CLAPTRAPONOMY I
Time creeps backwards, forwards, closing statements, words
open emerging worlds
Shifting sands, sentimental claptraponomy, truths variable
Made up worlds, breathed from words like collapsion - lies
waiting to be de-mythed
Oceans waterfall from the thunderstorm, lightening never
strikes thrice
Everything leaps sideways sometimes, even umbrellas turn
outside in
Much like melting ice this galaxy and the next is subject to
change
The things they tell me don’t make sense; they want to put
me into their box
Scary stuff, they don’t understand that they’re the ones who
have been brainwashed
I can take it or leave it - walk away before things get too
heavy
But sin is addictive, harder to give up than tobacco or gin
Like the Gin mill, the Gin
Palace, and the babies that are
born in Gin
It’s the same the world over, different ones telling the
same old lies
Selling the bodies of those that they have violently
captivated
Prostituting themselves for peanuts when the candy starts to
run dry
Leaving me sitting here alone, crying myself to sleep every
night
The racket that they make, they think the carnival is still in
full swing
All I can do is pray for rain, it’s like living on a
fairground here
With next winter to look forward
to - all I can do is hibernate
Lonely as the proverbial fish out
of water - fighting for life
Gasping for air, stupid as a beached
whale stranded on the sands of time
Beware of the fallen angels,
demons, and delirium tremens
She’s screeching ridiculously like
a flat tyre on an express train
Demanding as a child with a
massive case of the terrible twos
She kneels in front of Father
Ignatius and confesses all of her sins
Astronomy, astrology, Scientology
(kicked it into touch)
World religions come and go unlike
golden calves in the wilderness
That hang about like proverbial
millstones around the felon’s neck
Playing music manically suggesting
it replaces all language
Dressing for the occasion
stretching in her leotard yesterday
Upsetting the apple cart and the
boy on the back of the beer dray
Walking in the snow looking for
Poo Sticks to throw into the river
All knowledge is subjective you
will realise one day when it’s too late
The milkman gives the little boy a
carrot to make the snowman’s nose
Everybody’s going home for
Christmas, sounds like some sort of sad song
Of course, I’m already home, I live
here in fear of my life daily
The best I can do, is go to the
match on Boxing Day, if they play
In the New Year things will be
fine, all bad memories will be erased
Pleasant thoughts will be
implanted into the corporate mind of man
Don’t forget, no one will need to
regret anything ever again
Space rockets will come and go from
the moon, shooting the bad comets down
Lovers will watch them from secret
places as they dart across the sky
Whisky will be mixed down until it
looks and tastes like river water
In Poland
my cousins husband took me for a bike ride to the park
At the junction he dismounted, ‘We
have rules in this country’ he said
The rest of the family had gone to
Warsaw, so we ate Bigos
Why are the girls so beautiful in Poland?
My son and his friend ask
We were driving from the airport
to the cathedral in the salt mine
It was late September, but still
warm enough for us to sleep outside
The ballerina and the bally dancer
will practice at all hours
No mistake, lovers will be matched
according to the music they make
Life is not a chocolate orange, a
cheese mountain, or a lake of wine
The feng shui lady is coming today
to rearrange the kitchen.
The cook has been throwing daggers
at me all day, he hates changing things
When the tide goes out, will it
come back? And where does the ocean go to?
The only stars the little boy knows
play football on the TV show
It’s amazing the difference a
little bit of investment makes
Mediocre Leicester
can become champions with the right set up
She makes the tea letting it brew
slowly in the kettle on the hob
People come to ask her the way to
the mythical temple of love
She looks deep into their souls
and saves the penalty for later on
Who are all these people, and
where do they come from? Where are they going?
This life doesn’t have all the
answers yet, the planets keep some secrets
Even on Mars they have water under
the dust, if only you look
The Martians and the little green
Moonsters that we’ve talked about before
Travelling at the speed of light,
they might eventually arrive here
We travel anywhere, everywhere all
the time, at the speed of thought
Nobody really knows how to have
their cake and eat it, or do they?
A lot of people drink it these
days, they make cake and shake it madly
Some married guys I know have a
girlfriend on the side, what does that mean?
Check the afternoon lock-in at The
Pancake House in St. Peters square
The skateboarders take a big
holdall of cans of beer and hand them out
After they get tipsy they get spray
cans out and graffiti the walls
She doesn’t need to go on a diet; she
can buy the next size dress
All women are beautiful, ‘I know’,
she tells me, when she smiles at me
‘If the barn needs painting, slap
on the lippy!’ they say down south - sometimes
Old timers, blue rinse brigade,
and grey, coffin dodgers to the last man
They say that I’ve only got eight
years and eleven months left to live
Why were there some guys in the
Bible that lived to nine hundred and odd?
We go to Oversize Elisabeth’s for
the full English breakfast
Every month that’s got an ‘R’ in
it, and a few that don’t like July
Last time Pierre the inebriated
artisan came with us too
We sample beer shake brunch for
starters, and take vodka smoothies to go
Then queue outside the pub,
waiting for it to open at nine am
The red Rum drinkers sit there
scratching their boozers hooters, it’s murder
The day drags on, drinking pint
for pint with Peter the pissed up painter
Artistic as Cézanne, sober as a
hanging judge, nowhere to run
When nightfall comes we stagger to
another bar for cocktails at eight
Outside and up there somewhere
planets collide, new worlds are formed by thought
You know what thought did don’t
you? I think he just thought he did what he did
Satellites are falling from the
skies back down to earth like lead balloons
But the cranes are still going up
to build more towers to scrape the skies
Bent as a plastic fiver, crooked
as the Chesterfield church spire
More backhanders than a tennis
bat, one racket after another
Everything’s computerised, what
will people do when the power fails?
The Millennials and the generation
before them have no clue
The three day working week, no electricity,
and candles for light
It gets addictive; starving
yourself for more than three days is not cool
The self congratulatory society
annual big ball
And guess who turns up? All the
grabbers, all of the tramps, and all the thieves
The old Jersey
lighthouse looks magnificent, standing there in the rain
The Grand National at Aintree will
never be quite the same again
Runners and riders jockey for pole
position at the Tartan Bar
We watch the international at the
Corbiere Pavilion
It’s Scotland
v England and
they beat us 2-1 we buy all their beer
Only the year before we had
thrashed them at Wembley five goals to one
I used to drink in the Trafalgar
and the Tenby at St Aubins
All the pubs were open from nine am until eleven
pm
Some hotel bars were open all
night and the beer was as cheap as chips
I worked at the Royal Yacht Hotel in
Saint Helier for a while
And later on at the Parade Bar
where I first met the crazy beans
The head waiter at one place was a
window cleaner from Wythenshawe
Deluded, waiting for the frost to
thaw on a sunny summers day
Funny as a rocking horse rider on
steroids, racing round the house
Bubbly as Champagne,
fizzy as Cava, mad for it down in Dijon
Keen as mustard, fit as a butchers
bitch on heat, fired up for the fight
Tooled up to the elbows, dressed
up to the nines, if only looks could kill
Is commercialisation an imitation of reality?
The newscaster announces the
capture of another terrorist
He says he is acting alone, but
the devastation is so vast
A dozen organisations or so claim
he was working with them
The flags remain at half mast as
the president makes an announcement
‘The ceasefire is well and truly
over, we will resume bombing soon’
The pilots scramble, and the
ground crews kick start the jet engines over
The rebels, the terrorists, and
the government troops blame each other
The superpowers can’t resist
throwing in the Wellington for fun
Manipulating life, death, and
eternity to win brownie points
Obnoxious as Baden Powell, with
his Wolf Cubs, and the Boy Scout movement
I was the last Tawny Sixer and the
First Red Sixer at Eleventh Sale Saint Joseph’s
Frightening as the Hitler Youth was,
we would have beat them at football
Me and my street could have played
for England, we
trained outside every night
Five-a-side, seven-a-side, in the
hockey nets at the tennis club
In nineteen sixty-six we beat North
Korea at Worthington
park
At Saint Aidan’s school we played
football every day with a tennis ball
Two of the names I recall are,
Antonio Bibby, and Chris Cain
I was a milk monitor, handing out
the little bottles with straws
Mrs Harrison was the only
shopkeeper open on Sundays
We would always stop to buy cream
cheese, pickled gherkins, and kiełbasa
But the thing I liked the best was the cold milk machine outside the shop
