Re: It's Poetry Darlings!!
I'm quietly confident that I am going to reclaim British poetry from the pine tables of middle-class housewives: My heroes and influences are Morrissey and Marr, of course, but poetrically,
Ginsberg, Bukowski, Rimbuad, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman, Mayakovsky, Voznesenksy, Primo Levi, Roger McGough
Here are a few of my works:
I Am Just A Man
For McGough, Farley and Andrew Dean
As lonely and stark as a Lowry matchstick man,
I must look stupid against the silversmith’s sky
Which saps birdshit from the prideful sandstone angles,
And which turns the stained glass into holy neon
As it bleeds reds and blues to their rightful richness.
The hulk cathedral competes with cranes building up
To clouds crowning this shiny Atlantic city
As top of the morning blings off Paddy’s Wigwam,
And the Mersey breeze sings sailors’ boasts of a
Girl in every port, and two in Liverpool.
I feel like God today, privileged to roam
In a Man U shirt in the heartbeat of Scouseland.
Boddy’s in my veins, this morning’s hangover has
Soared me to as high as the cocky Liver birds
Who smirk across the broad Mersey to Birkenhead.
I nod to Prescot peacocks with Cricket dresses;
And watch gulls jostle for space on the Three Graces;
I can hear the Anfield roar rouse Stanley Park;
And with a bronze Billy Fury, see ferries dock
Their tourists and cargoes like they have always done.
And her lasses and las flash grins and Japanese
Tourists pose in the bulb flashes by the Cavern;
I’m dwarfed by dishes and arches in Chinatown;
As culture vultures gorge within Saint Georges Hall,
When WAGS browse wall-to-wall in the gleaming L1.
Liverpool is a pert ageless nymph of all life
Stopped growing further still by the sea-bound buffer
Which opened her to America and wide worlds:
The glitziest trading post; Britannic cradle -
Artisan pout and New York chic with a Scouse wink.
And she is, forever, for I am just a man,
A mortal man -
I am just a Mancunian.
----
Home
I am in love. I am in love.
Reading Keats by the bleak Irwell
Wondering about the people
Who broke the waters of my life.
I am in love, I am in love.
I’m walking back down the towpath
Which divides Manchester estates
From Salford estates thinking
Is happiness equality?
And if yeah, what keeps lives apart?
Such a immense thing was never
Emptier.
Just wait til I leave;
Can express real emotion
Without drugs pulling me down;
Or medicinal alcohol
In the half-glass (yet never straight)
A bedsit crammed in a suitcase,
Amber lights no longer blind me,
And its concrete ties don’t bind me,
I am the angel of the North,
So keep safe my Icarus heart.
It’s you I will not leave behind
------
The Manchester Renaissance
Proper Mancs say: "Shut your north and south!"
divided only by shirt colour
come derby day.
My Manchester,
built by buildings as big as its heart;
today we’re changing for the better.
We’re not so soft as the cotton made here
cos we’ve had it mint and we’ve had it hard.
We’ve stood back and watched our mills fall quiet -
that was a revolution in ruin.
A government got its turn with Thatcher.
Eighties’ kids laboured on to gleefully
stick two fingers up at her in the Hac
while they were ‘avin it on pure acid
and mesmerised by ‘A Guy Called Gerald.’
Lots of cash and drugs have been injected
into Manchester - that’s the way we do it -
and today we are changing for the best.
On our Pennine throne, we are king
and over the northern realm may we reign
til’ those fibreglass cows come home.
May we be top, sweet, sorted, sound
til’ that endless rain stops falling,
when Leeds is bigger, Liverpool louder,
when London finally stops calling.
Shout out to Oasis, the Smiths,
Edwards, Bell, Lowry and Turing.
Anyone who's who: north or south,
red or the blue, the born and bred
and diehards, to the through and through,
and don't forget the adopted few.
To the city that just dozes
in the dense concrete jungle.
A pulsating throb of vibrancy
pounding the labyrinth street.
All resounds and all is colour,
as I view the kaliedescope
of cultures, the fusion of creeds
in the simmering crucible
always toiling, always bubbling.
Pigeons and gothic gargoyles,
and me watch the sun run away,
and my Manchester, yours and ours,
settles under the brewing sky.
And, like applause, the rain slowly
falls down as a crescendo,
harder, faster, as to encore
such a symbol, such a gift.
www.myspace.com/templeofmoz
but I think I could have improved upon it if I had given it more time 
