Last year our local road was upgraded with bicycle lanes separated from the road with hundreds of black and white bumps. Many people called them armadillos but my wife and I realised that they were actually something more sinister. 

This is a nonsense poem written as a challenge for our Written Word Group meeting on Halloween 2025. 

No zebras were hurt in the making of this poem…

Another Halloween poem, this one about the monster in the White House. It may seem superficially anti-American, but it isn’t, it is just lamenting what America is becoming. 

Went to bed last night and wrote half of this, having watched Newsnight. Finished it before I got up this morning. Heroes don’t always wear capes, some villains are always in fancy dress. 

This is the first poem in my new season. 

Write a poem, and you can do whatever you like with it. You can make it for everyone, or, as in this case, just for one very special person. 

I went out to dinner on Friday 13th. I’m lucky I did. 

This is a poem I finished a few minutes ago, it is now Saturday 14th. 

It’s probably a first draft. If you see it next week, or tomorrow, or at noon, it might be different. 

My wife is away, I fear I am turning feral, and unused to behaving in company. 

This tries to explain why I went 50 years without writing poetry. Although it is true, I am not sure who was telling me not to. It was possibly myself. 

My brother is not gloomy as an adult, though he was a bit miserable as a child, at least once I was born. 

A cheery tale of domestic abuse. This is not a rare phenomenon among elderly couples, but is always shocking when you see it. Not always actual physical violence, but verbal abuse and financial control are common and not hard to spot if you know what to look for.

Sometimes love is soppy, and so are love poems. The Written Word Group had an open mic meeting on Feb 14 this year and I wrote this poem for my wife who I first met 25 years ago. she liked it, and I hope you do  and yes, it is a bit soppy…

Feb 14 was also the anniversary of the first poem I wrote in adulthood. A poem that won an upgrade on a Virgin flight from Miami. 

I won a bottle of brandy on a tombola and owned it for about a minute before tripping and smashing it beneath me. I lay for a while in a pool of brandy with large shards of glass. It could have been serious, but it wasn’t. A friend drove me home to change and I started this in the car. I finished it just as the do was ending. It could have been much worse. 

I like poems, and sometimes I like a poem that rhymes. What I have always hated are rhyming couplets, two lines, same rhyme, restricting your thoughts, sounding like a nursery rhyme. 

This poem is made up of more than twenty of the cursed things, but I hope you don’t notice. 

It also contains an almost rude word, but I hope you’ll forgive me and blame it on the boogie, or on Michael Jackson anyway. 

On 28 April 2025, Spain and Portugal had a huge power outage. This poems explores the way in which, although we all had the same power cut, everybody’s experience of it was unique. 

This is a poem about a row I recently found myself in. It didn’t go well. I’m not sure that over- reacting was the problem, but it really did not go well.