In-Love Doggerel

You're a starship powered on Xanadu nectar;
I'm a pogo stick on coal.
You're a majestic arc of the milky way;
I'm a quark in an unsold cheese roll.
Your eyes launch songbirds and sonnets;
Come fly with me on my crackling comet.

Your hair evokes the erotic scents of perfumed night bazaars;
I exude burning tyres on torched, smashed deisel cars.
Beside you a pulsar is like a sorry matchstick spark;
As I stand in a room of moths,
I'm the dark.

You're the clearest proof if there is a God,
Their image is of your resplendent own;
I'm often asked to be the face promoting payday loans.
As you glide past men how their minds dissolve,
Their eyes kerbcrawl out their face;
I'm all Genghis Khan cologne liberally splashed over exploding beer crates.

Even when you sneeze,
You make this man go weak at the knees.
And if you had dandruff, as you brushed your hair,
Surely it would sparkle like snow through Swiss mountain air?
And that sliver of marmalade left on your cheek,
Reminds me of liquid gold encased in an amber hive of magic bees.
And when you carry rubbish to your bin,
I follow you just so I might fall right in.
Then, as you're unblocking the drain, really rocking those wellies,
I, like a smitten garden gnome, 
Wobble,
And turn to jelly..

Verily, Grace Kelly, may I be your Shelley,
Though you gaze rapturously at a shopping channel on the telly?


  

As Tender As Exploding Teargas Grenades In The Palace Of Skimmed Goats' Milk

An elephants' graveyard of vacuum cleaners - 
Acoustic, unplugged, John Cage. 
A light dust sheen accumulates around their trunks: 
The all-tangled Cro Magnon robot compost heap, 
Slumming in the open-plan tomb of my jazz-gloom basement. 

Another one every year or so I add to their numbers - 
Another perished vacuum, sucked down, down the mouse-musk mire. 
It's all Crimewatch and The Wire. 

Am I The East London Vacuum Cleaner Strangler, 
Or, maybe The Newham One? 

Imagine watching the TV news - the cardboard talking-head "neighbour": 
Yeah, yeah. I saw him in shop once, 
Where he bought milk made with goats. 
I mean, why would someone ever do that..? 
Since then I've never trusted a man that buys goats' milk. 
Skimmed. Goats. Milk. Ho! 

And, he might go on.. 
Well, actually,  
I was quite moved watching the police smash his door in with their uniform legs, 
And throw tear gas grenades nice and tidy in his hallway smaller than mine. 
It makes me feel protected, and powered yes? 
At long last getting value for my Council Tax? Agreed. 
I showed them my Neighbourhood Watch sticker on my front window sill. 
I display a Baby On Board sticker there every day too.
It's good for this country they said.

Forest Gate Mystery Train

I'm on the Forest Gate Mystery Train, 
With my burgled geranium eyes. 
I'm on the Forest Gate Mystery Train, 
Sighing goldfish clock sardine spies. 

Spammed atomic; trolleyed marine, 
Frost-buckled arms glow margarine, 
Slender dolls slalom offside knees, 
Capsules backslide into the stalagmite City. 

Tutankhamen consortia; 
Shoulder-penguins soggy cadge the dappled glimmer, 
Ink-blot floozies aim the infatuation-Derringer: 
Coffee?... Drink? 
And the treacle line thuds floating eurhythmic ghostly tambourines. 

The sly budgies chirp office trash - 
Yammering satellites eclipse; 
Aural chalk lines extradite silhouettes of lips. 
Forest Gate Mystery Train - 
Silence on the soundless amplifies. 
I travel a million underground-air-miles, 
And mermaids cycle the jelly eel sky. 
Mind the gap: you're half woman, I'm half fish - 
So the one and us evolves.. 

Forest Gate Mystery Train - 
Leering, marching men; somnambulist egg brains, 
Millionaires roll higher off ghostly rabbit-hutch plains. 
Win a dream lottery and slap down the deposit, 
In Stratford there's now a launch pad for a bungee-jumping space rocket. 
(It's just by the casino). 
Warp factor none, 
A ready meal for one, 
Microwaveable thoughts blister the bubbling plastic film, 
And the plasmatic Krakatoa infusion fizzles  
a Noah's Ark of arterial gerbils. 

Forest Gate Mystery Train - 
You've got one. 
I've got one.