Selected poems

Refugees

Assorted Poems, Selected 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, Selected 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, Selected 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.

The Ice Cream Vans

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

It has been warm this winter
so it was not until today

that I saw the vans begin
their slow rumble south –

startled into movement
by the early January frost

which had gathered softly
upon their windscreens

before waking them suddenly
as if from a night sweat.

I watch this strange procession
as it passes, a curious sight

suggestive of fun and funerals –
an ice-creamed cavalcade,

a cornettoed cortege
of lollies and ninety-nines,

all pinks and whites
and Mr Whippy markings –

bound for North Africa.
Not all will make it.

And, as they pass by,
I hear the wayward chimes

of Greensleeves, O Sole Mio,
Half a Pound of Treacle,

for these are the songs
they sing to each other

as they start their journey
and I feel myself charmed

even though they do not
chime for me.

Pretty Things

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

They spent the day swapping
stardust-sprinkled stories

of classroom rebel rebels
and rescued car journeys,

eye-shadowed evenings
of first gigs and girlfriends,

best gigs and boyfriends,
fan letters insanely penned,

awkward teenage oddities,
faces and phases and changes,

moon landings, all-time lows,
serendipity in far-off places,

the loneliness of Lazarus,
and the golden years of families,

fame, fashion, fancies, dances,
all the fanatically-vinyled panoplies,

tall, true tales of we-can-be-heroes,
for Planet Earth was blue

and there was nothing else
they could do.