The weight of the world
as it waits for the red, red earth to move
a collective breath held
as a personal fear is shared

For a news cycle, we care
and choke a little at the tiny coffin
before clowns and sabre-rattlers
blind us from the graves behind

The sounds of your voices
work with me,
the resonance of your mirth,
your anger, your vexation,
your empathy, your soul,
is orchestral in our everyday scrum
to keep me humming along

I seem to have missed the lesson,
or maybe it was a paid seminar,
where being a ******* to folk not like you
is seen as cool

A staggering self-belief, or indoctrination
into a way of thinking that excludes
the workers, powerhouses, batteries,
seems insane in a way
that only limited lineages
seem genetically capable of

But now I’m stooping, so I’ll stop

Let’s all stop
being in thrall to noisy *******,
rugger-buggers who had charmed and broken youths,
who knew no hunger except in minds
and no kindness except paid for

I would feel pity, but these bred monsters
are parasitic,
so to let them survive,
******* and spouting lies,
kills us all in the end.

Britannia rules these waves

Get the angle right,
and the light from a wan blue sky
reflects on the sodden ground
like a disco dancefloor,
pathfinding to somewhere
with umbrellas in glasses,
sand between toes
and baked skin

That it is February
in this upper latitude
can do one for a minute,
let us lounge, sweat loose
and remember our grins

The bitterness of five
square spaced letters
gladiatorial, etymological,
born of thought,
a daily word hurdle
just to **** with friends

This knee used to be fine,
no grinding feelings or immobility,
I crouched like a god

I also had back muscles
that laughed off twisting,
I wiped my *** with gay abandon

My eyes focused when I woke
and any blurriness was a sign
of rock ‘n’ roll

Now, as my supposed wisdom grows,
this flabby mechanism
seems want to say no

Hear those Friday beats drop
from hard to soft
as seconds elongate,
minim rests to pause
until all too belatedly
you are freed to remember