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…
Selected poems
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.