***** Luke Wright *****

Embrace the Wank.
Shoot juice gallery white at rock opera ballets
sack off the caress, then fist, those concept-tv scallies.
Paw, letch, feel up, grope, and engage in intellectual foreplay.
Sleep around with every textile-student cliché,
find the space…
…within the space…
and look ace in call centre chic.
Take the avant-garde from behind,
Get arty,
talk about the theatre of cruelty
at a Shoreditch Christmas party.

Then:

Embrace the Wank.
Get tanked up at nouveau-postmodern-fuck-fests
suck best at Jay Joplin's barbeques.
Get new.
Then get newer,
go through a blue period
then get bluer.
Skewer yourself on the pulsating cock of fad culture,
cut off the balls of lad culture, then dance naked with them round Hoxton Square
sing a working class song and scream I WAS THERE

when they ...

Embraced the Wank,
dressed up the skank, and gave it
a Black Sabbath throwback haircut,
those au fait identical scare hacks
on Damien Hirst polka-dot prayer mats,
giving head to the Great Lord Happening,
who created that scene
where they made a manifesto written with every silent letter in the bible,
where the only art were ads, and the only poems libel
stencilled onto beer mats then leered at silent spoken word raves
compèred in semaphore by an S&M sex slave

So:

Embrace the Wank.
dump those level-headed straight-talking common-sense machines,
so calm, sorted, down-to-earth hearty and serene,
and start a movement based on hair products,
a dotcom to sell your chi
burn a million quid because it's a Tuesday
and you can - because it's free!
Then pose naked for posterity,
score own goals for pretension.
Do it for life. Do it for death. Do it for kicks,
but always, always, always do it for …
attention.

I Don’t Get Out of Bed for Less than Ten Grand

Substance is back in fashion
Another mag has shot it
Sexy, draped all over Style,
Demure yet quite psychotic.
Substance is doing the rounds again
And I’m going to hitch a ride;
If the mainstream wants a bitch to slap,
I’ll be the blushing bride.

You can’t feed your kids on critical respect
That can get quite Marquis de Sadeian.
Ever seen a five year old choking to death
On the arts review from Saturday’s Guardian?

It’s horrible! I will not let it happen to me!
Poets don’t need to know the price of a pint of milk.
As long as they know the price of an Innocent smoothie
They can write for patrons of a different ilk.

So the emperor gets new clothes today
The underground won’t understand
I’ve got a new tactic to make my art pay.
I won’t get out of bed for less than ten grand . . .

It’s been three days …
I’m starting to smell.

Boredom starts to permeate the drip… drip… drip… of time
Ideas like bed-bugs come and go across my twisted spine.
But people only want you when they think they can’t afford you,
And if you hold out for long enough persistence will reward you
Then right on cue the phone goes - it’s the BBC
They’re making a documentary and they say that they want me . . .
As … one of 10,000 randomly selected consumers to take part in national survey.
I say I don’t get out of bed for less than ten grand

It’s been two weeks.

The back of my head is going bald
from rubbing on the headboard
My girlfriend keeps saying things like:
I’m not attracted to bedsores.
Or: Why don’t you just get up and wash?
and so on, and so on.
I think she’s gonna leave.
Well – good! I don’t need no one.
Just this warm crusty duvet,
My baseless self-belief,
And the faint smell of brine…

Channel 4 called,
With an offer of nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine
They’re so funny! I told them to go and hang
I don’t get out of bed for less than ten grand . . .

It’s been a month.

My girlfriend left last week.
Said she couldn’t take the ignominy.
And just when I’ve learned
to shit myself with dignity!
Now I’ve no one here to listen to me
and I smell like dog
So this is how low you have to be
to set up your own blog!
Viewers of my web cam can watch me sweat and rot
Imagine Rab C Nesbit – but without the humorous plot.
I’m imprisoned by my own stardom, but liberated by my plan
To refuse to get
out of this bed
for less than
ten grand.

It’s been three months.

I’m getting to know the environmental officer really rather well,
Because my neighbours are philistines who’ve complained about the smell.
Still - I’m famous on the Internet. I’m that crazy bed-in guy
Oh mate, you should check it out, he’s got poo all down his thighs!
I’ve no time for doubters, because I’m going somewhere at last
It seems I’ve been in bed so long my protest counts as art!

I’ve got reviews in all the papers, I’ve got tons of celebrity fans
I’ve got a pop song in my honour by some neo-britpop band,
Outside my bedroom window is a maze of TV vans,
Distinguished folk with PHDs who want to shake my hand,
Letters from poorly children who think I understand,
Girls who want my autograph across their mammary glands…
But best of all
An Arts Council grant
for exactly
ten
grand.

One Night of Spending

Madness! Madness! And I don’t mean the band
There’s madness on the heads of the Ikea clan
They’re rioting in Edmonton with credit cards and shrieks
Of Make us Scandinavian! and That’s my futon bitch!
The bitter glinting eyes of these suburban folk
Say it’s bruscetta warfare and they’re off their face on coke.
Imagine Sans-cullottes
in a soap on Radio Four
It’s war amongst the middle classes,
Madness, madness, war.

As midnight strikes forebodingly across consumer land
Thirty-something couples draw up their final plans
Right, Ashley take the side door, Jez and I will storm the front
And Giles you’re the look-out; your code name’s ‘Bargain Hunt’
Ashley’s ‘Linda Barker,’ I’m ‘Flatpack,’ Jez you’re ‘Cheap.’
Now – do we take the Range Rover, or shall we take the Jeep?
So they’re off to fight their own kind - Che Guevara meets Dior.
It’s war amongst the middle classes
Madness, madness, war.

Down in the parking lot the queues become unsettled
By the sort of folk who call The Darkness “Heavy Metal”.
There’s trainee middle managers, the PR media type
Debt consolidating, administrating fans of Michael Stipe.
There’s jostling, and posturing, and arguments on diet
In theory low carbs work, but it’s not healthy to apply it.
You can smell the desperation as they bring down the door
It’s war amongst the middle classes,
Madness, madness, war.

In store there’s pandemonium. Stiletto heels are soaring
Businessmen in fisticuffs for laminate wood flooring
Sales staff frozen petrified by screams of What’s this worth?!?
The meek have finally risen, and they’re going to claim the Earth.

And they’re going to keep it minimal.
They’re going to spend their money
Because they think the Swedish meatballs in the restaurant are yummy
A riot to de-clutter, a fight for peace of mind, and what’s more,
It’s war amongst the middles classes,
Madness, madness, war.

So in the lacquer-splintering chaos of the flatpack dream gone sour
The shop floor should-have-been-someones who get paid by the hour
Shake their heads, as those accountants and estate agents show their fists,
With a look that says To me, there’s really nothing more than this.
They bathe in comfort spiked with shadows of the lives they never lived
Sleep in air-locked living rooms with films of things they never did.
And as they battle with themselves, paying less and getting more,
It’s war amongst the middle classes
Madness, madness, war.

"Channel" "4"

Reality TV bites, and the public, it bites back,
drip-fed neat their own lives by lifestyle guru hacks.
Pointless pop psychology passes for viewing pleasure,
with the odd erect penis thrown in – just for good measure.
Here trash has got an ethos, and game-shows mirror lives,
tell us something about ourselves, before pulling out the knives,
for live autopsy analysis of celeb culture lore…
But it’s so “Bold”
It’s so “Shocking”
It’s so “Channel” “4”!

This summer everyone will be talking about “Brits Do The Orient”:
Find out what happens when a school-girl from Kent
swaps her daily routine with that of a Nepalese prostitute.
Will Jenny Smith find herself helpless and destitute?
Or will she loosen that stiff upper lip and… get on the game?
- answering the much-asked and increasingly complex question
Are English people different from Foreigners,
or are we essentially all just the same?
Thought-provoking stuff.

Media types, who don’t slog a nine to five,
And who believed the hype around dogma 95,
prop up soundbite culture with their depictions of youth
and cite Vernon Kay and June Sarpong as proof
that they’re in touch with all the hip and trendy kids out there,
vomiting Top 100 lists
as if somebody cares,
with a presenter whose Not afraid to swear, and a soundtrack by The Cure…
It’s so “Retro”
It’s so “Huh, like I give a fuck”
It’s so “Channel” “4”!

This autumn, Davina McCall will take to the streets of Brixton at night
and find two young men to take part in a “shoot-til-you-drop” gun fight.
Handheld camera action captures the gritty inner city vibe,
whilst short-lived press attention is promised to whoever survives
“Street Hate” -- which aims to glamorise poverty and excessive violence
to white middle-class children who don’t live in cities,
and asks the pertinent question
Is gun crime excusable in the context of late-night youth TV?
(Yes.)

Poorly scripted porno-soaps are here to deal with issues
but simply have the teenage boys reaching for the tissues
a group of pseudo-RADA hos,
dressed in nouveau-Prada clothes
will strike an Eldorado pose
with their newly sculpted nose
and teach the kids about drugs-and-AIDS-and-rape-and-AIDS-and-drugs-and-stuff,
then undermine the efforts made by flashing us their bleached-blonde muff.
But whatever the case a blonde master race can never be a bore
It’s so “Provocative”
It’s so “Aren’t northerners funny?”
It’s so “Channel” “4”!

This winter Larry Hagman and Damien Hirst present a new six-part documentary
about the imaginary friends of some of the UK’s biggest name celebrities.
Hear about the dinner parties Posh Spice has with her invisible friend Lottie
or the eight-hour sex sessions Robbie Williams has with his imaginary chum
Robbie.
Entitled simply “Friend” “(question mark)”,
the show aims to make the general public feel better about their sad, narrow lives
by exposing those of the people they worship,
and allows Stuart Machonie to say
I knew that already
A lot.

Cutting off the edges of cutting-edge tv,
it’s here to tell you you’re ugly in cleverer ways than ITV,
it’s here to tell you it doesn’t quite know what you should be today,
it’s here to offer you Jimmy Carr to find a better way.
It’s here to over-theorise and intellectualise pop trash,
it’s only really here to make itself some cash,
it’s here because we want it. It’s here because we’re bored.
It’s so “Well Marketed”
It’s so “Us”
It’s so “Channel” “4” !

And don’t forget, week nights at half-past eleven
is Russell’s Brand's new show “Russell’s About” -
the concept is similar to the much-hated show
”Beadle’s About”
but with a camp presenter in leggings.
Now that’s progressive TV programming.

Crap Masseuse

I haven’t moved my arm
for nigh on a week.
The bruising around my neck
means I find it hard to speak.
There’s a dull ache in my groin
when I try to take a leak.
The reason’s very simple:
crap masseuse.

Are essential oils and castor oil
really the same thing?
Are you certain that spanking my arse
will heal my hamstring?
Do we have to spend the session
listening to Sting?
Oh we do, do we, great,
crap masseuse.

This is a B&Q Workbench
you’ve asked me to lay on
Those certificates on the wall
they’re all written in crayon.
You’ve quite a Brummie accent
for someone who’s Malayan…
You’re sure you’re not from Dudley?
crap masseuse.

Crap masseuse, crap masseuse,
Must you continue your abuse?
My elbow doesn’t bend that way
My back is turning puce.
Crap Masseuse, crap masseuse,
Here’s my philosophy
Pulling toe nails out -
isn’t reflexology.

Lighting tea lights with a blow torch
you’re really quite a charmer.
Strange, but the donkey punch didn’t
make me feel much calmer
And straddling me and screaming
Hare Krishna! Hare Rama!
Does nothing for my karma,
crap masseuse.

After half an hour with you
I’m like an infant in his cot.
I’ve a nasty case of nappy rash
I tend to cry. A lot.
But now I have to go,
I have to keep my three o clock,
With your friend, the shit beautician,
crap masseuse.

Stuck In The Middle With You
For Central Trains

O Central!
Negligent vendor of middle brow carriage.
Sad trundling weekend dad, eternal let down,
Your coaches are airless like a loveless marriage,
As you lumber from broken town to broken town.

O, Booby!
Over-weight and sweaty-browed.
I am astonished at your complete lack of gumption.
Three hours late, and you almost look proud,
Wheezing into Leicester like a pack horse with consumption

I’ve seen the best minds of my generation delayed outside Matlock,
Starving, hysterical, queasy, dragging their luggage through Derby station
At rush hour, looking for …
A simple explanation to why you refuse to adhere to your timetable.
Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and grumpy,
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
Ice cold waiting rooms in West Midland cities contemplating compensation
And how there are so many other things they’d rather see
Then your woefully insufficient luggage racks.

And I don’t want your excuses, so shut your mouth.
This country is all about North and South
Glasgow to London -- now there’s a journey with gravity
The rugged scenery of the North, and the south with … London, basically.
But at least it’s not Kettering, moribund to the point of tears
East Anglia and Wales are just a pair of cuntish ears
and you flip flop between them
East to west,
West to east,
Left to right,
Right to left,
Like Menzies Campbell with a dicky tum.

You are the smell of other people’s crap in your own broken loo.
You’re the tea that tastes of potpourri your refreshment trolley brews.
You’re the station’s slack-tied drunkard singing Spandau Ballet’s True.
you are your own
bus
replacement
service.

Your station staff are wretched. Their inertia is infectious.
Your conductors talk like fascists to disguise the fact they’re feckless.
Your seats stained with the gruel of a thousand black-shoed spectres.
Your colour scheme is
Shit.

Why are you so scared of punctuality?
Why do you lack the most basic functionality?
Why sound so bored when you announce a fatality?
Why are you such a bollocks train company?

Keep Grantham!
Keep Sleaford!
Keep Nuneaton!
And Mansfield!
Keep Nottinghamshire silos,
and the breathless dreary fens.
Keep Cleethorpes!
Keep Newark!
Keep Stafford!
Keep Bingham!
Your line of sun bleached coke cans,
And the journey that never ends.

There are leaves on the lines that mark my face
As each day I grow older on your seats.
Dragged from pointless place to pointless place,
Your puke green carpet ‘neath my weary feet.

My soul unravels as I bear witness,
To your unrivalled, astounding shitness.

The Yes Affair

Your face was everywhere that summer,
And I watched you smitten from the sidelines,
Until that fatal day our eyes first met,
Across a crowded press conference.

We did some brief flirting.
I asked hard questions.
The mouth of a navvy and the hands of a hack,
But the way you danced around them
Made my head buzz with electric lights,
And my heart skip like election night.

Yes, there was something about you
that made me consider my entire life

And I could see that you saw this.
I was your very first conquest,
You the visionary patron,
And me your court artist
To immortalise for a loan.
And you knew when you called
I’d say ‘yes.’
And that ‘yes’ really set the tone.

And call it timing, providence, fate, luck – whatever,
But the tone seemed to filter through.
And the nation stood up for us.
Said yes to us. Well, yes to you.
Still, I didn’t think things could get better
I wasn’t just writing for you,
I was writing for the whole world,
Because you were the whole world.

You sailed through the re-election.
My slogans made Saatchi salivate.
A thousand copy-writers
couldn’t copy what I could spin
on my little finger back then.

Your brand dripped from every
billboard, newspaper, chatroom, text,
stencil, telegram, menu, fax,
e-mail, advert, website, flyer,
TV, poster, pa, invite…

It was given out by drama girls at every fringe arts festival,
Got on your mind like news print at countless business seminars,
Moved shadow-like across indie gigs came out the mouths of groupies,
And it circled us on conveyor belts in London’s new Yo Sushi!s.
It was spread thick on bruschetta by every TV cook,
It was drawn on the pages of every children’s book.
It clogged up vacuum cleaners like dust on the tongue,
And was fired from the barrels of your peace keeper’s guns.

Alzheimer oldtimers would mistakes their sons for you,
As teenage girls in city schools would save themselves for you.
I stamped your name under the eyelids of every woman man and, child,
Made sure that’s what they saw when a cancer patient’s smile.
I made you the food on our plates, and the hope in our hearts,
The mother of the future and the father of the past.
And I wrote it with every last drop of my anaemic genius
It was my Lear, it was my Waste Land, it was my Paradise Lost.

But in the end it was just you,
Plain and simple - the guy in the suit,
everything you said so familiar,
that won the second landslide vote.
Yes, you were perfect and in the end
I was just spinning you 360 degrees
For effect.
You came complete with polish and brush,
And all I could do was buff.
Now my saying ‘yes’ was enough,
And you didn’t need say it back.

It would be safe to say my art suffered:
polemic ditties, undramatic kitchen sinks,
And novels that just told it like it is.
Fact after fact of benevolent statesmanship,
No lies to cover up, no figures to bed, no empty promises to make.
Now where’s the art in that?

So I said ‘NO’, and walked away.
And no, it wasn’t out of spite,
And no I didn’t mean anything I said,
But politics and love are fickle,
And ‘yes’ just didn’t strike the same chord.

And soon the public joined in,
Swapped brands on a ten-year itch.
Our love, our affirmative decade,
Condensed to a tone in the changing of the fads.

You left parliament and became a consultant.
A thousand one-night-stands back-to-back.
And I pursued a television career.
Spending my days arguing
with other
broken-hearted hacks.

The Rise & Fall of Dudley Livingstone Esq.

Dudley
Livingstone
Esquire.
Journalist, family man, Tory,
A little bit of Jack The Lad with a pinch of Jackanory.
From a lineage of land-owners who always shot on sight,
But savvy enough to know not to boast about being an Etonite.

Instead he stuck to shooting off his pen in periodicals
His wit would warm like sherry, so his right-wing doggerel,
Didn’t seem so extreme and he found being green
Meant you could say Send them back! and it wouldn’t sound
so obscene…

As long as he stuck up for cyclists,
And said how jolly vital the poetry recital is,
And stuff like that, which Dudley duly did, and said so on Radio Four,
Wormed his way onto woman’s hour and made Jenny Murray guffaw!

And a man like that is wasted in the private sector tent,
So Dudley got the call one day: Prepare for parliament!

A by-election borough in safest Tory Surrey
where multiculturalism is Going for a curry.
The kind of place the Telegraph is turned up to the max
We’re not really racist,
We’re just not too keen on blacks.

But they thought Dud was just the ticket,
And they ticked the box marked CON,
Cheered like England took a wicket,
And sung their favourite song…

(Which at the time was James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful)

He made his mark in parliament a firmly anti-stance,
Reactionary, but edgy, and familiar at a glance.

Dudley was the minister who stood for anti-sleaze
Dudley was the minister who said Let’s save the trees!
Dudley was the minister who said Deport the Jews!
But then he could always make us giggle on Have I Got News For You

People didn’t mind about the racial insurrections
Because he stumbled on his words and had contrived inflections.
His hair was always messy and he’d forget to zip his flies
He was posh and silly – therefore incapable of lies…

Dudley had mastered anti-spin and the more he looked confused,
the more he could be prejudiced and always be excused.
So when May rolled around and the grass roots gave permission,
Dudley found himself as leader of the opposition.

And from there to Number Ten, Dudley made himself at home.
Annexed parts of Brighton, locked transsexuals in the Dome.
There was no ideology – he just wanted to be nasty!
Brought back hunting!
Brought back hanging!
Brought back Noel’s House Party!

And he always had an answer that would please the right wing press
Hid behind pop culture when taking questions from the left:

- Are you sure that burning Catholics is necessary sir?
- Oh you make it sound barbaric. Look – here’s me! with Blur!

And the public were awash with love and admiration,
Because good press can negate the moral implications…

But then one foggy London morn his world came crashing down:
The kissed and blabbered revelation of Arabella Brown.
His illicit mistress sold her story of excess,
Sleaze from every angle on every page of the Express:
Dudley’s such an animal he’s naughty and he’s kinky
He likes a golden shower when he’s dressed as Tinky Winky

For Dudley, as a married man, this was a moral blight
The Mail can take a holocaust but Cheating just ain’t right!
So they dug up every bit of shit and with a shot of retrospect,
Now everything that Dud had done seemed all the more suspect.

They hounded him from office, his cronies bore the brunt.
The public started asking why they voted for such a … Tory
But they remembered fondly Dudley’s gift to play the fool
What a pity, they remarked, that he had to break the rules.

On The Anniversary of Yesterday's News

I want to feel
but life’s a full time job
I want to care
But through third hand news stories
Facts stolen from soundbites
Grainy footage
Video-phone visuals
Garbled bulletins
yardstick emotional rhetoric
and a blinking news ticker
stuck
                           stuck
                                                      stuck
                                                                                 stuck
                                                                                                            on Saturday Night,

Through conflicting reports scanned on eight-coffee-break-days
Through Calvin Klein ads, Angelina and Brad, Jordan’s boobs, Coleen’s shoes,
Paris Hilton’s big night out and the latest girl next door turned superstar.

Through Britney’s baby fat,
The Beckham brats
X-Factor inner dealings,
Who Kate Moss has fucked this week,
The emotional bond I have formed with my choice of energy drink
And Bono
(Yes, Bono requires constant attention)

I can’t seem to concentrate

Can’t seem to find anything
except the silvery cynicism I reserve for anything I hear from anyone

Because 7/7 had it’s own signature tune on CNN
Had a flash animation on BBC News 24
And through exploding graphs & inconsolable downloads,
I wasn’t sure if I was still playing computer games

The war on terror needs fuel.
It needs tragedy.
And wars are two sided
This is going to happen again and again and again and …

When my friend Tim said
New York New York so good they planed it twice
I couldn’t help but stifle a snigger

                           Remember that episode of My Family
                           When the whole family got stuck on a tube underground for an episode
                           The ultimate test for the excitable Nick and his curmudgeonly father
                           Robert Lyndsay was very funny
                           It’s a classic sitcom trick - Confinement
                           Hancock did it in a lift, Seinfeld queuing at a Chinese restaurant
                           Blackadder did it all the time and …

And this is fucked up.
It is.
It’s really fucked up.
It’s fuck … fucking fuck…

Sally and I once stayed up all night
Ran around town on a teenage speed binge.
The slogans from closed shops impotent and grey

As we lay on the green green grass outside the mall
and planned what we’d do if bombs went off in London.
Run home from work,
Meet in Bow
Stick together, whatever.
It’ll be a new beginning, right.

I’m not fighting in world war three, baby.
I’m not fighting in world war three.
We’ll just take off
The two of us.

And it could well be the last days of Rome
This week in Vogue - togas
Did you know Jen and Angelina have both used the same bodyguard?
Yeah I know…
Proof they have the same taste in men.

I wasn’t in London that sticky July day
But I thought Sally was going to be,
We spoke at lunchtime
I was just angry. I didn’t say the right things.
But everyone was alright.
Yeah. Everyone’s fine.
We all said the same thing
Everyone is OK.

I mean … Sal nearly got that tube

Weird isn’t?
It’s just really weird

And now, in Bali, there’s more …

23 people dead. 23 people dead. 23 people dead.
That’s quite a lot I suppose.
150 injured. What would that look like?
Yeah that’s loads.
But did you know over 300 people die each year from gastric bypass surgery
It’s true. Yeah I know, isn’t that mental?

In July I rang my friends in London …
James walked up and down Oxford Street and thought
Sarah watched rolling news footage and ate junk food
Joe couldn’t get out of town and ended up drunk on Olivia’s doorstep
And Chris was holed up in his office reading Internet facts …

Ten million Russians died in WW1
Brazil has more Avon Ladies than soldiers
Ringo is the oldest Beatle
And pigs can’t look at the sky.

Stansted

My dad used to work
For the Civil Aviation Authority
In a round building close to High Holborn
And whilst he was there he worked on the planning permission
For the control tower at Stansted

For me,
as a kid
t his was the most tangible of his achievements
And for years when ‘dads’ were mentioned I’d say:
My Dad was pretty involved with the “Stansted Project”
I’d say: My Dad was the top guys
And only very occasionally,
When proud freckled faced boys needed to be silenced:
My Dad built Stansted with his bare hands

And yet I never really knew exactly what he did there:

I didn’t know it like I knew
His mahogany trouser-press
The brass bowl for his change,
The way his cheek felt cold
When in came back from work in the rain
Smelling of trains
and the morning’s aftershave

or the skeleton clocks he spent his weekends making
meticulous time-keeping under glass domes
the way he’d rest his hands on his stomach after we’d eaten
the brown sweater with the hole in the cuff

or how his check shirt would show
At the neck of his workshop overalls
The silver popper at the top undone

The occasional Kit-Kat wrapper in his car
Dad you’ve been eating chocolate. Ummm.

And I’ve never asked.
I just see him out on a flat field
That is not yet a run-way
Clipboard in hand
Directing other men
Wind sock blowing in the breeze.

Camping Dad

The granite sky weeps on commuter belt towns
As middle aged men with grey temple tufts
Have sweaty dreams the length of commercial breaks
In which they put petrol into their diesel cars
And it unlocks some forgotten, buried pain
It’s like Rousseau said, man is born free
but everywhere he is on trains

and it wears you down when you can count the decades
on most of one hand. Generation games:
How many landmarks can you remember?
The M25, a sewage plant, the M25, factories at Witham
A row of shops, the M25, the M25, the M25, the M25
Until you start to think: I’m trapped in a matrix
I’m not really alive.

But come Easter weekend, the crows feet are stretched
A glorious Thursday afternoon logging-out
He begins to taste the rapturous peace
from before the dreadful daylight began
cynics take heed, if you think hobbies are sad
cos who’s that pulling his house behind him?
Blimey! it’s Camping Dad!

So …

Ta ta mobile, au revoir
to touching in his Oyster Card
There’s The Great outdoors! Regard!
Here comes Camping Dad

Nice to meet you, how do you do?
Are you a fan of the botanical gardens at Kew?
A bike ride is nice, that’s a fact, it’s true
Phew! I’m Camping Dad

Never were a chap in such fine fettle
When making tea in a camping kettle
I used a glove to pick it up because it’s made of metal
Oh Camping Dad

Camping dad got solar panels
Camping dad got style
Camping dad owns range of flannels
Camping dad got piles

At night he cooks and sips his Bass
Organic lamb splash of Shiraz
Now we’re cooking with camping gas
He says that every night

Now he's enthusing over the tetra pack
a damn fine piece of engineering that
he deserved his money, that Rausing chap
Camping Dad is right

He doesn’t care if his hands get dirty
He’s recaptured youth, he feels about thirty
He’s out in the wild, well a campsite in Chertsey,
Curtsey Camping Dad

Camping Dad appreciates
Driving at forty nine
Camping Dad appreciates
A gently warmed glass of wine
Camping Dad appreciates
Organised games and fun
Camping Dad appreciates
The occasional cheesy pun

And mum!

Camping Dad appreciates
Wearing Pringle sweaters
Camping Dad appreciates
A time when we still sent letters
Camping Dad appreciates
Things that neatly stack
Camping Dad appreciates
A lovely pipe of crack

No he doesn’t - that was a joke
Camping dad does not condone drug use in any way–
he’s not that kind of bloke

I mean what’s the point
When you can roll down a hill
And smell fresh cut grass
Who’d want a silly joint
Take your bloody ecstacy
And shove it up your …

And whilst we’re on the subject
Camping Dad does not appreciate
Sulky teen
It’s a nice holiday
Must he always ruin it?
Take that ridiculous fringe out of your eyes
What is this ‘My Chemical Romance’

But then at night sulky teen still looks so sweet
And Camping Dad can recall
when he could fit him in one hand
when the world still felt so small

Because it’s a shame you know
How things change
If only life would fold away
Like a kitchen in a motorhome
If only a pocket full of fifty pees
Were the answer to all our woes

Camping Dad feels uneasy
About fun pubs, credit cards, shopping malls
And the Sunday Times Magazine
Camping Dad doesn’t like
The glitz of Formula One
It gets in the way, he muses
Of the excellent engineering

John Gray PHD told me
that men like to retreat into their caves
And with a world of endless macadam out there
the indicator’s tick-tock-tick and the perpetual tow
I ask you fellas, what you do
If you had a cave
on wheels
With it’s own chemical loo?

What is it Exactly?

What is it exactly that you plan to do
with all the moments you saved;
the stolen seconds that amassed to hours
the sprinted escalator at Waterloo,
the Oyster Card, the microwave,
the sluggish baths that became quick showers?

Exactly how long will they remain
lined up on your study bookcase
Like DV tapes labelled in neat black felt tip?
Alongside self-help books, puzzles and board games
Left to mature before you taste
Taking quiet, studied, deliberate sips

Smug in the knowledge that everyone else
Has blown there’s on three course meals,
The scenic route to and from work,
And an extra pint on Fridays, whilst
You were making chronological deals
And buying easy-iron half cotton shirts.

But perhaps you’ll never find the right moment,
not wanting to deplete your store,
and find yourself hurtling towards death
without a single second left to contemplate
A life time sat in cafes watching the door,
Twiddling your thumbs and catching your breath.

Darryl

Everyone’s got a mate who fucked up.
Mine was Darryl,
All nasal and pessimistic
his hope backed up in his sinuses,
masochistic.
With cartoon rain-cloud over cropped ginger head
and above his monobrow a mole like a baked bean.
My baked bean.
Pretty gross, innit.

We first met when we were six.
He showed me round at my new school
Fond of saying Ummm… and I’m telling on you,
that early awkward bond is crystallized,
Preserved like a laminated scratch.
We’re shoulder-to-shoulder in our first school photo
My pigeon-chested slump and crew cut squint
versus his goody-two-shoes straight-backed grin
taunting me with his good behaviour
I look defeated, as grey as a graveyard.

Darryl lived with his Nan.
His mother dead before he knew her.
But he was a happy little man
He didn’t question the rules
we drifted at school,
And then he was moved,
And our paths didn’t cross
Until puberty knocked.

Then he moved into my street.
He became convenient company
when my weekends got bored.
By then his two good shoes were scuffed
and there was teenage rage brewing beneath that ginger tuft.

We were all told that Darryl was no good
A negative influence. Bad egg. Trouble.
But his wild bullshit stories were Friday night fun
Down the rec, wrecked on hooch, smoking fags that we’d bummed.

He told bare faced lies that could well be true
Because this was Darryl, and Darryl was stupid enough
To do the stupid things you would never do.

I glassed a swan
I toe-frigged a girl
I’m going on Jim’ll Fix It

It was him who keyed cars new year’s eve ninety six.
It was him who sniffed poppers until he was sick.
It was him that stole the vodka we drank by the bypass,
That night it was him got knocked down in the car park.

Don’t get me wrong- he wasn’t hurt,
He just walked into a stationary car.

Just my luck to get run over.
Darryl - you weren’t run over –
you walked into a stationary car
Oh yeah.
I’m such a loser.

We weren’t best friends.
Darryl mostly hung out with Joe Gray,
Who had a face like a cheap sausage
that’s been grilled for thirty minutes,
Rippled and waxy, shrunk and dried out,
And a brown bouffant balanced above bringing out his pout.
Joe Gray - who’s voice broke over the space of seven long years
And who’s older brother pinched the cherry of a girl I liked.

Oi, Luke - you know Katy?
Well, my brother pooned her.
And she loved it!
Hah hah hah! Gutted.

Joe was a cock.

But Darryl, just damaged
You see, aged twelve,
the dead mother had turned up
Not so dead after all – just didn’t give a fuck
And like a stepped-on Coke can his straight back
had collapsed.

I thought you were dead…

Turned out he’d been lied to since he was one.
She played mummy for a month then she was gone.
Oh curse his trusting head.

Course at the time we didn’t know this,
Found out years later from gossiping mothers,
Keen at last to tell you all that you’d missed
Like a director’s cut of your own life
That made sense of all the strange bits.

And so to us Darryl was just someone to hide behind
To send clattering through boundaries so we could peek beyond.
And our mums were so pleased that it wasn’t us,
Who broke our wrists trying to force open a bottle of bud on the bus…

No one actually wants to
Wash their hair with lighter fluid
And then spend all night desperately trying to rinse though it
As Bigger boys chase you around with their precious clippers.
We just wanted to see what would happen,
And then nip home for our dinners

And that was Darryl all over - an impotent Rasputin;
For all his playing up there was no dramatic conclusion .
He just wandered into static traffic ‘til it finally moved on
We all sorted ourselves out, passed exams and were gone.

He passed from mate
to acquaintance
Then quaint anecdote
With a touch of schadenfreude.
A cruel party piece to conjure up.

Everyone’s got a mate who fucked up
You might see them skulking around the bus shelters they frequent,
like a scribbled-on picture book. Like pocket money spent.
Darryl became just a character to me,
last I heard he was banged up
GBH.

And yes, I’m worried that he’ll read this and turn up.

And I don’t know what I should do
About the spectre of Darryl that remains in my mind.
The poet in me wants to carve up the meat, spit out the rind
And state: others fail so the rest of us don’t have to

But the man in me is not so desperate to prove
the lesson he’s supposed to.
Just wants to say sorry
to the ginger kid in the photo.

Dance

It all started for me when, aged nine,
I was invited to my first disco,
And my mother said with a wry grin;
So then, show me how you’re going to dance
And I just sort of shuffled quickly around the kitchen,
Throwing my arms across my head in a
spastic opera of stop-motion boogie.

And she said Hey – that’s …
um …
really good…
And I took her to mean Hey that’s
Actually
really good.
And then ten years later I’m in Hollywood
(That’s Hollywood’s on the Station Road, Ipswich)
and I’m thinking – Hey, I’m really good
when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored ceiling
and I realise I’m just a nine year old
in six-foot-four man suit
dancing for his mother by the kitchen table
in 1991, and I just stopped.

You see, I do not dance
Because I cannot dance.
I just look like the cumbersome one from Westlife
As he hunches to reach the mic
I writhe and stutter
Gyrate and flinch
Like a musical choreographed by David Lynch
Like a nervous breakdown through the medium of jazz
Like your dad
at your birthday party
dancing
to Yazz….

The only way is down
2,000 ravers - their gurns turn to frowns
as I throw my arms in the air expecting the chorus,
and it’s an instrumental breakdown,
and I have to pretend I’m running my hand through my hair…
Pretty time party girls giggle into drinks
at my King Kong ballet on a sticky ice rink

flailing badly timed arm movement
follows flailing badly timed arm movement

precedes:

flailing badly time arm movement

and funny knee thing…

Anyone who’s seen me will know I just don’t look well
I move like a man with haemorrhoids
the marionette from hell
I salsa like a sex offender
Tango like a tit
I foxtrot like a fox
with Prince William after it.
I Rumba like a Gumby
I Twist like I’m pissed
A river dance would drown me …
and alarm the fish

I look like I’d feel more at home around a maypole
(But the Norwich medieval re-enactment society won’t have me on their payroll)
Not with this semi-irregular thrusting action I seem to have coined
I lack the elegance
I look like a Morris Dancer with a bad case of flatulence
Like an injured giraffe with electrodes stuck in to me
Yes, when dancing my sex appeal is like John Prescott’s dignity …

It doesn’t exist.

So I don’t dance
I’ll just sit this decade out
Yes, I’m really ok, yes I will be alright
Yes, I did come here to sit in the corner all night
I watch the epileptic light display
Shower the pretty people as the pied piper
Leads them off to a higher place
That later I try
To interpret like runes
On the fag-ash breath of people so alive they buzz
Setting each other off like sparklers
As the whole world says Dance like us,

dance like us,
dance like us,
dance, dance, dance with us

Dance
To a beat that plays on all six of your senses.
Six? Yes, six: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste
And the one you don’t have:
Rhythm.

Dance
On a walkway through an endless airport
Onto flights to places you have never heard of
Where you can dance to the songs you danced to here

Just dance dance dance dance dance out your fears

Dance
To the clanking of the great printing press
As it spits out the facts from left wing to right
Each one a new bar of the same old beat

Just dance dance dance dance dance and repeat

Dance
To the stitching in the distant sweatshops
The rattle of the fundraiser’s plastic penny box
Dance out your demons or just dance off your socks

Just dance dance dance dance dance and retox

Just dance dance dance dance dance and repeat
And repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and
Don’t dance your mind, just dance your feet,
And repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and
Dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance …

But
            I
                      Just
                                     Can’t.

Quick Lunch

We’re in our first year of marriage
And I’ve been struggling to write a poem about you all day
We sit at the table my parent’s donated
Eating ham and brie sandwiches
It’s a quick, clean lunch because I am working
And the dirty plates have piled up.

The first swig of ale from my bottle chuckles gently
As I pour it down my throat,
Aha ha, Aha ha, Aha ha
You drink last night’s chardonnay.

We ask each other non-sequitors
That don’t seem worth answering
Do you think Kate still has that old sideboard?
Will it rain at Glastonbury this year?
When do you think my order will arrive?

We’ve spent all day together at this pace
Surrounded by things we now share
My stapler, your laptop, bills,
a copy of Dubliners that could belong to either of us

I stop eating and look right at you
I think about our first year at university
And the way your long brown legs
Would fold messily beneath your bright summer top
As you sat down on the grass by the lake.
You’re still so refreshing,
Like a popsicle in August.

Sometimes when I realise you’re mine forever
It scares me so much the world stops making a sound
And I have to stare past your eyes into your face
To remind me that you’re solid
And I’m not going to break you.

I’ve drunk enough beer for it to have stopped chuckling
I get up, clear the plates, go to my study and start writing.

It’s Mimms O’Clock!

Alright, Dad!
Picture the scene:
Thirty degrees and grandma’s is still three hours off.
Kids kicking up a fuss in the back,
The missus has got the camel,
There’s crisps all over the upholstery,
someone’s pissed themselves,
there’s Umbongo going everywhere
And you’re shouting …

Sharon, you donut,
You flapjack,
You hobnob,
You Jaffa Cake,
You stupid pink wafer biscuit,
Sweetheart!
Shut those kids up I’m trying to negotiate the road works at junction twenty-five!
And why do we have to listen to Steve Wright in the afternoon?
I tell you, if he plays one more Bee Gees record
I’m gonna shove Massachusetts right up his arse …

And then you see it.

Like an oasis.
A huge, beige bricked, neon lit branded oasis,
An oasis that sells burgers and petrol
And porcelain figurines.
A watering hole, a roadside tavern, a plentiful dry dock
And you’re thinking: Three of them, one of me
It must be Mimms O’ Clock!

So Hello Moto, Welcome Break!
Come rest your right foot without risking death.
Vat of coffee, a piece of cake,
Gulp a lungful of that gasoline breath.

Unstick your crotch from the seat of your jeans,
Come beat out a rhythm on our steal latrines,
Come withdraw your money from our cash machines,
We’ll charge one eighty five…

Doesn’t it feel great to be alive?
Watching obese pre-teens
tuck into a family feast each
like happy shoppers with the contrast of a cloudless sky
It must be Mimms O’Clock!

Come swing your cock
With truckers, travelling salesmen, national express patrons,
And holiday makers wearing sandals with socks.
Green light indicates minutes till next inspection,
Red light means… it smells like piss.

Yes, kiss me quick and squeeze me quicker,
the petrol forecourt just got slicker,
it’s Milton Keynes but even shitter
It must be Mimms O’Clock!

Two hours free parking! Two hours to stop!
Wander empty-bladdered around our shop!
Run your hands along the rows of glossy packs and fizzy pop,
Press your sunburnt cheeks against our bottled water,
Lie star-shaped on the bonnet of someone else’s Porsche,
Fall in love in KFC
with someone else’s teenage daughter.
This is Mimms O’Clock

And as the sun sets over the M4 in the western sky
Like the glint of nine lives wasted
in a faded cat’s eye
The London orbital is a clock face
with the minute hand broke
There’s no detail in the
endless
hours
it evokes.

Funeral Poem

I hope I die
In the changing room at Primark
Squeezing into a pair of denim shorts
Two sizes too small
Slumped back on the stool
The denim tight around my slackened knees
A style far too young for me
so the shop girl later comments: Poor dead try-hard…

I hope I die
In a mall in Maidenhead
My colon rammed with lamb jalfrezi
Let it dribble from my arsehole
Down to my metatarsals
And make some cleaner loathe me
When he gets it on his clothing
I hope he slops his mop and curses me for being dead.

I hope I die
On a kid’s plastic train at McDonalds
Sweating, dressed as the Hamburgler
I hope my wheezing and gasping
Gets next door’s children laughing
Let them clap and let them squeal
when I bring the happy meals
Crashing to the bleached dirt-cracked floor as I fall

And at my funeral dispense of the eulogies.
Don’t give me another man’s version of dignity.
I don’t want poets flexing their literary pretensions
Comparing me to a felled redwood or the River Wensum.

Just stick me in a deck chair atop my red Escort
dressed in a fishing hat, Bermuda shorts,
and a T-shirt with Well Dead and Loving it written on it
Have Page Three girls drape themselves on the bonnet.

Forget the meaningful folk songs – play Agadoo, instead!
Get the make-up girl to draw a penis on my forehead,
And in place of a hymn just shout at my corpse:
We’re going to Alton Towers, and you can’t come because you’re dead!

Shoot down any pomp or significance.
Don’t let that get in way of who I really was,
Because stencilled wit on a grave stone
Written in pure testosterone
Means nothing if you lived your life like a bastard,
Means nothing if you came home every night plastered,
Means nothing if you never gave your loved ones what they asked for.

So lay me out on a Black and Decker Workmate
Intestate,
In Margate,
with a hard drive full of porn
A grin on my lips, my dignity torn
And ask

Was I any good to you?
Did I really do my best?
Did I make your dreams come true?
I hope the answer’s Yes.

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NEWS

01 May - I will be on Radio 4's Saturday Live at 9am on Staurday 3 May. I will be reading two topical poems penned on the day. Eek!

10 April - I am part of the collective running a new literary cabaret called HOMEWORK. We have a five show season planned at The Horse & Groom in Shoreditch. See our MySpace or our E-Flyer.

09 April - I am to host and perform in a new radio pilot for Hattrick. The show is provisionally called Trashcan. We have recorded a live show and are currently in post-production. More info here

24 March - I will be taking a new show of poems to Edinburgh. A Poet's Work Is Never Done will play The Zoo Venues 10-16 August at 9pm.

20 December - Joel Stickley and I have been accepted on to the prodigious East to Edinburgh scheme for 2008. We will be taking to the Fringe a stage show based on our book Who Writes This Crap?

22 November - First lot of 2008 Poet & Man tour dates posted on gigs page.

Buy Luke's poetry record on CD. The Rise and Fall of Luke Wright, Esq features 12 of Luke's best poems, all for £6. Buy it here.

Buy Who Writes This Crap? By Joel Stickley & Luke Wright from Amazon.

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