3.24.2009

The Bus Driver's Prayer by Ian Dury

Our Father,
Who art in Hendon
Harrow Road by thy name
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Wimbledon
In Erith as it is in Hendon.
Give us this day our Berkampstead
And forgive us our Westminsters
As we forgive those who Westminster against us.
Lead us not into Temple Station
And deliver us from Kingston
The purley and the Crawley,
For Iver and Iver
Crouch End

3.18.2009

Drizzle

You weigh me down.
Yet I only realise,
Like another layer of gravity,
Once the relief lifts from my shoulders.

You soak me through.
But my tongue feels nowt as it hangs out
And my eyebrows are sufficient protection.

You annoy me.
But don’t fuel me with the passion
To run.

You‘re drizzle.
And when I stop to think,
God, I hate you.

3.16.2009

Grapefruit

I shall wheel a grapefruit*

In honour of the dead

In honour of the people

Who looked upon and said

You'll never wheel a grapefruit

You haven't got the hands

You haven't got the stamina

You haven't got the fans


*This is an old Lithuanian proverb my Grandfather used to often repeat to me, although I’m unable to recall the native expression he said before repeating with the English translation.
It means to show the determination to go ahead and do something against all logic and advice because you truly believe in it. Apparently, when I was very young my Grandad would mutter the phrase at me as I showed this determination to do apparently pointless and unconventional activities.
In my teenage years, when my Grandad became wheelchair bound, I would wheel him the short distance from his bungalow to the village pub for a shared pint in the roadside garden and we would sing this nonsense song of ours together (him joining me to emphasise the rhyming last word of alternate lines) much to our own amusement and to the confusion of friends of either of our separate generations who passed.
Strangers often assumed I was making fun of a mad old man, but we were both making fun of a mad old world.

3.09.2009

Nice

Nice is twice
The word
You’ll ever be
So stop the propa
Ganda
You think you’re such a
Rebel
To sneer at me
Say a word that better describes so perfectly what I define?
You can’t
So use me
Say me love me
And don’t be insulted
When you’re confronted
Or complimented
With my name
I’m nice I’m here
'Til the next Shakespere
Invents a better word for you all
To use to death
Through a lack of your own
Imagination.

3.02.2009