If your rhyme is stuck and you can’t get by
then you may need the use of a hy-
phen implanted at the end of a line
and soon your poem will sound like a Stein-
way piano in a grand concert hall,
its notes floating in the air like a ball-
oon. So what if the words happen to spill
into two lines? Do not pity these syll-
ables, orphaned, adrift, left there to hang;
their beauty is in the way that they dang-
le.
You caught me stealing
a glance at you.
Ordered me
to empty out my pockets.
I shook my booty
onto the table:
a swiped charge card,
a nose I’d pinched,
one poached egg,
a ruler (half-inched),
a gaze I’d shifted,
some spirits lifted,
and other
stolen moments.
You told me
to stop thieving
and start behaving.
Fat chance.
I would even nick myself
shaving.
Writing poems which rhyme can be tricky and tough
for words often look like they’re from the same bough,
yet the end of each line sounds quite different, though,
and best hidden behind a hiccough or cough.
I wonder, did this bother Byron or Yeats?
Or Larkin or Wordsworth, Auden or Keats?
Were opportunities presented or simply just threats?
Could they think up their rhymes without caveats?
But what should it matter when all’s said and done
if you should read this as scone when I meant scone?
It’s hardly a crime for which you need to atone;
it would all be baloney to an abalone.
So perhaps I should not be quite so afeard.
Some poems are best seen rather than heard.
He’d think about her
constantly – well, 22/7 –
never completing.
He even stopped eating.
Then, one day – at 3.14 –
a chance meeting.
But, sadly, not repeating.
It starts with a window,
preferably of the Georgian hung sash variety,
for the Poet is nowhere without one.
There may be other things involved, too:
a laptop, or some paper and a pencil,
or a Remington Home Portable.
And a pipe, of course.
Equipped, the Poet sets his* face
to one of Ruminative Contemplation
to survey the world through the window.
The Poet stares. The Poet gazes.
The lips purse. The brow furrows.
The eyes narrow and then …
a leaf floats down from a tree,
a snatch of birdsong is caught,
a postman rummages in his bag,
and the Poet is off!
The image, smell, sound
is plucked, examined, cross-examined,
until a memory is stirred …
perhaps the pattern
on a childhood picnic blanket in a Dorset field
or the trace of that first kiss
in a grimy bus shelter in Wolverhampton
or the crumbling headstones
of a Cumbrian church graveyard in October
which, in turn, provokes
larger – far grander – thoughts
about Life and Death and Beauty
and Hope and Truth and Loss
and God and Loneliness and Self
and Terror and Forgiveness
and so it continues
until the day slips softly into darkness
and the people who have proper jobs,
in factories and in offices and in shops,
walk past, carrying their bags and lives home,
and glimpse the Poet, silhouetted with pipe,
through his Georgian hung sash window,
and think to themselves
that he really needs to get out more.
Please note that Poets are available in all genders
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)
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.
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.
