Get your chunky sweaters on; it's poetry time....

Poetry.

Doesn't that word just fill you with dread? I'm going to have to listen to someone intoning humourlessly about something that makes no sense. Plus, they are going to talk in a funny voice not like their real voice. Plus, they are going to become over earnest.

Ok- I am a Philistine (yes, I am 3000 years old, attack Israel frequently, raping their women and dashing their babies against rocks. But it's ok..... I am undergoing counselling). When I was 14, in the top set for English Literature, I did say to the teacher about some poem or other (you can see it had a deep impression on me) 'This is not a poem as it does not rhyme.' Now, at 42, having heard stuff that does rhyme (ie Coldplay) I have learned that rhyming does not neccesarily guarantee quality:-

'Lights will guide you home

And ignite your bones'

is hardly Shakespeare (ok, I am jealous).

With all this cornucopia of caveats, here is a poem I do like.

Simon Armitage is tops (and not just because he used to work with someone I knew as a part-time probation officer in Oldham) - 'Killing Time' is excellent.

Check out:-

'Scarborough beach on Friday, sandwriting

says Jesus is Lord.

Letters come and go. On Sunday he's lard, lurid, blurred.

By Tuesday he's bored'.

And this, by way of a lengthy introduction is my Christmas bit:-

Meanwhile, the lights on Oxford Street this year

ask us to stop and think

not of Christ in his crib or reindeers hauling a sleigh

but a chemically-inferred orange drink

and the nation's best known brand of frozen peas,

frozen straight from the pod.

And couples walk its golden mile, brides and grooms on the aisle

of the church where money is God.

Back where,back when, Christ was a painted clothes-peg

in an After Eight box;

Mary the Tiny Tears doll and Joseph the Action Man

knelt with the sheep and the ox

in the shape of a fun-fur teddy and porcelain dog

from the mantelpiece, and all

were lit by a single flame from a nite-lite candle

floating in a glass bowl

within the manger of an upturned packing case with a window hole.

And it had the right feel,

even if one version of Christmas compared to another is no more or less real.'

I challenge you to buy the book or to use it at sometime.

Right- enough earnestness for one night, chunky sweater off. That's better. Back to being irreverent (and irrelevant) and time to clean the kitchen. Man, that's living............