There you go again,
jogging my memory,
exercising my conscience,
climbing up the wall bars
of my guilt,
bench-oppressing me.
But then you can hardly talk,
snug in my wallet,
smugly wallowing.
You’ve got no excuse.
Your plastic companions
are always active.
See the healthy sheen
of my Boots
Advantage card,
my library card
limbering up,
lithe and ready,
and just look
at that debit card,
flexing its muscles once more.
Yesterday I was very excited to take delivery of advance copies of my book, You Took the Last Bus Home. It is an objet d’art; a beautiful jacket, colourful endpapers, French flaps. Shame about the words inside but you can’t have everything, I suppose.
It publishes on 6th October and is available for pre-order from all those usual bookshop places.
You can find out more about it here: https://unbound.com/books/brian-bilston
WARNING: may contain poetry.
Brian
there he was,
chasing sticks,
doing tricks,
and all that stuff
next minute, woof
Yesterday was Read a Book Day apparently – as it should be every day. Anyway, here’s a poem to encourage such an activity.
it is hard to think
there’ll ever be
a better sprinter
he runs out faster
than the toner
that’s in my printer
I lay awake
all last night,
working out
the omnium,
turning the pedals
of my mind,
suffering from
insomnium.
it’s
been
four
years
since
we
last
met
and
I’ve
not
got
over
you
yet
Essential to any beach trip this summer
is Mouna Lellouche’s Obsidian Nights,
an exploration of the self and modernity,
and best consumed in its original Berber,
of course. She’s been gone a year now.
There’s no book that shouts ‘READ ME!’
louder than the waves which crash
upon the rocks than John Phillipston’s
fine new exploration of equine prostitution
in early modern theatre, ‘Tis Pity
She’s a Horse’. I woke one morning
and she’d just cleared out. And, finally,
any time spent relaxing underneath that –
no note, nothing – Mediterranean sun
would be incomplete without the latest –
she’d only taken the little suitcase –
Oriana Malmoud, whose new book,
The Insubstantiality of Things, is a sustained critique
of consumer culture – pizza again tonight –
which, she argues, can only be combated
by a new set of moral imperatives.
Well, love, it looks like you’ve got a shape-shifter
there, tricky buggers them, please excuse my French.
You’ll need your photon gun and a monkey wrench,
if you’ve got one to hand. Watch as you lift the
neutrona wand, love, valuable that is. Good
stuff. Now, there’s a cyclotron in that backpack,
not that your pretty head should worry about that.
It’s to concentrate the protons, see. That should
create a positronic ionized stream
to polarize with the negative charges
of the ectoplasm. Still with me, darling?
Lovely. Wait ‘til you hear the shape-shifter scream …
There. He’s not going anywhere! Now, love, just
pop him right inside this Muon Trap. Double
check he’s secure. We don’t want any more trouble
from the likes of him! There, you did it! You must
be exhausted. I didn’t think you’d stick it,
not at first. It’s tiring work – even for men.
A lot of people wouldn’t have it in them.
Still, a cup of tea will sort you out. Biscuit?
