I'd like to pepper my poems
With referenes to Greek mythology
Or sprinkle a little Norse legend
Throughout my stanzas.
But, alas, it will never be:
For, you see,
I utterly failed my Literature GCSE.

Hazards lie in wait
As the Disco lights ignite.
Rhythm the seducer
The DJ the inducer.

Fragments of a cacophony hung in the air:
A note here, a note there

Broken glass crushed underfoot
Traffic-cone-trumpets playing flat notes
A grievous insult to the left
Uproarious laughter to the right:

All in all a right riotous night!

I hung tantalisingly in the night sky
For a billion and more years,
Your coy companion,
Your one-faced little twin sister
Left barren by our mutual creation.
Glad was I then
- as an Aunt to your four billion children -
That you sent twelve to visit me in my dotage.
I do hope you visit in peace again soon.
Yours faithfully,
The Moon.

My dear Astronaut,
Love you to the moon and back:
Easy on splashdown

Your creeping tendrils reek of toil and stress,
They've taken root beneath my bed,
Your nourishment is the nightly sweat,
That drip drip drips off my forehead;
You lap it up greedily.
Every drop intensifying your desire to confuse me,
To consume me with self-doubt,
Slowly but inevitably,
Turning my mind against itself.

An unwilling host for your dark massy form,
I carry you silently dusk to dawn.
You grow fatter day-by-day,
Becoming ever more greedy night-by-night,
Taking joy in supping on my liquid fear:
Like the perfect storm at sea,
You are too big to weather.
You are a ferocious dog let slip his lead.

You have blocked all escape routes,
Your shifting, insiduous form did that stealthily,
My mind, turned-in, paralyzes me:
A mental and physical double-lock,
Confining me to my king-size prison,
Meaning you can gorge upon my misery,
Until you leave nothing but an empty shell,
Then friends and family will all agree, 
"at least now he is free of his living Hell"

Something high in the sky is superior
It views me as completely inferior
I fear for my soul
Lest it fall down a hole
Into a fiery Lake Superior.

A ****** of Orange and Yellows
Pushed you through the Blue
Into the star spangled Black backdrop
For the White-Yellow companion
Of your Green and Blue Mother Earth.

You dug today
Some mud and clay
With two-year-old hands
And a giant *****.
You dug today
A new place to play
Filthy, muddy wonderlands;
Just the place for an escapade!

I miss those days when I could turn heads,
And woke up each morning in other people's beds.

Two of you,
One in a lunar limbo
And billions of us.
Armstrong and Aldrin
And Collins
And Earth.
One small step
Two deep breaths
A billion or more gasps.
Mother Earth, Module and Moon:
a human constellation.

An ancient language,
Perhaps the oldest,
But still a target
And the **** of jokes
From many many English folk.

Abandon the failures,
Imperfections are unacceptable:
Loved ones were perfect in shape and spirit
(in imperfect, idealised memories).

Flawed not flawless,
These bespoke folk:
They are and are not that rotting loved one.

'Failed clone'
Society's latest stigma.

'Orphaned clones'
The lowest class.

"The rash keeps coming back!
They've given me a cream,
But it keeps coming back"
Public symptoms announcements:
It never ceases to amaze me
The willingness to declare illness.

Love's expressions hide deep within my mind.
I lack a link from mind to mouth,
Dumbstruck whenever I am lovestruck.
My Cupid is mute and wears a Dunce's cap,
His hands quiver and his arrows blunt.
Despite this, I long to steady myself,
To sharpen my wit,
To hear my own voice tell of my love.
But this is too much, too soon
So I took to ink and paper to put words to feelings.
The pen hovered, frigid, not wishing to kiss the paper
But muscle was mightier than the sword
And with touch achieved, my love bled onto the page.
Finally, expressions of love were conceived.
Overcome, I tore out the page,
Read and read again
And vowed to read aloud my words.
However, it was not to be,
Shame, being my Nemesis,
Struck me dumb once more
And guided my hand to an old shoe box
In which I deposited this bill of love.

The petrol flowed into its stomach.
Me, its feeder and its keeper,
The taxed and the fined,
The disqualified and the uninsured.
The gullible, puppy-eyed fool
Who bought a machine
To make him look cool.

Cars are real jerks.

Five men on stools:
Men of the hour seeking power.
Silly fools.
Bickering and sniggering,
Blowing their own trumpets,
Apart from He who blows a Trumpette
And cares not what he says,
And whose fans care not what he says
As he stumbles into power
And feels the hand of Churchill upon his crotch.

You ripped the door off:
The electro-magnetic attachment
Was no match for your frustration,
Which goes to show,
You cannot guard against
A young man's anguish
Manifested as rage,
A judged and stigmatised rage,
Born of poor attachment:
An open door that was never closed.

Memories compressed under a thin sheet of glass,
A camera first and telephone last.
My laughter, my pride and my joy it stores,
Joylessly sealed in a glass and metal sandwich.
But this little device taking over my life,
Has one disadvantage:
A finite memory full to bursting,
Warning me it's 'Dangerously Low on Space'.

Just as a frog cannot relate to a tadpole,
He could not recognise his younger self.
No retrospective map of life had he,
No string-tied bundles of diaries
Or heavy-hearted Journals
To reunite him with the naïf
Who floated along life's river
Unaware of being navigated by others,
Others who rowed but did not instruct
And abandoned ship on the stroke of his eighteenth
Leaving him overawed and falling overboard,
To eventually flounder upon the shores of independence
Until he was forced to stand on his own two feet of clay,
Like some evolving amphibian
Waddling into life,
Stomping and stumbling in the quagmire of society.
A faux pas here, a faux pas there,
Slow and painful lessons
That built resilience and self-reliance
Resulting in a proudly self-made man,
Now unaccustomed to failure
And whose memories of humiliating failure
Have sunk to the bottom of the river of his life.

The weather was changeable,
A warming sun for the previous hour,
Then, without warning,
The wind rose high,
The roof rose higher:
No use running for cover, I thought,
Since the cover had gone the way of my courage.
You see, I had a role to fulfil
Sure, its fulfillment in sunny spells was a breeze
But in a Force Ten gale?
(Cue howls of laughter)
Progress was at the pace of a snail
And nerves are torn to ribbons
(Much like the poor flags).
Was it life or death?
Well, it depended on how much you didn't wish to die.
Luckily for me, my aim in life is not to witness death
And that is why I pushed on,
And huffed and puffed
Until we got our Lifeboat to the stricken drunken Jetski pilots.

We heard a creak in the attic
I sent my wife to investigate.
She's still up there,
Negotiating with our new-found tenant
Who is totally unrepentant
For having snuck into our home
And setting up camp.

The polite crowd clap and whoop
Their brogues and plimsoles tap the floor.
Yeah, they worship and adore
This little mess of a group.

Their tunes were never mainstream
Which is just how the cool kids like it
Their identities pursue the dream:
Reject the norm and fight it.

My friend is a very good man,
Nothing to hide
No terrorist ties
But still,
He really looks like Carlos the Jackal.

I met the Devil the other night.
But, try as he might,
He couldn't deceive this old Knight.

I'd met Death the previous day.
I'd lost my way,
But I convinced her to go away.

God has spoken to me in the past.
Been a long time since we spoke last.
It's time He stuck His colours to His mast.

Was it never more than lust
Looking back at all the fuss?!
Let me white-out 'love' from my biography
And write out 'lust' on that paper's scab.

And when I think back on those romantic notions,
It's clear that all those loving feelings I thought I had
Were triggered by lotions and potions
Perfumes, cocktails and blind devotions.

But now, with the benefit of hindsight,
I see the cheap trick youth plays on the mind;
Naivety conspires with shallowness,
And confuses lust with love!

The two of you rely on the two of us.
Such trust you place unknowingly.
No other life do you really know;
No yardstick but the notched door
That charts your slow-quick-slow growth.
But read between the notches:
The spaces between them represents nurture and nourishment,
Sustained by our love for you both.

I'm my own worst critic:
I think my 'work' is good.

Why do I stick to it?
Because I'm sure to think I'm good.
It's the best I can offer
All I have to proffer,

I know why I bother,
I quite enjoy my own poet's corner,
Which for me is a sanctuary;
In which to spend a stolen private moment
From a day tending to my children
And retaining gainful employment.

The further away I get from you
The more I can see into your past.
Time and space offer a grander view
Of how we made it last.

When we were joined at the hip
And our love was new,
All your faults were totally eclipsed
By my romantic idealised view of you.

"Jesus Makes You Smug"
Is was it said on his coffee mug.
"****** atheist is lucky I'm a pacifist"
Thought the very angry Jesuit.

Your secret stands tip-toe on my shoulder,
It leans in to whisper in my ear,
The teller, the story, the revelation
Intoxicate me,
Spin me dizzy,
Turn my thoughts fizzy.
Your messenger tells me you love me:
This was most unexpected!

Red Kite hovers and spies,
A Raven studies a dying lamb,
Sheep graze the grass,
A pheasant enters left looking lost.

I gaze out at this scene
Through sheets of glass.
I am distinct from real nature,
Cocooned by architecture.

That youthful streak in you
Cared not for its state of repair.
The risk and reward of a joyride
Was irresistible to your impulse.
So, with a pickpocket's grace,
The key to car and fate was yours.

And so, to the moment
Where you left our reach:
Youthful daring did dictate
That the narrow asphalt stream you would take.
A hard black shimmering Styx,
That offered you a deadly deal:
Beat me one more time
Or your soul will be mine.

We're still unsure what occured,
That sunny, hope-filled evening,
The hedges and trees caught you in their grasps.

I like to think that this world knew your path,
That the trees and hedges' limbs were trying to slow you.

But their warning you did not heed,
Faster and faster
Not slower and slower.
Your treacherous instinct had kicked in,
The wounded car a wild horse
Who knew only one thing:
Run, run, run!

We knew it ended at a passing place,
(the irony won't let me forget)
A car driving the opposite way.
No room for you both
On this narrow stretch of the Styx:

You lost control,

Nature and mechanics lost their grips,

You went into a roll,

Your steed unseated you,

And, well...

We miss you.

My my, your royal Highness
How your drug of choice
Overcomes your shyness!
We haven't seen you in a while,
We've missed that wicked smile.
Stick around, take a seat
Take that weight right off your feet.
We were just saying,
There's no point complaining;
Old habits will never die,
So sit back and let's get high!