My auld fellah
Had a boss way
Of pricking pomposity
With his prong
He'd simply listen to them bloviate
Then
Get their name slightly wrong.

The happy guitar player
Was excited
Today was his young son's birthday
He presented him
With the beautiful hand crafted six string
His great grandfather had made
That was given to him by his own dad
When he was the same age as the lad was now
"Son" he said "I give you this,as is our family tradition,
that you might bring music and sweet laughter into
the world.It won't make you rich but you will have
the precious asset of creativity,to know you brought
some inner spark from what is you and from whole
cloth cast it into the ether for all to hear.I impart the
same advise my dad gave to me on this day.Never be sharp,
never be flat,always be natural."
The father smiled warmly
And handed the boy the guitar
He carefully took it
Weighed it in his hands
His eyes pouring over every excuisite detail
Even after a hundred and thirteen years
He could detect whiffs of cedar and rosewood
He stood in silence a moment
Then looking up
He met his fathers adoring gaze

He then beat him to death with it
Cut his **** off with the E string
Wrote THE FUTURE IS NOW
In **** blood on the wall
Set fire to the house
And went off to become
An AI software engineer.

If nature abhors a vacuum
Why doesn't she fill us in?
Does she know where the voids are?
Or how they did begin?
Cos there's plenty of em out there
As well as within
But they're never completely empty
Just scaresly occupied
Introspection
And space telescopes
Might keep us
Petrified.

They don't care it dooms them
They don't give a ****
Oft portrayed as the earths saviours
They're just nihilistic humps!

My ma would say
It's bin a funny old year
But I remember her saying that
Since I've bin able to hear
Or at least to remember
That I could do the same
Everyone does it
Everybody is to blame
We generally don't  demur
To the ones we deem smart
There is in em
The  truth
That we feel in our hearts
But do us a favour
And check the year's news
And see just how accurate
These ***** were with
Their  views.

There's a sweet silver hue on the grass this morn
Soft defracted through the dew
A warm misty drift is formed
Soundtracked by the pigeons
Moaning low
A quiet transcendent being is born
The briefest of existence
Magnifies it's vague brilliance
As a cloud bank rolls over
And screens it for awhile
You know that it's still there
A bulwark against the care
That been persistently nagging you
To be alive
But when the sun appears again
something has know changed
It's flattened out
All joy gone south
Your eyes cast down
And once again
Yourself you do chide.

I love terrible weather
But it always passes me by
I should go and work for
NASA.

The provision of suicide booths
Would be like free air travel
For those who say
They'll leave the country
Should the other side prevail.

He's psoriasis
And cirrhosis
Got the tablets mixed up
But both nestled
In his ale gut
It didn't matter
A ****.

It's the Badminton horse trials today
Seems an exercise in futility
How are they going to
Toss up the shuttlecock?

This time it's Ecumenical!
Especially if you include the pagans
All rolled together
Ritual,food and offerings
To both the Carpenter
And Goddess Eostre
That what was Ceasre's
Could have been laid before her
Fresh Cherry Blossom
Swirls down on to rotting Magnolia
And it's only Holy Tuesday.

Too young for the first
Too old for the second
Quite the fine timing
When all is reckoned
He could have been one of the 20 percent
Destroyed at the Somme
Their flags and their bodies
Horribly rent
Or shredded with schrapnel
On Omaha beach
French liberation for them
Just beyond reach
Instead he was a docker
And fathered eight kids
Imagine the population difference
In this fair land
If Arch Duke Frankie
Had not got whacked
By the Gavrillo and the Black Hand
But the war machine rolled
And the tales all got told.
My lucky grandad
With his dockers hook
Stands and stares at the future
From the Liverpool Dock.

Memory is a *******
It lets you stay there
In that fuzzy place
Beyond fear and care
When you think back
It's not the event you recall
But the last time you recalled it
In the records hall
Edited each go
By what's on your mind
Subconscious gymnastics
Act as a blind
To what really went on
Decades ago
If you saw as true
Up your guts you would throw.

It's tough having  a bet on the new Pope
So few know the runners and riders
It's not like getting a tip on the Gold Cup
A sparsity of insiders

At least round here

Though there's no shortage of followers
The intricacies of conclave politics
Amount to insider trading
Could they go to Africa
Or the rar east
The home team
Must be leaning and persuading

Maybe ***** to the rules
Gender swap the role
Like they do these days in the movies
Get a lass on the throne
Resize the fisherman's ring
Perhaps everything will be groovy.

I'm lining em up
Urologist
Proctologist
Phlebotomist
Clinician
Radiologist
Encologist
Anaesthesiologist
Mortician.

In a former church
With friends
After a boozey train ride
A transient slide into
A magnificent side show
Of another's life
She want you to look into
The family bond
Of the performance
The beauty
Of the
Respondence
The glide on the way home

Just enough arseholes
To keep things interesting
Yin pushes yang
You know
That kind of thing
Like the outer spinning arms
Of a spiral galaxy
They are on all edges
Seeking calamity.

What must it have been like in Jerusalem
After the dust of that first Easter settled?
Imagine the recriminations
On all sides
Including the Romans
The way it was handled
Who was a traitor?
What now?
Who wants to lead?
What the **** just happened?
Will the grief
Not be relieved?

I just seen my footprints
In the snow
Good lord!
I walk funny
Like the left leg
Doesn't like the right
And won't look it in the eye
The problem is the hip
Denuded of articulate cartilage
The grind and weakness
Make my gait so obvious
If it gets much worse
I'll be walking round in circles
Getting more pathetic
Like an inverted turtle
When I look down
At the frosty prints
It's really quite a shock
If you want to know what time it is
It's always nine o clock.

Some people talk about what we've done to nature
And how it will have its revenge
Then how come I've just seen a crow
Struggling with a gull
Over a chunk o pepperami?

The strait is calm
Now's the time
Row me out
To the isle of graves

The sky is clear
But not for long
Soon will the come
The dark waves

That make the passage
So arduous
And unreflective
I won't get my story straight
Time is short
And winding down
They don't like it if you're late

It's hard enough
With this skinny fellah
And his one string viola
His riff so harsh
And unrelenting
As to induce
Catatonia

Speaking of strings
I've got one left
It is taut
Yet resisting
I see the ladies
With their scissors
How long to still be existing?

Essentially inedible
Is that all
That terrible?
When you consider
Where the criticism came from.

Got arseholed and lost in Glasgow
Wandered off into the hills
Eons passed it seemed in stasis
Ended up in the Bootes void
Came to with a start
As I floated inside of eternity
Took me ages to get a cab
Then I woke in Central station
Laided out on a bench
In the lap of some fella
Called Rabb.

If Alan Latchley
Were still alive you could ask him
Like he said
She can bring a tear to your eye
She can bring the blood to your shoulder
She can bring the kettle to the boil
Cos football is about nothing
Unless it is about something
And what it is about
Is football
He tossed a coin into the air
He let it fall
He knew not where
But at least
He could look himself
In the mirror
In the morning and say
There is a man!

Drukenactivity
There I just made up an new word
I know you don't agree with me
But that just makes you sound absurd
Cos the activity o the drunk
And the productivity
They sow
Makes you the biggest
***** that
I have ever known.

How many times
Have you looked at a digital clock
Seen 9-11
And thought what are the odds?
On any given day it's 1440 to 1
If you calculate that way
Like Del Amitri said
Five oh five
Is not SOS
That's initially
How we got into this mess
So roll over avoid the distress
Of your screaming time piece.

When Loudons in a mood
There's just nobody like him
Seems he could spit regret and bile
Ad infinitum
Found one of his CDs
At the back of the shelf
Still had its cellophane jacket on
A lot of dust it's repelled
It's one of them
My father left to me
Without knowing
Turned the case over in my hands
Tiny aftershock
Sweetly glowing
Seems almost a shame
To take its thin coat off
But it won't feel the benefit
When it's time to shuffle south.

My auld man
Saw a ghost when he was alive
In England's most haunted pub
Strangely enough
He swore he wasn't lying
Or that he was half cut
The ***** doesn't work that way
Unless at the extreme edge
Not in the middle of the day
When asked what the spectre looked like
He said "Just some normal fella."
He liked a joke Jimmy did
But in his voice there was a tremor
And a tone not oft heard from him
in point of fact not ever
His mates started calling him The Exorcist
A double meaning both were clear
For he'd visit you in the evening
And make your spirits disappear.

As he and the eleven
Rested In Bethany
The iscariot chose this Wednesday
To fall profound into infamy
He sold himself cheap
Didn't go for the big money
The standard price of a slave
Thirty pieces
Was all he had coming
But that play was a ruse
A ploy and a bluff
He just didn't think The Lord
******* enough.

It's falling out the ether
It wants to find your 🧠
To slide down your 📡
Is it's exclusive aim
It exists to make connection
With you and you alone
No other mind  can house it
Cos it's come so far from home.

The mark of your smartness
I failed of course
It meant the school
You got sent to
From central casting
Divorced
There's probably somat similar
In this modern age
But I've got no kids
So I cannot engage
On the way we educate
And who goes where
So I shrug to my fellow dummies
You'll  be fine
Ignore the *******
I'll see you over there.

The timing belt
On the conveyor is loose
It jerks and it stutters
That won't be taken as excuse
And the boss man refuses to shut down the line
Got to keep his numbers up this month
Short sighted selfish functiory
Without any spine
So the drones work like drones
With staples and tape
And put their hands in the moving machine
Praying it won't break
Risking injury and death
Cos the job must get done
As the ******* sneaks off early
Away to have his fun
But the tales always the same
The line is bound to choke
Then they'll wheel in the next dicksweat
And trust again to hope.

You know when you need a ****
But just cannot release?
Cos self containment
Is something
That will not desist
Then don't think of your bladder
Think of the abyss
Then there will no need
To move your
Photons
To this.

Roald Dahl's unexpected tales
Was inhabited
Mostly by fails
115 episodes
They put up on the clock
The vast majority though
Just made you scoff
Poorly written
With lacklustre pay offs

Of course there were fine exceptions

The Irish pickpocket
Lot's wife
And the lamb of slaughter
Showed how it could be
Just what it ought to
And then there was the sharpest of all
Spark a lighter ten times
Or lose a finger
As i recall

But on the whole
The lack of quality
Made the mind boggle
I much preferred the gory
Hammer house of horrors.

Just before telescopes and such
He dared venture out to touch
Not just the face of God
But more
Than the church allowed
No centre could there be
No sun circling
You and me
Planets around other stars
Holy uniqueness not ours
So they strung him upside down
In front of all the town
And burnt him
Through the hours
Upon the Field Of Flowers.

What does a priest keep in his allotment shed?

Lettuce spray.

Where's all this rain they keep talking about?
It not fell for awhile
But it's hardly a drought
Weatherman don't know what he's talking about
Where's all this rain?

You don't feel it yourself
What others think of you
And they rarely say it
Not within your earshot
Till its too late
Standing over your box
You don't feel it yourself

Some day a real rain will come
Like Travis said to the candidate
Been thinking of Firearms and Mohicans of late
The time has passed for scholarly debate
Some day a real rain will come.

If you make the crowd laugh
Then you're winning
Doesn't matter
How ****
Your argument is
If your opponent left
Flustered and squirming
He's the one
Who is stinking of ****
Play to the gallery
That's how it is
Like Sun Tzu said
If he's a hot head
Take the ****.

The Holy Mountain
Had Christs for sale
The road to perdition
Had a basket of ****** Mary's
Blackadder sold fake holy relics
Telly and movies
Have a pretty dim view
Of the church's
Financial activities.

Great
Holy
Easter
Bright
The week that unlocks the door to the light
In the six weeks since the pancakes and the ashes
Selected abstinence
To the Lord brings a confluence
A coming together of saviour and saved
Through the shared experience
Of gratification delayed
While he starved in the desert
Tempted by pure evil for forty days
We gave up chocolate
That's how the lord we did praise.

Everything's going somewhere
Even if it's nowhere quick
Those ahead are expanding
Into nowt that we can expect
And when we get there
It'll be changed by what has been
Is this some slow punishment?
The rubber
Against sin.

There's some places you go
Where the mantle is thin
And there's just enough cracks
In the crust to begin
To let something through
With no shape and no size
No essence of anything
On which to rely
For definition
Or earthly ken
Makes you start to remember
Of occurrences when

You've felt this before

Kefalonia
Central Glascow
The street where you live
The whole nation of Ireland
These locations all give
Pause for thought
On what is and what ain't
The nature of fact
Though it's incredibly faint
I felt it most pronounced
Outside Cozzarelli's in Belleville New Jersey
Over ten years later
Still makes me uneasy.

In the garden of Eden baby
In the room above a pub
In the valley of the shadow
That's where I found my love

When dinosaurs ruled the earth
The day the Earth stood still
When a river ran right through it
That's when I got my fill

Something in the way she moves
Some day my prince will come
Some enchanted evening *******
Some kind of wonderful

Who watches the watchmen?
Whose side are you on?
Who are you peter Townsend?
Whose heavy head wears the crown?

Licking *****
Is. O course
The job you have signed into
When  it goes  to  
The thing that thing
Doth damage the plate we know
That stamps the truth
How doth thou it do
And then contemplate into
What We all die alone
That seems where we came in here.

Cos it lives in your veins
And it crawls on your skin
It aches in your bones
Like some fell vitamin
And it alters your thoughts
It empties your bank
It drags to the light
All the things that you lack
It scatters your friends
They got their own trouble
tryin to deal with their own Jones
Here it comes! On the double

So you ask the question now dawning
Is the high in the night
Worth the cough in the morning?

Any moment now
A light will descend
Better take some with you baby
Around the bend

It comes and goes
To them that really want it
I tell myself,I'm not one of those
Only time will tell
If I'm not telling the truth
I don't know myself
Well,how about you?

When left is right
It's left to better men than me
To chase the light around the bend

All those nights I just dallied in vain
All those nights I lay twisted with shame
Time is leaking completely unchecked
Time to cut your self free from this wreck
Time to digest and quickly move on
Time takes the **** out of us all.

Pick a friend
Any friend
And shuffle em
Into the pack
Could end up in the front
Or way in the back
Might be lost in the middle
Or at any point hence
If your buddy holds the crown
Could you mount a defence
Of him and you
And his family of course
Would you see him on the battlefield
On his big ******* horse
For they say
A fully shuffled deck
Will never be dealt the same twice
So if youre planing a dynasty
Seek different advice.

You can't have any pudding
If you don't eat your meat!
HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANY PUDDING
IF YOU DONT EAT YOUR MEAT?!?!?!?!!!!!!!

God came to me
In a dream last night
He didn't say which one
Voice ambiguous
Shape unclear
My eyeballs overcome
He's a lot funnier
Than you might expect
He's quite fond of a pun
His advice is for all
To laugh together
Or cry apart
Then all is done.