Dogs and cats and poems

My dog would write a poem, for sure,
if only he could hold a pen or pencil in his paw,
or learn to read and write.
But I feel he lacks the intellect, being a dog that’s none too bright.
And so he’s content to bark, and wag his tail,
chase balls and sticks, and tear the morning mail.
Though, sometimes, when he looks at me in a certain dogged way,
not hoping just for food or a simple canine game to play,
I feel he might enjoy a creative writing session,
just for the thrill of a more cerebral form of self-expression.

My cat, though, I’m convinced,
would never feel the need
to ever write a poem
- unless a suitable fee was agreed.

Clerihews

(clerihews, invented and made popular by EC Bentley, are, to my mind, a much underrated and underused form of light verse. They comprise four lines, the first being a famous (or infamous) name, the second line rhyming with the name, and the third and fourth rhyming with each other. Meter rarely enters into it, and the content should preferably contain a grain of truth, and a big dollop of absurdity.) Here's a trio of my more recent efforts:

Michelangelo
Never mastered the banjo.
The demands of the Renaissance
Left him neither the time nor the patience.

DH Lawrence
Had no abhorrence
Of the sexual act.
He quite enjoyed it, in fact.

Queen Victoria
Disliked euphoria.
Though the Empire enthused
She was not amused.

LIMITS

We live in four dimensions;
what fun to have a fifth!
But the Great Dimension Maker
is infamous for thrift

and claims there are no more to have
(or none He can allow).
So length and width and depth and time
must do us all, for now.

The Sputum Tree.

The sputum tree
Does not exist.
I somehow think
It’ll not be missed.

The wheelie bins are waiting…

The wheelie bins are waiting
On every street in town,
Waiting for the bin men
To tip them upside down
And empty out, into the truck,
A fortnight’s trash, or more,
Stuff that’s overflowing,
And falling to the floor.
They stand there, constipated-
Could things get much worse?
Three weeks now, they’ve waited,
Each one fit to burst.
Standing in the ice and snow
It wheelie is no fun.
The wheelie bins are waiting,
But the bin men still don’t come…

Scrappage

I wish I’d looked after my teeth –
And the rest, from my head to my feet.
My body’s a state,
I feel overweight,
I’m no longer shiny and neat.

My muscles are stiffening,
My arteries are thickening,
My joints are beginning to rust.
My back’s starting aching,
My skin’s started flaking,
My hair’s falling out in disgust.

My teeth have got longer,
My new specs are stronger,
I find myself wanting to nap.
To my family I said:
After I’m dead,
Just sell off my body for scrap!

They looked at me so,
Said: No! You can’t go!
We want you to live, can’t you see?
Alive, you’ve a job,
So you’re worth a few bob,
Dead, you’d fetch less than ten pee!

My Rubbish Poem

I wrote this rubbish poem
Just the other day.
Chucked it in my wheelie bin
For the council to take away.
But they refused to have it,
Said it was too heavy.
For removing rubbish poems,
They’d charge an extra levy.
So I’ve put it on my blog,
Hoping that one day
Someone will find a use for it,
And take the thing away.

The Jolly Banker

(with acknowledgements to Charles Causley)

I saw a jolly banker,
With a jolly smile.
He looked extremely jolly,
Because he’d made a pile.

Jolly great big bonuses
Were his, he said, to keep.
All in all, they added up
To quite a jolly heap.

He told me that his jolly bank
Had all the jolly luck.
For we all jolly bailed it out
When things had come unstuck.

He said it was a jolly shame
That we weren’t rich, like him,
Then went off to his jolly yacht
And gave a jolly grin.

On his jolly sailing boat,
He jolly celebrated.
With lots of jolly bolly,
He got inebriated.

He jolly well fell overboard
And by the tide was caught,
Weighed down by his cash, he drowned:
Jolly good, I thought.

Baldies

God saw men had ugly heads:
To save them from despair,
He raised an arm and kindly said:
“To all men, I’ll give hair!”

“But some men’s heads are beautiful,”
He suddenly recalled:
“They don’t need to cover up-
I’ll let those ones be bald!”

Keeping the City Going


A large open lorry inches down the dark icy hill,
slipping between snowed over parked cars.
A man in a grimy hi vis jacket stands, and sounds
uneasy on the back, flinging out shovelfuls of sand
and grit from a sprawling, diminished heap.
Occasionally, he yells “Stop!” to the driver, and looks
unsteady, too near the open tail gate. He seems
pissed off, unsafe, but probably glad of the overtime.
What might Laurel and Hardy have made of this?
But this is serious: our roads must be fit for purpose,
those centimetres of snow have to be shown who’s boss.
As the vehicle passes, yellow light whirling, I see the livery
on the door: blue and white, Godiva and horse, and the words
Rapid Response Vehicle. City Vision – Quality Services.

ice and snow

The young ones slip and slide and skate
for them the ice and snow is great.

They don't care about the cold
unlike all those becoming old
who fret about their fragile bones
and buying food and heating homes.