Neil Fulwood- Three Poems

Honest Piss

 

I remember the Seventies as a decade

of muted colours: gunmetal greys, browns like rust.

Everywhere had dark interiors: amusement arcades,

pool halls, cinemas. Pubs were spit ‘n’ sawdust

archetypes. Linoleum floors. No frills. Back then,

there was no gleaming array of pumps: the choice

was bitter or mild. Lager was for girls. In Nottingham

you drank Home Ales or Shipstones (Shippoes,

in common parlance, or if you rearranged the letters

“honest piss”); it was like supporting Forest or

County, listening to disco or punk.

Now it’s wall-to-wall carpeting and menus, feta

cheese and humus. I miss the spit ‘n’ saw-

dust sometimes, the simple honesty of getting drunk.

 

Should Accidentally

 

Ten green bottles carefully

Lowering themselves from the wall,

Ten green bottles carefully

Lowering themselves from the wall,

And if one green bottle should …

Nope, saved. Ten green bottles,

 

Perfectly intact, crossing the road,

Ten green bottles crossing the road,

White van man’s distracted by the girl

Coming out of the newsagents

In the hot pants … but wait,

 

Ten green bottles are safely on the other side,

Ten green bottles safely on the other side,

A building shrouded in scaffolding

Before they reach the corner

And a lunchbox slipping

From a brickie’s hand

That creates its own maths problem:

 

If ten green bottles proceed

Past the scaffolding at a leisurely pace

While a lunchbox falls

With the speed and momentum

Of a USAF drone descending

On a defenceless village

What are the percentage odds

Of the old nursery rhyme

Finally claiming its first victim?

 

Who cares?! This is a poem, folks,

Not an equation. The ten green bottles

Have been singled out for single malt

And they pass through these stanzas

Unmolested. The lunchbox, though,

Is beyond repair. A passing dog

Snaffles up the ham and cheese sandwich.

Tabloid

 

It bangs the drum of itself all the way down Main Street,

blows its own trumpet, a one-man band

singing for the fish ‘n’ chip supper

it’ll provide the wrapping for tomorrow.

 

It flashes saucy snaps of celebrities caught in whatever act

makes for a good headline.

It announces itself in alliterative capitals,

then lowers the register for a finger-wagging editorial:

 

it disapproves even as it revels in the dirty details.

Following behind it, a drunkard

shouting the football scores and disparaging

the players, the manager, the ref;

 

a middle-class art student wrapped in beads and bangles,

passing herself off as a gypsy woman,

mumbling about luck and the stars.

And here comes last decade’s glamour model

 

with a thousand vapid make-up tips

and a range of swimwear she wants to promote.

Hot on her heels and short of breath

comes some world-class bore who used to be big

 

before drugs and divorce derailed his career: he’s here

to tout a snort ‘n’ tell memoir

and give his opinion about last night’s telly.

Hangers on and Facebook followers

 

bring up the tail-end while the sponsors of this spectacle

toss out flyers for mobile phones

and payday loans, littering Main Street

with the fall-out of their short-term profit margins.

 

It turns the corner and continues its clamour,

a big parade of rhetoric stomping over people and facts.



Neil Fulwood is the author of film studies book The Films of Sam Peckinpah. His poetry has appeared in Butcher's Dog, Art Decades, The Screech Owl, Your One Phone Call and Medusa's Kitchen. He's married, holds down a day job and subsidizes several real ale pubs.