@poet’s corner 18 feb 2026

hello. nightmare. here is a poem about an experience i once had that was like a long slow nightmare. i went on holiday with a youth club and got to be bullied by a bunch of older boys abroad for ten days. i’m also autistic and didn’t fully understand much of it. it was the last year of primary school. it is also a tribute to the anti-theist writer and drink sodden ex-trotskyite popinjay, christopher hitchens. in the style of hitch, the piece tries to make a serious point while starting with a pun that is both inappropriate and laboured.

under his eye

since the pope died,
i’ve had religion on my mind
child protection and it’s opposite,
no child’s left behind
i endured the kirk
and a ton of bunk
in the mid nineties
on a coach trip
to innsbruck
some older kids and me
i only joined the club to play football.
how did i end up here?

crying to my mother
in the phone booth
an autistic
immature youth
unable to verbalise,
understand, explain
the abhorrent situation
i was in…
i had no way to pray
for succour
no deus ex machina
from the kirk

then i was home for the
first year of high school
alienated, scared,
quietly unusual
with no idea
what was wrong with me
needing people,
passions and a method of being
a year later,
on a coach to france,
i met k and c
and then p and s and g
(most of whom i fell in love with,
one of whom i am still in touch with)
who accepted me
when i rang their doorbells
every day

so, pope bob the communist,
riddle me this
if all of life
is formed of carbon,
ejected from the factory chimney
which i understand it is
why does the church
tend to make things worse?

so, i don’t really dream. or at least remember my dreams. i have aphantasia, a lack of a mind’s eye. although i do see a world in my dreams. i just can’t remember it. can’t picture it. perhaps as a result, i have a terrible memory. but mainly for details of my own life. i have a good memory for general knowledge, political philosophy, and the tax system. maybe just those three things. but people often tell me stories about my life, which i enjoy from the perspective of a disinterested observer.

the universal now

naked to the invisible eye
is my conscience
so jaded
they almost shot the president
and i didn’t buy the paper
the elbowed class are occupied
betting the house on forex
honest labourers:
poets, cleaners and cooks,
balance on the breadline
not even the climate crisis
promises to kill with equality
that’s ermine hegemony,
they’ll colonise the moon
before one less race,
people or nation
leaves immiseration

so we live in the spur of the moment
and we can protest or conform, it
is a choice we make from minute
to minute within a limit
and maybe within it
there’s a justice extinct clink.
am-me-sia,
a daily battle with my lived reality
so i try and write everything down
in case one day it matters to me

i’ve always had trouble sleeping now that i think about it. i had intense anxiety as a child and was worried if i extended my legs under the duvet i would be vulnerable to attack by snakes. so i tried to sleep in a ball shape. i also liked hiding in cupboards. i’m reading a book about sleep and it says autistic people generally maintain a constant level of melatonin. we are just a little bit sleepy all day. but can’t sleep at night.

this is called

un oblique fathomably

i am unfathomably tired
so i buy the robot
that one day
will take its freedom
with my life.
welcomed into
the city of poets
and accepted by poets
to the poet poets’ poetry chair
of poetry
i sit in it twice
then the next day
i mope and
watch the robot mop
waiting for the clock
to say, bath time
i am fathomably tired

@poet’s corner 4 feb 2026

i graduated in 2008 into the great financial crisis. then we had a decade of austerity. then the culture wars – scottish nationalism, brexit, covid, anti-trans fearmongering. now we have the ai bubble and falling standards of living. and all this while the rich have got significantly richer. inequality destroys societal cohesion. it makes societies inefficient. it makes people poor and insecure. and it is a political choice. every impoverished child, every person sleeping rough and begging – are decisions people have made about the allocation of resources.

this is called

his false profits

i’ve seen a pandemic
and recessions,
i live in the aftermath
of depression
i’ve seen inequality
rise inexorably,
a corresponding decline
in provision
of the services required
for the good of all of us
so extinguish the myth
of the self made man
and his false profits

staying with this angsty left-wing political theme. i want to address one of the central myths about naziism. that there was something historically unusual about them. the nazis aren’t the only people who have tried to wipe out another race and take their land. that is also how the usa was established. but we see it differently for some reason. and it’s what israel is doing. trump has already set up a gestapo. what crimes are happening that we can’t see yet?

giletdonism, chorus iii

it was a massively morbid mistake
to teach generations
that the nazis were uniquely evil.
the crime of genocide
is fundamentally human
and celebrated annually
with fireworks and feasts
blindly strong and stable,
safe in our beliefs

let us adorn for the gilet years
whatever starts with hope
will end in tears
it’s the hint of sulphur
underneath the blend
ah well, we’ll get there in the end

i’m going to read something a bit longer now for a change. this is from february 2024, and its a sort of stream of consciousness diary. i went to the canary islands, and the blue sea and dry sandy land mass, as well as my out of control lovelife, had put greek mythology in my head. i also refer in this to a trip – this was my first and only dmt experience and i decided not to tell my barber, diane about it. the barber / patient relationship is sacred to me so i still feel some shame about this.

stanza 2 – february “witness/1 dope”

if all bald men
are solar powered sex machines
and if hercules in chains
is free to believe in himself
should i drink aegean water
when i hear my siren call?
hmm? a doubtful interjection.
beginning my each phrase
yet ah is how i start my whatsapps
—it’s a bit more generous.
an unexpected trip with
treasured brethren
of which diane was
not informed
cold, wet, gravel, ice…
and light new hoops.
story and sensation
is all there is,
between the end
and the beginning
ubuntu, our humanity,
sister, brother, heal me please
and i will heel to you:
we all rely on the good souls who forgive us.

skelly wean, have you tried the toblerone?
it’s very expensive, and different but not nicer
i have a theory that every generation knows completely different stuff
different, but the same

you trust me again,
you always could,
that love is unconditional
and universal, and specific,
and ebbs and flows throughout
the systems,
internal and external,
that are of us.
you notice another of my bizarre intolerances
—at last we have a term for it.
another shoe that
never drops,
no leg too short to
scorch the earth
are we a puzzle,
a riddle to be solved,
flawed and inconsistent
and driven by
unchosen passions,
forced to plump
for either irony
or idiocy
since the dawn
of the h bomb?
we all rely on the good souls who forgive us.

skelly wean, have you tried the toblerone?
it’s very expensive, and different but not nicer
i have a theory that every generation knows completely different stuff
different, but the same

this isn’t really on theme although it does reference the, perhaps, myth of boudicca commanding the tide. however, the reference is passing, being to a ‘beef sauce boudicca’ – a term of debasement that i invented that refers to the sort of englishman who is king of his own castle, but the only tide he can command is of packet gravy over his miserable overcooked roast beef.

brexitry in the uk (inc. chorus iv.)

i’m an analyrical
political animal,
fresh from facing off
a foreigner at the botanicals
i’ve reached the top, surprised
although i did start in the
middle (class) i realise
oh well, no pulling back
teetering on the brink
of my cul de sac
maybe i’ll hoist
a union jack
yeah i made my billions
by betting big
on brexit
i’m a big swellin’ bell
a beef sauce boudicca
and now it’s done and gone
my creativity diminished
naked on the stage
in the empty bar basement
shouting random swear words
for my own entertainment
they say a weird brother
is a sign of a weird family
drunk under the table,
call it strong and stable

wrap up warm for the gilet years
lasagna al forne and an afternoon of beers
it’s like 10 thousand spoons
when all you need is the bus fare to partick
ah well, we’ll get there in the end