Contents
The Once-Empty Page
Skywriting
In Good Spirits
Ex Patria
Mensa
Oxbridge Blues
Half-term
Away from You
Good Old William
Writer’s Block
Executioner’s Block
Children’s Writer
For Want of a Better Title
The State of Poetry
New Poem
Sound Advice
Riddle
Literary Riddle
Acrostic
Granny’s Favourite Anagram
Clerihews
Apostrophe
A Critic Reviews the Curate’s Egg
@thomasdylan LOL
Epitaphs
The After-Dinner Speaker
The Perfect Crime
Drop Dead Gorgeous
Whoops!
Deadpan Delivery
Sign Language
The Juggler
Fame
Vanity Press
Q
You Asked For a Poem
Rhyming Sausages
The Rhyming Diner
Shearing on the Côte d’Azur
Jellyfish Morton
A Good Age
Rubber Bullets
VAT
Windows of the Soul
There are fascists
Conservative Government Unemployment Figures
The Leader
A Brush with Authority
Uncle Eno
Uncle Malcolm
Uncle Pat
Uncle Jed
Cousin Nell
Cousin Daisy
Hill of Beans
Granny
Quick on the Draw
Slow on the Drawl
Gun Love
Moist
Poem on the Underground
Concourse
Ode to the Leaf
Autosuggestion
Recycling
Survivor
Multi-Storey Car Park
Multi-Storey Carp Ark
Five Ways to Help You Pass Safely through a Dark Wood Late at Night
Dear Scott
Drinking Song
Passive Drinking
Missed
The Bright Side
Hard Times
Depressed?
7 a.m.
Another Mid-Life Crisis
My Philosophy in a Nutshell
Worry
Wartime Blues
Fired with Enthusiasm
Early-Morning Poems
The State of the Bathroom
The lost Lost Property Office
The Wicked Queen’s Mirror
The Cracked Mirror
Rear-View Mirror
The Dental Mirror
What Man Wears
Bath – Avon
Hen Party
Rooms for Thought
Life is but a Tree
When the Bough Breaks
In Good Hands
Ring
Love Cycle
Cake
Friends of the Earth
Palmistry
Cane Toads
Rainforest Gateau
Fatal Consequences
Global Warming
Wiwis
Ostrich
Seagulls
A 13-Amp Slug
The Deserted Village
Taking Stick
Light Sleeper
Neighbourhood Watch
Fire Guard
Poem against Capital Punishment
The Concise Guide for Travellers
The Dada Christmas Catalogue
Punk Doll
Lonely Hearts
Weight-Watching
Scintillate
italic
Friends, Flies and Fingernails
Dressed for the Occasion
Time Flies
Said and Done
The Proverbials
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN BOOKS
IT NEVER RAINS
Roger McGough was born in Liverpool, and received the Freedom of the City in 2001. During the 1960s he was a member of the group Scaffold, which had an international hit with ‘Lily the Pink’. He presents the popular Radio 4 programme Poetry Please, and is President of the Poetry Society. He has published many books of poems for adults and children, most recently As Far As I Know (Viking, 2012), and both his Collected Poems (2003) and his Selected Poems (2006) are available in Penguin. His trio of Molière translations – Tartuffe, The Hypochondriac and The Misanthrope – have been notable successes recently in the theatre. In 2005 he received a CBE for services to literature.
‘Home James and don’t spare the Norses’
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Poetry
That Awkward Age
The Way Things Are
Everyday Eclipses
Collected Poems
Selected Poems
Penguin Modern Classics
The Mersey Sound (With Adrian Henri and Brian Patten)
As Far As I Know
For Children
Sky in the Pie
Until I Met Dudley
Dotty Inventions
Bad, Bad, Cats
Good Enough to eat
The Bee’s Knees
All the Best (selected poems)
Slapstick
An Imaginary Menagerie
Lucky
Theatre
Tartuffe
The Hypochondriac
The Misanthrope
Autobiography
Said and Done
Erratum
For ‘heaving’ in line one read ‘heaven’
For ‘one’ in line one read ‘eleven’
For ‘tomato’ in line seven read ‘a martyr’
For ‘Erratum’ in title read ‘Errata’.
The Once-Empty Page
This page was empty
Its mind was blank
It used to gaze out vacantly
And thank the lord
The written word
Had given it a miss
And then this.
Skywriting
Clouds are the earth’s handwriting.
I open the sky
And don’t like what I’m reading.
In Good Spirits
This icy winter’s morning I rise in good spirits.
On all fours I exhale a long white breath
That hangs in the air like a shimmering rope
Under which, with arms akimbo
And eyes ablaze, I dance the limbo.
Ex Patria
After supper, we move out on the veranda.
Moths flit between lamps. We drink, think about sex
and consider how best to wreck each other’s lives.
At the river’s edge, the kitchen maids are washing up.
In the age-old tradition, they slap the plates
against the side of a rock, singing tonelessly.
Like tiny chauffeurs, the mosquitoes will soon arrive
and drive us home. O England, how I miss you.
Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon. It’s the little things.
Mensa
‘His parents knew he was brighter than most other children, when
Joshua potty-trained himself at 23 months after reading
a book on the subject.’ – Daily Telegraph
Yes, Josh was the brightest by far
Posh, bookish and swotty
Six ‘A’s at thirteen, each with a star
Went up to Cambridge. Took his potty.
Oxbridge Blues
While up at Magdalen
Spent the time dagdalen.
Moved on to Caiu
s
Became the baius knaius.
Half-term
Half-term holiday, family away
Half-wanting to go, half-wanting to stay
Stay in bed for half the day.
Half-read, half-listen to the radio
Half-think things through. Get up,
Half-dressed, half-wonder what to do.
Eat half a loaf, drink half a bottle
(Save the other half until later).
Other half rings up. Feel better.
Away from You
Away from you
I feel a great emptiness
a gnawing loneliness
With you
I get that reassuring feeling
of wanting to escape.
‘I concur with everything you say,’
smiled William.
‘Oh yes, I concur with that,
I agree.’
‘If that’s the general feeling you can count on me.
Can’t say fairer.’
Good old
William, the Concurrer.
Writer’s Block
The excitement I felt
as I started the poem
Disappeared on reaching
the end of the fourth line.
Executioner’s Block
Money good
Hours short
Can’t stand blood
Don’t like sport
Had to stop
Nervous wreck
Given chop
Pain in neck.
Children’s Writer
John in the garden
Playing goodies and baddies
Janet in the bedroom
Playing mummies and daddies
Mummy in the kitchen
Washing and wiping
Daddy in the study
Stereotyping.
For Want of a Better Title
The Countess
when the Count passed away
During a Bach
cello recital
Married an Archduke
the following day
For want of a better title.
The State of Poetry
New Poem
So far, so good
Sound Advice
Once you write a poem
you must write another
To prevent the first
from falling over.
Riddle
To ease us
through those difficult days
At hand to tease out
waifs and strays
Though causing pain
we squeeze you again
and again. Vain? Not really
more a fear of the unruly
If you wish to borrow mine
simply repeat the opening line.
Literary Riddle
I am
Out of my tree
Away with the fairies
A nut. A fruitcake. What am I?
Answers: Tweezers.
One line short of a cinquain.
Acrostic
A favourite literary devi
Ce is the one whe
Re the first letter
Of each line spell
S out the subject the poe
T wishes to write about.
I must admit, I
Can’t see the point myself.
Granny’s Favourite Anagram
A granma
is an anagram
of anagram.
Clerihews
Jane Austen
Got lost in
Stoke-on-Trent.
Moral: She shouldn’t have went.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Invented the clerihew accidentally.
And incidentally,
Why didn’t he call it the bentley?
Clara Hughes
Invented clarahughes
‘After me they’re named,’
She claimed.
Apostrophe
What fun to be
an apostrophe
floating above an s
Hovering like a paper kite
in between the its
Eavesdropping, tiptoeing
high above the thats
An inky comet spiralling
The highest tossed of hats.
A Critic Reviews the Curate’s Egg
‘It’s all bad.
Especially in parts.’
@thomasdylan LOL
‘What Dylan Thomas means to me in 140 characters –
bringing him into the modern era in the form of a text’
Request from the Western Mail
He fell in love with words as a child
Language-guzzler, dazzling, wild.
Crazily obscure, lyrical yet tough
And forty characters is not enou
Epitaphs
The Wreck of the Hesperus
A lass
bound to a mast
drowned
alas.
Lady Godiva
Here lies Lady Godiva.
She didn’t wear a bra
or knickers iva.
Moll Flanders
Here lies Moll Flanders.
It has to be said
a thief, a whore
and five times wed.
Adept was she
at social climbing
then repented.
Nice timing.
The After-Dinner Speaker
Sitting around the table each evening
his wife and children pick nervously
at their food, dreading the sound
of the tapping of the knife against the glass,
of the rapping of the spoon upon the table,
signalling that he will rise to his feet
and upstanding, speak for forty minutes.
An hour sometimes, if the wine kicks in.
How they look forward to those nights when he’s away,
at a conference, say, of managers or teachers.
And they don’t have to listen
To those boring, yawning after-dinner speeches.
The Perfect Crime
The sword-swallower
stabbed his unfaithful
wife to death
Before disposing
of the murder weapon
in one gulp.
Drop Dead Gorgeous
Inserting a deadly comma into the cliché
He said, ‘Drop dead, gorgeous,’
Then pulled the trigger
Whoops!
You are strangely excited
as we enter the crowded bar
and find a small table in the corner.
You insist on fetching the drinks
and before disappearing
squeeze a note into my hand.
It reads: ‘Why go home tonight?
I have a room. I have a bed.
I have a spare toothbrush.’
I recognize my own handwriting.
Deadpan Delivery
I was popping a few frozen
Fugo fish fingers under the grill
When there came a loud knocking
Quickly donning my clown costume,
I opened the door.
It was the Deadpan Man with a delivery
‘Do I have to sign for this?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m not hard of hearing,’
He quipped, deadpan.
Sign Language
Hannah said that at boarding school
Talking in the dorm was forbidden after lights out
So she and her friends devised a form of sign language.
Trouble was, in the dark, they couldn’t see what they were saying.
The Juggler
Cousin Amos, famous in his day
Would only juggle with objects
Beginning with ‘A’
Like Acorns, Apples and Anchovies
Alarm clocks, Armadillos and
Armchairs
And just the once, an Alligator
Which, sad to say
Went straight for the jugular.
Fame
The best thing
about being famous
is when you walk
down the street
and people turn round
to look at you
and bump into things.
Vanity Press
Fell in love with my editor
wrote poems, yearned for her lips
She married a literary critic
now sends me rejection slips.
Q
I join the queue
We move up slowly.
‘What are we queuing for?’
I ask the lady in front of me.
‘To join another queue,’ she explains.
‘How pointless,’ I say, ‘I’m leaving.’
She points to another long queue
‘Then you must get in line.’
I join the queue
We move up slowly.
You Asked For a Poem
You asked for a poem
off the top of my head
I plucked out a hair
‘That’s not fair’ you said.