Selected poems

LOVE POEM, WRITTEN IN HASTE

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

(with Autocorrect turned on)

O what Brave New Worm is this
That holes you, my sweet darting love?
I see you in the stairs that twinkle
In the heavy above.

Your light shins down upon me
and sets my heart on fir.
You stir up my emoticons
And fill me with dessert.

I gazebo upon your lovely Facebook.
Your rainy nose, sweet, unmissable,
The blue-greed eyes like limpet pools,
And your petty mouse, juicy and kissable.

Come with me, Angle of my Dreams,
Hold my ham and journalist into the night
And together lettuce explore the worm,
Over the horizontal and out of sigh.

You are a map

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

In bed, my fingers trace your contours,
caress the lines from coastal margins,
slide along secluded pathways

and linger in hidden beauty spots,
before a gentle incline leads them
to the peaks of two majestic hillocks

separated by a narrow ravine,
to be followed down, down, until
vegetation arrives as a surprise,

scrub makes way for enchanting forest.
I ready myself to plunge into the interior
but then I am told to turn off the light

and I carefully fold my scale 1:25 000
Ordnance Survey OL4 Map
of The Lake District: North-western area,

including Keswick, Cockermouth & Wigton,
before placing it back in my bedside drawer,
alongside my pipe, nail clippers and loose change.

Please Take This Hand In Yours

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

Please take this hand in yours
and hold it tight,
then bury it in the garden
in the dead of night.

His other body parts,
I will put in the ground,
when it’s peaceful and quiet
and there is no-one around.

Lines Written Upon Arriving At A Holiday Cottage And Discovering The Lack Of Reliable Wi-Fi

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

slow burning days drag by
as the smouldering fag ends of hours
turn themselves to ash

second-hand jigsaws
sleep smugly on dusty shelves,
uncontrite at their incompleteness,

next to a well-thumbed
Robert Harris and the fortnight
stretches like old laddered tights

evenings drab with scrabble
and the death rattle of yahtzee dice
provide no substitute

for videos of piano-playing cats
instagram selfies, status updates
and Lionel Richie memes

instead this, the buffering
and the suffering and the shutters
which rattle in the wind

The Importance of the Oxford Comma

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

Owing to ambiguities caused by its omission,
the Oxford comma became the subject of a petition
raised by serious serialists desperate to ensure
its use was to be mandated in lists of three or more.

Signatures flooded in from across all of society;
never had they expected to see such variety.
Who would have thought that those in favour
would have had such a diverse, democratic flavour?

There were the investment bankers,
the robbers and thieves,
as well as C-list celebrities,
the needy and mildly-diseased.

There were the footballers,
clowns and less mentally able,
alongside the poets,
unemployed and emotionally unstable.

There was Michael Gove,
a drug fiend and a trafficker of human organs,
and, of course, the sexual deviants,
Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan.

Such was the range of names
that the list did constitute.
Oh, not to forget the Queen,
a well-known madam and a prostitute.

Exclamation Mark!

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

Mark was his name!
He would shout and proclaim!

Every sentence he wrote
would end just the same!

He would assert! He would blurt!
He would ejaculate and spurt!
Each line was a screamer!
A gasper! A slammer! A shrieker!
A literary loudspeaker!!!

Frankly, it all began to needle and nark!
Why did no one think to question Mark?

Read My Lips

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

I don’t need a lover
who’s a looker,
just someone who knows
the shortlist
for this year’s Booker,

with an insightful view on
Doris Lessing or Ian McEwan,
being satanically well-versed
in Salman Rushdie,
and would find it cushty
to share pillow talk
about the work of A.S. Byatt.

Yes, that would be a riot.

I could never judge a lover
by her cover,
be swayed by make-up
or a fancy hair do;
I’d much rather her be intimate
with À la recherche du temps perdu.

To be clear, I’m not talking
Fifty Shades of Grey here,
but finding someone
who knows their way around
the complete works of Shakespeare.

I would rip out my heart
and write her name upon it
if she can recite to me
his eighteenth sonnet.

So don’t give me eyes
to get lost in;
I’d rather have a heated debate
about Jane Austen.

I don’t care if she talks
in a Donald Duck voice,
if, together, we can thumb
through the stories of Joyce,

nor will we ever feel
an unbridgeable gulf
if neither of us are afraid
of Virginia Woolf.

You see, one thing I’ve learnt
as I’ve got older
is that literature
lights up love
and makes it smoulder

and that beauty
is in the eye
of the book holder.