Tag: #poetry

the 13th month

the bell chimed, it’s time 

to introduce the thirteenth month

rationalise the calendar with months of 28 days

plus an extra day, a global holiday 

for all workers

during which the bourgeois financiers 

shall man the (beer) pumps

and another one the same each leap year

and the extra month should be a holiday too

slide it in between july and august

call it hedonia, for a long free summer.

we all work too much. why can’t we rest more. i’m sure that if we just cut out all the pointless jobs that are just done to make money, and just did the stuff people need and love like cooking and nursing and entertaining and building good places to live in and growing stuff etc, then we could probably all have a pretty nice life where nobody wants for nothing. but some rich guys want to own everything, so we have what we have.

soy flat white

she goes by hot chocolate, that makes me soy flat white
karmic on the balcony, sharing a thunderstorm,
writing this poem, i hear my queen through the wool
and feel the love epochal
in napoli, where love is king, the pizza is immortal
and a thousand wonky steps climb to a hot pink moon.

in the queue at the starbucks in edinburgh airport, a young black woman was in the line ahead of me. she ordered a hot chocolate. the (white, timid, young, male) barista asked her name, and she said ‘hot chocolate’. obviously, this made the barista quite uncomfortable, but the woman who ordered the drink clearly found it hilarious.

then i ordered my soy flat white. but i just said my name was benn. poor boy.

then i went to napoli and waited for my girlfriend to join me from sorrento. when she arrived, she took me running in quite intense heat and the route she plotted just seemed to go directly up in the air. afterwords we napped and listened to nick drake.

and from this little verse came the title of this body of work, the love epochal. which to me anyway embodies the search for meaning in an amoral universe in which love, joy and happiness coexist with alienation, despair, poverty and war.

toblerone [remix]

hamstrung by the ancestors of landlords
beneath the distant barren peaks of a toblerone—
the traumatic trough entrenches resilience.
a slight slide and crunch underfoot on icy steps,
the organism (the leviathan) slips into disequilibrium.
revolted by bolts of thunderous chunder, and a cold sweat
a risky coffee poured into the evacuated gut.
in a feverish daze, i found the courage to ask for help
and was restored—with my problems undiminished

there is a nut on my bath plug. it can run up or down a screw length. no clue why, at first.

one day, after one of my many long baths (like the one i’m in right now) i turned the knob that ejects the plug. and it had no effect. so i was reduced to spending my evening emptying the bath into the loo with a saucepan. then i went to drill a hole in the plug, but before it made an incision the jolt of the drill burped out the seal and the plug came out.

i inspected the nut on the plug and inferred that clearly i must turn the screw all the way down to the bottom, for maximum ejaculatory force. i did this, and then for ten years or so, generally when i tugged the knob at the end of the bath, the plug always came and the water drained.

but then the knob ceased to have effect again. it impotently refused to drain. twice again in the space of a few weeks. it even made it into the poem (perhaps not yet published, i can’t remember, and, as i said, i’m in the bath.)

i don’t understand, i thought, the second time. the nut is screwed maximally to the bottom?!

a few weeks later it occurred to me. maybe i should try screwing the bolt leftwards, up to the top of the shaft. sure enough, with that setting, the ejected plug sat a good half centimetre further out of the water.

thank fuck i never spent that £2.49 on one of those rubber plugs that you just pull out and never ever have to try and extract with your toilet plunger ten years ago when i first had this problem.

naked to the invisible eye

naked to the invisible eye is my conscience
so jaded, they almost shot the president; i didn’t buy the paper
the elbowed class are occupied, betting the house on forex
honest labourers: poets, cleaners, 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 on every day’s agenda keep an item just for you
say no, instead of yes, and swear allegiance to yourself
and see yourself in every other soul

an old friend, don john, who i have not seen or heard of in probably 20 years, once accidentally said ‘naked to the invisible eye’ rather than ‘invisible to the naked eye’ during one of his tutorials at oxford. a creepy mistake which cuts to the meat of the disconcerting level of surveillance which seems to be a feature not a bug of late capitalist society.

i remember around the turn of the millennium seeing a movie about the stazi in east germany. the level of surveillance by the state against its citizens was rightly seen as shocking. it was one of the most effective arguments the western allies had against actually-existing state-socialism. do you want to live in a cliping society where thugs go through your garbage?

but then the snowden leaks happened and it turned out the us and european governments had been illegally spying on their citizens for years. we can probably be sure they still are. but on top of that, we now have unelected tech megapolies monitoring us and we are freely giving them our data, and that of those we communicate with. we tell their ai chatbots our darkest secrets. maybe we just aren’t very smart. maybe these technologies are generating issues and possibilities that we aren’t yet capable of understanding.

just ruthlessly enforce them

now i’m 40 i can’t work computers or my phone
i don’t make the rules. i just ruthlessly enforce them
at least i no longer leap to the tories’ whim
girl gang, geoluhread mango tango continuum
90s memes are back in favour
things can only get better bet moar dead raverz
first to the pub and the tank lager is off for permanent
but there is no better feeling than voting out the government?

i use to play scrabble with my friend m.l. at tchai ovna in shawlands. its long gone. we would drink tea all evening. surprisingly good buzz from a long night on the oolongs. one evening i got a bit confused and made a foul move on the scrabble. it was a basic and clear error. and m.l. correctly called me out. ‘i don’t make the rules,’ he said, ‘i just ruthlessly enforce them.’ so that stuck with me.

i think it may also have been m.l. that told me that until the discovery of the fruit, an orange, there was no word for the colour orange in english. geoluhread is just an old english combination of yellow and red. please don’t quote me in your english language essay and i am not responsible if you fail.

i always planned on starting a band called ‘moar dead raverz’. let me know if you fancy joining?

locker 91

whenever i can get it i take locker 91
the needle as the razor ice cold like a gun
bounce a buttcheek out the bottom of your beltskirt and i’m shook
but don’t jump, please god don’t jump
overmorrow will come and tomorrow will be yesterday
I am an intellectual and I watch election special (eh?)
rich e. sunak gone with the small sound of a [cough]
neither feared, loved or loathed
a dog that never bit, or barked. just soiled and wet the bed
may he eat out a career, helped out to get ahead
by the mediocrity reapt from our tired ground
which through the veins of parliament abound

hello, it’s july now and we are now into part two: getting there (a brexit prayer). it is really a continuation of part one but it comes with my own acceptance that i don’t really have time to post every day or to make a new song and video every month. so for the next six months my plan is to post new poetry on tuesdays and wednesdays and revisit stuff from part one on fridays.

also today is my album launch so please check it out on apple music, spotify etc.

anyway, this is a fun little bit i think. locker 91 is the locker i like to use at the gym. 1991 is the year my girlfriend was born. its a good number – its a palindrome. i remember being told this in 1991. that the next one would be 2002. a date so ludicrously far in the future that i discredited reports that it would eventually be more than twenty years ago.

we were on a run along the river, me and my girlfriend, and there was a stand off at a bridge. they were trying to talk a suicidal person down. i hope they are ok. i hope they found meaning and purpose in the last twelve months.

then rishi sunak lost the bizarre 4 july election he called. i always felt that rishi was inappropriately seen as a sensible person. perhaps in comparison to truss and johnson. but he was chancellor during the bizarre era of bounce back loan fraud, ppe fraud, and he tried to stimulate the economy by reducing vat on dining out during a pandemic. our polity will not miss his cool helmsmanship.

there are also two references to the godfather in the lines above.

have you tried the toblerone, insolent infant?

have you tried the toblerone, insolent infant?
it’s cheap if you can afford a lot of it
i have a theory identic twins in tandem
are set at random on their paths
different, but the same

and that’s the end of part one! i think i enjoyed it . it’s been a lot of work. i’m tired. i hope it resonates with someone out there in the ether.

i’m going to do something a bit different for second half of the year. tune in from tomorrow for more poetry in ‘the love epochal part two: getting there (a brexit prayer)’.

all through the night, we have no past, we won’t reach back

all through the night, we have no past, we won’t reach back
dilatory breathing, with the inmates chewing fat
i always laugh when i chop onions, ever since my pet cat killed himself

all through the night is a cyndi lauper song. its a banger! what an artist.

dilatory is one of my favourite words. i am curious about the etymology – is it related to delay? if so, why isn’t it spelt delaytory? – but not so curious to look it up. another of my favourite words, i think i mentioned before, is demonstrable. a combination of demons and monster. quite scary.

chewing the fat means blethering or gossiping. shooting the breeze. we have loads of words for banter and patter round our way.

do you laugh when you chop onions?

stars are parts of empires, feart to boo a ghost

i schedule noxious imbibition and obnoxious noise projection
with colleagues, on a rager, dipsomaniacal

i was thinking about stars. what do they symbolise? parts of empires. 50 stars for the 50 states of america. or the stars of the european flag, representing the 12 founding members of the european union. or the 27 states/districts/stars of brazil. i don’t know what the australian stars mean but whatever it is, i mean, we are in empire territory, aren’t we?

and boo a ghost. haha. it’s meant to be boo a goose. but an old friend’s colleague used to say ‘x would be scared to boo a ghost,’ which i found hilarious as its an altogether different prospect. it would be a flimsy character who wouldn’t have the matter about them to boo a goose. an encounter with a spectral being would likely put one so firmly on the backfoot that any booing would be bizarrely foolhardy.