Category poems

Here’s the way to spin it, boss.
Go out there, look glum,
say you take responsibility.
Don’t mention Dido, dad, or Dom...

two months in, he can barely remember
a time before, has pared life back
to weekly shop, the bins, a newspaper
that yellows on the kitchen table...

The dog ate my homework.
I did not have sexual relations with that band, ABBA.
The dog is called Fido, er… Tyson, er… Boris, no…

Like Saul on the road to Damascus
when Jehovah stopped for a word and held forth
Mary Wakefield met Lord God Almighty
on the A1. In March. Heading north...

these numbers on a page
are a testament to british ingenuity
a familiar fairytale of sharp teeth
wolf as grandmother
remember people would die anyway...

Two hours, in, you hunger for what isn’t there,
the flesh on their bones, the life behind the names...

Rattling through the low hills
in the darkness and the endless endless rain
the train is overcrowded
because the train is overcrowded...

And so, it comes.
That winter morning when you wake
and find that you have had.

enough...

Laura’s snaffled an exclusive
freshly minted by the Tories
a left-wing thug has punched a bloke!
she tweets...

if there is god thinks Piotr then this bus will not stop at sentchiles sick tempull places which he cannot name places which all look the same bus will not leave him in darkness on dog-shit chip-box puddle pavement cold…

I did not know you. I did not know you and I was not there when Tuesday morning burst in upon you, kicked down the doors and stormed into the flat, when a dozen men with guns, – policia doing the…

at her terminal in the library of a small, forgotten planet she wonders who the others are and how they made it here when it closes, she walks to the stop finds the 42 left a long, long time ago…