Month: August 2021

The List of Things I Can’t Explain (After John Cooper Clarke) by Nigel Lloyd


By Robert Garnham

The List Of Things I Can’t Explain (After John Cooper Clarke)

Solicitors Fees
Signs in Chinese
Why people like the blue mould in cheese
Voice operated TV’s
I can’t explain any of these.

David Icke
A frog on a bike
Why a Lesbian is called a dyke
Touring a rainy country by trike
The value of a Facebook like
Why there’s two Mr Reids called Mike
If you can’t explain then take a hike.

I don’t think I’ll ever explain
Why it’s a dyke and not a drain
How people don’t suspect Batman is Bruce Wayne
Why people are fascinated by David Blaine
They will all incur my distain.

An overnight sensation
Romesh Ranganathen
The demand for a Christmas Playstation
A windfall from an unknown relation
All of the above defy explanation
And therefore will avoid notation.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand
How a watch can cost one hundred grand
How they make glass out of sand
Why prostitutes don’t work a week in hand
Who’s in the Plastic Ono Band
How English food always seems bland
How a car can drive unmanned
How unfriendly becomes offhand
Why you’re never alone with a strand
None of these feature in my future plans.

The Northern Lights, Trilobites
Disco music by Barry White
Why the London Palladium only opens on Sunday Night
Why your breath doesn’t smell when your talking shite
I can’t explain them, but someone might.

Nigel Lloyd lives in rural Donegal and has had poems published in several magazines
From Crannog to Progressive Rock Magazine, he also had a poem featured on
BBC Radio Ulster Soundscapes programme and was a finalist in the
Bring your Limericks to Limerick competition 2018 and a finalist in
The Piano Academy of Ireland Limerick competition 2021.

www.nigellloydpoet.com

 

Driven Bats, by Jim Lawrence


By Robert Garnham

Driven Bats

Just 27 nautical miles
Off the eastern coast of Nowhere
Rusts an old abandoned oil rig
Where guano is piled impressively high

The bats that leave this rich deposit
When not hanging upside down
Off the western coast of Somewhere
Fly backwards like black hummingbirds

Other times they love to hover
Helicopter-wise for fun
Above the ageing public buildings
Of Nowhere’s bureaucratic streets

And when they flit through Somewhere’s skies
Bothering tourists for fish and chips
They cackle like demented demons
As they dive bomb with Stuka screams

But there is nothing they love more
Than flying over the oil rig
Cranked up on snatched carbohydrates
Shitting a mountain of minerals

Bio: Jim Lawrence is a poet, freelance editor, writer, translator and bedroom guitarist in Southampton. He likes the blues, cats, Jack Daniels, Gillian Anderson and any food that isn’t an avocado or a sprout.

 

Instructions for reading a gas meter, by Ama Bolton


By Robert Garnham

Instructions for reading a gas meter

1. You’ll need a pen and paper and a torch.
2. Open the door of the cupboard in the corner.
3. Move the vacuum cleaner and the two pairs of boots.
4. Get a brush and remove the cobwebs from the meter.
5. Lie down on the floor so that your face is level with the meter.
6. If there isn’t enough room for you, move the sofa.
7. If you can’t move the sofa, get help.
8. No, not me. You know I’ve got a bad back.
9. Press the button.
10. No, the other button.
11. If you can’t read the numbers, get a magnifying glass.
12. Press the button again.
13. If you still can’t read the numbers, get your camera.
14. Turn off the flash, if you can remember how.
15. If you can’t remember, find the instruction manual.
16. No, I don’t know where it is.
17. Try the top drawer in the kitchen.
18. Under the mousetrap?
19. Press the button again and take a photo.
20. Quick, before the number disappears.
21. Maybe use the zoom?
22. Try again.
23. That’s better.
24. Upload the photo and write down the numbers.
25. Go to the website.
26. The password’s in the blue book under G for Gas.
27. Enter the reading.
28. Yes, I know it’s a smart meter, but the new supplier can’t read it.
29. No, we’re not changing back.
30. Cheer up; you only have to do this once a month.

 

GDPR, by Marie Studer


By Robert Garnham

GDPR

He stretched his legs under the hospitality
Of her kitchen table, listed the locals lately deceased,
Those who reached old age, those taken young.
She offered currant cake.
Reaching for a slice he asked in a flash,
What age would you be now, Nonie?
She returned the plate to ellipsis equalised
On oilcloth. Smiling benignly, she enquired
What age would you think I am?
He subtracted generously from the score,
Near enough, she said.
No hacker would ever crack
My mother’s personal information or ransom her ware.

Marie Studer has written poetry since her teens in the1970s and started to submit in 2018. She won the Trocáire Poetry Ireland Competition 2020 and the Halloween Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Bangor Literary Journal 2019. Her poetry has been published in the Stony Thursday Book, The Waxed Lemon, Wee Book of Wee Poems, Fire & Water, Drawn To The Light, online and local anthologies.

Twitter handle: @StudiMarie

 

This shit?, by Jo Sachs-Eldridge


By Robert Garnham

This shit?

Is this it?
This shit?

Are you happy with your lot?
Cos I’m fucking not.
Not with this lot.
This rot.

Not this.
Is this it?

This shit?
If it is
I’ve had enough.
I don’t want this lot.
Not this.

I don’t want the trying
The crying
The sweating
The giving
Of everything
I’ve got.
For what?

Is this it?
This shit?

But don’t you dare ask
What do you want?
Cos who fucking knows.
But it’s not this.
Not this lot.
Not this.

She’s happy with her lot.
But what’s she got
That I’ve not?
What is it?
Maybe she just doesn’t know
What she’s not got.

Or maybe
I don’t.
Maybe whatever I’ve got
Is the lot.
Maybe you just grab that shit
And you say
THIS IS IT!
I’VE GOT IT!
This lot.
My lot.
I’ve got it.
I’VE GOT
THE LOT!

Jo Sachs-Eldridge lives in Leitrim where she mostly dreams up community projects involving bikes and words and other stuff she naively believes will change the world. She has notebooks full of writing that is legible to no-one and a daughter who is a wonderful distraction from everything.

 

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward, by Aoife Cunningham


By Robert Garnham

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.
I nearly fell down the loo,
Like Alice in wonderland.
While im trying to excrete urine.

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.

My shoes are dr martens
And I dress like
a bohemian goth,
This I must say,
Gets in the way,
of my OOTD.
Because I don’t have access to my belts or my lace!

There’s no curtains in the psych ward,
So I have to get crafty,
I get a little bit arty
and hang a sheet.
It’s like a sad tapestry
For the room that it is.
I guess that’s true

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward

Now I’ve learnt all the tricks,
From drifting between institutions.
To wear a scuba mask,
In case I fall down the toilet bowl.

I’ve learnt all the tricks
From years of experience.
To use your wit to find a way
out of this hole.

There’s no toilet in the psych ward

 

Sleeping Legion, by Jennie E. Owen


By Robert Garnham

Sleeping Legion

They’re all here tonight you know,
every face you’ve ever seen
flickering behind your eyes like cherries
spinning like bells
they put on a show
as you push off your blankets
then swaddle them again.

Your old maths teacher chases you
to the edge of the cliff,
a book of equations in one hand
a garden gnome in the other. Whilst
a midwife leads you
down endless
hospital corridors

where at the end
you’ll find nothing but the check-out boy,
the one with whom you locked eyes
over a cucumber
and a packet of hob nobs,
last Tuesday.

Jennie E. Owen’s writing has won competitions and has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband, three children, and cat.

 

When Brian Became Broccoli, by Ben Macnair


By Robert Garnham

When Brian Became Broccoli

When asked what he wanted to be,
three-year-old Brian thought about it,
for a while, and with a smile,
said that he would like to be Broccoli.

A strange choice for a career,
you might have thought,
but Brian was only three,
the age where you could be what you wanted to be.

When a kindly local Wizard was told of this tale,
he visited Brian and asked: ‘And who might you be?’
Are you the little boy who wanted to become Broccoli?
Brian nodded his head.

Brian went to bed that night,
but he woke up with a bit of a fright.
His hair was green, stiff, and standing on end.
The following night, he went to bed,
and woke up completely Green.
His Mum and Dad had never seen anything
quite so obscene.

The next day, they found Brian in bed.
He had become Broccoli.
The kindly Wizard broke the spell,
and for 14 years, all was well.

Until the Wizard turned up one day,
and was quite drunk.
‘I am afraid that the spell didn’t quite wear off.’
he said because Brian was becoming a Punk.

Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire, in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair

 

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull, by Janet Sillett


By Robert Garnham

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull

My group of friends read Larkin aloud
skiving off hockey,
outliers in a school
which dished out piety at 9am

We admired his contrariness,
dirty words,
and suburban weariness,
his constipated ennui

Larkin inspired me to study
in a god forsaken east coast city
a shared terrace with a parrot
a bath in the kitchen
on Anlaby Road

I skulked in vain in the library,
until we parted company abruptly,
Hull, Larkin and me
I moved on, as they say,
to Plath, Stevens, Crane
to a concrete place of learning,
and Larkin expressed his adoration
for Margaret Thatcher

I reread his poems, when living
in bedsits, in semis,
in the disillusionment of marriage

But let’s face it,
Larkin was a bigot, racist, serial snob
I want to see them starving,
the so-called working class
nostalgic for the good old days
when only white men played cricket for England

Consumer of pornography
(but never in the library)
composer of sado­masochistic reveries
shared to fellow man poets
posh adolescents fumbling with themselves
in bedrooms after lights out

I want to cancel Larkin
unknow his life,
his pervasion of archetypal Englishness
I settle for drowning in his poetry
with fingers in my ears

PS Apologies to Hull which I now think is a great place.

Janet Sillett recently took up writing poetry and short fiction again after decades of absence. She has had poems published in the Galway Advertiser, Poetry Plus magazine and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, and flash fiction in Litro. She works for a think tank.

 

Ode to a Pee Funnel, by Christine Fowler


By Robert Garnham

Ode to a Pee Funnel

Alan’s caravan was the apple of his eye
It was a 1979 beauty
And only ←———-→ this wide
It had nowt of this modern rubbish
It was retro through and through
But there was one adaptation
He was really proud to use
It was a plastic funnel
Set up at just the right height
And the circumference you know
Was really not to tight
With wiggle room to spare
So when he stood there
And let it all hang out
There was only sound of running ‘water’
And moans of delight
And when the last drops were shaken
And everything tucked back in place
He was often heard to murmur
That’s a cracking thing I’ve made.

Christine Fowler was in her 60’s, when she began focussing on writing and performing poetry in autumn 2019 and published in journals and anthologies since 2020. Her poems are informed from a life time of experience of working with people in challenging situations. https://www.christinefowlerpoetry.com Instagram@christine.fowler.poetry