people often say “less”
when they mean “fewer” -
it’s not important, I
guess, it’s just grammar    ..

wanted to knock on his door
and ask him to come out to play
but what if his dad answered
and what if he said, oh ok  ..

she said I wonder
what you look like
without your glasses

he said I wonder
what you look like
without my glasses    ..

they say a time machine wouldn’t
be possible
but that’s *******
I’ve got a clock

this is where I live
I’d ask you in
but it’s a mess

glad I never met george orwell
since he’d have despised me for
being a weak liberal and well
yeah he’d have been about right

I’m drunk
feel your

contempt
so not

quite drunk
enough     ..

when I was a kid I got a sixpence
a week for
pocket money, plus the beano
every
saturday
and then, suddenly, they
brought in decimalisation
and a sixpence no longer existed,
and I’ve worried about
money
ever since   ..

we rented a room
so cold we went to bed
with our clothes on,
but not for long

sitting at a pavement table
   of a turkish café
  near the gare de l’est

feel myself hunch
  like a dishevelled pigeon
over lunch, the waiter

asks for our order,
     naturally in french
and I ask “parlez vous anglais?”

     he enquires if we’re dutch,
               or quite possibly deutsch    ..
guess it doesn’t matter much

used to think I’d like
to get to know you,
but I don’t, anymore

people find me cold,
which is also
how they leave me

frightfully british but
also roman catholic
ate no meat on a friday
was always fish and chips

we’re both getting old,
but she still has dignity and desirability
and a demure sensuality and
all I have is a cough

don’t like restaurants
are full of people
who could have stayed
at home and cooked

your underwears me down
with it’s expectation of
fulfilment, but I’m just not in the mood
right now I’m reading

why call murderers butchers,
    when we get our lamb chops
from the butchers, and very nice they are, too
    few, those old shops   ..

the angry knocking
and the insistence
I open the door

couldn’t help wondering
what was behind it

a man of letters
who pens
upon
trivial matters in convivial inns
where his life is spent
almost invariably
in tatters       ..

love to walk alone
through the city
streets are not just for grown
ups a daisy!

alas
a loss
unless
undressed
the poor old
chap was loved
I guess
her curls
in swirls
around his chest       ..

ok so I’m alcohol dependent
you got a problem with that ?

he said I don’t know why
I ever went out with you ..
she said but you didn’t go out
with me, we just happened
to leave at the same time  ..

looking back
on our old haunts
me still    ..

we brush against each
other
than that there is
nothing  ..

as she closed the
door behind her
mind was made up

opened a bottle of scotch
“how’s that going to help?”
ever tried drinking this stuff
with the lid on    ..

why do people dislike politics
so much that they
prefer mob rule over civilised debate
is better than hate

people tend to comment on
the content or subject of a poem,
rather than the form or the style
it out, mate, style it out

there is little conversation
over dinner as we’re concentrating
on eating I wonder what we’ll
talk about after      ..

a sunday roast
washed down with a pint
got back on the coach
and belched.
what more do you want     ..

last time I wrote a poem that
was
any good was on the late lamented
deep underground poetry site about an elderly woman on the
bus who offered me a boiled
sweet,
I thought,
but no, thanks     ..

if you haven’t read any of the
british library crime classics, then
what is there left to talk about, muttered
the old bloke down the pub

sitting in a pub writing
a poem but it
wasn’t very good and the
beer was awful

p g wodehouse and
john betjeman made
life seem worth living
just to read them    ..

old bloke in the café reads his
newspaper religiously
over breakfast every morning and
thanks God for letting him be
for now

feel unsteady, seems windier than
it used to be -
don’t know if it’s a climate change thing,
or just me

old bloke in the pub says
he’s drunk on the unfulfilled hopes
of his youth
but in truth it’s the scotch

someone stops the road sweeper
and asks him the way;
he says, like this     ..

don’t get me wrong
I like trains;
it’s just getting on

some days my legs work better
than others look at me oddly
as I clutch onto the railings, the wall
and you, you most of all  ..

the first time we met
I loved her face
but I fancied her legs
and I know that’s
sexist and objectification
but we’ve been
married for thirty two years
so who cares

what’s with this whole twenty
first century internet
thing about having followers,
I mean I feel like a stalker

rather write detective fiction
than poetry but I wouldn’t
be any good at it, and what’s
the difference? she says

stevie smith was the
greatest poet of her
age, but what’s her
age got to do with it

just recently discovered
   christina rossetti on a second
hand book stall
  down the market there were
others shouting their wares so much louder,
   but who cares

use a stick since my stroke
approximately four years
ago it was when I last ran for a
bus, but I don’t miss it

aren’t as many second hand
bookshops on the charing cross road as
there were when I was younger
of course, so were they   ..

ate our sandwiches sitting
on the steps leading up to
the art gallery
it’s a matter of taste, she says

love museums full of stone age
artefacts, the odd roman sandal or two
and victorian pottery, and all
those insects skewered beneath glass cases
not solved by pulling faces
at what our ancestors got up to