Let’s get out of Europe

We can’t take the heat

It’s OK for a fortnight

But now it’s got us beat.

Stop it at the border

Keep the weather out

Too hot for the English

Not what we’re about.

Jet stream out of Europe

What’s it coming to?

Sweeps across the country

Who asked me and you?

Keep your foreign weather

Leave us well alone

We don’t want your sunshine

We prefer our own.

Bring us clouds and rain again

Chance of a good moan

Hateful British weather

That we can call our own.

Weather of our choosing

Give us back control

Foreign interference

Don’t want that at all.

I’m old, I’m male,

I’m pale, I’m stale

So please ignore my views.

We’ve had our chips

Been written off

Removed from public gaze.

‘That’s your lot

Enough of you

Be gone

Get out of here.’

‘Surplus to requirements

Time to leave the stage.

Crawl away and die some place

That’s all we ask of you.’

‘We want to hear new voices

Different points of view

We’re sick and tired of hearing

From the likes of you.’

‘You didn’t get a leg up

Go to private school

But look like the advantaged

So that’s enough of you.’

‘You got to have an angle

A different point of view

No one wants to hear now

From the likes of you.’

It’s a cucumber rhumba

Shakedown vegetable ball

She’s one hot tomato

Staked up struttin’ tall.

 

Dig those great potatoes

See them pumpkins sprawl

Vegetables a dancin’

No better sight at all.

 

There’s some fine chuck berries

Rhubarb’s gonna be wine

Apple sauce with dumplings

Fine crop harvest time.

 

Cabbage Patch percussion

Beetroot keepin’ time

Purple Sprouting, Runners

Strawberry fields; all mine.

 

Broccoli a go go

Lettuce all alone

Grandad in the veg patch

Raking out the stones.

 

Shed your inhibitions

Call a spade a spade

Do the mashed potato

Think we got it made.

They say that empty barrels

Make the loudest noise.

It’s often those who’ve lost their voice

Most desperate to shout.

You can not buy the silence

Of those who will not speak

Hear their silent screaming

Their rising fit of pique.

Hear the barrels jarring

Down the bumpy road

If you don’t hear them complaining

Just wait till they implode.

It’s not the silken voices

That strike the loudest notes

A noise will pierce the silence

The quiet ones in revolt.

It’s so hard to reason

With those who will not speak

It’s hard to turn a barrel round

That’s rolling down the street.

From my new collection on Wattpad- Male, Pale and Stale

If poems came in flat packs

You’d empty out the parts

And try to figure what went where

And how it ought to look.

You’d have a stack of words to sort

Some rhymes to give a shape

A structure and a rhyme scheme

A unifying thought.

You’d piece it all together

Once you’d got the gist

But someone else created it

The credit would be his.