My Year in Diets Veganuary Fibreuary Starch Cakepril MaycaroniCheese June&tonic Julicecream Augustickytoffeepudding Septembeer Octoblerone Doughvember Decemburger
Selected poems
New Year Office Chitchat How was your Christmas?you ask and I think ofthe bloodstained rug and the silent scrapingof the spade in the gardenat midnight and the wash washwashing of my hands and the dreams,those endless dreams which hauntthe night-time and smudgetheir thumbprints on the dayto come and I replySuper, thanks. Yours?
Prayer for Uninteresting Times Send me a slow news day,a quiet, subdued day,in which nothing much happens of note,save for the passing of time,the consumption of wine,and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote. Grant me a no news day,a spare-me-your-views day,in which nothing much happens at all,except a few hours togethersome regional weather,a day we can…
My Unbearable Politeness of Being It’s the same dilemmaevery year, I find,upon meeting a personfor the first time, for how longdoes wishing thema Happy New Yearremain de rigueur? Perhaps I blow thingsout of proportionbut I tend to erron the side of caution so I’ve alwaysHappy New Year-eduntil October the Third.
This was the year that was not the year This was the year that was not the year I repaired the bathroom tap and emptied out the kitchen drawer of a lifetime’s worth of crap. This was the year that was not the yearin which I launched a new career. A West End hit eluded me as did Time Person…
Resolution Having failed to keepA new year’s resolution forPretty much ever, this year I resolve toPlay it safe. The trick is to knowYour limits. Keep it simple. Now what I resolve to do is toEschew a poetic form. Abstain fromWriting an acrostic for a whole Year. A resolution, I think,Easily done. Eminently achievable.A piece of…
Roger’s Thesaurus In order to grow, expand, widenhis lexicological corpus,Roger bought, acquired, purchaseda synonymopedia, a thesaurus. Soon, presently, without delay,he no longer ran out of things to say,speak, utter, express, articulate,give voice to, pronounce, communicate. This was all very well, fine, great,wonderful, super, terrificbut his friends, mates, pals found himboring, tedious, dull, soporific. So let…
To make poems rhyme can sometimes be toughas words can seem to be from the same bough,yet each line’s ending sounds different, though,best covered up with a hiccough or cough. Was this upsetting to Byron or Yeats?Dickinson, Wordsworth, Larkin or Keats?Did they see these words as auditory threats?Could they write their lines without caveats? What…
O do not askif I am beach body ready. Observe how the folds of my stomach ripplelike the wind-pulled waves. Rub your hands over these pale buttocks,sand-smoothed by time. Note my milk-white limbs like washed up whalebones,stranded and useless. Consider these tufts of hair on my back and shoulderssprouting wildly like sea-grass. And listen to…
The mathematician John Venn was born on this day in 1834. To commemorate the occasion, here’s a poem in the form of a Venn diagram.