Tag: humour

GDPR, by Marie Studer


By Robert Garnham

GDPR

He stretched his legs under the hospitality
Of her kitchen table, listed the locals lately deceased,
Those who reached old age, those taken young.
She offered currant cake.
Reaching for a slice he asked in a flash,
What age would you be now, Nonie?
She returned the plate to ellipsis equalised
On oilcloth. Smiling benignly, she enquired
What age would you think I am?
He subtracted generously from the score,
Near enough, she said.
No hacker would ever crack
My mother’s personal information or ransom her ware.

Marie Studer has written poetry since her teens in the1970s and started to submit in 2018. She won the Trocáire Poetry Ireland Competition 2020 and the Halloween Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Bangor Literary Journal 2019. Her poetry has been published in the Stony Thursday Book, The Waxed Lemon, Wee Book of Wee Poems, Fire & Water, Drawn To The Light, online and local anthologies.

Twitter handle: @StudiMarie

 

This shit?, by Jo Sachs-Eldridge


By Robert Garnham

This shit?

Is this it?
This shit?

Are you happy with your lot?
Cos I’m fucking not.
Not with this lot.
This rot.

Not this.
Is this it?

This shit?
If it is
I’ve had enough.
I don’t want this lot.
Not this.

I don’t want the trying
The crying
The sweating
The giving
Of everything
I’ve got.
For what?

Is this it?
This shit?

But don’t you dare ask
What do you want?
Cos who fucking knows.
But it’s not this.
Not this lot.
Not this.

She’s happy with her lot.
But what’s she got
That I’ve not?
What is it?
Maybe she just doesn’t know
What she’s not got.

Or maybe
I don’t.
Maybe whatever I’ve got
Is the lot.
Maybe you just grab that shit
And you say
THIS IS IT!
I’VE GOT IT!
This lot.
My lot.
I’ve got it.
I’VE GOT
THE LOT!

Jo Sachs-Eldridge lives in Leitrim where she mostly dreams up community projects involving bikes and words and other stuff she naively believes will change the world. She has notebooks full of writing that is legible to no-one and a daughter who is a wonderful distraction from everything.

 

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward, by Aoife Cunningham


By Robert Garnham

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.
I nearly fell down the loo,
Like Alice in wonderland.
While im trying to excrete urine.

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.

My shoes are dr martens
And I dress like
a bohemian goth,
This I must say,
Gets in the way,
of my OOTD.
Because I don’t have access to my belts or my lace!

There’s no curtains in the psych ward,
So I have to get crafty,
I get a little bit arty
and hang a sheet.
It’s like a sad tapestry
For the room that it is.
I guess that’s true

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward

Now I’ve learnt all the tricks,
From drifting between institutions.
To wear a scuba mask,
In case I fall down the toilet bowl.

I’ve learnt all the tricks
From years of experience.
To use your wit to find a way
out of this hole.

There’s no toilet in the psych ward

 

Sleeping Legion, by Jennie E. Owen


By Robert Garnham

Sleeping Legion

They’re all here tonight you know,
every face you’ve ever seen
flickering behind your eyes like cherries
spinning like bells
they put on a show
as you push off your blankets
then swaddle them again.

Your old maths teacher chases you
to the edge of the cliff,
a book of equations in one hand
a garden gnome in the other. Whilst
a midwife leads you
down endless
hospital corridors

where at the end
you’ll find nothing but the check-out boy,
the one with whom you locked eyes
over a cucumber
and a packet of hob nobs,
last Tuesday.

Jennie E. Owen’s writing has won competitions and has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband, three children, and cat.

 

When Brian Became Broccoli, by Ben Macnair


By Robert Garnham

When Brian Became Broccoli

When asked what he wanted to be,
three-year-old Brian thought about it,
for a while, and with a smile,
said that he would like to be Broccoli.

A strange choice for a career,
you might have thought,
but Brian was only three,
the age where you could be what you wanted to be.

When a kindly local Wizard was told of this tale,
he visited Brian and asked: ‘And who might you be?’
Are you the little boy who wanted to become Broccoli?
Brian nodded his head.

Brian went to bed that night,
but he woke up with a bit of a fright.
His hair was green, stiff, and standing on end.
The following night, he went to bed,
and woke up completely Green.
His Mum and Dad had never seen anything
quite so obscene.

The next day, they found Brian in bed.
He had become Broccoli.
The kindly Wizard broke the spell,
and for 14 years, all was well.

Until the Wizard turned up one day,
and was quite drunk.
‘I am afraid that the spell didn’t quite wear off.’
he said because Brian was becoming a Punk.

Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire, in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair

 

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull, by Janet Sillett


By Robert Garnham

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull

My group of friends read Larkin aloud
skiving off hockey,
outliers in a school
which dished out piety at 9am

We admired his contrariness,
dirty words,
and suburban weariness,
his constipated ennui

Larkin inspired me to study
in a god forsaken east coast city
a shared terrace with a parrot
a bath in the kitchen
on Anlaby Road

I skulked in vain in the library,
until we parted company abruptly,
Hull, Larkin and me
I moved on, as they say,
to Plath, Stevens, Crane
to a concrete place of learning,
and Larkin expressed his adoration
for Margaret Thatcher

I reread his poems, when living
in bedsits, in semis,
in the disillusionment of marriage

But let’s face it,
Larkin was a bigot, racist, serial snob
I want to see them starving,
the so-called working class
nostalgic for the good old days
when only white men played cricket for England

Consumer of pornography
(but never in the library)
composer of sado­masochistic reveries
shared to fellow man poets
posh adolescents fumbling with themselves
in bedrooms after lights out

I want to cancel Larkin
unknow his life,
his pervasion of archetypal Englishness
I settle for drowning in his poetry
with fingers in my ears

PS Apologies to Hull which I now think is a great place.

Janet Sillett recently took up writing poetry and short fiction again after decades of absence. She has had poems published in the Galway Advertiser, Poetry Plus magazine and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, and flash fiction in Litro. She works for a think tank.

 

Ode to a Pee Funnel, by Christine Fowler


By Robert Garnham

Ode to a Pee Funnel

Alan’s caravan was the apple of his eye
It was a 1979 beauty
And only ←———-→ this wide
It had nowt of this modern rubbish
It was retro through and through
But there was one adaptation
He was really proud to use
It was a plastic funnel
Set up at just the right height
And the circumference you know
Was really not to tight
With wiggle room to spare
So when he stood there
And let it all hang out
There was only sound of running ‘water’
And moans of delight
And when the last drops were shaken
And everything tucked back in place
He was often heard to murmur
That’s a cracking thing I’ve made.

Christine Fowler was in her 60’s, when she began focussing on writing and performing poetry in autumn 2019 and published in journals and anthologies since 2020. Her poems are informed from a life time of experience of working with people in challenging situations. https://www.christinefowlerpoetry.com Instagram@christine.fowler.poetry

 

The camera never lies, by Sarah J Bryson


By Robert Garnham

The camera never lies

Take off your rucksack, it’ll spoil the image.
Here I’ll watch over it. Can you pull the scarf straight?
Zip up your jacket. That’s it, turn your face
so that it catches the sun. No – I can’t take it yet.
There’s a whole family in the way having their fun.
Just wait. Stay there. it won’t be long
before they are out of shot.

Damn. Now the sun’s gone. Hang on. It’ll be back soon.
There’s a strand of hair … can you pin it down?
Now. Are you ready? Look this way…without squinting?
Yes, I know it’s straight into the sun. Look away,
then I’ll give you a count…. One, two three, ready:
chin up, that’s it. Now smile.

Sarah J Bryson
Bio: Sarah has poems published in print journals, anthologies and on line. She has been a regular participant, during the Covid pandemic, in a weekly on-line arts event, combining photographs with haiku style poetry and has recently had several poems on the Poetry and Covid site.

 

Grumbles, by Amanda Baker


By Robert Garnham

Grumbles

I don’t want air treacle in my nostrils
a sullen clot of exhaustion in my stomach
sending spider webs of weakness through my veins
as I trudge up the hill.

I don’t want the miniature catgut squeal
of mosquitoes behind my right ear
to brush its crushed body off my upper arm
as I flail at the soft hollow behind my knee
driven in from my twilight garden.

I don’t want to stretch my fingers to relax
after clenching the steering wheel for thirteen hours
trapped between the swaying container walls
yellow blue and white barely visible in the torrential rain
as useless goods get transported across Europe
in response to an impulsive click on the tick box.

I want to be Legolas,
dancing lightly through ancient lichen-hung forests,
intact ecological webs singing their joy,
untouched by wildfires, beetles and drought.

Amanda Baker is based in Berlin. As a scientist, teacher, and animal physiotherapist, she loves exploring new ideas. She has had performances in KlinkerdIn, the Curious Fox and Over the Edge and has poems published in Automatic Pilot, Poethead and Strukturriss. She thoroughly enjoys Kevin Higgins’ Poetry workshops.

 

The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood, by Trisha Broomfield


By Robert Garnham

The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Night Attire ( with apologies to Charles Perrault who probably wrote the original story in 1697)

‘Ah but just feel that cloth, the quality, the cut.’
Red Riding Hood noticed the glint in his eye
as the wolf’s hot, bad breath crept round her pale neck,
‘That’s one piece of clothing I simply must buy.’

‘It’s an heirloom,’ she said, with a vital step back,
‘belonged to my grandma who, if it wasn’t for you
would be waiting for me in this very bed.’
The wolf grinned, ‘but sweetie, it’s just me instead.’

‘I’m not at all sure’, Red Riding Hood said,
‘I should be sharing this feast with somone like you,
there’s a quiche in this basket and I know for a fact
that the canis lupis (and I suspect that you are), doesn’t eat that

‘Oh silly Red Hood, don’t be so unsure, we have changed
over years of the telling of tales, we eat quinoa, and eggs
you can trust me to share your fine basket of wares,
we even’, he murmured, ‘eat most things with legs.’

‘Take your hand of my quiche you ravenous beast,
and look what you’ve done to my cloak
where is my grandma? You must think I’m dim.’
‘There’s room for one more in this bed, do come in.’

‘You’re joking,’ she said, I’m just not that sort
and you’ve not had a haircut or shave
I’m taking my wares and my very fine cloak
I’ll leave you the food; perhaps with some luck you will choke.

‘But sweetie you must see that all through my life
and the length of this very fine tale
I’ve been waiting for you, it’s predestined, it’s fate!’
And the poor girl became the last thing that he ate.