When you show Britannia tears
She will comfort you, cradle your soul
and make everything alright, show her
the face of heroism, of remaining loyal
to her throughout life, of being faithful
in a world in which she suspects she has done
many wrongs, then her tears are for you
to respect and kiss away gently
as they run down the side of her cheeks.
Britannia is old now, my Queen still fights
on, I see the rage, I feel its heart as she lays down,
Where would I be now
If I had the courage of my convictions
as a fumbling teen, ready to shout
and flick a finger or two, doesn’t
matter about this and that,
I am going to go round the world
and write down all that I see,
it doesn’t matter about money,
I just require a sturdy mind
and the bottle to do it;
betrayed before I started
by the spine
which the Doctors missed
and the muscle of love and music of sweet
talking women.
Was the microphone too big for me,
it seemed to dwarf my
insignificant words, honest
yet of no consequence
to the world and its wife, only
Time, infinite wisdom that it provides,
would ever illuminate such a question
and give it a reasoned, considered answer;
conscious of the second hand moving, trivial
pursuit but in my heart
just another reason to love;
they have travelled a long way since
set down at school, the embarrassment
of being called names and sneered at by teachers,
Remember how we panicked,
the last straw of a civilised society,
Orwellian, 1984, Big brother
is watching and taking notes;
remember that panic
as cameras zoomed in our conversations
and attacked our sense of moral outrage…
They should have waited a few years,
installed them now,
in the back of our heads, showreels
for the courts for out of our mouths
comes the awful truth,
we have become C.C.T.V. ourselves,
reporting every little thing that might
offend us, regardless of its merit,
The hippopotamus wallows in the mud
of the world but the shallow pool,
clear and crystal, remains unseen,
out of the sight of the dear old chubby hippo;
he has not made the decision on purpose,
he just has the guilt of the river
on his shoulders.
Not understanding that the massacre
of elephants was not his fault,
he carries the remorse
of being a hundred miles away
on the day the poachers came,
to him the mud
is the only salvation he knows.
The urge comes and it takes strength
to quash it, to stamp on it, flatten it
lest it take me down dear heart,
to get on the train, to find myself
on a platform staring out across
a once abandoned town of memories
and haunt it once more,
but would you remember at all,
would you smile, playfully
slap on the back
and reach out to me,
the gentle reminder that we are still friends,
or would it be easier for you
now, before I board the train
You can call me a Tw**
I won’t take offence, call me a piece of
dirt, a shit, an arse, a f***,
Knob, Di**,
cuss me all you like, damn
me to Hell, liken me to porn,
if you feel cheap,
lazy even
forgo a letter, knock yourself,
find a better word than git,
Smeg is perfect, possibly,
it appeals to the Red Dwarf fan in me,
however,
don’t stand there and call me Hall,
that’s a No No;
you are not a N.C.O.
I have nothing against your left eye,
it is the pupil that you know will
pass its eleven plus
and go onwards to University
and despite falling in love
with many a pretty girl,
all mysterious and from a foreign field,
the pupil will become a good egg,
concentrate mostly on the study at hand
and leave with honours,
the gratitude of the pool table
and the smiles of the women
as a reminder of what it was to have
a good eye.
I was never in,
save if there was a new album
in which Monday mornings
spent flicking through covers
and memory
of songs heard on the radio
during the weekend
were too much for my psyche
to let go, the hook,
the lyric became my needle.
Never in, always out,
what was the point in self imposed prison, surrounded
by walls, decorated by posters to cover
the stark white oppression and unhappy warden;
now I stay in, the world has become
my prison, for the body and mind cannot
I might be a Manchester Blue,
so old school that I used to have slate
and chalk to calculate City’s
progress up
and invariably down the league.
A fan since the days of Dennis Tuert,
Willie Donachie and Asa Hartford, yet
still as the new season approaches,
I salute one of the special ones,
the soothing
Voice of Anfield,
the heroic stance in the box
of echoes and history,
the voice of football
in a world gone mad with the overpaid
and the undeserving, George’s timbre