The Future

Remember the Future in chrome and concrete?
An intelligent house on a well spoken street.
The robot would iron and hoover and clean
No poor people anywhere,
None to be seen.

Hover to work for just six hours a week,
From a hole in the wall I would choose what to eat.
The music was rubbish and sport was just weird
Religion was mad men
In blankets and beards.

War had converted to some kind of game,
All the people were children who all thought the same.
Love was a pill and depression a cloak,
No one pictured a cow
No one made up a joke.

But that was the future when I was a thirteen,
It didn't quite work out the years in-between.
The future of now is just Tuesday next week
Crap weather, new iPhones
And on line critique.

Nora

You are in bed in your front room
Surrounded by your family who
Stare through your skin at almost a century.
Ignoring the commode in the corner 
As you teach them how to die more slowly.

On better days you loaded me
with packs of cakes and memories
Mints and stories about holidays.
You told me that life's too short to be unhappy
And how to grow tomatoes.

Long before you gave us
Squeaky clean cheese sandwiches
Looney Tunes, smoky Saturdays.
Before tucking my brother and I in for the night
Under heavy blankets.

 

Money making ideas no.1

A short story about an artist who amputates his own foot, puts it in a glass box ands sends it to an open submission art competition - only to be told by the selection panel that his work 'lacks coherence.'

An observational comedy routine about the difficulties of living your life with the face and hairstyle of a comedian whilst not actually being funny.

An opera about the up and down relationship of two people who occasionally glance at each other though their respective car windows during the morning commute to work.

A Top Trumps card deck of all of my Facebook friends with stats such as 'emotional incontinence' and 'need for constant self validation'.

A YouTube channel presenting videos of a monkey sat at a laptop attempting to write a novel while a twenty year old university drop out from Lutterworth commentates in a high pitched voice.

A comic strip about the hilarious adventures of a boy who feels no empathy, is completely self centred and believes that the world has been made solely to provide him with opportunities to get one over on his fellow human beings. Though he loves his Mum.

A walking tour of the ugliest houses in the Mapperley / Sherwood area of Nottingham.

Dog Cheese.

Psychic egg cups.

Pizzahats.

Indie

Indie people
Back when they met
Pulled round
Bobbed and horny
Pinch faced and flowery
He could never have known.

Now his balding spreads
Stretching many a t shirt
Her earnest career
Is an alien breakfast
The scent of her reading
fanzines of regret.

Down at the tram stop
Sunglasses beautiful
Sherbert and boiled eggs
Hatch mini indie kids
Pointy  feet  papery
Sunny day festival
Gather ye like minded
people of yore.

But what
 is
this
chart shit?


Nice people like proper songs.


Strum on that epiphany.






 

Our best work

One see-saw snoring
Flat out on his back
The other still and curled
Like a fossil

Deep under dark and cotton dreams
They grow before my eyes
Like stop-motion snowdrops
Our best work.

I'm leaning against the door
realising my biggest loss:
Not witnessing this every night.

December Bike Ride

Flying freezing
Headlong
Into the pissing rain
And a kaleidoscope of browns
The most boring green you've ever seen
Pedalling  under a dishcloth sky.
Sweating off my blessings and sins


A fugitive from Christmas
 I roam the land 
Of couples and dog children
And day glo aristocrats
And I am gripped with the urge
To let everyone know
That I exist
That I love them.

what the hell...

I'm
grinning

ridiculously

to myself

at the
photocopier.

I stifle a laugh
at the sink.

My bemused colleagues

would shake your hand

IF

they knew
you were responsible

for this
latest upgrade

of me.

Liar

I don't want to lie
But I
Have been blessed
with a creative mind.

The stories  I tell
Don't intend to hurt
More polish and refine
The truth to a shine.

No Sleeper

No sleep and it looks like I've  
Not yet come far enough.
I stare out of the window 
We roll past untidy piles
And back yards to deal with later.

What I need to
What I will do
What I want to
What I won't do

Rattling to the buffet
Where I run into my wife.
And talking for the first time in months,
We are reasonable as weak tea
Burning the roofs of our mouths.

As I make my way back I swerve to
Avoid let down loved-ones.
The colleagues I once screwed,
Unface- book friends
By climbing out and crawling along like a film.

Re seated I pass time inventing
A life with the stranger opposite,
She is eating hula hoops and texting
First we get swept along
Then are doomed by baggage in the end.

Ring ring releases  morning,
Rumpled and crusty I
Crank my eyes and the carriage turns to into duvet.
Light at end of tunnel?
This is as faint as it gets.

3 proposals for new video games.

1. You are flying and hovering unaided  - around your current location. The area where you live is projected into your consciousness in real time. You are able to swoop effortlessly over and through a virtual version of streets and gardens that you walk past in every-day life. You can choose to peer undetected through windows or soar hundreds of meters into the sky looking down through the clouds a huge and detailed matrix of human existence.

2. You are way too clever. In a huge 'sandbox' environment you are able to build and maintain relationships with an immense choice of player and non player characters; acting and interacting in quest for mutual fulfilment. You can run simulations in your imagination and endlessly consider the consequences of possible choices. However, eventually you must experience the exhilaration of taking decisive action. After this you will have a lifetime to wonder what the hell you were thinking whilst carrying the pain and disappointment of others.

3. Your task is to literally bore the people around you to death. You have a wide range of weapons, some of which are listed below.

Your children and the stuff they do.
The ability to see a conversation as an opportunity to recount a series of anecdotes (pausing only to give the vaguest impression of listening to the other person).
Your long-time solidified taste in popular music.
Huge social privilege and money plus a deep need to overcompensate for  emotional insecurity.
Monolithic ignorance plus an inflated sense of your own significance..