When you run at me with careless speed

And fling your arms about my neck

The world melts and I am lost to you

 

Your head on my shoulder, a soft apocalypse

Displaces time, distorts perception

I am so happy I cannot smile

 

I cannot smile or I will weep for weeks

I never knew the chasm was there

Until you held my hand and we stood at its edge

 

I w...

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Middle aged bodies are like sharks;

If they stop moving they sink.

You must know that.  What did you think?

You'd stored childhood's frolicsome larks

 

Like blubber stored inside a whale,

Or water in a camel's hump?

That from off the sofa up you'd jump

To tote that barge and lift that bale?

 

My friend, it doesn't work like that.

Ever tried to start a...

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British, Not Pure

 

They would, perhaps, be less inclined

To rant on racial purity

If Britishness were more defined

Precise, and with more surety

 

But such a task is far beyond

All experts in ethnography

Genetics does not correspond

With cultures flowing wide and free

 

To take my case as case in point

I’m English – that is plain to see

My passport is distinct, not joint

I’ve lived...

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The York’s Prayer

Our Dad, ‘oo art in Hebden,

Tha’s norra bad fella.

Tha’s County come,

Tha’s will be done,

On Earth as it is in Yorkshire.

Give us this day our daily barm-cake,

And don’t mind us when we bugger up.

We’ll try not to mind the buggers who bugger us up.

And lead us not into Southern ways,

But deliver us from t’mucky stuff.

For thine is this county, wi’ power ‘n’t glory,

...

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My Butter Fingered Mind

 

The poem I forgot

Would have been my bread and butter

A staple in anthologies

Where experts put a thousand

Of the best down to rest

And get credit for their edit

 

All the things I could have got

I might have bought a yacht

With the poem I forgot

 

I think its form was lyrical

It may have been satirical

 

But no! Its tone was serious

Noble and imperious

...

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EMOTICONTEXT

It sometimes is a testing trial

To think of things that make me colon close bracket

And when life really gets me down

My face displays a sullen colon open bracket

It should be easy, don’t you think

To see life through a cheeky semicolon close bracket

But that eye’s never winked for me

They both close, and I cannot see

So I’ve decided, what I’ll do

To keep expressions pure an...

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Radiant

The cold tap runs hot before it runs cold

The water is old it sits in the pipe

                                                                Next to the hot one

Absorbing the heat

We should be grateful

And plunge in our hands

Absorbing the heat

That sat in the pipe

Next to the hot one

Before it turns cold

The heat is a gift

Or rather a trade

A bargaining made

Between tw...

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Do you remember how the bronze bouquet
Would sway in the wind on Angel Hill?
Those blue-green leaves against the grey
Skies are held aloft to this day still -
Though never still - the city’s thrum
Plays a chord on them for its own ear
Enticing those alive to come
Embrace the dead remembered here.

And here our grass-stained jeans would kneel,
Our bark-rough hands would press the stone.
Braving the wind we wo...

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