21st Century poems from a 20th century man. 60+poems to amuse and stimulate.
A wide range of witty and thoughtful poems from "Grumpy old poets' manifesto" to "Summer of Love" with therapy and climate change in between.
Excerpt
Can we stop the unstoppable?
Cnut cnouldn’t hold back the tide,
No matter how hard he tried,
Sitting on his beachside throne
He cnouldn’t do it on his own
He cnouldn’t do it with his chums
Giving of their maximums
Even with doctors of spin
That tide still kept on flooding in.
But just because that old Dane flopped
And the ocean was not stopped
Does not mean that we should shrink
From kicking up an awful stink
About the way our world is going
CO2 ever growing
Climate change, freaky weather
Nations that cannot live together
Ice-caps melting, forests dying
Tourists with no fear of flying
Seas trawled clean of cod and whiting
Whilst G8 leaders going on fighting
To protect their latest sponsors
Junk bonds financing wastelands
Junk food swelling out our waistbands
Salty snacks, chocolate sweeties
Kids with type-2 diabetes
Big Brother closing round our flanks
Biometric data banks
Bombing children in error
Exponential war on terror
So much is happening ev’ry day
It’s not an option for you to say
What can I do on my own?
At the least you can make your views known
At the least you can do little things
That might help to clip the wings
Of budget, low-cost airlines
You might start using rail sometimes.
coda
One small deed may mean nothing at all
Just as one single brick cannot build a wall
But deed after deed and brick upon brick
That’s how to construct a partnership
That might help in the end to staunch the tide
That threatens our global suicide
2006
38 Saving the planet, costing the earth
Do you ever try to do things to save the planet, but end up
wishing you hadn’t?
We bought a wormery the other day to turn our food scraps
into compost and keep the rats at bay from our bins.
But it turns out that our worms have food allergies. They are
celiac and citriac and don’t care for onions either.
Now we are having to buy food for the worms that we don’t
like
and still throw away our own food scraps.
Still Living on my Feet is the follow up to Tichaona Chinyelu’s first book, In the Whirlwind, which was rooted in a sense of hard-hitting revolutionary black love. However, in this sophomore effort, Tichaona brings the revolutionary essence from deep
