TRAMP WITH A LAPTOP

In a hut eating a Brazil nut, a Brazilian feels he’s in a rut.
He’d wanted to manufacture knives, but he never made the cut.
Ironically, the factory where he used to work had to shut.

In Sheffield, a chef in a field is deciding he must yield,
His restaurant is losing money and his cuisine had never appealed.
Admitting to himself he was a failure, he knew his fate was sealed.
‘I will retire in Nuneaton,’ he thought aloud, then drank until he reeled.

The tramp with a laptop sat at a bus stop,
His lap a prop for the PC he uses non-stop feels warm through his grimy attire.
Tapping at keys, his eyes freeze on the flickering screen,
The sight of him to some is incongruous; to others he’s obscene.
He pays them no mind, surfing the net,
Looking for porn websites designed by a vagrant and a vet.

Vague, Grant—so uncertain when first met,
Seems no more coherent on subsequent occasions he’ll forget.
Grant wishes he could grant wishes and wishes his grant was bigger.
He also feels, albeit vaguely, that his girlfriend takes him for granted,
Yet he can’t resist her figure.

Mel, born in Melbourne, frowns at her medical records,
Which reveal a drugs overdose in her teens,
Mel ODs—inscribed in red ink makes her think about her past,
Living beyond her means.
Now, far away from the psychiatric ward,
She’s far less wayward and obsessively cleans,
Her only extravagance is her £100 pair of jeans.

Spike, Chairman and MC, makes his point quite bluntly,
But atleast everyone can see that he speaks his mind,
So they can find the thoughts he has on it.
Plain-talking Spike, on Salisbury Plain, taking a hike,
May not be all that sharp,
He sometimes acts the fool, but never plays a harp.
He rarely ‘harps’ on about things, which is to his credit,
His ego’s modest in size although he prefers others to have fed it.

‘IMP ALES’ read the labelled bottled beers.
They’re Spike’s favourite drink,
He drinks and cries out, ‘Cheers!’
After nine or ten of them, he regularly disappears…
To relieve his bladder, feeling sadder,
He splashes water on his face from basins in pub toilets.

Returning to his back-slapping cronies propping up bars,
Popping outside lighting up cigars.

Spike isn’t ugly but has some facial scars,
In certain lights they resemble types of strapless bras.
At the end of these nights, Spike, feeling rank,
Gropes for the door handles of taxis,
Waiting for a fleeting moment.

Mo, a woman he used to know,
Meant something to Spike a long time ago.
What had Mo meant at that moment when they’d separated?
He didn’t know, she’d yelled a lot and he’d felt berated.

Lurching in the back of some cab, Spike tries to take a stab—
At talking with the driver…
Moments with Mo submerge in his foggy memory,
But the surly cabbie, unusually, doesn’t want to talk,
Spike decides that he doesn’t either.

Home at last, he thinks—aghast at the taxi fare.
Grumbling, he pays, gets out and sways,
Then, to himself, he says, ‘Spike, my son, you are a survivor!’

SEPTEMBER

September’s here already.
Am I all ready?
Ready or not, I’ll give it a shot…
See what this month’s got,
Before October arrives and that’s my lot!

I’ve experienced over forty Septembers—some of which I forgot.
Some were cool and some were hot,
Some were fun and some were not.
September tends to signify the end of summer, which is a bummer,
Unless, of course, there’s an ‘Indian’ summer.

Joe Strummer—co-founder of The Clash—was born in 1952…
In the summer.
Fifty years on, he died in December,
Which is the ideal time for a Christmas mummer.

SMILES APART

When they are meeting, people include smiling in their friendly greeting.
Smiling is a nice thing to do, but it can be self-defeating
Especially if you do it and forget that you are eating.
In certain cultures, showing your teeth can be seen as a threat,
Irrespective of the condition or the cleanness of your set.
Similarly, smiling for no apparent reason makes others quite upset.
Beginning grinning on inappropriate occasions also makes them fret,
This facial signal, conveying happiness, is not always welcome, you can bet…
At funerals where there are frowns,
By the seaside if someone drowns,
In reaction to a tragedy, smiling doesn’t work,
In fact, it makes you look and feel insensitive and a silly berk.

Use smiles cautiously to avoid alienation and guilt,
Be careful to observe the rituals, on which our gestures are built,
To avoid embarrassment and possible social exclusion.
Practise smiling properly so your smile’s never out of place,
Rehearse until it never looks forced on your smiling face.
Try ‘safe’ smiling at home when there’s no one there,
You might find a mirror useful in helping you prepare.
With patient application to these exercises, you’ll find the kind expression you need,
For accompanying lip-curling motions that are bound to succeed,
In satisfying the expectations of others so you—and they—feel safe.
Oh, and try using a lip gel so your smiling lips don’t chafe.

SOAP

Soap operas don’t wash with me,
With their Swiss cheese plots and implausibility.
Soapbox sermonisers talk a good game,
But I don’t like listening to them all the same.
I’d rather not get in a lather when someone soft-soaps me,
Despite the fact I’d much prefer they’d simply let me be.
Soap deception perpetrators really should come clean,
Soap comes in bars sometimes called cakes and are very often green.
Soap can be used for washing and acts that are obscene,
Especially when it’s wet and slippery—you know what I mean.
Like it or lump it, soap is here to stay.
Some soap is quite expensive—it’s surprising what you can pay.
Regular use of all kinds of soap keeps B.O away.

THE MANTELPIECES

‘Go to Uni, son.’ Fathers cry in unison.
‘To provide more photographs for our mantelpieces,’ they further explain.
Then it’s down to each son’s academic brain,
To study; to earn future pictures of themselves wearing mortarboards and gowns,
The frightening prospect of their failure causes paternal frowns.
The dads’ fads, long forgotten, fed their youthful desires, but now—
The slips of girls they made love to are miserable cows.
So they invest their remaining ambition in their genetic tradition,
So they can fill the gaps on their mantelpieces.

THE CHAPLAIN AND CHIEF LEE

Chief Lee, concerned, with his people,
Is inspired inside a steeple,
On top of his favourite church,
Within which the congregation perch on creaky pews,
They hear their minister spews,
Owing to his constant intoxication
The chaplain will sway and lurch,
While preaching about leeching and negative traits,
His alcoholism is funded by the weekly collection plates,
He urges feelings of love in people he hates.

One night in his bed, some anonymous man lay down beside him,
‘Who are you?’ He asks him, but the stranger is dead.
Next morning, mourning, he consults his most loyal parishioners.
Can the chap who’d lain next to the chaplain the previous night be identified?
No, they shake their heads in unison,
‘No, no,’ so many of them cried.
Could their chaplain—while drunk, perhaps—have killed a stranger in his sleep?
A stranger who might have prayed that if he died the Lord his soul might keep.
Was the chaplain to be believed?
They suddenly began to speculate, after years of being deceived.
The chaplain shook his hung over head,
Then—as was typical in the mornings—heaved.
As a youth, he’d felt consumed by the Holy Spirit,
Now, blinking bloodshot eyes, he consumes, wholly, spirits.

'WACKO JACKO' WON'T BE BACKO!

The untimely demise of Michael Jackson has precipitated a media-fuelled process that is becoming strangely familiar. A process involving mass grieving in public, hysterical overreaction and the phenomenal enrichment of florists; a process that first occurred, and most visibly, with the death of Diana. A process involving repetitive cycles of news bulletins with clichéd sound bites from celebrity friends, linked with footage of fans gathering in places connected with the deceased. A process that has no clear rationale behind the prioritisation of its coverage; causing Diana’s death to overshadow that of Mother Teresa and MJ’s to outrank Farrah Fawcett’s.
On TV, admirers relate their feelings of devastation with apparent sincerity, incongruous with their status as, often, complete strangers to their late icons. As superlatives are added to sentences of increasingly exaggerated praise, disproportionate to the achievements of any human life, marketing forces capitalise on relevant merchandise with the unselfconscious abandon of a swarm of locusts. Media mantras mesmerise members of the public into reactions of a Pavlovian nature. Discussions between people include the half-dozen or so catchiest headlines and quotes, becoming confused with their own thoughts.
There is much hypocrisy with this process of virtual deification—in Jackson’s case people seem afflicted with especially short memories. Forgotten are their previous impressions of the performer as a complete weirdo. ‘Wacko Jacko’ was the phrase most typically used to describe the eccentric star in life. In death, the same tabloid that coined this derogatory phrase published a 32-page commemorative souvenir in a vulgar display of obvious double standards. Although Jackson was cleared of child abuse charges, there was a widespread and general feeling among the public that there is ‘no smoke without fire.’ While Jackson’s reputation was tarnished by these suggestions—they would have irrevocably destroyed that of anyone else, famous or not—he appeared to bounce back. To survive suspicions and accusations of the type of behaviour that is universally condemned and considered so heinous it is irredeemable makes MJ unique. A fact as notable, perhaps, as the one that he produced the best-selling album of all time, ‘Thriller.’
Naturally, his death is sad—as sad as the loss of any life. How many millions of other people died around the same time is a hard to guess figure. Equally hard to figure is how public figures have come to figure so largely in the daily lives of significant numbers of people, leading pedestrian lives out of the limelight. Is there any shared sense (among anyone ‘out there’) of urgency behind the desire to understand this?

OCEANS

Sometimes the Atlantic Ocean is referred to as the pond.
It’s not an expression of which I’m fond.
I don’t usually see eye to eye with people who use that expression.
It could be said that we’re oceans apart.
Talking of oceans, the Pacific to be specific,
Isn’t it amazing how its southern waters share their name with a popular musical?
What an inspiring sea!
None of the others share their names with a smash hit show.
Current thinking among oceanographers suggests that oceans and seas are vast bodies of water and that there’s more liquid on Earth than land.
So why they should be expected to inspire musicals, as well as being big, is hard to understand.
Ocean liners, it strikes me, must create the most fleetingly ephemeral and shallow lines…
We all know how water behaves, moving so fast when it’s displaced that it can’t be traced.
Allegedly, the Red Sea parted for Moses but when it drowned the Egyptians on his tail he didn’t give a damn!

SKELETAL(L) STORIES

‘Pick the bones out of that!’ I exclaimed to the defeated palaeontologist.
‘You can’t cut Dinos with a dinosaur.’ He feebly replied.
‘I surmise that you’ll fossilise with fossil eyes.’
This, one of my replies, was met with no surprise.
‘Extinct, your ex-stink, of something old and obsolete, leaves you incomplete—like ankles without feet. You might be neat, but you can’t stand up…’
‘I’ll not stand for this,’ he indignantly sounded.
His mouth agape, his eyes rounded.
‘In your field of expertise you’re sufficiently grounded.’
I decided to concede.
‘I must push on, I’ve mouths to feed.’
Interjected the bankrupt restaurateur who’d retired in Nuneaton, masturbating repeatedly over images of Michelle Heaton.

RELAYS

To relay the message about the baton, Shirl picks up the phone giving the receiver wire a twirl.
Steamed up, the chiropodist made her toes curl.
‘A sauna,’ said Shauna, was unlikely to straighten things out. ‘But no doubt you’ll give it a whirl!’
‘Hello, Tommy Greenears here,’ Tommy picks up the phone.
‘Hiya, Tommy, it’s Shirley, dear.’ She says as he starts to groan.
Had he upset her putting his foot in it with the chiropodist?
He sighs relieved when, without sounding peeved, she talks about a stick for guiding musicians.
The orchestrated responses of ponces pounce on ounces of his grey matter as they continue to natter.
The patter of little feet passing the premises of dodgy chiropodists provide percussion in the mental soundtrack of the mind affected by concussion—
The result of a blow to the head with a telephone receiver wielded by a malicious deceiver, who’d lied about the results of a relay race that actually had been tied.
The draw having been denied, a line was drawn under the deception by the mastermind of its conception.
Smugly, the liar circulated a flier coupling the false results with ads for dubious foot care, which results—for Shirl—in a scare.
Shirl’s girls inherit mistrust for pedicures and seduce reflexologists and the like, so as to break their hearts and, with those called Mike, impale their feet on a metal spike.
Systematic and cruel, Shirl’s daughters make foot fetishists drool.
Taunting foot masseurs, they play the fool—serving revenge cold, they are both hard and cool.
Getting loudmouths to put a sock in it by putting lead in a sock, for use as a coshing tool, they indirectly and vicariously vent Shirl’s spleen.
Washing their hands of them, former friends—horrified by their acts, so mean—keep clean by steering clear.
Everyone senses about them something that’s queer.
Except for their hapless victims—heel, sole and toe specialists whose special lists list specialties special teas spilled over and stained.