Sitting on the train,

Neat houses flash by.

But life is not neat,

Though houses may be.

Behind those neat walls

Lurk furious hearts,

Unleashed as soon as

The train disappears.

These airtight dramas

Lie far from our minds.

We keep our heads down.

Our neat lives go on.

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The putty on the antique frame

Is crumbling in my dreams;

The richly patterned tablecloth

Comes free at all its seams.

The neatly-tended flowerbed

Turns wild and overgrown;

Once-pristine grassy spreads of lawn

Are patchy and unmown.

The wondrous spectrum of our world,

Its subtle, shifting slants,

Gives way to cheapskate slogans

And simple-minded chan...

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It can help you pass your A-levels

Or similar bog-standard tests;

It will cook up birthday verses,

Can sketch some blackbirds in their nests

Or write a decent theme tune for TV.

But Beethoven’s ninth symphony,

The trio from the Rosenkavalier,

Gaugin’s Christs or the Mona Lisa?

Such inspiration it can’t get near.

AI is the service of the bland.

The risk is it will unde...

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Long ago, it was the wife who would push him

-‘These are our sort of people,’ she would say-

To take that job, which he couldn’t manage

And came home each evening utterly spent.

Oh, the ordeal of dinners with the boss

And Councillor Twitface for Sunday tea,

When he would have preferred to mooch around

And watch the football or listen to jazz.

That certain kind of snobb...

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So many lives, so many hopes and dreams,

They all finish loaded on the scrapheap,

Piled high into one moist organic hump,

Where, some decades later, the needy poor

Will hollow out hovels to dodge the cold,

And some bright spark will soon call it recycling

And trumpet this sham as sustainable.

Then celebrities will come, and sleep out,

In self-pleasuring solidarity,

And c...

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