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Your support makes all the difference.BY MARTIN NEWELL
A poet mounts the Brighton stage,
Reciting stanzas loud and clear.
A reading at the TUC
From Tony Blair? What's happening
here?
D'you keep a dog and bark yourself?
The answer's yes, we must suppose,
Since laureates cannot blast away
The blackspot on the Labour rose
And poets don't have unions,
As such. My God, though, if we did,
Such workmanship as Tuesday's ode
Consigns you to the blacklist, kid.
And poetry's unstable stuff...
The verses? Temperamental, those,
Though rhymes themselves are safe
enough
When handled by us hardened pros,
But in the hands of amateurs
With no internal metronome
The scansion tends to be all
Over the shop.
So, kids: don't try this stuff at home.
"Millennium wheel may not be able
To stand upright on New Year's Eve":
A headline in The Independent,
Something I can quite believe.
The plans for Y2K have proved
A bit of a disaster zone.
But what I know of New Year's Eve,
The Wheel may not be on its own.
As Floyd the fearless hurricane
Brings chaos to the States again,
The only things which visit us
Are Light Breeze Reg and Constance
Rain.
So far, at least, we're let off light,
The summer wet, the winter warm,
The odd tornado in a town,
But nothing like the kind of storm
Which other countries suffer from
Increasingly, to illustrate
That global warming's underway
Officially - we learn of late.
Now when I look up in the sky,
Which as a poet I have to do,
And see so many planes at night,
I think about that CO2,
Recalling stuff my grandad said
Long years ago, regarding air
And weather in pre-Greenhouse days:
"It's all that muck they sling up there.
It can't be good, though, can it, boy?"
This homespun wisdom given free -
Though thirty years and lots of cash
It took to make the world agree.
Aw... Morse is dead, the papers said,
And things can never be the same.
In tearful pubs they'll ask tonight:
"But what was Morse's christian name?"
To pub-quiz nerds who know big words
The answer is: "Endeavour".
But I'll reply, "Inspector,"
Cos I'm not very clever.
"Lewis?
LOOO-WISSS!"
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