a short poem about a short cycling holiday in argyll

a hot heat,
awestruck, fading
but you won’t get rid of me
a lizard in argyll,
a long goodbye,
hyper-palatability
confused saint mungo,
road chicken strut
and tut. and tut.
sent the pint back
and got a new one
just the same

there’s the road ahead
and the music in my ears
an idea in my head
called the gilet years
it’s the beep of the derailleur
greeting the last cog
march on, forward, onwards,
towards our epilogue

i am always thrilled to see a lizard, all the more so if it’s in scotland. you don’t see a lot of lizards here. i’ve seen more red squirrels than i’ve seen lizards here. three squirrels. two lizards. oh i ordered a pint of st mungo and it was dead nice. in the bar. then i ordered another one, in the restaurant. but it tasted different, not as nice as the first, so i assumed they had given me the wrong thing and sent it back. anyway, the exact same flavour of pint came back. i think maybe they gave me the wrong pint at the first bar.

my pre-millennial childhood

o index finger
like a long toe
my pinky also
unusually small
little wonder
my handwriting’s unclear.
correction fluid
another go, please
i subtract seven letters
and get left with rect o fud
register my domain
with the nineties web dial up
to bravenet guestbooks
and fansites and bandsites
try and capitalise
on the dot com boom
all you need is a brand
profits will come soon
the scars of hubris
are born by us
inferior designers
and i wear them fine

i’m not sure if my little pinky actually has any impact on my handwriting. but if you remove enough letters from the ‘correction fluid’ we had in lieu of tip-ex in school, you could make it say rectofud. so they nearly all said this. pass me the rectofud, one might say, after an egregious spelling error.

as a 13 year old boy, i thought, i will set up a record label called rectofud. i made the website. it was the dot com boom. i figured that was all i needed to do to make my millions. it was fun anyway. the web was new and exciting and fun and i had my own little place on it, before myspace and bebo came along and gave everyone their own little webpage and none of my school friends had any need to post on the rectofud guestbook any more.

alanis said it first so it’s ok

i go to bed early
i wake up late
french kissing won’t be tolerated
on this date
a collegiate day
leaves me rough
in my navel
looking for fluff
two roles away
on down the hill
wine and dine
(and sixty nine)
on a jagged little pill

this is mostly just silly, but i have been thinking a lot about belly button fluff recently. there used to always be fluff in my belly button if i had been wearing clothes that day. most days if not all that would be. but there is never ever fluff in it any more. i still usually wear cotton tee shirts. i still have a belly button. and i’ve been basically the same size for 30 years at this point. i don’t understand what has changed. if anyone knows, please let me know.

but i ask, what app is it on which i will find this so called authentication code, and chorus

krypton factor
authenticity
villification code
is this landing?
is this a story
that needs to be told?
chat gpt
thinks my poetry sucks
well, shucks
i was promised strong and stable

get tucked in for the gilet years
keep it strong and stable
despite hopes and fears
a pudding waits
at the end of the repast
let’s hope we get there
at last

remember the world before you needed to have a million apps on your phone? i had the original apple ipod touch. it was an incredible device. you had to jailbreak it to install any apps that weren’t the apple defaults. but it already had a web browser and email and that was enough to be perfectly useful.

remember the even better world before camera phones? there are so few photos of me prior to about 2008. and the world is probably better for that. man i hate having to pose for a photo. or stopping to take a photo. remember when taking a selfie used to be embarrassing?

man i am so old. anyway, off to take a mirror selfie to post to instagram. sorry for the grumpy. please take photos and use apps if you enjoy it. the phone has changed me too. now i merely lurk on flame wars on reddit rather than engaging in them on bb forums.

very grammable

from the whangie we frolick
gleeful down the hill
passions may contract
but others will swell
glow up and gentrify
come good in quick time
blow up my mentions
like and subscribe

the whangie is weird rock formation in the campsies, north of glasgow. we went on a trail run there. it was fun running down the hill but i was sore for days after.

i seemed to be doing a lot of thinking about social media this time a year ago. i was posting regularly to instagram at the time. i was wholly unsuccessful at creating my market there! man i hate zuck.

introducing (a stupid idiot)

i’m n.n. benn
that’s benn
with two n’s
i don’t claim
be an artist.
multidisciplinary
autistic typist
is what it says
on my passport
though sadly
i’ve been convicted
and sentenced
to hard poetry,
for infinite years
in both practice
and theory

this bit is a little tribute to the early 21st century glaswegian hip-hop duo, the stupid idiots. sadly, none of their music seems to be online any longer, and a new band is calling itself the stupid idiots on spotify. i presume the original stupid idiots’ lawyers will have been in touch.

once described by the nme as ‘gleefully profane’, i think its fair to say they were my favourite band of all time. just pipping a three way tie for second between bob dylan, enya and the archers’ theme song.

smell tomato paste and cheddar, my da’s cooking, my home

i was just making some toast and cheese and i thought i’ll make it a bit fancy since, let’s be honest, this is what i’m having for dinner.

so i mixed some seeds and tomato paste and olive oil and salt and cheese into a lumpy paste, spread it on wholemeal pitta bread and bunged it into the oven and make a sort of turbo-pizza snack. and i remembered cooking with my dad when i was a wee boy.

we would buy pre-made pizza bases from the supermarket. or even just a crispy morton’s roll. and then tomato paste and cheese. so my version is a wee bit fancier. but that’s just a generational shift. there’s more stuff in the supermarket now than there was when i was a kid. nobody cared about mixed seeds and whole grains then. the food my parents eat now is different from the food they are then.

that’s why nostalgia is so emotional, and can hit so hard. it’s that longing that you didn’t know you had for a thing that you cannot have, because it just doesn’t exist anymore.