Big Garden

As a child
I would often
cross the road
and catch grasshoppers
by their little legs
in the scrub patch
opposite our house.
We called it 'Big Garden'.

I would let them go at once.
I just needed that moment
when their tiny bodies thrusted
in the delicate tweezers
of my fingers.

That's twenty years ago I suppose.
The big garden is now a house
and my hands are too big for
catching grasshoppers.
I don't mind.
My priorities are different these days
anyway.

White Shark

The street is alive again
and I need some water
some bread and a bottle.
I left you sleeping on the steps
of the exchange and
propped a sign about your neck
that said
Caution: Great White
and hoped that would fend off the
bums and drunks who got too close.

I'll be back before the dawn
when the real monsters come
circling.

The Rainbow

I walked you to the hospital
and you talked of old Malawi.
'Pink Gin Days', you called them
and you cried.

Your boy was only five.
You left him for three days
alone and terrified
to talk of old Malawi.

Doctor, Doctor, what do we become?
The air, the sky, the elephants,
the sad and long-faced men?
The walk was done
and was undone.

We talked just then of Christ
and elephants.
Your boy is gone.

The Mood and the Moment

Young marine, you lost your friend.
His blood was in your hair.
Faceless killers and
a language you fail to speak.

Step across the desert,
move out of the sunlight
(ducking through the doorway).

Roomful of enemies;
women and kids.
They could be haunted.

You're pulling the dream together
from the trigger of your weapon.
Roomful of bloody dreams.
It's the mood and the moment.

The Lovers

I bet you don't remember this:
sitting cross-legged and drunk
on the roof of my car
and staring at the setting sun.

I told you you were beautiful
but you looked at me and said,
'If you think this is beauty,
you need your fucking head examined'.

Later, we made hurried love
behind the police station stables
and you whispered,
'love is one long rape'

and I took you home
and listened to your father's records.

Notes To Those About to Jump

All in all it's very sad
when people's parachutes go bad
It's quite enough to make you cry
as they come hurtling from the sky
screaming with their final breath
and plunging to a messy death.

I saw one once whose 'chute had failed.
(You wouldn't believe how much she flailed.)
Her legs and arms windmilled around
right up until she hit the ground.
At that point (and this is rather sick)
she just became a bloody slick.
Her parents got in quite a muddle
When they saw their daughter was now a puddle.

But you've got to see the funny side
as for every parachutist who died
there's loads who had a super time
and landed on their feet just fine.

So if out of your party three or four
end up as ghastly heaps of gore,
just tell their families to be realistic
and quote to them these great statistics
then help them out by saying, 'fuck it.
Let's collect your kid. I'll get a bucket'.

Destiny

You didn't see those falling logs
as the lorry bounced on the
corner of the curve.
Somehow the bump
threw them up
like grasshoppers.

I remember thinking about
something you'd said when we were
growing up
'Some people are born to
be killed in accidents', you had said
laughing
and then you fingered me
as a prime candidate.

I remembered also when we
were f---ing about on that frozen pond
and I knocked out three
of my brand new teeth.
You laughed.
'Better get used to it, Bro,
It's just a taster'.

Yeah, and now those logs
poised in the air
grasshoppers no more
sudden and fatal
and I thought I'd had it
but then everything
I thought I knew about gravity
went wrong
and the logs hit you instead.

I'm gonna miss you, Bro, but
I guess
you realised your destiny.

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

Part One - The bride.

You get me as you want me
Mimicking sighs in the lusty morning
Etching patterns of extasy into your back
with perfect unbitten fingernails.

You get me as you want me
Wearing skin tight primary nylon tops,
unredeemed denims
and no knickers to block your way.

You get me as you want me
Never saying that I love you,
Vacant-eyed as I find you cheating,
You'll never see my lipstick tears.

You get me as you want me
Crucified on our marriage bed
choking on your drunken breath
as you abuse me with arbitrary domestic objects.

I am strapped to the underside of the planet.
It slowly turns against me.


Part Two- The groom.

Who stapled that pornographic blowjob smile onto your face?
I do hope it wasn't me.

Who scissored away your memories of first love and closed-mouth kisses
and gaffer-taped a rough and hasty handjob in their place?
I honestly don't know anything about that.

And who, I wonder, mugged Cupid for his bow
and sent a volley of his little love darts into the
soft flesh of your unsuspecting cunt?
I was busy creating art so I didn't see the crime committed.

As I reap the crop from seeds I didn't sow,
I have to wonder if you even noticed the changes taking place?

How Not to Kill Everyone on the Planet

We were waiting for the bus
the bastard one oh seven
and you said, 'Hey, let's for fun
kill them all'
and I blew my nose and said
'Who?'
and then you just repeated
that one word
'All'
and went off swinging up Bounds Green Lane

Later, the police called and asked me
to come and get you from
the police station in Enfield.
You'd killed a cat, they said,
but you were sorry.

The Misfits

Two men were roping a wild white horse
on salty desert sands
and somehow the sky and clouds
were shades of grey
although the sun was shining.

And all through the silence of their concentration,
you did your crossword puzzle
and drank fresh lemonade and
stirred the ice-cubes with your finger
and licked your fingertips
and looked at me.

It was like I had been summoned before royalty
and you said something to me
that I never understood.

You said, 'I am the sky and the horse.
You are the men who drain the colors.
Let go. Let go of the rope'.

No-One Would Dare

I have to say it was obvious
as the water surged over her body
and the lifeguard was elsewhere
(up the beach with blondes I suppose)

I have to say I knew she wasn''t coming back
and when you looked at me and said
''Don''t worry'',
I thought ''coward''
but then you held me
and I held you back tightly
and hated myself

It broke all our friendships that day
as the water took her further away
and we each wore that same terrible expression
What did it mean?
We knew what it meant all of us.

It''s just hard to explain.

Rebellion and Murder

Rebellion and Murder

It's hot and it's Saturday afternoon.
The garden is the garden still.
I just came back from watching the ants
make a nest out of parts
of our shed.

I can't say how long I watched.
An hour at least.

They made their nest and it made me think
about chaos, about death
and life and birth and revolution.

I let the ants climb over my feet
and over my hands and arms and
then finally over my face and
into my
mouth.

I tasted their movements gravely
and felt suddenly old and tired.
Then drastically, I poured my coffee cup into
their nest
and watched them sail away
and watched them drown.

Christmas Cake: A Recipe For Life

Christmas cake: A Recipe for Life

Ingredients
5 teacupfuls flour
1 teacupful melted butter
4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded.
1 teacupful cream
1 teacupful treacle
Between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children, unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes slain 27th May 1234 near Altenesch, Germany.
1 teacupful moist sugar
80,000 Turks slaughtered at the Battle of Belgrade 1456
2 eggs
1oz of powdered ginger
20 million victims of First Crusade
1lb of raisins
several hundred thousand witches, burned at the stake or hanged
1 teaspoonful carbonate of soda
20,000 Huguenots killed on command of Pope Pius V
Thousands of Jews slaughtered in 1096, maybe 12,000 in total
All the Jews of Basel and Strasbourg, lightly burned.
200,000 Polish Jews, massacred in 1684.

Countless dates, all forgotten

1 tablespoonful of vinegar.