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Is It Too Early For Poetry

Is it too early for poetry?

When should it be?

When beasties come out in the dark?

When beautiful sunsets light up the park?

Or when someone is doing it for free

Finding the words, just for me

Does it really have to rhyme?

All the blinking time?

And they don’t know I’m not really listening

Because they can’t see inside my head.

What’s he said?

Is it too early for poetry?

I want to see with my ears

Rub my eyes to hear better

Big Breath

Breath out - rushing to school

Big Breath

Breath out - couldn’t find PE kit this morning

Breath in - strange man in assembly

And breath out

National Curriculum

Add to Dictionary

My little girl says that a boy in her class

never changes the spelling of words on computers

But just presses ADD TO DICTIONARY

ADD TO DICTIONARY and make new words

Change the spelling of words,
change the meaning of words

Change the laws of spelling and language,
make everything absurd

So alter minds and perception, recreate the world

Rename animals, plants and trees and

ADD TO DICTIONARY and make it so.

From sad to Said so all sad things get talked away

From mad to made because what is made can be unmade

From Parent to patient, father to further, mother to smother-hover got to love her

ADD TO DICTIONARY and make it so.

Change the world by shifting it’s blocks

From hard to easy, are maybe easier

From unsay able to shout able

Undoable to done

From Poet to Premiership footballer,
Business tycoon or royalty

No on second thoughts dreamer,
themer screamer poets are richer,

From cat to dog, from dog to cow from cow to bird

To fly away.

Learn to make words because you never know what you might need to say

ADD TO Dictionary and make it so

Type all the bad, mad, nasty things, all the things that make people fright and fight

and children quiet, type them there in electric paper, electronic letter blocks

With pictures on that make words then change their spelling and so change their nature

Rename the world to make it your own

ADD TO Dictionary and make them so.

Accidental Parent

I am your accidental parent,

Not because when your mum and I knew you were coming and going to be born we were surprised and delighted, but more surprised, no we kinda thought you would come to live with us, it’s because anything I have done as a parent has been
an accident more than planned

It’s because when I went to school they never taught us the really important things like:

Reading wage slips, painting pictures, how to play Smoke on the Water on an electric guitar and how to be a parent, should we ever be one, not everyone is, not everyone has to be,
but lots are going to be.

I’m sure those important things are taught in school now after all these years, I mean it would be ridiculous not to.

All the noblest efforts to raise a happy balanced you who knows right from wrong and will mostly choose right, can seem along way away sometimes, do what I say and not what I do, guidance on things I don’t understand, sage advice that you will remember for years doesn’t come.

Then you tell me you remember a wave on a beach on a holiday and what it did four years ago and how you felt.

What will you remember of me? How you felt?

As you slowly walk away from our shared beach and tides of days, and find your own patch and view and we will visit each other on the constantly resetting sand. There will be a time when education teaches you to Compare and Contrast and I may not be the
‘Best Man in the world anymore’ as long as that doesn’t really matter to you, who cares, not me.

I am your accidental parent, learning some things but it is mostly accident not design, I guess the trick is to keep going and leave an impression, a memory, a belief that although we were accidental, accident prone, parents making it up as we go along,

You know we tried.