Like modern day knights
we muster around a
table.

We don’t wear shiny armour
we wear suits that are 50% polyester
50% rayon.
Our jousting poles are have been

replaced with
nervously bitten biros,
and on a fuzzy screen the MD appears
speaking from a country where the currency is
colourful

but ultimately worthless.

His voice is delayed giving

and talks of mergers, leverage &
buy outs.

But I fade out like a ghost image in a propaganda film,

doodling hieroglyphics on a pad.

From the window I see workmen digging a
hole and I wonder will they ever reach China?

Have you tasted jealously ?
its like a misshapen stomach
that swallowed jellied biros .
Are you lacking in choreography,
where your own walk
should be the more significant dance
rather than the musings of a foolscap fanatic.

Waiting on the bus
sunglasses worn by female drivers,
scratched surface,
cigarette hanging,
redundant postbox,
red,
thoughts about letters and the written word.

A future with no pens.

Head shakes.

The pen is mightier than the sword will cause confusion in years to come.

"What is a pen?

a question from a future child - confused looking at pictures of biros.

These relics.

These dodos.

tippity tippity tap
tap tap tippity tap
tippity tap tap tap
And
stop.

This is not it.
This is not art,
this is no way for me to start.
This glowing screen
this cold machine
can never catalyze my dreams into
                                       communication
                                                ­   conversation
or fire my
                                                            ­imagination (nor can
The mincing of a pen
across neat lines).  Writing only hurts my hand.

And so,
I stand.

Re-align the ol’ synapses
Click my fingers and my HOUSE collapses!
   And  THERE,
Planet Earth, with a grin, says,
“I dare you!  Throw form to the winds!”  And I,

I want to blast my words from the sky
with a big, black blunderbuss,
scatter the survivors to the four corners of heaven!

I want to ****** my fingers, scraping in the grit,
Frantically digging in the glaur and the grime for runaway rhyme

I want to haul my metaphors in, thrashing, from the sea
Hold them, know them, set them free!

I want my similes to flatten me
Like rhinos on the rampage

Tell me your stories, in everything you do
Make a bonfire of biros, a pixel pyre
And dance  your poems as the flames leap higher!

I want to write with my FEET across a Scotland-shaped sheet!

I do not want to be neat.

To tether in letters,
To file for forgetters.

Words on a page are birds in a cage,
Poetry unspoken
Life, unwoken.

How many have stood,
will stand beside you
in Heptonstall,
had a photo taken
next to her spot?
Students, admirers
from any nook or cranny
with drained biros,
Ariel under an arm,
her morning song spoken
again, and again.

You're the next-door neighbours
they haven't come to see.
Only a lonely cup
of coffee-stained
hunchbacked flowers
where you lie
in loving memory,
with Emily,
husband with wife,
home to the right
of the graveyard's star.