Riot Brigade
Flashed all their truncheons bare
Flashed as they turned in air
Cracking hell’s-grannies there
Dare not a liberal spared
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the tear-gas smoke
Right through the gates they broke
Press-hounds and puppies
Admiring the backhand stroke
Thrashing and thundered.
Points make prizes, praise
The first man to six hundred!
Hippies to the right of them
Hippies to the left of them
Horses behind them
Volleyed and thundered.
Rubber-bullets, shot and shell
Not a horse or hero fell
They that had fought so well.
Each rozzer-filth counts the points
Of broken skulls, legs and joints
Top shot will scoop the prize
Of points to six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Treble overtime paid
To each of the Riot Brigade
A wedge of six hundred!
[2018, from the comic novel The Wrong ’Un cf. Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Tennyson]
The Penthouse
I have a flea.
He lives in the mat
By my feet.
I wonder
If he curses God
And hopes to die
Like me,
Or maybe Life is rosy
And complete
By sucking the blood
Of my feet.
Regurgitates Shakespeare
For fun, this fiend;
Fires his belly i’ the sun.
Live and let live, says the flea.
[2009]
Smashing Atoms
I was working in the lab late one night
Squinting at a proton with all my might,
The brute double-bumped before my eyes –
And now I’m down for the Nobel Prize!
[2016]
Love in Bloom
I loved thee in thy springtime blush of youth,
Life ripens, glisters autumn shades of gold
Now crumbles dread – too soon has turned to grey.
Those happy days. I love thee of a truth,
And keep thee close as when I once did hold
Thee in my arms – so soon have blown away
Those days like leaves.
Yet Life retains thy love for me
To blossom, dear,
As sure my love for thee.
[2002]