Some haiku for International Haiku Poetry Day

Selected poems

Assorted Haiku

Haiku #2511

Tourists wait in line
to enter Machu Picchu.
Oh, look! A high queue.

Haiku #564127

how dare you suggest
I have a short attention
spanish omelette

Limeraiku

There once was a young
limerick from Kew who turned
into a haiku.

The Constraints of Haiku

Tied up all night with
a haiku dominatrix
and her three-line whip.

Shakespearean Haiku

Shall I compare thee
To a summer’s day? Alright –
Thou art pretty hot.

How to Write a Haiku

The last line should flow
seamlessly from the first two –
hippopotamus.

Publication Day!

News

It’s publication day for ‘How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside’.

For those of you who preordered, I hope your copy has arrived and you enjoy reading it.

For those of you who, for some strange reason, didn’t preorder, it should be out there in most bookshops for perusal and purchase. But only if you want to. 

There’s a special edition available through most indie bookshops (signed and with a bonus poem inside).

The book is available through the usual online places, too.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve written a show based around the book, which I’ll be touring with later on in the year.  

If you have any questions, please pop them in the comments and my PA (Poetry Assistant) will get back to you in the next couple of months.

A picture of my new book jacket, featuring a mildly perplexed man looking up at a giant horse with an egg shaped body.

A poem not to be taken for granite

Selected poems

On Tender Hooks

Let me cut to the cheese:
every time you open your mouth,
I’m on tender hooks.

You charge at the English language
like a bowl in a china shop.
I wish you’d nip it in the butt.

On the spurt of the moment,
another eggcorn tumbles out.
It’s time you gave up the goat.

Curve your enthusiasm
and don’t give them free range –
or the chickens will come home to roast.

Sorry to be the flaw
in your ointment. You must think me
a damp squid, I suppose –

but they spread like wildflowers
in a doggy-dog world,
and your spear of influence grows.

A poem in which I interview a cat

Selected poems

Job Interview with a Cat

Tell me, what is it about this position that interests you? 
The warmth, perhaps? The security? 
Or the power you must feel by rendering me useless? 
Feel free to expand if you wish. 

I see you have had experience of similar positions. 
Can you talk about a time when you got somebody’s tongue? 
Or were set amongst the pigeons? 
Tell me about a time you’ve had to deal with a difficult situation –
for instance, have you ever found yourself in a bag?
If so, how were you let out of it?  

How would you feel if you had to walk on hot bricks?  
What about a tin roof of similar temperature?  
With reference to any of your past lives,  
has curiosity ever killed you? 

Finally, where do you see yourself in five years’ time? 
In the same position? Or higher up to catch the sunlight? 
What’s that? You would like to be where I am now? 
Oh, it appears you already are. 

A poem in which I experience intimations of mortality

Selected poems

I Did Not Tell Death Where I lived

I did not tell Death where I lived –
But he has found me all the same.
I hear his knock upon my door
And the calling of my name.

My Snapchat settings kept him out.
On Instagram I blocked him.
Facebook friend requests were spurned –
Yet still he keeps on knocking.

A court injunction freshly filed,
But still I sit in fear.
Oh, my mistake. It is not Death –
I think my pizza’s here.

A poem about the benefits of acrostic poetry

Selected poems

Acrostic Poetry: The Benefits

Available in a range of words

Children love it!

Requires less effort to write than a sonnet

O is the fourth letter in ‘acrostic’

Something about S

T

I don’t want to do this any more

C Already done that one

At last, a proper poem

Assorted Poems

This is One of Those Poems Without Any Rhymes

This is one of those poems
without any rhymes,
the sort of thing you might read
in the Telegraph or Times Guardian.

For, as proper poets know,
rhyme’s deleterious
and only gets in the way
when you’re trying to be serious profound.

It’s childish and cloying,
simplistic and singsong
to bat rhymes back and forth
like some dull game of ping pong table tennis.

To the literary critic
it will cause great affront,
which will make you resent them
and think them a snob.

This is also one of those poems
which looks like it might go on to say something insightful
about the human condition
but then just kind of ends.

A body horror poem

Selected poems

No Body’s Perfect

his tennis elbow
was his Achilles heel

and his Achilles heel
was on his athlete’s foot

and his athlete’s foot
made him down in the mouth

and though the down in his mouth
he took on the chin,

it became less a shot in the arm
than a chip on his shoulder –

so that when the doctor
finished examining him

and told him what was wrong,
he was all ears

BookKind Non-Fiction Book of the Month

News

The totally ace online booksellers BookKind have chosen ‘How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside’ as their Non-Fiction Book of the Month for April.

This is doubly good news because every copy sold via BookKind raises money for charity – just select from a range of charitable organisations when you order: https://bookkind.co.uk/book-of-the-month-home/

In celebration, here’s a video of me confronting the blank space of the white page. Or possibly the white space of the blank page.