Hi! Welcome to my new blog. What I'd like to do is to get my comic verse to a wider audience. At the moment the vast majority of my work is created for the Poetry and Prose evenings that Kath and I host each month. Quite often people have said "why don't you sent that up to this or that publisher?" Better than that I'll put it on a blog. The way it works with the P & P evening is that we think of six words at each session and, at the following session, P&Pers have to use those words in a poem or piece of prose that they have written. So here is the first one to appear on my blog; I hope you enjoy reading it...






Words – cyclical, terrible, rat-catcher, consent, negative, sneezing.

He was an honest looking feller
This down-and-out “Big Issue” seller
I felt quite sad he’d had to live
For so long in the negative.
He’d lost his job a while ago
Exactly why he did not know -
“How terrible it’s been,” he said
To find a place to rest my head.”
He gave a little, plaintive, sob.
“I don’t know why I lost my job.
It’s not just the economy
It’s not been cyclical for me,
The time of year, or change of season -
There’s got to be a better reason.
I was a rat-catcher by trade
A goodly living I had made
And as the years both came and went
I moved, by mutual consent,
From town to town - just catching rats –
Successfully, check out the stats.
I’ve had my share of ups and downs
But rats have always been around;
From sewer pipes I’ve come up wheezing
Sometimes coughing, sometimes sneezing
With loads of rats, a goodly haul -
But now I find there’s none at all.
They’ve gone from rubbish tips and drains
From sewer pipes and water mains
It’s very strange and really weird
The rats have somehow disappeared.”

I thought – this seems most dark and sinister –
Then walked, by chance, into Westminster –
There I found Rats in every quarter
Doing what they didn’t oughter -
And this confirmed my worst suspicions
They’d gone up to London to be politicians.