@poet’s corner 4 march 2026

hello. i am thrilled by the recent evidence of sunshine. the theme took me back to a weekend last summer. i was in london with my girlfriend to run a 10k and visit friends and family. on two occasions that weekend i sat on a sofa in a garden by blooming apple trees, shading myself from the hot sun. and this is what i wrote at the time:

backpack to london
for the downtown fun run
ladybirds, butterflies,
apple trees
and sofas in the sun
through the field of wheat
like a young theresa may
teal dragonfly perched
on a vibrant green
leaf above a rust bed stream
we wade with baggy minnows
by the weeping willow
clock two foxes,
attempt avuncular football
scorched between the bridges
peddle assisted
to the bucket hat photobomb
goosebumps on
the cold carriage home

that made me think of holiday poetry more generally. i always try and record my holidays in poetry. i don’t know why i don’t just take photos like everyone else. this was a trip to wales with my girlfriend’s family, including multiple young nieces and nephews.

we pick brambles by nebo
up the lane from nazareth
hold a toddler up a boulder
you know slow is not
intrinsically good or bad
park the motor
don’t feed the metre
tempo of doms
get a parking fine
waitrose cafe
avocado experiment
free tuna baguette
for the crash test dummy
swings, roundabouts
humming a christmas song
i guess i feel like i’m one of the uncles
from home alone
all our kisses are stolen
kids voices climb the stairs
white hairs in my moustache
catch the light in the morning mirror
visit the folly hotel of port merienion
lily pads and various trees
a beach that doesn’t reach the sea
sleep in and miss the hike
overdosed on the house party life
read a book to ariana
mostly seems to bore her
well she asked me to
then the last supper
aubergine, cheese and garlic
you drive me home
i’m a good passenger you say
i’m infinitely patient
and never complain
but pray silently as we speed towards the
slowing car ahead
drop the car off at the airport
and run back to town
both bridges are out
so i take the subway home
as do you
in the other direction

and finally this isn’t on theme but almost worked with last week’s theme of chips. this next bit is written from the perspective of a tender stem broccoli and hence all opinions contained within it are not necessarily my own.

the last antipasti

broccoli can’t be a prize,
everyone says,
or would say
if inquired of.
but my stem’s tender
as a lover’s thighs,
crunchy with salt,
drenched in rendered
fat, yum
pair me with focaccia
and dipstick me
in extra virgin
verging on
extravagant…
a celebrity
of humble bent

mind the time
you overordered carbohydrates
a panicked salad reprobate
arancini, croquettes and chips,
you had a need that i could sate
pumped with protein
and polyphenols
light and taut
and a little bit special

trust me,
flake almonds upon me,
indulge in fulgent greens
i answer your troubles
with charm and sheen
there is no knowledge
but sensation
so slide on in
to my dm’s
the merlot refill
unexpectedly chilled,
effervescent on your tongue
makes you cry yum, yum

confidence is recklessness incarnate
so crunch my fibrous branches so delicate
are you here for sublime?
or did you get lost looking for
the beige light district?
over by the camp
but closeted quarter?
oh yeah have another breadstick,
fill up on brie
i know you’ll be back for me

perhaps i can attract
one of your more stylish companions
i grew in the alluvial soils of campania,
learned english from hollywood movies,
reared on volcanic aqua minerale
and the sun’s patterns
you, with the specs,
you don’t wanna eat yet?
i can feel i’m cold.
was it yesterday? really yesterday?
bathing in the sunshine
when yanked,
quite jolted,
held tight in a gauntlet
flung in a crate,
i’ve been in the shade,
a day, who knows
they seared me!
and i’m here,
with the almonds,
but the plate’s cold.
all the sundried tomatoes are gone
the salami too
even the mortadella

oh, love may be king
in napoli
but fortune favours
brocolli
yes someone will
come back for me

i remember
when i was young sprout
thinking that if i was the first human
it would never have occurred to me
to eat food
or make love
that was an absurd thought
for a cruciferous vegetable, i know
but come on and eat me,
end this limbo
let me go
my whole life
flashes before my florets
i’m sliding off the plate
into the wastebasket
into the bin
a cardinal sin
and you know
i don’t see any chips in here,
you philistines.
i am a prize!
how did this happen to me?
am i weird looking,
or weird being?
you reach the top
you’re hot
and then you’re not
just one shot
then you’re compost.
it’ll happen to you too
one day.
memento mori.
i regret nothing.

@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