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.
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 […]
‘Sweetheart’, he called me. Clicked his fingers like the snap of something deep inside my head. And when I got to his side, he asided, Alright darlin’? Smiling slyly at his mates who looked a bit shamefaced. And he ordered his drinks with his practised leer and dangled a note to pay for […]
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.
My original home town, Middlesbrough, built a couple of hundred years ago from nothing and peopled by outsiders from all over the world who came to work, has been home to many different cultures for as long as I can remember. Over recent years, somehow the football club attracted a fan from London, Yusuf Jama, […]
This is what hope looks like,
two wee cinnamon dots
clutching mom’s hand tight,
peering out at the wide, wide world
through childish curtseys and wonder,
not stopping to think about
white hooded badmen
now drowning in shame.
That everyone could see
we are all ants scurrying
round the palm of a sometime
benevolent mountainside.
There are moments profound,
tissues all round, talk of hope, coping strategies.
The North, chipped and scavenged in these standing stone days, does not fall asunder nor domino down in sight of barber surgeons with their slingshots, chippings. Long abraded by high seas, we stack lean as limestone, holding our breath like we have held our noses, impassive in the face of this flitting ephemera. We Danelaw […]
From Peterloo to Tolpuddle, Jarrow to Orgreave, there’ll be no further uprisings today sir, we read the press, know what to believe. The daily tales spin an almighty weave about who’s to blame, wouldn’t you say sir from Peterloo to Tolpuddle, Jarrow to Orgreave. We’ve learned when to smile, when to grieve and follow our […]
