"irn" poems
Here come
pairs of legs
riddled with cellulite
accents
stuff the air
Neuwcassul
Burmingum
stores reek
of cheap tat
bargain last-few-quid items
Irish music
no-one gives a jig about
Mr. Whippy's
for sale every seven/six
make that five cafés
women packed
like bubblewrap
into denim shorts
middle-aged men
plagued with tattoos
Irn Bru tans
back at the chalet
kids thwack
plastic *****
with plastic racquets
next-door neighbours
puff on their nineteenth
*** before midday
come night
karaoke floods towards us
like a murky tsunami
don't stop believin'
hold on to that feelin'
but the girl
in the museum
had a ponytail
another one
dipped in gold
like a fancy chess piece
and I walk around
in a Norwich shirt
lick sea-breeze
and know
this isn't
home
Jul 29, 2014
Jul 29, 2014 at 3:29 PM UTC
You are four hundred and forty-six miles away
from me.
Four hundred and forty-six miles over
rivers, mountains, a country border,
over great London fist and Glasgow knot,
all passed by in the second it took
for your words to reach me
and the power of words
hits me like a big red double decker bus
and I wonder if it hits you
at least as hard as a can of Irn-Bru
and as Big Ben shakes the city
I think about how time is a greater barrier
than distance could ever be
because you are four hundred and forty-six miles from me
but yesterday you were only fifty centimeters away,
the distance of my eyes from the laptop screen.
Jul 23, 2013
Jul 23, 2013 at 1:41 PM UTC
I walked along the shore,
orchestra of shushes
as water slopped
across my bare toes,
jangle of pebbles
as I placed one foot
in front of the other.
In the distance
the orangeade tang of neon lights
punctuated the view,
electric hyphens
from the arcades
crammed with Irn-Bru-skinned tourists
there for a week
on this comma of coast.
In the winter it is different.
A silver fug that sweeps the streets
like the cocoons of a thousand ghosts,
machine jingles muzzled,
cafes only drip
fed with regulars
from around the corner
coming in to pick the horses
for the 2.10 at Uttoxeter.
The phone quaked in my pocket -
my mother, calling me home.
I passed the sandcastle rubble,
slobber of seaweed
like the drool of a kelpie,
my socks speckled with sand
as I texted back
on my way
Mar 24, 2018
Mar 24, 2018 at 11:57 AM UTC