Poet, singer, songwriter, actor - there's no beginning to my talents. Working constantly and live blissfully on the North East coast I’m a poet based in the North East of England and my poems have been published all over the place.
Torn bloodied from the belly of the earth beneath your tinytoes, I am the precious gone to the bad. Longtime have I waited, glowering malevolent, a blackhearted mountain your grandpas built for coppers. My day is now. Time colliding with overripe circumstance; your coalboard clowns my hapless henchmen. Rainfall I have held like bile has […]
Slick your hair back smooth, hold your arms wide open. Tell your fellow countrymen their beloved land is broken. Play on their grossest fears and promise wage increases, then take your shiny hammer and smash their land to pieces. When the fabric is dismantled from ceiling down to stanchion, wave a cheery farewell and retire […]
There are poets in front of you on the Poetry Escalator To Heaven. From dawn to dusk, non-rhyming, they climb aboard The Golden Stairway Of Acceptance. Their poems sing like hymns, like Arts Council bids you were too lazy to fill in. In your darkest dreams, they’re laughing at you, but that’s not really true. […]
We can’t afford the heating and petrol’s being rationed suddenly telling the truth seems terribly old fashioned. The food isles are half empty, we’re all going on a diet, now Project Fear is Project Here those baying voices are quiet. Their vivid sunlit uplands, so alluring years before, are now as distant as the stars […]
‘Fancy Mice’, I found out today are just domestic rodents, which I feel confident saying is a missed opportunity. How much better it would be if The Fancy Mice were instead a manufactured pop group circa 1973. They would sing falsetto over cheesy backing tracks they’d never heard, before the soft clunking of a studio […]
There are foodless holes on my regular strolls around supermarket shelves, the wheels on my trolley having come off, and the folly is we did it to ourselves. We looked back rosily at war, at Normandy and Agincourt and opted for more strife. Now the irony is endless; we sit here friendless as driverless lorries […]
When will it dawn on you we are anything but friends? Still, 75p says you’ll stick with me until the bitter end. Were you hoping that my gloss would grub off on your sleeve? You’re as foreign to me as the refugee I spit on as they leave. Just because our target’s placed on someone […]
It will not be long now until dandelions have strangled the black ground beneath them and no traces remain save for the props and the poison filling up the cavernous belly of the carcass slain by a fortyfaced dragon bent on revenge. It will not be long now until nobody is left who remembers the […]
The hollowmen are here bumbling in the breeze, truth on yoyo strings, there and yet not there. Stickysmiley candymen painting panstick facts that washaway nightly onto hazy crazy paving. Battendown your boltholes, the goons are on the loose, reaching for the foreigner, the handshake, the noose. Ring them bells at midnight, their dolour dark and […]
The ladies and gentlemen of the lifeboat crew will not check for skin colour before extending saintly fingers, risking all so a stranger may live. They know you cannot catch fear through the meeting of lips, the free donation of air to buy another second. The coxswain for today heard the shorebound wails of “All […]
Dawn Butler, MP was removed from the chamber last week for saying that the Prime Minister: “lied to the House and the country over and over again”. It seems that you can be called out for exposing lies but not for telling them in the first place. Pigs live in sties, Yorkshire puds rise, wet […]
These youngmen so heavy with a country’s hope,
legs shredded by the studs of high-footed politicians,
these torchbearers of the truth, their light
shaming the shade of cynics in corners.
What I want to come home is social justice, honest leaders who can point the way away from intolerance and blame. What I want to come home is a sense of shame at homelessness, and people who cannot even afford to eat. What I want to lose is an uncaring elite who can […]
In Happyland we sing our song of pride in riches from squalor, we read our press and nod along while worshipping the dollar. Take pride in our irrefutable past, mansions built from sugar and cotton, take heed of that flag, pride of the mast and keep saluting till you have forgotten. So sing […]
You can take them to a judge
but no one cares anymore
about fingernails blackened
from springs snapping tills shut.
As long as sour butter drips
from smiling lying lips on the BBC,
We need a brother of the blues; come blow your horn, light a fuse beneath the tinder of our fickle lie-down-and-take-it, ever-so-humble, bowing, scraping days. We need Sister Rosetta to rasp and wake us better, shake our crumbling foundations, hold us up to a mirror, come deliver us from ourselves. We need to […]
There are no disasters, only opportunities
Let the bodies pile high in their thousands
It is easy to make promises, it is hard work to keep them
I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done
The street of shame is alive,
thriving with the buzzing of texts
as slippery lizards bend eachother
over cokedust covered desks.
Charmed as children, we follow the river
and fall across a fairytale
It didn’t begin with uniform wearers,
armband bearers; that’s just where it ended,
with proud keyholders
to blandly wicked gas chambers.
Hoist the flag over the food banks,
tell the world just who we are,
paint the breakfast clubbing hungry kids
red, white and blue;
then snap them all in two
to check they’re British through and through.
Little fishingboats, like minnows
around the Nissan ship’s leviathan,
skim the sea’s silver top coat as they
skate into the hungry rivermouth.
The blackbird on our fence
is protesting freely
across several keys
about excess competition
in this morning’s song contest
She came in peace to reclaim the night,
with her sisters, a candle and a thimble of hope,
which wept itself out under flashing blue lights.
Striplight eyed, Eve tumbles out
to mourning’s waking arms,
home to bed’s hollow belly,
the longnight’s deadweight
gushing from her soul
into the pillow’s soft shoulder.
For all the zipped-up body bags,
for carrying your country without pause,
for tending all those beds,
for tending to our dead
you get 1% and a round of applause.
