You Can Paint Me Red and White and Green but it’s All Yellow

Sometimes nice guys

Do finish first

For good reason

The push on stages comes with ages

Not dressed in limelight

But yellow

And now

The world all knows 

Llongyfarchiadau G

It just goes to show

Art. Work.

Art. Work.

Look at the artwork. There is skill, there is discipline, on display

there’s a show that must go on , come what may.

There’s funding, there’s advertising, a champagne pop party

there’s power, there’s privilege, there’s a crowd that’s arty.

But think on this.

When ‘you are obliged to look at this painting for at least ten

minutes so that you can appear intellectual’, 

while you’re hanging on someone’s every word, 

think on this.

It’s the unsung who cleaned, who secured, ticketed, procured

who properly ensured that this, & thousands like it,

happened at all.

It’s not an abstract thought to express some gratitude, to display

some praise, to pay humanly, to treat with grace, those who allow

us the impression, that it’s just the ‘genius’  that’s clapped & papped

& lauded, revered & reviewed & consumed & hung on the wall.

Let me make this clear.

It’s the unsung who really put it there.

It’s the unsung who deserve the applause.

It’s the unsung who we fight for,

or there’d be no art at all.

The Absinthe Minded at a Quarter Past Fifty

He was famously absinthe minded enough
To want to paint his own legacy
He’d already glossed over the doormat of self-awareness
With his own perception
Pulled self-tapping screws from the barrel belly of his past
Swapped his intake valve for a rustier much larger one

On the way back from getting
A spare set of keys for his heart
He bought a two pound tin of creosote from the floor outside the shop
It smelled like the essence of his being
It was the colour of his complexion
The ‘landscape of his body’
It was a bloody mess
Any natural beauty had long been ditched and
Smashed for six at a 65 over Limited country car crash
He vaguely remembers the 5-oh
He vaguely remembers the 5-oh at his door

By day he was a practising horizontalist
Satin finished sat indoors
Whining away the hours
His third eyed view from five foot two
Decorated the interior of his dwelling
Trees dropped wonky shells in
The war zone of his expression as
His money always ran after the wrong horse
And his empty life was in the feeding stage of its own third course

He waited until the hottest day of the year
To paint the frame of the window to his soul
Magnolia hair and artex skin and sponged guts
He laid the carpet out for himself
Painted it red
With his temper on eggshells
He stubbed his cigarette
Before kicking the can up the road
Which bounced like the baby he fought not to be
As serotonin alarm bells went off in this melt
He sat and felt his brain drip
On the bread of his own doorstep

The undercoater would take him back some day
That shook him to his very bones
He’d seen the red raw core of his very self
And seen that someone had already been round
To paint it black
Who had paid for that?

Half way through undercoating the gateway to his mind
He threw his tar brush over the wall
And put a stop to that start
He went for a quick one over the road
In hope that drinks till pay day
Could be on the missing slate of his mind
And he could chalk up a couple of coppers
And nail them to the dart board
And then decide

So when you hear the news
Any day now oh boy
Look north
Raise one to the solitary
Pull another from the fridge
To the ones whistling their unfinished symphony
On life’s back and Forth Road Bridge

Sundi’all This Will Be Yours

There’s a spare key
Under the pedant tree
There’s a hedgehog
At the border
There’s a sun dance complimentary
When the weather’s out of order
There’s a willow patterned welcome
Where hive minds protect their bees
At Sundial you can
Check out any time but
You can never leave

The Restaurant Signage Advisor

The Restaurant Signage Advisor
Cries into her apostrophe bin
There’s something eating up inside her
She’s suffering for our sins

As a girl she’d climb the pedant tree
She would string and pickle commas
In the airing cupboard they would be
‘Till they were 101ers

She cut the hyphens from her Barbies
Poured full stops on the slugs
Her old man was a grocer see
And a punctuating thug

Later she worked happily
In the employment of semantics
Her spaghetti was alphabetti
Her thesaurus love romantic

She was never a ladder climber
Though spent her time up ladders
A real job-for-life typer
Work was making her mad her

Despair would get the better
In this age of under spelling
She’d curse the written patter
Her demons needed quelling

She clocked it planned it properly
Her suicidal sign
Above her old man’s property
She’d hang herself in time

So light for her four candles
Give your grammar a cremation
Flay yourself with Twitter handles
With Fahrenheit 451 sensation

She write the sign to become a shrine
To proper spelling grammar
As she hung by the neck above the deck
The sign said “s’not S’pelt like that you wanker!”

Mic Airtime

Inadvertently
Don’t hype The Right
Do concertedly about it
Don’t fuel their fire and smoke without
Don’t mic airtime tick
Don’t auto cue the news
The dichotomy goes like this
A full belief in the good of people
That people hold the power
And a full belief the world
Is only ever full of pricks

Kicking Cans

He was a polystyrene tray of a man
Ticking his way to closing time
Past remnants of the morning famine
Picking the last of the salt of the earth
His dustbin mind with its
Dustbin minders and lock-up lodgers
With their lock-up logic kicking cans down
Sticking the plaster now
Back on Forwhatitsworth Street