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| | | SATURDAY LIVE: Meet the Poet
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Go to the Listen Again page | | | | | |  | |  Saturday 09:00 - 10:00. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Lost Child
For Julie Myerson
My baby's addicted to rusks
He eats them from dawn until dusk
His thousand yard stare
Is driving me spare
But the Costa Prize is surely a must
My Career in Fashion
I was the face that launched a thousand zips
All skin and bone apart from my lips
but mostly I looked like I'd slept in a skip
My career in fashion
my complexion looked like bubble and squeak
my clothes weren't just vintage they were antique
I passed off my look as wife beater chic
My career in fashion
I pitched up at parties five hours late
a chip on my shoulder and more on my plate
when models said "darling" I replied "mate"
My career in fashion
I'd turn up back stage, get ignored by the band
feeling less vintage and more second hand
wouldn't quit my bed for less than ten grand
but I rarely got out of bed
The dam paparazzi foresaw my end
you know your career is over when
you're on a scooter and you're chasing them
My career in fashion
But the paps had a point, I agreed with them
i quit all camera's tedium
with a face like this - radio's my medium
My career in fashion
| | | | | | | | | | My mate yanny dropped his phone in the bath
He knifed his broadband line kicked in his set
Grew vegetables along his garden path
Wrote letters to everyone he’d ever met:
His old school friends, forgotten dinner guests
first boss, girlfriend, the man who brought the coal
he wrote in biro from an old fusty desk
didn’t use smilies, wrote his words out in full
and soon the replies began coming back
printed envelopes outnumbered by scrawled
on ones with pink stickers as his friends packed
them out with stuff they never said when they called
there was something about making something
that appealed to blokes who had previously
just penned one line texts about birds and bling
and each one back felt like something for free
better nonsense composed at window sills
than a clockwork life and a mat full of bills
| | | | | | | | | | US Election Poem 08
mooses. money. flag-pins. guns.
pledges. Bristol. hockey. mom
religion. rhetoric. power. fame
Barack. john. sarah. what's his name.
clintons. caucus. bulldog. lipstick.
meltdown. bailout. someone. fix it.
maverick. top gun. hardened vet.
no. heart-attack. palin. whole world dead.
audacity. hope. black. white
let's hope america gets it right
Keep Your Protests Ugly
raise your banners britain
and keep them raised
from minor's strikes
to damning with feint praise
we are a nation of complainers
and long may it continue
the tut tut of pensioners
the tiny voice within you
that says:
we should have a hospital / bypass / post office / pub
and american businessmen can't buy up our clubs
Protest about pop stars and errant celebs
Protest about adverts and what our kids are fed
Protest about love rats and strikers who dive
protest about baked beans if you have to,
just anything to remind yourself you're alive
keep on protesting
and keep your protests ugly
don't gloss them up so they look good on the telly
don't let them be presented by ant and dec
(which one's which, which one's which?)
with a theme tune by Girls Aloud
and a running commentary by Simon Cowell
don't phone a friend or ask the audience
stand up and be your own defence
don't splash your protest across the pages of heat magazine
don't sex them up for the slack jawed teens
by reducing them to slogan on a bracelet
breath into them the love of a thousand arrival lounge embraces
keep them alive, red clawed and angry
rough-skinned, sharp toothed and screaming
and turn them on the apathy in the UK
prove once and for all that England's not dreaming
because we are truly human when we care about something
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This Week, Be Glad
To all sand-paper skinned cabbies in ranks that snake for leagues
To weekend dads let down again with Happy Meal fatigue;
To shop girls working Saturdays so hungover and sick;
To the gauche and awkward school boys with permanent split lips;
To salesmen in Burton suits who shoot the rear view frowns;
To all those disenfranchised souls in glum commuting towns;
This week be glad of one small fact - 'least you're not Gordon Brown.
The Nuns Need To Know
The nuns need to know
The nuns need to know
Give them page three freakshows and Flop Idols
Popbitch libels and Boris Johnson's blood shot eyeballs
maggot eating d-listers,
Mika, the Scissor Sisters.
Hit them with Channel 4 documentaries
with the 'concerned' presenting style
and titles like: Body Popping Peadophiles
and The Girl Whose Face Exploded
give them Loaded and Young Mums' Mansion
give them ill-fated Olympics expansions
give them Clarkson
as he harps on
like a fart that never ends
give them Lily Allen's ... “friends”
give them David Cameron's meaningless trends
and Littlejohn's lies and hatred
give them pop culture grated
over our lust for gory details that will never be sated.
The nuns need to know
The nuns need to know
They need to know how quickly these dullards become iconic
They need to know that Hasselhof isn't being ironic
and they should probably know about Bono's Jesus complex
(After all, that's their line of work
it would help put it into context)
Then chuck them a bit of Channel 5 News
soaked in bubble-gum flavoured booze
show them women who own five hundred pairs of shoes
and a bendy bus
cos if they knew about this Hell On Earth
they might pray some more for us.
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