In New Wave days and times of Kitchen Sink,

The Club could seem the centre of the world.

Spent workers went inside to swallow drink;

Tempers might flare, cheap insults would be hurled.

Booze sharpened anger, retribution swelled,

As unattended wives would cast a glance;

The sum of all emotions was expelled

In cold revenge with little left to chance.

And there’s a h...

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It’s clever how they’ve set this up:

A bowl of fruit,

A jar,

A china dog,

An iron bar (an iron bar?)

Behind – some crumpled remains,

The stench of rotting heaps

Of defenceless women and men.

Still, no one can see or smell this,

So that’s all right then.

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That was once our view.

It was my perfect view;

Out of the blue, a tree grew.

From then, there was no perfect view.

After that, our lives closed in,

And you, with your arrogance,

Your new-found taste for sin,

Plus your innate flair for spin,

Emphasised the symbolic side

And, harking back to sweet evenings

When we listened for the early owl,

Became impatie...

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Give us all your money,

Then go and find some more;

Try borrowing from loan sharks

To maximise your score.

Steal it from the corner shop

Or from your parents’ stash;

With every tempting wager,

We’ll part you from your cash.

Your chances of a pay-out

Are vanishingly thin;

You might as well take out your wad

And chuck it in the bin.

Your bank accoun...

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The hottest March, now ten months in a row.

Women from Switzerland have won their case;

Climate safety is one more human right.

There’s progress, but at far too slow a pace.

The likes of Greta Thunberg talk good sense,

Reminding us that we don’t do enough,

Because we are addicted to our jaunts

And piling up excess, transported stuff.

Although the world revolves an...

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He won’t give a penny to help Ukraine;

He won’t lift a finger or part with change.

He wants his America ‘great again’

And thinks that such places are foreign and strange.

He won’t give a penny to help Ukraine;

He prefers to do favours for his mates:

Like jailbirds whose crimes are far from mundane,

And heads of authoritarian states.

He won’t give a penny to help U...

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I’m batting at eternal number ten.

My mediocre talent falls apart;

Soon I’ll be walking back on nought again.

I’m in a team of skilled, well-coached young men,

Convincing me that cricket is an art.

I’m batting at eternal number ten.

I do not move my feet or sidestep when

A lethal bouncer flies towards my heart.

Soon I’ll be walking back on nought again.

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Two years ago, we had no words,

Because words seemed superfluous.

Branded upon our consciousness,

All we needed was the image:

Each scorched mark would remind us

Of newly discovered horror.

But, in the end, the words returned;

Our memories demanded them.

A less reliable record,

Yet devastating for all that:

Shifting, changing, containing tears

As well as anger. Tha...

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The washing on the line is mine, is mine;

The washing on the line, it dries, it dries.

My best friend down the road, he dies, he dies;

Our enemy of old, he lies, he lies.

The washing on the line, it sighs, it sighs.

The washing on the line is mine, is mine;

The washing on the line, it blows, it blows.

Desire for revenge, it grows, it grows;

The guilty man nearby, he cr...

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I have asked myself what we’re fighting for,

And have acted at times as if I knew,

But now I understand what really counts:

The right to take a different kind of view.

If you wish all opinions the same,

The enemy’s arrangements are for you,

But some of us will battle to preserve

The right to take a different kind of view.

The free flow of exchanges and ideas

Co...

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An avaricious devil is mankind;

He goes and grabs all things that he can find.

Perhaps he’s not aware that it’s unkind;

Faced with the danger, he says ‘never mind’.

Mankind intends to decimate this place,

To slash and burn and eat up every space,

With acquisition as some kind of race

To mop up Earth’s resources with no trace.

The monster has now caught us in his t...

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They have made a mess of the house next door;

Mum, Dad, two kids and a cat are no more.

Can someone explain what they do this for?

Who knows? They just don’t like us, I suppose.

In years gone by, it was never like this;

We greeted, with a handshake or a kiss,

Our nearby friends. How has it gone amiss?

Who knows? They just don’t like us, I suppose.

It looks as thou...

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I’m gonna win big, so big, this time;

I’ll notch up a record score.

There’s no way, trust me, there’s no way

That the other side will get more.

Our democracy is sacred,

To say otherwise is a sin;

So I will accept the verdict,

Provided, of course, that I win!

If I should lose, I will cry foul,

Alleging there was massive fraud;

I don’t need any evidence –

I...

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I knew the Braithwaite boy at school;

I knew him when he started work.

He bagged fruit at the market stall:

Quite slow, but never one to shirk.

His parents lived beside the park;

They were the type to put on airs.

They saw him as an office clerk

Or in the city selling shares.

But he was quiet, often teased,

And ready to accept his place;

The customers seemed...

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My theory is as good as yours,

I am entitled to my facts.

We both have our opinions

But it's me that the truth attracts.

I saw it on the internet;

It’s as valid as your learning.

It says the world is flat and square,

Not round and daily turning.

And don’t expect me to believe

All this talk of global heating;

The weather’s always on the change:

Someone sai...

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Don’t shoot!

Stop the violence,

Stop the killing.

Don’t waste your time with gods,

Or clerics on the greasy pole,

Or warped ideology

Which tells you what to think,

Or the cult of the madmen,

The travelling circus,

The usual suspects,

The old men in suits,

The gap –

Between the theory and the practice.

Be yourself;

Lay down your arms,

Reach out your hand...

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The Grand Old Man of town,

He makes his films and cries:

The scenes contain no love,

No hope, no joy – just lies.

He’s had to do a deal

And play their dirty games,

Although until this day

He does not know their names.

The power of his dreams

Has been reduced to dust;

He’s had to tow the line

To earn himself a crust.

And in a year or two

The wor...

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We laugh at experts and suck up to fools,

Effortless amateurs from public schools,

And love the chancers who sidestep the rules.

That’s how we are right now, that’s how we are.

We laugh at research and usher away

Facts and achievements on public display;

We’d rather go down on our knees and pray.

That’s how we are right now, that’s how we are.

We laugh at the trut...

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As you may have seen on the News and Features page, I have compiled a selection of fifty poems to mark the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some of these poems will be familiar to regular contributors, but a number have not yet featured on the WOL blog.

This is a private print and not available for general sale, but I would be pleased to send a free PDF copy by e-mail to anyb...

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Time, or what passes for time,

Is a culprit, most unkind,

Stealing what we find,

Emptying our mind.

Time should be the music

Which everybody plays,

Adding to our days

In unexpected ways.

But time is made of windows,

Shattered one by one in hate,

A commentary upon this state,

Where rescue parties come too late.

Time is the gun, time is the shell,

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‘Time passes,’ said the man at our table.

‘People want something new.’ I guess he’s right.

It's the prevailing theory round here.

‘The same old faces,’ opined another;

‘You know, Zelensky. Always wants money.’

And ‘here’ is anywhere, maybe everywhere.

Time passes. All of us know that feeling:

You turn a new page in a calendar

Or put away Christmas decorations.

At cricket...

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The hottest January ever;

We’ve passed the one point five degrees.

Climate change is on the march,

Frying the air and boiling the seas.

Do not say we didn’t warn you;

We have been banging on for years.

But the actions of our leaders

Are running decades in arrears.

And don’t pretend it’s all fake news

Or the facts are inconclusive;

Evidence for such opinions

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A morning to freeze the spirits.

As they shiver in hollowed times,
Workers stamp and spit used breath.

At the corner I see two men:

Their eyes wet from today’s bad news.

‘You can always tell,’ says my guide;

'They both had sons where it happened.'

I try to do an interview:

Get short shrift. Understandably.

As we leave, one of them calls out:

‘Poetry is dead. Art is dead...

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We queued at the supermarket;

I saw that everyone was dead.

And yet they were still standing.

Out of defiance? Contempt?

Perhaps just out of habit.

We queued at the bakery,

And in the rows of cakes

We saw the faces of the fallen:

Unmoved, at last at peace.

We queued at the bus stop.

A passer-by called out to us

And we called back,

But no one was alive

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Because I clean the lavatories,

I’m considered quite low grade;

In the last place on the list,

Overworked and underpaid.

Though down the pecking order,

At the thin end of the scale,

You rely upon my labours

With my brushes and my pail.

Do toffs and chief executives

Have to sanitise this mess?

I should get higher wages

Than the barons of the press.

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The war’s cold exclusion has stripped out love.

Two years on, I stroll among the Bruegels;

The pictures dazzle in their joyless way,

Reflecting life’s treadmill of chores, horrors,

Its accommodations and its intrigues,

Its little stratagems for making do,

Not forgetting massacres and revenge.

I’ve read about the gas used at the front

To flush out choking soldiers marked for...

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We went to a ball, but they said we could not dance.

We joined a choir, but they said we could not sing.

We ordered a beer, but they said we could not drink.

We shared an embrace, but they said we could not love.

We went to the bathroom, but they said we could not wash.

We sat in a restaurant, but they said we could not eat.

We took out our pens, but they said we could not write.

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Middle Americans, in their homely way,

Are often overheard to say:

'I was just goofing around.'

They goof and they goof and they goof,

And sometimes they goof a little more.

And then we get Donald Trump.

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You can spot the signs:

They talk of ‘hard-earned cash’,

And ‘putting our people first.’

We know what’s coming next:

‘Yes, the invasion was wrong,

But do we really….?’

Or, ‘why can’t they get together

And sort the whole thing out?’

Fatuous bewilderment

Is hardly an excuse.

It is so damned easy to say:

‘We expected some light

At the end of the tunnel’

When you...

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It was in Chemistry at the end of last week…

I was chatting away at the back of the class

When the teacher came and smacked me round the head.

Shocked, I protested and I said:

‘But I was telling them what you told me:

That the President is a very good man.’

‘That was yesterday,’ he replied. ‘Today he’s a bastard.

He’s just killed my brother and jailed my nephew.’

‘Oh, I’m s...

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He sipped in cafés in the afternoons;

He’d been below the average at school.

Tradition made him thrash away at life,

Despite this, he was no more than a fool.

Then suddenly he had his first big break;

A full-blown, bloody war had to be fought.

His doomed adventures did not matter now;

All trails of damage added up to nought.

A strange equality in times of war

M...

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A school tragedy (A poem within a poem)

The first day of the autumn term

We knew that something was amiss.

We saw the solemn-looking staff;

We felt the pain of grief subsist.

It seemed that in the holidays

A boy called Whipps had disappeared.

Since almost thirty days had passed,

The worst of outcomes was now feared.

He was a shy and quiet boy,

To w...

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A viper slides its way beneath the grass;

The animals of prey are on the prowl.

The innocent and helpless stand no chance

Against the savage tastes of hawk and owl.

Upstairs, forbidden lovers take the plunge;

Their beads of sticky sweat adorn the bed.

She’s fast asleep while he boosts up his pack;

Outside waits a procession of the dead.

The hunters beat the heavin...

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