Anybody young who wants to be a politician
should be barred from politics as a national threat.

I do my bit for evolution

by killing flies within my reaches

so that those that aren't so stupid

propagate the species.

Pauses

He sat on the kerb, his feet in the road -
not someone I wanted to talk to -
but through his tiredness, sadness showed
so I paused to ask if he was alright.

He lifted his head but glancing at me
served only to act as reminder
mine wasn't the face he wanted to see
and I couldn't help, whatever his plight.

He got to his feet and looked all around.
I asked where he wanted to walk to.
He paused. Then he spoke. It seemed that the sound
echoed deep from the darkness of night.

"My wife has just died. I don't know where she is.
So now I'm just trying to find her."
I paused. Was he mad? Or was some insight his?
He turned. "Well, good luck." His wave seared my sight.

Sissinghurst

The failing summer evening sunshine
struggled across the hazel hedges
which walled the grassy alcove where
a straggled arc of listeners
focused a poet there.

The man stood to recite his verses
(published in his latest volume)
and used the cliché 'poetry sings'.
But while he sang of humankind
a thrush sang thrushy things.

Soon it was joined by blackbirds, robins
shouting their manhood to the heavens.
Sound without sense to human ears
but clear and fresh and ringing true
as daylight disappears.

Boldly the thrush confronts the audience
flaunting rhetorical repetition.
Although it can't make its poetry scan,
unfazed by the human competition
the bird outsings the man.

But as the stain of night's black pigment
spreads through the sky, the thrush must finish.
Without humanity's spoken word
it cannot think beyond its kind.
The man outlasts the bird.