Collected Poems
Roger McGough
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
COLLECTED POEMS
Roger McGough is one of Britain’s best-known poetry voices. Following the success of the bestselling Penguin collection The Mersey Sound (with Brian Patten and the late Adrian Henri), he has been captivating children and adults alike with his unique blend of heart and wit for more than four decades. Much travelled and translated, he is now an international ambassador for poetry and was awarded an OBE for his work in 1997. In 2001 he was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool.
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First published by Viking 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
11
Copyright © Roger McGough, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A. M. D. G.
ISBN: 978-0-14-195911-5
CONTENTS
Preface
Learning to Read
My Little Eye
Bye Bye Black Sheep
Snipers
Bucket
Smart Railings
Tramp Tramp Tramp
Bars are Down
Sad Aunt Madge
Hearts and Flowers
Casablanca
What Happened to Henry
What Happened to Dorothy
The Fallen Birdman
Alphabet Soup
The Railings
Squaring Up
‘What does your father do?’
Having My Ears Boxed
Another Brick in the Wall
Sacrifices
Wearing Thin
How to Become a Sixer
Maurice
Hard Times
Spitting Prohibited
Ee Bah Gum
A Fine Tooth Comb
Vague Impressions
George and the Dragonfly
Snowing Down South
An Apology
humdinger
Man the Barricades, the Enemy has let loose his Pyjamas!
Shy
Rainbow
Poem on being in love with two girls at the same time
Comeclose and Sleepnow
A lot of Water has Flown under your Bridge
Aren’t We All
after the merrymaking, love?
The Act of Love
Dunenudes
My little plastic mac
Discretion
Who was The Naughty Girl
Contact lenses
Near to You
Sundeath/greentears
If life’s a lousy picture, why not leave before the end
You and Your Strange Ways
The Fish
May Ball
The sun no longer loves me
Vinegar
On having no one to write a love poem about
My cat and i
Dreampoem
Dreampoem 2
What You Are
A Square Dance
On Picnics
Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head
M62
Noah’s Arc
Icarus Allsorts
Three Rusty Nails
Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen
At Lunchtime
On Having a First Book of Poetry Published (The day the world ended.)
Let me Die a Youngman’s Death
SUMMER WITH MONIKA
Summer with the Monarch
happiness
Buddies
un
Amateur traumatics
bravado
Vandal
Bulletins
Trenchwarfare
McGough’s last stand
Cake
tigerdreams
tightrope
Hash Wednesday
The Mongrel
10 Ways to Make a Killing on the Stock Market
All Over bar the Shouting
The Perfect Crime
Last Lullaby
You and I
40—Love
No Message
A golden life
P.O.W.
Three weeks ago we decided to go our separate ways
The Rot
Head Injury
Mouth
Holiday on Death Row
Goodbat Nightman
P.C. Plod at the Pillar Box
P.C. Plod in Love
The Sergeant gets a handsome deal
P.C. Plod versus the Youth International Party
On the Road
Birmingham
Wolverhampton
Bradford
Huddersfield
Newcastle
Leeds
Sheffield
Canterbury
Cardiff 6 p.m.
Cardiff 11 a.m.
Cardiff
Poem for National LSD Week
Nottingham
9 to 5 (or cosy biscuit)
Conversation on a Train
SPORTING RELATIONS:
Grandma
Uncle Malcolm
Cousin Wystan
Uncle Mork
Uncle Pat
Cousin Caroline
Uncle Anthony
Kung Fu Lee
Albert Robinson
Cousin Chas
Aunty Dora
Aunt Ermintrude
Uncle Bram
Billy Our Kid
Wild Bill Sitting Bull
Uncle Noah
Granny
Dear Lonely Hearts
Cousin Reggie
Angelina
Uncle Sean
Merve the Swerve
Terry and Pancho
Uncle Jack
Uncle Trevor and Aunty Penny
Cousin Horatio
Alf
Alfreda
Cousin Fosbury
Aunt Agatha
Old Mac
Eno
Marvin
Barry Bungee
Uncle Jason
Cousin Christ
Cousin Fiona
Big Arth
Accrington Stan
The Hon. Nicholas Frayn
Aunty Ann
Uncle Leo
Uncle Len
Elmer Hoover
Uncle Jed
Cousin Daisy
Cousin Nell
Footy Poem
Is My Team Playing
Poem for the opening of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool, 1967
In Two Minds
crusader
Catchin
g up on Sleep
vampire
warlock poems
Nocturne
exsomnia
ofa sunday
Scintillate
italic
Unlikely
Waving at Trains
Flying
Newsflash
Postcard
Dawnmare on 24th St
Incident at a Presidential Garden Party
There’s Something Sad
What the Littlegirl Did
The horse’s mouth
Poor Old Dead Horses
My Busconductor
My Busseductress
The Hippopotamusman
The Icingbus
Just another Autumn day
The Last Strike
Conservative Government Unemployment Figures
Work-to-rule
The Leader
A Fair Day’s Fiddle
out of sequence
UNLUCKY FOR SOME
The Lesson
Water, Tree, Cave, Mother
Pantomime poem
Sleep Over
Persimmons
The Stranger
snowscene
The Wreck of the Hesperus
Closet fascist
There are fascists
Vegetarians
There Was a Knock on the Door. It Was the Meat.
Cabbage
Soil
and the field screamed ‘TRACTOR’
The Scarecrow
The Birderman
The One About the Duck
Honey and Lemon
Five Ways to Help You Pass Safely through a Dark Wood Late at Night
a cat, a horse and the sun
Trees Cannot Name the Seasons
Sap
Green Piece
Behemoth
The Fly
Crocodile in the City
The Lake
Curse
Pure Jaguar
Five-car Family
Stop All the Cars
Stinging in the Rain
The City of London Tour
Sheer
On Dover Beach
Global Warming
Fatal Consequences
Bad Day at the Ark (i)–(iv)
St Francis and the Lion (i)–(ii)
The Father, the Son
Tsutsumu
Spoil-sports
Pen Pals
Old-fashioned Values
Light Sleeper
Ex Patria
Posh
Shite
The Jogger’s Song
Fart
End of Story
No Surprises
Six Shooters
Greek Tragedy
The Terrible Outside
The End of Summer
A Brown Paper Carrierbag
The Identification
A Cautionary Calendar
Kyrie
Train Crash
Funny sort of bloke
Uncle Harry
Good Old William
Tide and time
In Transit
War of the Roses
What My Lady Did
W.P.C. Marjorie Cox
Poem for a Lady Wrestler
Who Can Remember Emily Frying?
The Host
The Tallest Man in Britain
Laughing, all the way to Bank
Valentine
As Every Bandage Dreams
Romantic
Your Favourite Hat
Today is Not a Day for Adultery
Fits and Starts
The Map
Whoops!
Dialectically Opposed
Bath – Avon
The Examination
The Poet Takes an Autumnal Stroll on Hampstead Heath
Creative Writing
Meeting the Poet at Victoria Station
Blazing Fruit
Take a Poem, Miss Smith
An Ordinary Poetry Reading
After the Reading
Clone
Muffin the Cat
The Logic of Meteors
His poems are nets
A Critic Reviews the Curate’s Egg
Two Riddles
The Nearest Forty-two
The Written Word
Word Trap
Planet Babel
On the Point of Extinction
The death of John Berryman in slow motion
One Poet May Hide Another
A Visit to the Poet and his Wife
All for Laurie Lee
Educating Rita
This be Another Verse
The Darling Buds of Maybe
From ‘Les Pensées’ by Le Duc de Maxim
Toffee
Poetspotting
Trust Me, I’m a Poet
Wheelchairs
For Want of a Better Title
Memento Mori
A Serious Poem
Awful Acrobats
It’s Only a P…
It’s Only a P… Part Two
Coach and Horses
Poem for a dead poet
The Filmmaker
When I Am Dead
Repelled by Metal
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse
I Don’t Like the Poems
Porno Poem
This is One of Those
The Battle of Bedford Square
For the Sake of Argument
The Newly Pressed Suit
Framed
the picture
The Revenge of My Last Duchess
How Patrick Hughes Got to be Taller
The Boyhood of Raleigh
Ex art student
The Theatre
Big Ifs
Children’s Writer
Joinedupwriting
A Literary Riddle
What prevents a poem from stretching into Infinity?
Haiku
Two Haiku
THE SPOTTED UNICORN
Rabbit in Mixer Survives
Happy Ending
In Good Spirits
Nothing Ventured
Days
In Good Hands
Bees Cannot Fly
My Life in the Garden
The Perfect Place
Happy Birthday
Here I Am
Uncle Roger
Punk doll
Rocker-by
Where It’s At
The Lottery
Crazy Bastard
Fear of Flares
Q
Clutching at Cheese Straws
Half-term
Isolation
Perfume
5-star
Melting into the Foreground
Ode on a Danish Lager
Missed
Used to Drink
The Blues
Star Juice
Drinking Song
Another Mid-life Crisis
Early-Morning Poems
Shavings Account
Prayer to Saint Grobianus
Fired with Enthusiasm
In Case of Fire
Vague Assumptions
It’s a Jungle Out There
Flight Path
Don’t Read All About It
Survivor
Everyday Eclipses
The End
The Bright Side
Worry
The Unknown Worrier
New Brooms
low jinks
Passion
Solarium
Dressed for the Occasion
Getting On
Getting Off
You may get the vote at eighteen, but you’re born with a price on your head
My Shadow is but a Shadow of Its Former Self
Science, where are you?
Poem with a Limp
Right as Rain
Say ‘Ah!’
Bits of Me
The Wrong Be
ds
The Health Forecast
In Vain
THE ELEMENTS:
Oxygen
Nitrogen
Carbon
Iron
Mercury
Sulphur
Gold
Fool’s Gold
Element 109
Bob Dylan and the Blue Angel
Hey, Dude
A Bolt from the Blue
Thank U Very Much
My Divine Juggler
Love Cycle
M.I.L.T.
Echoes Sound Afar
Balloon Fight
The Man in the Moon
Defying Gravity
Sad Music
The Trouble with Snowmen
In at the Kill
Bearhugs
Four Sons (A Wish)
Just Passing
Who are These Men?
Cinders
Monstrance
The Way Things Are
Index of First Lines
Index of Sources
PREFACE
The poems in this volume represent a span of over forty years, the earliest having been written in my twenties. I decided against a strict chronological order, preferring to bring together those related by theme or genre. Some poems that appeared in Watchwords (Cape, 1969) were occasional pieces commissioned for television performance, and in their best interests I have omitted them.
A number of poems have been revised, but only where the language seemed unwieldy, even at the time of writing, and some puns have not improved with age. But I have tried to resist the temptation to revise my original thoughts and feelings, however naive and indiscreet they appear in grizzled retrospect.
Sky in the Pie (Kestrel, 1989) was my first book of poems written for children, and to date there have been six more. The line that divides children’s poems from adults’ is a blurred one, and the few that have crossed over into this collection seem more at home. It is not a question of their having been upgraded. Seven previously unpublished poems are also included at no extra cost to the reader.
My thanks to Tony Lacey at Penguin, Adrian Mealing at U.K.touring, and to Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, but especially to all the readers and listeners who have supported me over the years.
Learning to Read
Learning to read during the war
wasn’t easy, as books were few
and far between. But Mother
made sure I didn’t go to sleep
without a bedtime story.
Because of the blackout
the warm, comforting glow
of a bedside lamp was not permitted.
So Mum would pull back the curtains
and open wide the window.
And by the light of a blazing factory
or a crashed Messerschmitt,
cuddled up together, she would read
saucebottles, jamjars, and, my
all-time favourite, a tin of Ovaltine.
So many years ago, but still
I remember her gentle guidance
as I read aloud my first sentence:
‘S-p-r-i-n-k-1-e t-w-o h-e-a-p-e-d
t-e-a-s-p-o-o-n-s-f-u-l o-f…
My Little Eye
The cord of my new dressing-gown
he helps me tie
Then on to my father’s shoulder