Hand of God

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

We cried blue murder at the time.
It was a crime against humanity,
Not an act of spontaneity
From the digits of a deity.

Still, the next week, each lunchtime,
We were all doing it.
Any aerial challenge became
An opportunity for divine intervention,
With an asphalt Ascension
Into a playground pantheon
Of class-war champions
Beckoning for anyone who could
Pull off a palm of providence
With confidence.

And although our clumsy
Sleights of hand were always exposed,
Like a bungled party trick,
It didn’t stop us from trying
To create artistry out of artifice.

Clive of Suburbia

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

Clive’s a brass-knocker examiner,
A doughty door-hammerer,
Selling Wikipedia Britannica
With suburban street stamina.

He goes from door to door.
His feet feel sore and raw.
He’s just turned forty-four,
More or less (for less is more).

He’s a doorstep smash-and-grabber
A gilt-edged gift of the gabber,
He got the moves, he got the glamour,
He got more jabber than MC hammer.

To Clive there can be nothing easier
Than selling self-authored pseudo-academia,
Fifty leather-bound laptops of Wikipedia,
With a month’s free access to Virgin Media.

Compilation Cassette

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

It was about three weeks after we met
That I began work on that compilation cassette.
Each track the result of a deliberation worthy
Of the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints,
Subject to a process of veneration and beatification
Before acceptance into the cassette tape canon.
It’s a miracle it got made at all.

I can’t remember now which songs made the cut.
There would have been no Country & Western,
(There was never any Country & Western)
But they would have shown me to be
Discerning yet eclectic, both acoustic and electric,
Vaguely exotic, mildly erotic, quintessentially quixotic
And other things I was not.

I don’t know whether you ever played my cassette.
By the time I had posted it through your letter-box,
You had already started going out with Colin Hancox.
He was good at rugby.