The Radioactive Kid (excerpt)
"...and each raindrop plutonium enriched
My pelt drank it in through every pore,
Irradiating the gruel-thin blood which
carried the poison to my very core.
and there the change began - cells were ruptured,
DNA strands unfurled, reformed reversed,
gradually, painfully restructured
and left me whole but with this three-fold curse"
Getting in Touch with Our Feminine Sides (excerpt)
"It's morning and it's just the two of us
In the Transit-crew bus, driving out to work,
past dew-hung spruce, in this neck of the woods.
The floor is strewn
with chainsaws, chains, tools, grease-guns, tubes of grease
whilst whe whole van stinks of sap and two-stroke mix.
I would screw my oil-stained Maxpoof coat up
into a ball."
To a Louse (excerpt)
"Your own bloodthirsty tribe, I know's
turned up en masse in vese and prose
by the likes of Rosenberg, Rimbaud,
and George Orwell.
Not one's so celebrated, though
as your guid sel.
Yer lad's there in the pew behind
with farmer's boots and hands. You'll find,
(the plough-boy thing's a pose), his mind
is like a whip -
swift, sharp and ready with a rhyme,
or cutting quip."
Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn (excerpt)
Hello! What's all this here? A kitschy vase
some Shirley Temple manque has knocked out
delineating tales of kids in cars
on crap estates, the Burberry clad louts
who flail their motors through the smoky night
from Mancherster to Motherwell or Slough,
creating bedlam on the Queen's highway.
Your gaudy evocation can, somehow,
as would a Daily Express expose."
conjure the scene without inducing fright
- Tim Turnbull
