Workplace - A Bosnian Tanka

At the edge they stood
Assumed positions as if
It was workplace but
No place for neighbours with guns
To bury neighbours with none

The Godfather of Dole

His language used to be industrial.
Then it were desperate,
Now it's academic.

His heart,
Closed and blackened,
Like the slag-heaped upon
Bits of pits which
Dig bits of
Physical ticks that twitch
And conflagrate
And agitate
The propped nature of
His strong fragility,
His hard sinewed inability
To comprehend,
What they call
The end.

Twisted,
Wheeled monuments
Astride the landscape,
Like rugby league
Prop-forwards.
Heads down grafting,
Huge shoulders strain,
To scrum the earth,
Extract the ball,
Pass it on
From theirs before,
Who've passed it on
From theirs before,
Who'll pass it on
To theirs no more.

Stick a miner's hat on
The policeman’s baton,
The excessive force
From the perspective
Of a skewed directive.
Game no more.
Faith no more.
Work no more.
‘84.

Red cabbage blood spots
On the grey scale pitch.
Tip buckets filled
For battered pride n’ chips.
Legs set, backs bent,
Arms out for the onslaught.
Give blood,
Play rugby,
Play war.

The crowd that
Engaged and
Doffed caps to
Hand-offs and
Nose-cracks,
Are now enraged,
And off caps for
Hand outs,
For lives back.

This is Northern
Soul-shaking,
Back-breaking music.
This ain't no
Wilson Picket song.
This tune's 33 year-old
Played at 33 revolutions P.M.
By The Godfather of Dole.

Wake up Maggie,
I think I've got something to
Say to you…

Queen Ham Pop

(All fun in The Sun)

As queens take each other on
Draught style
The most boring Geordie we’ve ever met
Regards the revellers
Middle aged

In t’ times of their lives

Solid types in liquid dresses
Glamorous girls and
Dance floor mixers
Wi’ ‘I’m not gay or owt’ lads
On amyl nitrate to the karaoke
Tongues the texture of suede

In t’ Bradford on the tiles

Between bouncers
Flouncers and nails
Long lashes and fake knockers
The adverts on the telly scroll
Queens
Ham Sandwich
Poppers
Queens
Ham Sandwich
Poppers

Prize Plum - A Tanka

The Eton tosspot
Politics lecture does fade
Into lunacy
As the plum is popped from the
Gob of this simpering tit

Abutted Toast

Half cut
Points abut
Like council meeting minutes,
Or unlucky sods
Who bump
The big man
On the the way
To the bogs.
In the back of the head
It seems sincere,
But they’re all
Out front
Round here.

For Lviv

In West Ukraine
a blue crane
lifts the barley
from the guts of the town.
In this accident of geography
she found the only puddle in the city
and made one hell of a splash.
Blonde and pleated,
tall and static,
a well trod speaker’s corner
she stood.
Her hometown was a
Bureau de Change
above a laundry room.

She could
not have the patience
of the flower seller.
She did not believe
in the sound of the sea.
The hurricane from the away end
blew the crosses from the hilltops
into her psychology,
blew the fuel from the reservoir
and filled her stomping ground.
Statuesque she daily flung
her concrete words ballistic
against the amassed and fascistic.

To mark the tenth anniversary
of her death,
football scarves were laid.
A small boy all neat and auburn
offered his historiography:

Fuck your vile corrupt 
Iconography 

Spat and turned
Into the café he burst
already old enough to drink
5 star Hararava
lit up his cigarette,
eyeballed the old patriots in the corner
who ran off
handing their beer money
to the beggar woman in the street.
He bowed toward her stomping ground
and sniped:

Never admit defeat!

Hip Sheep

The man
In the Clapton Tracksuit’s
On the blower
The progressive regressive atmosphere
Here’s no grower
Where a blooming
Girl with the public smile
Describes it for us for a while
All loon clobbered in obvious style
Prescribes it zone 3
2 mile
Vile
‘Cos
As much as they need electricity
To power this eccentricity
They google authenticity
On the outskirts of the city
Gritty
Stroll on
Push through
Don’t pull over
Where provincial hipsters
Move much slower