The Smell After Rain

Pensive afternoon, stormy and grey

Stuck in maths, at the end of the day

Unlike the teacher, the clock ticks

And the students perform arithmatics

By an open window I breathe

And watch the bushes sway and heave

The sigh of heat is broken

Under murmurs of a clouded ocean

Dark spots on a playground's floor

One or two, and then some more

Great thudding drops from heaven descend

Just in time for class to end

Warm and zipped with hood on hair

I care little for a stranger's stare

The best thing in rain is to run

To dance over puddles and skip for fun

Waves of rain fall like curtain

No question of what is (or isn't) certain

My hood is a drum and the rain is a beat

I scuttle and rhythm through my feet

My face is wet and my hands are numb

But I am free from that trivial sum

And as the clouds withdraw

The rhythm pounds no more

Pavement heated by the sun

I know that smell! Freedom!

Stand, Europe

German sausage and Viennese columns

Are protected by statutes and Golums

So mighty is the German craft

It cannot lend those Greeks a raft

For disagreement we are unable

To rescue culture from its cradle

No reform in forlorn France

Who's head is up its own ass

No support from folded-arms Britain

Who is twice shy, but has yet to be bitten

Italy is loathe to compensate

Those mafia dons who won't incorporate

Out with Silvio, out with Monti

We don't like politics in full nuddie

So its left to Alba and Estonia

Poland, and those who remember Bosnia

To stand up to bears and eagles

For a land united by historic evils

What here, then, is worth saving?

With torn-down monarchs and dictats raving

Europe, stand, upon your law

Only you know what came before

Only you know the heights and splendour

Of fertile land and high culture

You know how it feels to have wounds torn and tender

Yet you squat as some old vulture.

House a Home

You baseless cads with your aplomb

Pretend you have an atom bomb

The truth is that your phony war

Is much the same as it was before

So much “meh” and “never mind”

As if neutral is not unkind

So famished am I by your neglect

I feel our friendship is now a wreck

Beached on rocks of breakfast, dinners,

Where you judge we are as sinners

Begrudge me one last sliver of meat

Paid for by my hands and feet

My body aches, it is as stone

Caught in mud and left alone

You who bicker and fight and crone

Make it hard to call a house a home.

Dead End Job

How I long for graveside walks

Among the trees and bees and stalks

Swept away among my rushes

I pace and run for far off buses

Putting pots upon a shelf

For meagre scraps of another's wealth

Sacrificing on an alter

Opinionated homage to Walter

Unwitting gods these clever men

Who are much rarer than one in ten

So then are the odds

For us shop working sods

To climb the hill

Takes another's will

So economistic symbols

Use workers as its thimbles

No proper kiss but cupboard love

Two for one on this laced glove!

When putting out these POS

As meaningless as cyber sex

I think longingly of church knave

But really want to walk by that grave.