lanzarote iv.

fly a magic carpet ride
on the greenback camel trail
and bury my radar
deep at wounded knee
boquerones on the lounger,
bocadillo by the sea
agree to be fleeced
for an airport charter
nintendo cheesecake
or deep fried mars bar
waitress seems genuinely surprised
by everything we say
or order
last day jog 12k
no joint issues
hoppipolla yoga

i love eating cheese sandwiches on holiday. with a little tin of beer. then a little cake. or ten. bike rides, lounging in the sun, loads of carbs. feeling very tempted to abandon writing for the day and book a holiday.

web

@poet’s corner, 21 jan 2026

web. the web. it makes me think of the culture war that’s been vibrating my pocket since about 2013.

i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets mined further into the dark.

the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other, who think that poetry and irony are an affront to them. but they can’t win. there will always be poetry.

this is called

atlas tugged

earth is comprised

of water, mud and metal

so is the human body.

and as we pump pollutants into the air

we literally incorporate them,

a singular ticket to where?

i’m in my prime and,

unlike miss jean brodie,

atlas tugged

people expand in space to take it all

when i just want to be so small

hitlerism is coming back

and i’m as depressed as i am scared

as we lazily recycle a century’s

old colonial nightmare

my next tenuous link is that we are born into a complex, kafkaesque web of demands and constraints that nobody can really make sense of. a complicated global mass of billions sort of winging the rules as we go. but as a child, i guess i thought someone was in charge. turns out, nobody really is.

this is called

obligation, parts i and ii

as a child the buildings §

and roads scared me

in their scale

the work of a million lifetimes,

where did they come from?

and what was my obligation?

all my life i’ve suffered

discrimination

just because i’m shy and lazy.

and inattentive

imperceptive, defensive

stand offish

and prone to mischief.

well, today i made

a lovely little loaf.

am i a valid toiler?

instead of,

or as well as,

a poetry mine despoiler?

have i met

my productivity minimum

am i entitled to a break yet?

i posit that if workers suffer

ceo’s should go to jail

follow the money to personal wealth

and pierce the corporate veil

i am terrible at job interviews. i am naturally averse to self-celebration, and not fast at thinking. a bit overly literal. dumbfounded by even the most predictable tell me about a time when. however, there is one question that i could answer endlessly – tell me your greatest weakness.

this next piece picks up the idea of the poetry mine. are dictionaries tangled webs of poetry, and is it our job as poets to untangle those words, and spin them back, into their right place?

this is called

reverse engineering

every poem, novel, recipe

and joke

exists quiet in the ether

the poet doesn’t create

she discovers;

with a notebook she uncovers.

a subterranean homesick miner,

reverse engineering blueprints

of a universal designer

following on from that, this is sort of the philosophy of the common law legal system. when judges set precedents, they aren’t creating laws… they have applied legal principles to novel situations, and hence sort of, found law that isn’t new, just they never had to use it before, so they didn’t know about it.

so this is called

a very short poem about the criminal justice system

convicted, bailed,

acquitted, jailed,

the four court outcomes

how nice that they rhyme

so it’s easy to write poems

if you’re on trial for a crime

and i would recommend writing poetry if you are going through that sort of experience. trial, divorce, diagnosis, bereavement. lots of good material.

i’m returning to web as internet. calling back to web 1.0, circa y2k.

this is called

the failure and possible redemption of language

we don’t yet have the language

for the time in which we live

the 2010s, the 2020’s,

don’t feel lived in like the 90s

like naturally stressed 501s

two sizes too big

in each direction

y2k was the last mass adopted nickname

there is no confidence yet

in the unfolding millennium

so i propose a radical redetermination

y2k of d2k,

then d2k.1,

now 2k.2,

or, i posit “point two”

in practice

that’s all from me

lanzarote iii.

lizard pulse pathos
and egrets on the gravel cut
fling a ring around the thing
regret declined burrata
fact checked on carbon i rediscover
archaeomagnetic dating,
did you know the poles
will switch
and north will
become south.
prohibito biciclette
celestial waves
lapping rusty mounds
baps boobing
a breasty boundary
round emphysema
cowboy country

before i went on the bike holiday i’d had a period of poor health that culminated in a trip to the hospital and a spinal tap. i was on medication for migraines, but it made me sluggish and slowed my heart rate down, so i started the last climb of the day a bit ahead of my pals in case i struggled. i was fine, but i got lost and had to reroute my way back and i went over some very sketchy ‘gravel’ roads. quite stressful. being lost in the desert alone is not what i hope for.

lanzarote ii.

el grifo abandonado,
aquapark de los muertos
pizza tres quesos,
no blue,
snide salad.
poolside morning yoga
and think about the future
fall asleep in my clothes
fresh from the waffle shop boys
sick in the toilet at midnight
maybe thanks
to the waffle shop boys

i eat a lot of cake on cycling holidays. on this occasion, i think the late night waffle after dinner was a refined carbohydrate too far.

lanzarote i.

exhausted by the tyranny of choice,

unable to sleep

four alarmed hours,

panic

then mile-high boredom.

bad pizza is still kinda good,

parched stroll less soo

cacti burrito,

a visage

of the village

in the mirage…

reinforcements parachuting in

petulant torrents of surf,

energía de la patata grande

pumice piss,

curtain of cliffs

and scattered sand

past the chain-gang (squared)

by fag ash straits

of jagged lava,

literal poetry in motion

i’m not much of a photo person. i’m not sure why, as i have total aphantasia which means i cannot see anything in my mind. i can’t just look once at the view and recall it forevermore.

maybe i should. but this disability has meant my internal world has always been dark and wordy. so when i’m on holiday, i like to record the holiday in poetry. this short series describes my cycling holiday with friends in lanzarote last year.

why i support scottish independence but only if i get to be in charge

i long to modernise scotland
to the revue of my imagination
to restrict actors to a single role
depiction in our nation
and making them legally change their name
to the one they portray in fiction
punishable by death
and claiming global jurisdiction
then i will reduce the toothbrushing time
from two minutes to 90 seconds
and thus sanction my cohort
to luxuriate over breakfast
then i will retire to
the camper-van i’ll embezzle
proud of my augmentation of
our cultural endeavour

this won’t make me especially popular but i don’t support scottish independence. i think we live in an age of empires. that sovereignty is meaningless in an era where the usa might invade greenland. i don’t think independence will make the average voter more powerful. we should accept our powerlessness and work towards global government within whatever existing supranational structures available to us.

but if independence does happen, i would like to be president and these are my main policy priorities.

haw yuppie

i shout haw yuppie at a prefect
on a flip phone
citizenship is over,
we are now brand ambassadors
sold off forever,
forever 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

how come nobody says yuppie any more? is it because social mobility was like a once off event that only benefitted a small number of baby boomers?

remember when only poseurs had mobile phones? remember when it used to be very difficult to find a recent enough photo of yourself to use as a profile pic? i was just flicking through my photos there, and they are thin on ground until about 2010. very little record of my many fashion missteps over the years.

all the king’s memes

i despair we are so selfish
in such a self defeating way
meritocracy is not
a real-world thing
it’s a pump and dump town
and there’s new mayor in clown
so double down
to top trump
they say
all the king’s horses
and all the king’s memes
couldn’t repair humpty’s
defective genes
he pulls fascist faces
and pardons racists
we can only prey
for a ceasefire that sticks

a new leader had been ennobled and he was promising to end wars while at the same time pardoning violent people who were in prison for storming the capitol. a mockery is being made of the rule of law. corruption is open, bragged about. it’s depressing. so turn the news off and write some poetry.

horse

@poet’s corner 7 jan 2026

hi, happy new year everyone.

this isn’t about horses, but it sort of has has a donkey in it, and i think the don himself rode a mule, which is somewhat horse related i think.

i had been writing a lot of poetry in 2024. and in 2025 i started posting it to the internet and reading it in bars. and continued writing. but in a new context – a public poet. i mean, in a limited way. this change made me think of book 2 of cervante’s don quixote. one of the first great works of meta-fiction.

reus brexitus

brexitus rex, a fencepost;

no entry for french blokes

yes hello we are here

it is act two of don quixote

or quixote like… piss moat

(though i prefer quixotic,

like chaotic)

anyway

so far so quixotic

(to rhyme with exotic)

anyway

in which we ask,

will the windmills we recall

from the first act charge back?

in which we find,

that windmills

don’t charge on poets

this next poem contains one word that is a derivative of horse.

it is about an idea i think about a lot which i call the book at the end of the universe.

i like to think that, when this whole thing is over, all the players will be invited to inspect the logs and find out what the other characters were thinking, what actually went down, who thought they had got away with cheating, and so on. like, the ultimate compendium of gossip, sleaze, and quiet morality.

the book however raises questions: could it have existed before the universe started? does it already exist? do the players who have already left the game have access to it? or are there superplayers who have access to the book now? and would reading the book change the book?

anyway, this is…

the elucidation

hey. imagine if everyone

knew everything

not about the physics and philosophy of the universe,

god and the mystery of life;

but about every dirty thought you have ever had,

and all the gossip since the pharaoh and moses

smoked camel lights in negotiation

round behind the pyramid

not just who horsed who,

but every weird wet dream too

we would be more liberal and better behaved i should think

subterfuge stymied,

the obfuscated elucidated.

staying almost on theme, i want to do my first repeat, because while it doesn’t contain a horse, it would have if it not for the austerity budgets of david cameron and george osbourne. apologies to anyone who didn’t like this when i read it four weeks ago. also, apologies to anyone who doesn’t like it today.

this is called,

the hoarse foreman of the apocalypse

life under actually existing capitalism continues;

a unique combination of boring and stressful

the yoga word lost to an armed counter revolution

be mindful, namaste,

despite the flames, be restful

the firewater fades to a numb, dumb dysphoria

as we tag along

behind the hoarse foreman of the apocalypse

on foot due to cutbacks

finally. i don’t like to write too much about politics. i have a degree in political philosophy. i used to wish people were more interested in politics. i have been proved wrong.

anyway

a new leader had been ennobled and he was promising to end wars while at the same time pardoning violent people who were in prison for good, violent reasons. a mockery has been made of the rule of law. corruption is open, bragged about. it’s depressing.

but there is a horse in this verse.

all the king’s memes

i despair we are so selfish

in such a self defeating way

meritocratic is not

what the world is today

it’s a pump and dump town

and there’s new mayor in clown

so double down

to top trump

they say

all the king’s horses

and all the king’s memes

couldn’t repair humpty‘s

defective genes

he pulls fascist faces

and pardons racists

we can only prey

for a ceasefire that sticks

this was a spinal tap

they are taking the piss
a hospital day in boring pain
on my way to the spinal tap
they paywalled tour de france
doffed and donned by a duo
of up-duffed doctors
two days in the hospital
and i’m walking like a train wreck survivor
it was only my neck that hurt yesterday
a new diagnosis,
coital migraines…
i’m done with western medicine, man.
and that was how i met fah.

weirdly, i find myself writing this on 15 december 2025, the day ron reiner, who directed the spinal tap movie, was murdered. and for some reason trump has weighed in. what a miserable world we live in. but it is at least better for containing the great works of ron reiner.

entertainment. it’s there with food and shelter as one of the core essentials of life. even without food and shelter, one will seek entertainment.

this poem however is about some mysterious migraines i’d been having. i actually went to the doctor about my sore neck. i mentioned the headaches and before i knew it i was in hospital undergoing a gruelling litany of tests. on leaving the hospital, i noted that despite my two days in hospital, the neck pain i’d presented at the doctor’s with was if anything, significantly worse.

i complained to my barber, and she recommended a massage therapist called fah. i’m not going to claim she works miracles, but i did go on a cycling holiday to the canary islands like a week later.