Welcome to my Ted Talk
(My clicker isn’t working)
Welcome to my Ted Talk
(My clicker isn’t working)
How are we going to solve
Various big big things?
Three golden rules!
(Shame about my clicker)
Coming in to the coffee shop
I’m the bastard looking for
A power socket
Charging up my laptop
Charging up my laptop
Charging power to power my
Power point presentation
I have the power!
If I do this
(:::::::::::::;;;:;;)
You’ve just witnessed me doing it
And that’s an example of
POSITIVE THINKING!
Three golden rules!
1. Achieve the continuous
2. Apply it like a haberdasher
3. Can be split into twenty four subheadings
(This clicker is not working!)
If I put my hand in my pocket
And wander around
It makes me look more relaxed!!!
You’ve got to understand
That people
Always make
The wrong decisions.
Welcome to my Ted Talk!
Smug!
Life hacks!
(Fourteen different subheadings)
You can usually work out EXACTLY where
The bus will stop
And this will save you
TIME and ENERGY
There are eight different things I learned
SMUG BASTARD
When I lost my luggage while backpacking
(This clicker is just not working)
If I do this
(;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;)
It’s an example of sonic dissonance.
Madam, when did you last knowingly
Have spaghetti?
MY BOAT SANK!
And I didn’t even get slightly wet
My life is charged with a new purpose
I learned twelve new things!
Twelve new LIFE HACKS
LIFE HACKS
LIFE HACKS
LIFE SUCKS!
(This clicker is getting on my tits)
1. Technology
2. Murdering people is generally frowned on.
3. The power of positive thinking!
4. This clicker this clicker this clicker this clicker
5. I know six people called Ted and they all talk
Power point presentation validate it
Power point presentation validate jr
Let’s just validate if shall we?
This is an aha moment
Here’s a silly poem about going to Paris and having a miserable time and trying to break up with someone but you can’t because the metro is too noisy, and by the way, I’m using a salad spinner to mimic the sound of the metro. Apart from that, normal poem.
Cod, halibut, mackerel, rainbow mullets,
Brown turges, narrow-eyes loomheads,
Grand flappers, suspended marlin,
Norwegian screamers, ribbon-tailed Kenneths,
Sole, turbot, plaice, haddock,
Bulbous flatfish, flounder, spasm ray,
Honey roasted dogfish, the common eel,
To name but twenty species of fish.
And scampi, that’s twenty one.
And me? I think I’m gonna spew,
This old rusty tub flung round like
That Danish weather girl in the
Last series of Strictly,
Last night I honked up in my
Left welly
And only remembered this morning
When I put it on.
The trawlermen here have all got nicknames.
Stinky Sam is our captain,
I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, I would!
And Stinky James, our cook,
And Stinky Jim, who looks after the engine,
And Stinky Bill and Stinky Keith,
Who gut the fish.
These are the nicknames
That I’ve given them.
I was so cold last night
That my nipples went really big.
I had a weird dream
That I was stroking a caterpillar.
And in the morning Stinky Keith said,
‘Gosh, my moustache feels really smooth’.
Oh, the banter!
This morning I was laughingly called
A barnacle-encrusted puke-soaked
Impertinent half-witted buttock,
And I said,
‘Nice to hear from you too, Mum.’
Out on deck,
Hauling in a big load with Stinky Jim.
‘Do trawlers often sink?’, I yelled,
Above the clatter of the engine.
He replied, ‘usually only the once’.
Gutting fish with Stinky Bill,
He’s seen it all, has Stinky Bill
Looks one way, then the other,
And says,
‘Sonny Jim,
Have you ever been sexually aroused
By a walru…’.
I said ‘no.’
And a giant octopus stole my cheese sandwich
And a sperm whale
Tried to mate with us
And I was winked at
By a squid
And I’d never seen so many crabs!
And our captain was out on deck
With a jumping rope
Jumping up and down
I suppose that’s why they call him
The Skipper.
And the sea got rough
And I spent the whole afternoon
Being tossed
As the trawler rose up
Through swell and wave
And the skies spat rain
They were ever so brave
This lonely tub
On the wide wide sea
Perhaps this was the wrong moment
To tell Stinky Pete
That he would make my life complete.
‘Yay’ is the title of my new book, to be published by Burning Eye, and my new solo show, both of which are due to come out in the Spring of 2021. I’ve been working on both of these projects for a couple of years and I thought I would explain what I’ve been up to.
‘Yay’ will be a collection of upbeat poems, most of which tell a story or deal with a very specific place. Some of them are a little bit silly, some of them are somewhat life affirming, some of them are downright weird! And all of them are comedic in tone. The whole collection has been designed to make you laugh or smile.
The collection was devised a couple of years ago when it seemed that the world couldn’t get any more depressing. Naturally, after I started working on the project, it then suddenly did! The book contains poems from In the Glare of the Neon Yak, and Spout, my two solo shows, as well as material from my new upcoming show which will accompany the book.
The show will be called ‘Yay! : The Search for Happiness’. It was written in the first few months of this year and I have begun the process of trying to learn the thing. Indeed, I have been working with a director, the wonderful Dr Maggie Irving, with some funding from Torbay Culture, and she has been instructing me in the art of mime, movement and body expression. Unlike my previous shows, ‘Yay! : The Search for Happiness’ will have no props at all, just myself and a microphone. So in other words, I need all the help I can get! The reason for this is simply that I wont have to lug bags and boxes of props all over the country.
I’m still working on the collection. At the moment I’m in the process of deciding which poems will definitely be included. And of course, new ones keep arriving. It’s a very exciting time at the moment!
I’m looking forward to getting the book and the show out there into the world. Fingers crossed, of course, that there will be a fringe circuit next year. But if not, I’ll find a way to bring Yay! to your town.
In the Glare of the Neon Yak was written between 2016 and 2017 having gone through several incarnations, starting as a show called Vestibule Dreams, about people standing at the end of a packed train and sharing their stories.
The story of the Yak is based on that of Herne the Hunter, the mythical ghost who used to haunt several places including Windsor Great Park, near where I grew up.
I took the show all over the UK to various fringes and festivals culminating in a run at Edinburgh. And in 2019 I did a live version with the Totnes jazz band Shadow Factory.
A poem about a small town in West Virginia where I spent the night as a teenager.
Poem (Burnsville)
The car is big, brash and American,
As American as a baseball game,
And just like a baseball game,
It seems to go on forever.
The size of a frigate, this thing,
Burns enough fuel to power a small city.
You be navigator, my uncle says,
Which is easy as there’s only one road
Here in the mountains of West Virginia,
Even I can’t muck this up.
I catch my reflection in the rear view mirror.
You’re a long way from Basingstoke, sonny jim.
We’re on a road trip through America.
The scenery and grandeur are simply stunning
But I haven’t had a sausage roll in ages.
A teenage lad,
Overcompensating his obvious campiness
By wearing an Arsenal football shirt,
(I have no idea who Arsenal are,
I just like the fact they’ve got
Arse in their name),
And my uncle looks like Leslie Neilsen.
No wonder that diner back there
Went very quiet the moment we walked in.
And jeez, I’ve become so terribly English.
The Americans really seem to like it,
A waitress made me read from the TV Guide
And she couldn’t stop laughing.
And no, I’ve never met Benny Hill.
Why is everyone here obsessed with Benny Hill?
A muggy, huggy, humid day.
The moment I step from the car,
Everything goes Moist.
The constant heat has led to some serious chafing.
As the sun sets the highway announces
A small town called Burnsville,
We stop for the night,
Leslie Neilsen swings the frigate off the freeway
And we book into a small motel.
The adjacent highway sighs
As if it’s all too much.
The hillsides loom,
The Neon buzzes.
Passing trucks growl and
The world smells of diesel,
Melting tarmac and decomposing weasel.
It’s gritty,
But not in a Harold Pinter sort of way,
But in the way that grit is gritty.
There’s something sticky and
Unsettling in the heat of the night,
A bit Like finding half of a frog
In a packet of Quavers.
Restless dreams in wooden homes,
This covered fold, this
Hidden valley, and I,
Jolted up from hours of driving
And awash with hormones and teenage desires,
Suddenly turned on by absolutely everything,
Which I can only quell by singing
The refrain of a tv advert for Bran Flakes.
‘They’re tasty, tasty,
Very very tasty!
They’re very tasty!’
My room is hot.
I’ve seen these places
In so many films.
A bed, a bathroom, a bible.
I open the window and the moths fly in,
Thousands of the fluttering bastards,
Moths on the Tv screen, moths
Circling the lights, moths on the window frame,
And even the bastard moths are turning me on.
I try to bat them with the bible
But the bible turns me on.
I try to shoo them out the door
But the door handle turns me on,
And the door frame,
And the door turns me on,
And I turn off the light and then
Turn it on
But even turning it on turns me on,
And I realise that I have to get away,
Oh yes,
I have to get away.
I place my hands on my head and through
Gritted teeth I sing,
‘They’re tasty, tasty,
Very very tasty!
They’re very tasty!’
It’s warmer outside, and dark, so dark.
I walk down to a dried up stream
Behind the motel,
Turn and look at the wooded valley slopes,
It’s all so quiet and ethereal but bloody hell,
After a while it starts to turn me on.
I tell myself there must be monsters here,
Gun toting wild men,
World hating survivalists,
Angry war veterans, how masculine,
How beautifully masculine,
Sensuous and masculine,
How it turns me on!
I try to look for some natural splendour,
But all I can see is a Coca Cola machine,
Humming and electric and brash
And vibrating ever so softly, like a lover,
Which turns me on.
So I walk, I walk up to the main road,
The highway, long grass crickets chirruping,
Like the springs of a bed, (impersonate),
oh god!, back to the motel,
The motel where so many slumbering naked people
Have tossed and turned,
Oh dearie me,
How dreadfully even this motel turns me on,
And just as I’m thinking I should really
Get a grip,
I see the open door to the motel laundry room.
Bright lit fluorescent glaring in the sultry night,
And two shining hot shirtless lads operating
The machines, nonchalant, slyly sexual, the
Glistening sweat causing their lithe bodies to writhe
And contort with an ethereal glow,
They’re tasty, they’re tasty,
Oh my, they’re very, very tasty,
They’re very tasty indeed.
And all of a sudden the motel is just a motel,
The moths, the crickets, the Coca Cola machine,
The doorway and the light switch,
They are what they are,
And I am what I am,
And the lads, oh mumma!
We all know what they are.
I go back to my room,
Boy oh boy,
Do I go back to my room!
Whooo!
The next morning we load
Our luggage into the frigate
And Leslie Neilsen asks me
What I’d like for breakfast.
For some reason I have
Sudden hankering for Bran Flakes.
I’ve always been passably handsome
When viewed through frosted glass,
(Frosted glass slightly concave
Acting the same as ‘skinny mirrors’
In fashion boutiques,
Or are they just an urban myth?).
Anyway, passably handsome
At a quick glance.
Though this queer body,
Structured as it is like the
Centre Pompidou with all of its
Accoutrements and pipes on the outside,
Has, on drunken nights,
Momentarily convinced a member
Of the same gender that it might be right
For voracious osculation, you know,
Ironically, the night not a total waste.
There’s no accounting, my mother
Would say, for taste.
But last year it started to
Stand up for itself, (excuse the pun),
And developed a lump that had to be
Swiftly removed, like an edited comma,
Erroneous punctuation,
And then this year decided on a whim
To do the obvious thing and
Get that trendy flu that everyone’s been
Raving about, you know, like a hat,
Or that winter eight years ago when
All the trendy kids wore jumpers that said ‘Geek’
When they obviously weren’t.
Ay, ’tis a queer body, wrapped
Around a queer man who has the lusts of a
Queer man and the abs of a panda.
I know, I thought, let’s shave of all of my
Body hair (I was bored) and look beach ready,
Ended up looking like a chicken, oven-ready,
A butterball plucked and my chest hair
Itched like a bastard for weeks.
Most of the Ikebana club has been taking performance-enhancing steroids
Careful with those secateurs, Enid!
Shove the bastard in the pot,
All nuance has gone, hasn’t it?
Can someone help me pick up this
Heavy bad of Grow-More compost, oh,
It’s OK, Molly’s got it.
The judges in Biddeford last week
Thought something was amiss.
The winning creation looked more like
It had been threatened with a severe beating
And had assumed those convoluted shapes
Of its own free will.
When asked to provide a urine sample,
Ethel went berserk with a trowel.
She’s already got a two-year ban from all
Officially sanctioned ikebana competitions.
Maud was seen in the chemists
Collecting a suspicious package from a
Pharmacist who gave a knowing wink.
She’s in contention for a sixth title this year.
She also got my brother’s Fiat Punto out of a ditch.
Harold did something creative with some cherry blossom
But was too interested in
Showing everyone his glistening abs.
He’d oiled them up, apparently, with Bonjela.
Trevor’s suddenly built like a brick shithouse.
He’s got the branch of an oak tree
Rammed in a water butt and he ain’t leaving
Until he’s had it out with the committee.
Start the day with a yearn.
A bit of a yawn
And then a yearn.
When will he learn?
And then the urges kick in.
All fuzzed up on the indefinable this trendy shag happy
Fashion conscious tight t – shirted skinny jeaned hair
Purposefully unkempt to such the right degree as if
To promote architecture over aesthetics this knowingly
Crash bang handsome nonchalant gymnasium frequenter
With his yearning and his urges looking into the mirror
Thinking hmmmm, today’s the day I might meet and forever
Fall in love with
A chubby overweight forty something poet with glasses.
He yearns.
Yearns and urges.
This is what he wants.
You can’t spell
Urge
Without
Urrrrrrrrrr.
Two in the afternoon,
Never been up so early!
Slender fingers
Thumb
Poet dating websites.
Doesn’t see a thing he likes.
They’re all
Hip hop trendy slam heroes
Slippy hip lip spitting split lip
Literary nerds
They’re all
Achingly trendy
Syntax bendy rangers and shouters
Mic crooning pouters
They go from Bard to verse
He’s looking for
Old timer rhymers,
Middle aged and overweight and
Wearers of glasses.
Philip Larkin
He’d do nicely
Thank you.
He yearns.
The pain inside
It burns
He imagines
The ease at which
They squeeze
The poems out of themselves.
They make it look so
Effortless.
He’d like to do the same.
He feels he could
Bang one out
Any second.
Laughing with the lads beer with the lads now
And football with the lads all nonchalant joshing
And mega bants about birds and booze and beer and boobs
And he accidentally lets it slip that he’s always had a thing
For Alan Bennett.
I’m sorry,
Did I say
Alan Bennett?
I meant
Taylor
Swift.
He wants
To spend his years
With sonneteers
Become old and grey
And fade away
With haiku masters
Recover from a hip op
Forgetting all that hip hop
Better fetch a stretcher, man.
How he pines for
John Betjeman.
He yearns.
Sneaks on to
Chubby overweight forty something poet with
Glasses and a shirt and tie dot com
Sees pictures of various midlife
Midspread jovial looking
Z list performance poets
Draped seductively
Over
Typewriters
Library return counters
Art council grant forms
He sees the look of soulless doom
Hidden behind their thick framed glasses
And fixed forced smiles
And he thinks
I’d be there for you
All the time
Every time an audience didn’t laugh
Every time you crashed out the first round
Of the Swindon Poetry Slam
Every time a trendy fresh on the scene
Battle rapper says
Have you been doing this for long?
Bro
Oh,
I’d be there for you.
He yearns.
But the world
It still turns.
He wants a
Chubby overweight forty something poet
With glasses and a shirt and tie and possibly
Spiky hair too.
Oh,
If only there were someone for him.
Just who could it be?
Just who could this person be?
Just who could this person be?
Robert Garnham 