roger mcgough

Poems by Roger McGough

Snow and Ice Poems

(i)

Our street is dead lazy
especially in winter.
Some mornings you wake up
and it's still lying there
saying nothing. Huddled
under its white counterpane.

But soon the lorries arrive
like angry mums,
pull back the blankets
and send it shivering
off to work.

(ii)

To
boggan?
or not
to boggan?
That is the question.

(iii)

Winter
morning.
Snowflakes
for breakfast.
The street
outside
quiet
as a
long
white
bandage.

(iv)

The time I like best
is 6 a.m.
and the snow is six inches deep

Which I'm yet to discover
'cos I'm under the cover
and fast, fast asleep.


Cinema Poem

I like it when
They get shot in the head
And there's blood on the pillow
And blood on the bed

And it's good when
They get stabbed in the eye
And they scream and they take
A long time to die

And it all spurts out
All over the floor
And the audience shivers
And shouts for more

But I don't like it when they kiss.


A Poem Just For Me

Where am I now when I need me
Suddenly where have I gone
I'm so alone here without me
Tell me please what have I done?

Once I did most things together
I went for walks hand in hand
I shared my life so completely
I met my every demand.

Tell me I'll come back tomorrow
I'll keep my arms open wide
Tell me that I'll never leave me
My place is here at my side.

Maybe I've simply mislaid me
Like an umbrella or key
So until the day that I come my way
Here is a poem just for me.

America

America- A song by Simon and Garfunkel

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together

I've got some real estate here in my bag."

So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies

And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburg

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've come to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera."

"Toss me a cigarette I think there's one in my raincoat."

"We smoked the last one an hour ago."

So I looked at the scenery

She read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping

"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

And they've all come to look for America

All come to look for America

All come to look for America

this songs reminds me of last summer, the train rides and this place, a creaky musky room that the giraffe and i stayed in when we accidentally landed in the wrong town. the best thing about the room was the sink, just like in mr. bean's room. there was no air con and it was still and sweet-smelling. the corridors were quiet and orange, with a corn painted at every door, and we locked ourselves in the toilet to bathe in the two cubicles with the cool night air outside in a strange quiet town. Has anyone tried Mrs. Wagner pies and what are they like? If this were a song about Singapore, they'd say we boarded the sbs bus in jurong, orchard seems like a dream to me now, and it took me 45 minutes to hitchhike from tampines.

Work is piling up, decisions to be made, I feel like burrowing in a hole like a wombat (do they actually do that?), or a mole, and hibernating warmly in the soil for the winter and waking up for ginger cookies in spring. The internship promises a pay which I will give a part to my grandmother, a part to my parents and a part to getting an armchair and table for my record player for my room. THAT! IS EXCITEMENT.

clara meadmore

Please read this wonderfully ____ article: (can't find the word)

Clara's century without sex
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1790791.ece

My neighbours hired workers to tear off the layer of grass (strange, a layer of grass, but i guess that's what most people have now) in their garden and they might have put back on the old layer (it's now too dark to see) but they now also have a bunch of 2-storey tall plants (those with the vermillion stalks and coconut tree-like leaves) and I wonder how they put them up, too bad I was in school and didn't witness it! I was cycling around my lane and asked one of my little neighbours (he is maybe 4 years old) to race with me on his glorious dark-red Retro Red no-brake bicycle and his family was encouraging him, 'Go, race with Jie Jie!' and he said, 'don't want. so scary.'

I wish cars were more communicative, rather than a horn that is almost always probably taken to be hostile. Why can't there be a horn that goes 'thank you!' or 'stop being such a road bully, you idiotic nincompoop' or plays a short happy tune or blows out sweet-smelling bubbles into the polluted air, or says 'HI' to all the construction workers sitting on the backs of lorries and looking around at the drivers facing them, going past them. Why o why. Maybe if the horn system, buried deep in the bowels of the hot sweaty greasy engine area, were rewired in some way it would be possible.

Poem of the day: The wish of a pottery person
I wish I had an oven
to glaze my clay pots in
Then they would be shiny
Never melt into wet white dust
and I would be able
to make a living out of them

Another poem of the day: The wish of a busker
I wish a beautiful girl would come by
And listen to my music
I wish she would just stand there
And watch
And I could play her songs
For us to fall in love
on the street where I play

train

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the freshkilled game,
Soundly falling asleep on the gathered leaves, my dog and gun by my side.

-Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

I eat
red beads
that gleam
and shimmer
to my stomach.

How do fortune tellers read people's faces? When I interviewed the older people for our project they seemed to remember their childhood so clearly, even the rules of the games (ball-throwing game, catching). It comes to me in patches, strange patches of me and my brother, like being in our pajamas and unfinished cold toasted bread with peanut butter and sugar and milo on the table, sprawled on the sofa watching richie rich or dumb and dumber. and one of the best, when i hid outside his room and booed him when he came out so he jumped up and down like he was skipping rope. HA. This December I will live as close to the forest as I have ever gotten when we go on holiday in the australian countryside, though this a definite poo fake thing, as we will be in modern houses designed for tourists except with the forest is our backyard, though nothing can be as magical as gene's more-than-100-year-old wooden house with soft toilet paper, paintings by kirsti around the house, a musky old smell, a forest behind with berries you can pick and eat and soft bottle green grass that made me feel like it was alice in wonderland (which desiree and i sneaked into for a walk when we were supposed to be working at the park). (and Bismak is such a funny name) Actually the forest is metres from my house; the row that faces mine has a forest at the back, with cobras hiding in big straggly bamboo trees and monkeys flying among tree tops eating rambutans. That whole world is less than 100 metres from my house, golly gee. I think I got my ideas about living in the forest mainly from The Dharma Bums. But let's try it someday! We have to. Will I still use my computer when I am an old granny? Time to enter the dream world. Funny a few years ago I remember thinking how sad that the dream world is more exciting than real living...! Seize the day, seize the night, seize it all....! And kill the mosquitoes that plant their proboscis/probiscus in your soft skin. Goodnight stars and sky.


ah choo, somehow i suddenly remembered that night when the park opened till late and something special was happening (or was it?) and it was night and we were at the turbo bungy and there was a pigeon that kept coming and james and robert were running around playing catching and then james came to lie on the trampoline and there was bird shit we were all trying to avoid and we talked about how he neatened his eyebrows and then probably, as usual, we tallied the amount of visitors for the day. squiggly. and the mad dancing bowing couple at white river junction that night with the folk music! hahaha!! she was barefoot and had long flowy hair and big googly specs and he looked like a neat pervert and they were ballroom dancing right in front of us remember? and there was a plump spiky-haired girl in the room, and a brown-haired lady in a red dress with a bandaged eye and sunglasses. i loved the cucumber-green sweet-smelling room with a sink, where you threw away stuff that wouldn't fit. and how we dragged our luggage in the rain to the shabby train station after a breakfast of bagel and cream cheese and strawberry tea. O why am i feeling so strangely nostalgic tonight!