Two Poems With No Comparisons

one
I met a man in younger dress,
Ladies glasses, hair a-mess.
A jaw let slack, a gait set bowed,
His stubble peppered and razor stowed.

two
Ducks stand deadpan on gently thinning glass
Dogs chase dogs through frosted springy grass
Sparrows take harrowed hops
Skipping up in hoppy pops
And all the while I while away
While each low day slips astray

The Umbrella

Why do bic make razors and biros? What an odd combination. Is it so you can slit your wrists and write the note whilst staying inside the same branding? They also make lighters. You have to question exactly what that free-thinking individual took to crank his mind so wide open that he could see concurrent gaps in all three of those markets. Maybe as he was shaving he dropped his razor in the bin, had the eureka moment of the disposable blade, ran to write it down but couldn't find a pen anywhere, pulled out his cigarettes in frustration only to find his matches continually extinguished by a prevailing wind. Just a thought.

Puddles

We walk in the cold crisp air, with frozen hands and feet crunching the grass unfeeling. The dog clatters around us, bounding through bushes and fences, barking at his contemporaries. What is it like to be a man? Let us be honest here, let's leave the preening and the posturing of the peacock generation, let's talk about being a man in an age of football, tits and lager; of loaded, nuts and maxim. We have become the vacuous, our commercial break of an attention span leaving us free to chase skirt like our tails and fill our lives with white noise, drowning out any meaning the natural throws our way. I am very very shallow. Looks and statistics are really most of the battle for me. And I'd love to be open and honest about this, to just come clean about this to my loved one. But, the problem is, I'm just too shallow. It's a very vicious circle you see. But lay not your judgment at my doorstep, because let us be realists: it is the common man these days whose soul is so slight. Men are like puddles, the weaker of us like leftover sprinkles of a summer shower, the more well-rounded like pools of roadside water washed down in torrents of downpour, but, and here lies the rub, neither of us have depth. Some of us we know this, and we spend our time reconciling ourselves to this skin-deep soul, discovering our inner puddle. The others are still kidding themselves, they stare into that reflection gazing at the moon and pretending they have the sky in there. We walk in the cold crisp air.

Reasons I have a Manager

A woman tried to book me for a gig recently:

Woman: Would you be willing to travel to Guernsey?
Me: Do you have monkeys there?
Woman: What?
Me: Monkeys, you know, monkeys.
Woman: Err, no.
Me: Oh.
Woman: You're thinking of Gibraltar.
Me: Oh.
[Awkward pause. John fails to hide disappointment.]
Woman: So would you come?
Me: Well...
Woman: There's a zoo.
Me: Do they have monkeys?
Woman: Yes!
Me: Do they run around a lot?
Woman: Apparently.
Me: I'll think about it.

What have I become?

Aghh, have to be in Swiss Cottage in an hour so I've left the house with no lunch... And by that I mean I haven't eaten yet, not I haven't fed the house. Horse-Hankering Hungry I pick up a pasty at London Bridge, Large Traditional, and hop on the tube. Trapped underground my stomach rumbles are drowning out the train noise, my mouth is watering, my saliva is drooling; I unwrap the paper and take a bite. Steam erupts from the broken pastry, boiling tongues of burning gas lick my face and sizzle my tongue; the pasty is on the verge of nuclear fission. But I am SO HUNGRY! I can't describe my frustration here, tears of anger are literally welling up, only to be quickly evapourated by the rising heat. I blow furiously on the pasty and take tiny nibbled bites, but these serve only to frustrate my appetite further. The train arrives at Green Park, and just as the doors do their beeping, an old woman makes a last minute dash and jumps in. The sliding doors catch her like a fly between chopsticks, and a look of brief surprise flashes over her face. She's wedged, getting thinner by the second, the contents of her bags being loudly crushed in the pneuamatics, and what do I do? I stand there, face to face with her, taking small munches on my pasty, with nothing but a look of sublime indifference on my face. She struggles and pants, thrusts and squeezes, and I continue to have nothing but lift music filling my head. Finally she pops through, like a cork from a bottle, and red-faced and wheezing glares at me. I continue to munch. Geez, some people!

Oh! my God! i miss you

I look out past London landmarks as the carriage clatters over the bridge. Cold sunlight beams through the windows, my eyes wince in the shadows, my mouth is fur, my tongue thick, I've been up way too long already. I look down at my hands and clench my fists, my knuckles whiten, deepening the yellow green bruises, raising the collapsed veins and tightnening the pocked needle marks spotted with blood. I roll my sleeves down and rub my hands. I arrive early and sit in an empty restaurant as above me a mirrorball spins. They bring me a plate of food and I eat extravagance, shovelling forkfuls down my mouth in a bid to get nutrition, taste irrelevant. A woman enters, dark hair, dark skin, dark skirt, she sits at a table and drinks six beers, consuming nothing but cigarettes. Her eyes suck up the vacant tables as she reminisces the day away, her tight skin pulling her face into malevolence. Later that evening I'm on stage somewhere. There are lights and people watch me. I say things, they laugh, I say more things, they laugh more laughs. I leave finally and finally I go home. I vomit twice in my bathroom sink. I rinse my face and look at my sunken skin and darkened eyes. In the morning I am too weak to get out of bed, my body has collapsed in fatigue and will remain there for 36 hours. I call and cancel my show, my pillow smells of sick. The clown is asleep in me now and I can lose all things.

How do you know me?

Spam email is one thing; I have no real problem with some nefarious networking netherworlder firing out random offers of mortgages, medication and man-enhancement. What winds me up is when my friends join in! Page-long jokes, surveys, petitions, quizzes, pictures, powerpoint shows, they drive me crazy, especially as most of the time they are forwarded on by a network of friends, family and relations that I've never even met. Now, being a very sociable kinda guy, a professional party-goer no less, it makes me sad to have all these names and no faces to match them to, so I formulated a plan. I started to take note of those who emailed me, to pay attention to those names unfamiliar to me and unfortunate enough to have been cc'd in, or forwarded on. I began to compile a list of addresses, scanning each email I received for additions, deleting those names I recognised, slowly building up a diary of connections between me and a line of half-baked friends and long lost acquaintances. I created my database, hunting and gathering, collecting and collating, honing and pruning, aiming to arrive at a total of one thousand electronic strangers. Once I reached this magic number I planned to host a soireé of my own, inviting all these people and calling it 'How do you know me?' Each guest would have to work out exactly who they knew who knew someone who knew someone who knew me. Prizes would be given for the most elaborate connection, awards dished out for the longest travellers, songs composed for the most bewildered! My plan was fool-proof! unstoppable! irrepressible! And then my computer died and wiped out the database. So I decided to not bother.

Damn Brown

It's Valentine's Day and whilst others are dining out their sweethearts, I'm in a hospital bed whining out my bleak heart. And to make matters far worse I'm reading the Da Vinci Code. For years I've been resisting, insisting to Dan Brown's many petitioners that it's just not worth my attention. How can you have an opinion if you haven't read it? they say. But I'll hate it! Everyone I know tells me so. Prose is what I love in a book, richly drawn characters, subtext! Not some boy's own caper with Art History 101 thrown in. My friend Richard is the worst, he's been trying for ages. No, I say, it's a terrible book. Leave aside your religious objections and give it a go, he urges. It's not that, I reply, it's just really badly written. Leave aside the historical inaccuracies, the misrepresentation, the Harrison Ford references, he says. No, I continue, you don't understand, it's really badly written!! Anyway, recently he offered me some writing work, creating puzzles or something, the only catch being... I have to read the Vinci load as research! Fwjrjrwjr!! as Muttley would say. So I'm sitting here with the copy he gave me and let me tell you, this has surpassed all my expectations! I thought it would be awful, boring to read, mind-numbing to digest, but... it's so much worse! Surely this can't be the billion copy best seller everyone's been talking about? I'm 100 pages in and already I've lost count of the number of cars this guy has 'gunned forward' or engines he's revved. Does Danny-boy Brown have no access to a thesaurus? A badger could have danced on a keyboard and come up with better. The puzzles wouldn't fool a six year old, the dialogue makes Hollyoaks sound like Hamlet and the plot twist is so blindingly obvious the only surprising thing was that I hadn't died of boredom by the time I reached it. Am I the only one here guys? Guys? Oh sorry, didn't realise you were reading... by the way, it's the nasty English guy that did it, it always is.

Style Guide

I finally found a jumper today for £10 in Top Man! A couple of weeks ago while dithering over the purchase I'd sneakily put it downstairs in one of the many many girlie sections so it didn't get bought. Very clever of me. But then forgot where I put it and couldn't find it again. Not so smart. Since then I've been checking on its progress every few days as it's worked its way through the store tidying systems, and finally, today, it made it back. I snapped it up and was waiting in the queue when a blind guy walked past me on the way to the changing rooms with a selection of different coloured tops... Same top, just in different colours... Now I don't mean to be harsh here, but what was going on there? How useful are those mirrors really going to be? How exactly was he going to choose which shade worked best with his eyes? Fashion advice is an awful lot of pressure to put on a dog.

Over Charged

Over the last few days I have been generating dangerous levels of static electricity. I'm not sure why. Initially I thought it was just a new jumper I'd bought, as every time I pulled it off I'd crackle like 1 in 3 Rice Krispies and create lightning storms with the nearest metallic surface. But then it happened twice today and I was definitely in tried and tested regular non-sparky clothing, in fact at one point today I got a nasty shock off a clothes hook and all I was wearing was a hospital gown! (by the way, they let me wear pants this time!) I don't know what is creating all this excess atomic frisson... maybe it's my new haircut? Seriously, maybe that's the downside of having hair this great? Well, if the price I have to pay for looking this damn fine is avoiding major gas leakages and people with pacemakers, then so be it. Who knows, maybe I'll get a gig as a portable defibrillator?

Under Sized

I went shopping today. Regular leisure shopping, like normal people do. This is a very rare thing for me. Usually I go shopping for things like 77 envelopes, or glue that's only sticky on one side, but today I started off with some record shopping... until I quickly realised I'm so out of touch that I was browsing by the shinyness of the packaging. Next I ritually humilated myself in the search for new clothes. Now I don't mind admitting I'm slightly on the small size, I take a 34" chest and I'm proud to be conserving the raw materials. But shops seem to take great pleasure in reminding me of my vertical deficiencies. Whenever I go into Gap for example I have to ask for Extra Small. Not Small, not Regularly Small, but Extra Small! They might as well call it Elf Wear. But let me tell you, despite their blatant size-related dissing, I am thankful for the Gap! Most shops don't sell anything smaller than a medium. How does that work? In Ted Baker apparently I'm a 2! What's a 2? To make matters worse they don't stock anything smaller than a 5! I'm 3 sizes too small for stockage! That made me feel just great. But then on the way home I did one of the greatest side-steps in history. It was a thing of beauty. A woman halted right in front of me, and without any change in speed or fluency I crossed my right foot over the left, swung my body round her and shot past. It was so good that, and I'm not kidding here, a girl who saw it actually gasped! Yeah baby, felt like a ninja.

Backpedal to the Metal

I may have made a slight error in the candidness of my previous post. The error being that I have a girlfriend, and a girlfriend who is not best pleased to read about the intricate details of another woman's cleavage. I was made aware of this fact shortly after I posted my 'ode to bosom' when I received an email from my gorgeous questioning the legitimacy of my birth. So in order to restore the delicate balance of love and tenderness that joins our souls, and more importantly to ensure I get fed again, I must make amends. There are a few ways I considered doing this. The first would be to praise my girlfriend's own wonderful pair of spectacular accomplishments, however something tells me this would go down as well as a tap-dancing ferret pouring shots of tequila at an AA meeting for sound-proofed weasel-haters. (Her breasts are marvelous though.) The second would be to point out that the owner of the aforementioned cleavage was in fact a forty year old, cross-eyed drunkard of a woman. But then I'd run the risk of alienating my many drunk middle aged esotropic female readers (seventeen at last count). Finally I could protest my indefatigable right to freedom of speech, rail against the tyrannies of censorship and proclaim the vital role unshackled expression has played in our greatest works of art and humanity... but see my earlier note about wanting to get fed. So instead, I'll just say that perhaps I should have thought twice about going into such lurid details about a third party's assets. I am sorry. Thoughtless and sorry. Can I have dinner now?

The Cleavage

It's magnificent. No other word for it. This cleavage is magnificent. They stand there like two trembling blowfish surrounded by an ocean of sharks. I doubt the parting of the red sea attracted this many onlookers. It's Saturday night, I'm working a bat mitzvah, it's not particularly enjoyable and I walk over to a couple standing at the bar... after that it's all a bit hazy. You see when this woman turned around I was blinded by a cleft of such overwhelming magnitude, such density and proportion that I struggle to recall much else; all other details have been pushed into remission by the double-double D before me. As is my job, I attempted to show her a few card tricks, but it was a nightmare, I could not begin to concentrate; every time I did something impressive she jumped so much she barely contained herself. I had nowhere to look and to make matters worse she was about four feet tall so each time my biology got the better of me, my eye level dropped a good 12 inches. Not very subtle. Her husband stood by her side, fixing me with such a look of tested jealousy that I could feel nothing but pity. That still didn't stop me looking though. I couldn't help it! I had to look! My eyes were pulled towards these transcendant orbs by their sheer gravity. It was a mechanical marvel how much flesh was bulging over the top, handful upon handful bursting over this woman's dress, and yet somehow the nipples were managing to stay concealed, two little teats clinging on for dear life. In the end I could take no more; the risk of spillage was just too great, and I think if I'd have been faced with a full view of these silicon-free sensations I would never have recovered. So denying myself any further glimpses I limped away.

My Other Car is a Fuss

Why do buses display their number when they are out of service? For what possible reason do I need to know that the bus trundling around the corner with the "Not in Service" sign lit up is the 171 I've spent the past hour waiting for? Is it supposed to reassure me that at least that time I got close? All it does is make me ask just how the bus driver managed to get to work that morning when the public transport system is clearly as effective as standing next to a postbox with a stamp on your forehead. A bus is like the flu, despite your best efforts, sometimes you have no choice but to catch it. I really hate them. There is no less comfortable way to travel, you're squashed in like cattle going to market, the driver's about as light on the brake as a hippo with a leg spasm, and you're thrown about so much they become the equivalant of a human laundrette, tossing old women around like socks in a tumble dryer. We pay for this? They have no saving grace, even the route numbers are dull; P3, 49, 122, they sound like additives. They should lighten it up a little, have some square roots in there, make a little pun of it, or what about some of the more well known figures like Pi or Planck's Constant? You might as well chuck in a couple of imaginary numbers as no one will be that surprised if they don't turn up. This morning I'm waiting in a queue at London Bridge for the rather mundanely named 43. I've been waiting so long I have frosticles on my nose, and for the last ten minutes have been trying to blow steam rings. Finally a bus pulls up to the stop but halts short by ten yards. The driver gets out, turns off the lights, and steps out for a cigarette before realising how cold it is. While we wait in the snow he retreats back inside. I'm freezing my ass off here, I could piss icicles, and this driver is all wrapped up in his cosy warm bus with the window open! The cheek! Who is this guy? Who are we to board the bus? We are nobody! Just because our tickets pay for the upkeep, maintenance and running of the ENTIRE NETWORK! The bus driver! now he's a somebody. Oh yeh, he deserves to sit on his seat with his feet on the wheel smoking through an open window. I mean he's got a real tough job sat on his ass all day. We deserve nothing more than this frost bitten icy wind to whip and chafe us like dogs- At last! Before I can develop my rant further the driver flicks his butt away, starts the engine and shunts forward. He stands up and adjusts the sign, scrolling through the destinations before coming to a stop: Not in Service. Motherf&*"&*&"*"*