poems

The year his father made him go
as The World According to Clarkson

became imprinted in his memory,
like the silent skid of tyre marks on

wet tarmac. Brown Jacket. Blue Jeans.
White Shirt: top buttons left undone,

the hairy chest wig that spilled out,
curled upwards to a pale March sun.

And then the air of blokey bonhomie
he felt compelled to assume

the banter about funny foreigners
at the back of the classroom,

his arguing in Geography
against the need to go green,

and, of course, the punching
of the dinner lady in the canteen.