Month: October 2016

Halloween, 2016

This Halloween, I shall dress as the year 2016
and emit a frightful, fulgent sheen
from my orange-pumpkin-Donald-Trumpkin head.

I shall adopt the gait of Theresa May’s Living Dead,
and howl like a slithy Gove under a waxy moon.
My chest will be scarred with Brexit wounds.

I shall visit all doorsteps across this haunted land
with a leer on my face and a beer in my hand,
like a phantasmal, sharp-fanged Nigel Farage.

A dagger will be sticking out of my back
(the Severed Hand of Boris will still be attached).
And there, trailing behind me, poor fools,

will be the ghosts of the heroes you’d pinned to your walls,
all those pop stars and comics and actors
who filled up your lives with music and laughter.

Alongside them will be the bombed and the drowned,
the beheaded, the starved, the blown-up, the gunned-down,
from American nightclubs to Syrian towns.

So Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween!
If you’re not in when I knock, no fear;
I’ll be here all year.

Brexit in Pursuit of a Bear

Please look out for this bear. Thank you.
He’s been getting ideas above his station.
If found, hand him in to the Home Office,
Section: UK Visas and Immigration.

He is wearing a blue duffle coat,
red wellies and a wide-brimmed hat
in an attempt to look like one of us.
But do not be fooled by that.

He’s one of those funny foreign types
who try to come here nowadays,
to take our homes and steal our jobs
and eat Our Great Nation’s Marmalade.

It is thought he has terrorist connections
and may be planning to do us harm.
So please beware of his hard stare,
not to mention his right to bear arms.

Also reported in this area:
illegal economic migrant,
Great Uncle Bulgaria.

Artist’s Impression

Channel-flicking on the television,
a sudden flicker of recognition,

and there you are, lighting up the screen.
You’ve not changed much, it seems.

The selfsame eyes of grey flint,
those touchpaper lips,

that shocking blaze
of hair. It’s as if the days

lit by time’s slow-burnt passage
are reduced to ashes.

An old flame, charcoaled
back to life by the controlled

hand of a police sketch artist.
I see you’re still up to your old tricks,

wanted, as you are, for questioning
in connection with

a spate of arson attacks
in the vicinity of Matlock Bath.

A Poem Written When I Should Have Been Doing Other Things

My in-box bulges.
It swells like the clothes
in my laundry basket. It grows
like the mould on the pans in my sink;
so I had better get on with this poem, I think.

It may look effortless,
this dilatoriness,
but you should know
I have a professional qualification
in procrastination.

This level of consummate dawdling,
my exemplary shoulder-shrugging
at all forms of industry,
has taken years of struggling
against doing things straight away.

Work is not easily shirked;
one must learn how to delay.

Fridays, for instance,
are best spent spent dilly-dallying.
Saturdays are more suited
to some sharp shilly-shallying.
Sundays I loiter, Mondays I linger,
Tuesdays I fester, Wednesdays I fritter.
Thursdays should be left
for chewing one’s jaw
(although it’s acceptable to just hem and haw).

Props help: a chaise longue,
a fine pipe to smoke,
a phone, of course,
and a cat to stroke.

But even then,
not everyone can procrastinate
with such application like me.
I have a vocation
for vacillation, you see.

Anyway, I shall finish this poem later.
I need to re-check the light
in the refrigerator.

Brian Bilston’s Poems – all gathered up into some kind of book thing

I’m pleased to say that my poetry collection You Took the Last Bus Home has now published and is available through bookshops and online stores in both print and ebook formats.

If you’re interested in buying a copy, do seek out your local bookshop – or Hive is an excellent online alternative, as it allows independent bookshops to benefit, thus enabling the book industry as a whole to continue to thrive.

http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Brian-Bilston/You-Took-the-Last-Bus-Home–The-Poems-of-Brian-Bilston/19417281

It will publish in the US in January.

If you’d like to read more about how I went from posting poems in tweets and blog postings to publishing a book, you can read about it here in a piece I’ve recently written for The Irish Times.

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brian-bilston-twitter-s-poet-laureate-on-his-print-debut-1.2819450

Brian Bilston

Teachers

Teachers
are extraordinary
creatures.

They teach us
about topographical features,
and the causes of the First World War.

They teach us
about working safely with Bunsen Burners
and what a protractor is for.

They teach us
about apostrophe’s
and where not to put them.

They teach us
when to open our mouths
and when best to shut them.

Teachers
make us dream-chasers,
star-reachers.

Yes, teachers
are extraordinary
creatures.

Except for Mr Jenkins,
‘cos he put me in detention that time
when I done a Chinese burn on Craig Hutchings.