New Year, new crisis,
New Labour, new stories,
Old theories, old friends,
And the same old Tories.
Archives
Maes Howe
A white scrawl on the endless black
Rolls the stone aside. I crawl through the gloom
Of the long stone passage, empty and cold,
Shrugging off fear, towards the tomb.
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Gangsters
The underground car park now is half empty,
Silent and dark. But I know they are there –
Gangsters and mafia and crooked policemen.
They think I don’t know, but oh! I’m aware
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Birmingham Botanical Gardens
A garden has to be enclosed: there are rules
For creating a sacred space.
You must own the land or pay to get in:
Paradise is a privileged place.
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England, My England
What is England? A land of fossils?
Buckingham Palace, Stratford, the Lakes?
Tourists clog up the cosy deadlands -
But still, in the hinterland, there wakes
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Socks to you!
If you’ve got cold feet, you can’t write a poem,
So I find some white ankle socks in a drawer.
I wear them with pleasure and wriggle my toes.
But oh, how we hated them when we were four-
August 2011
We‘ve been carried off to an alien planet.
Even riots can’t bring us back to earth.
Virtue is lost in this virtual world,
Where the old cannot die and the young have no worth
My New Website
With a book, page forty is always the same.
But the internet fidgets and won’t stay still:
It challenges me with crashes and scares -
Computer fifty: Mary nil.
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Not all there
Bony trees blurred in November fog.
Not a sound from the park or the old man below.
The kids above must have frozen mid-romp.
Has the world stopped? And how should I know?
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