Tag Archives: theatre

Toothpaste advert Dental expert Argues with god

She’s not an actress at all
She’s got a lab coat
And glasses
And she’s talking ever so slightly
To the left of the camera
About how various experts recommend
A certain brand

And god says lighten up
And she says go pro
And god says lighten up
And she says
You can feel the difference.

She’s persistent.
He’s omniscient.
Her lab coat is sparkling
Unbelievably white
Subconsciously saying to the viewer
‘Our toothpaste must be good
It must be.
It really must be.’

God hasn’t got time for this,
He’s got an earthquake to set off
In twenty minutes
In order to punish a small town in Italy
Because parliament has been
Debating gay marriage.
God is a bastard like that.

Ninety nine percent of dentists
Recommend this brand
She says
And god rolls his eyes because
Thirty eight percent of statistics are just
Someone speaking out of their arse.

I saw an advert the other day and
Some bloke was wearing a white lab coat
And I thought here we go, more toothpaste,
Butq he was a washing machine technician
And he was flogging Calgon,
Whatever the hell that is.

Dazzle with brilliant whiteness.
Thou shalt not question the ways of
Thy lord and master
Removes ninety percent of most plaque.
Thou start not
Covet thy neighbours wifi.
It’s all one
Meaningless slogan
After another.

Do you need those glasses?
Have they actually got lenses in?
Bold frames, aren’t they?
And that clipboard
Just keeping tabs on everything, eh?
These are the questions I’d also
Ask of god, along with,
Why should we worship You?
Even if you are our lord and creator,
Are you really so sensitive?

I said to the dentist,
Why do you always look
So down in the mouth?
At least you get to the
Root of the problem.
A golfer came in and said
Most of my teeth are fine,
But I’ve got a hole in one.

Sorry, that’s
My easily triggered gag reflex.

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Why are there pockets galore?
Who looks at their pockets and thinks, you know what?
I really could do with some more.

Pockets aplenty and pockets sublime
There’s a pocket on each of your knees
Pockets on pockets and poppers in pockets
Now, where on earth are your keys?

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Your shorts they must weigh half a tonne.
A pocket on your thigh and two on each side
And you’ve even got four on your bum.

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Is it a sign of alpha male maturity?
So much metal, probably best not to wear them
While going through airport security.

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Do you carry lots of spanners and such?
I’ve never seen shorts with so many pockets
There’s even a pocket on your crotch,

Zippers and poppers and buttons and Velcro
And poppers and zippers god knows why.
Stand at the urinals desperate for a pee
You’ve forgotten which one is your fly.

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Have you really got so much to do?
Or are you a short wearing deadly assassin,
Your shorts being camouflaged too.

Why have your shorts got so many pockets?
Is it something for which you might brag?
‘Look at me with all of my pockets!’
What’s wrong with a carrier bag?

How to keep travelling when you’re in lockdown

How to keep travelling when you’re in Lockdown

The ceiling has cracks their imaginary maps
From the hinterland coving to the lampshade city districts.
I eulogise the bulb, write some light verse,
Have a drink, just a tipple
As I look at the stipple.
Travel is all in the mind
Well it has to be
When you’re in a lockdown.

I perambulated in a nonchalant manner
To every four corners of my temporary manor
Took photos of the sunset
As light glimmered from the tea set
Sipped a fine wine at the washing line
It’s such a fine time
For a lockdown.

The laundry basket has been designated
A UNESCO sight of special scientific interest.
I dived to the bottom from the deck of an
Imaginary boat
Found a vest.
I don’t even wear vests.
Creatures of the deep.
Mysterious creatures of the deep.

You haven’t lived until you’ve gazed at the banisters.
Their iconic skyline more evocative than Manhattan
Each pillar a Corinthian column these stern guards
I bought a post card.

Amid the humid splendour of the tropical bathroom
Balmy fat drops falling from a hot hot sky
Where many a fashion model has poised lips a pouting
I sipped a cocktail and looked at the grouting.

Oh the overriding gentle peace
Of sauntering next to the mantelpiece
Early in the morning to avoid the crowds and their backpacks
I peruse the bric a brac
I think I will come back
Maybe in five minutes time.
With a duster.

From the pouffe to the duvet
To the blanket which is crocheted
To my dinner which is gourmet
It’s a lockdown so I do stay
Right here.
And then when I think that I’ve been everywhere man
I’ve seen the comfy chair man
I’ve hoovered up my hair man
From my first attempt at a haircut.

This flat is a lifeline it feels like a lifetime
It’s feels like a fine time to be in for a lockdown
There’s seldom a fine line between
Distance and downtime
It’s hard to be upbeat when you
Get down for a lockdown.

But there’s a burning desire for travel deep within
Tomorrow I might go out and visit the bin.

Robert Garnham’s 17 Golden Rules for Getting the Most Out of Life!

Robert Garnham’s Words of Advice

1. No one is ever worth writing a poem for, though every now and then you’ll meet someone who’s worth a limerick, particularly if they come from Chard.

2. If someone tells you that they love you, it’s not always a test, it’s an affectation of the status quo, a joy delivered in the beauty of a relationship which actually works, so it’s best not to answer with, oh, that’s good.

3. Shrimp will always give you raging guts ache.

4. Hold on to your nostalgia, otherwise you’ll have nothing to be nostalgic about, except possibly for the time you used to be nostalgic about things, so maybe you can be nostalgic about that.

5. Look at your life. Isolate your fears, your demons, and anything else that gives you the willies. Engage with them and dance, and banish them with a smile and a wave and a cheer. Unless, of course, the thing that scares you the most is crushing loneliness.

6. It’s never too late to learn. It’s never too early to forget.

7. Only concentrate on that which requires no thought.

8. You might not ever mention the elephant in the room, but you can certainly wonder how it got through the door, and up the stairs.

9. Look at the mirror every morning and say, I am loved, I am loved, I am loved. At least this way you’re prepared for any other bullshit that comes along.

10. Everyone you see or meet or talk to has been born. Even Avril Lavigne. And if you think being born was difficult, try getting a mortgage.

11. Go on, help yourself to the last cake in life. Living is all about grabbing the last cake. Go on, have it. Enjoy it. The dog licked it.

12. Get up early one morning, when the dew is still on the grass, and go for a walk barefoot in the park. Let me know when you’re doing this so that I can come round and borrow your vacuum cleaner.

13.Do something that excites you every day. Subvert the rules. Turn things on their head. Naturally this does not apply if you’re an airline pilot.

14. How do we know that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck? Who was the first person to discover this? How many similar things do we do which are good or bad luck without us knowing? Brandishing a vase on a Thursday? Sitting on a pouffe just after lunch? The mind boggles, Mrs Henderson, the mind boggles.

15. Give as much joy to the small things in life as you do to the large. Which is why me and my ex split up.

16. If at first you don’t succeed, then maybe catching bullets with your teeth isn’t the job for you.

17. If you don’t think you can get it out, why the hell did you put it in there in the first place?

Poetry has no relevance.

Poetry has no relevance. That’s what I hear a lot. Oi, knobhead! Your poetry has no relevence! That’s a hell of a heckle. From my publisher.

But it does. Poetry is useful. Honestly.

I was in an airport. Just minding my own business. Just browsing. Hanging around the arrivals gate with a sign reading JUSTIN BIEBER, you know, just on the off chance. When all of a sudden is call comes up. ‘Is there a poet in the building? This is an emergency! We need a poet!’

Turns out this plane was in trouble. The pilot had collapsed at the controls having had an allergic reaction to a Pot Noodle. And then the co pilot, on hearing that the plane was full of zither players on the way back from a zither convention, succumbed to an undiagnosed zither phobia and became a gibbering, incoherent wreck.

So I’m up in air traffic control and they’ve got a zither player in the cockpit and I’m relaying to him the types of controls that he should be operating.

The aerilon speed flaps are the colour of fine Devonshire cream in the early evening sun.

The throttle control knobs are kind of shaped like a veteran Shakespearean actor stooping to pick up a 20p coin

The rudder pedal is broad and flat like a clumsy child’s first attempt to draw a map of Utah.

The undercarriage lever looks like ennui.

And we did it, we landed that plane, between us, soothing it down to a very smooth landing lulled by sonnets and iambic pentameter, just a classy addition of enjambement on its glide slope, we landed it, oh yes, we did, and everyone was saved!

And at that moment I saw the potential of poetry in all its glory to affect the world as a power to be used for the greater good, elevating ordinary souls above the gods and deities, for are we not all messiahs of the modern age, we poets, we brave poets, pens aloft like spears of triumph!

Poetry. Is. Useful.
Hooray!

And then I got home to my normal life of crushing loneliness.

Things I think about when I’m working on a project.

Things I think about when I’m working on a project.

Lately I’ve been putting a show together. In the old days it was simple, it was a process known as ‘putting a show together’. Now it’s called ‘project management’. I’ve been to plenty of meetings where I tell people I’m putting a show together and they say, ‘oh, you’re project managing?’ And some even say, ‘Oh, you’re a theatre maker?’, which is something I’d not heard before and I had to go and look it up. But apparently I’m in project management now and the one rule for project management is that I shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

The second rule, apparently, is that I can’t just see the bigger picture.

You’ve got to narrow down and focus. But if you narrow down and focus then you lose sight of the bigger picture. So you’ve got to have one eye on the bigger picture while at the same time you narrow down and focus. Often though you may not even see the bigger picture, so you forget what the bigger picture looks like because you’ve been narrowing down and focussing, or perhaps the bigger picture has become another picture entirely while you were narrowing down and focussing, and now that it’s big picture which doesn’t even include the bits that you’ve been narrowing down and focusing on, and the bits that you’ve been narrowing down and focusing on are now out of the picture.

And then you get bogged down in too much detail. Is the bigger picture even a picture? Is the bigger picture portrait or landscape? Why am I faffing about with the narrowing down when the bigger picture needs attention too? And how big is the bigger picture and how much wider is it than the narrowing down? And if I narrow down how far can I narrow down before narrow becomes too narrow? And anyway, who’s checking on all this?

It’s at times like this that I just decide to give up and go and make a cake.

How we danced to the time of music!

How we danced to the time of music!

An autumn park an hour before dark
A council workman leaf blower and bare deciduous branches
Stark against a late low sunshine sky,
The world itself aching to monochrome, a
Glimpse of anorak amid the lengthening shadows.
It was you.

Caught up, tapped your shoulder, you turned and smile
And the years melt like Himalayan snows,
And we hug on the path by the tennis court nets,
Zigzagged and crisscrossed by chain link silhouettes.

You look good, I say, so do you, he lies,
It’s been so long, I can see in his eyes
That it takes a while for the years to unwind,
To bring the details of our shared life to mind,
He’s handsome still, but in a way much more rugged
Than the man I so often hugged as if he were the meaning
Of life
But I was young and stupid
And so was he.

How we danced to the time of music!

He says,
Let us not talk of the past,
Let us build up the present moment,
Rejoice in our shared existence,
Acknowledge the nights that would never end,
Celebrate the fact that we are still friends
And love this present time,
This moment right now,
And this moment too,
That’s what we should do.
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

The contentment we feel as we stand in this park,
Is more than our past, and it will make its mark,
So that we might celebrate the very essence of
Our being here
As two distinct people.
Let’s take this absolute second, this one,
And this one too,
And maybe not that one,
But this one definitely,
And rise with them above the years
We spent together.
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

Let us dance divine in the moment!
And twirl amid the autumn leaves!
And rejoice in the fact that
Two incredibly sexy and gorgeous young men
Can meet in a park so randomly
And not immediately ponder baser activities
As if a giant machine has zapped from us
All ability to lose ourselves to throbbing temptation,
And also,
I have a bus to catch.
Let us celebrate this!
Why?, I asked.
Ah jeez, he said.

Life is a journey we only pass once.
The skies above, weather patterns,
The subtle moving of continental shelves,
Evolution in its slow mutation,
The planets a dance in this ceaseless rotation,
The absolute thrill of being alive,
The miracle of time, the fact that we thrive
Against all odds in our permanent drive
Through time, oh, it is a blessing!
So let us, oh, let us come together
And celebrate this, the present moment, now!

Why?, I asked.
Was it really so bad, was I really so mad?
The moment it ended, did you feel kind of glad?
Did I not provide the love that you needed,
Comfort and companionship on which you feeded
Like a ravenous beast, a ghost for the haunting,
Was being with me really so daunting?
That you wipe me so brazen from your own history,
Wipe the slate clean, pretend it wasn’t to be?
But you were my lover, my one and my only,
And the nights ever since have been so very lonely
In a world that now ached, I managed so slowly
To lift my head nigh and feel slightly less lowly
That . . Hang on . .
Is this about the two hundred quid that you owe me?

I don’t know what you’re taking about, he replied,
And off he suddenly ran.

The Tea Philosopher

(Poem written for my show, Spout, but ultimately not used)

The tea philosopher

The tea philosopher arrived
And sat himself down in the middle
Of the tea shop.
Dressed entirely in black,
With a beret too,
Just like the philosophers you see on tv,
He was only charging five hundred quid
For a full days philosophising,

We kept the tea coming,
Of course,
Because that’s why he was there.
Here you go, we would say.
Socrateas.
He didn’t laugh.
And he sipped it contemplatively,
And every now and then,
Jotted something down in his notebook.

At opportune moments he would
Hold his forefingers in the air,
As if to say, quiet,
The truth is almost upon me.
And we dared hardly breathe.
And we crowded in.
And we watched as he worked
And pondered
And probed the human condition
And we could scarcely believe it
At the end of the day
When he put down his pen,
Stood up, and cleared his throat
And said,

Without the spout,
The tea
Will just stay in the pot.

He then
Gathered his belongings,
Took his pay check,
And left.

That was worth it,
Then.

I’ve gone back to writing short stories! (But I’m still doing comedy performance poetry).

All I ever wanted to be when I was younger was a writer. This is really the only ambition I’ve ever had. My mother had a small bookcase with sliding glass doors and because of this, I’d always seen books as special, and as soon as I could walk, I wanted to be around books and write them, too.

I’d write at first school, filling up pages of scrap paper with words during the lunch hours and break times in which it was raining. I’ve always loved racing days because of this, knowing that I would be able to write instead of run around a playground.

I continued writing short stories all through my teenage years. My initial style was comedy and silliness inspired by my love of stand up and comedy films when I was younger. However, around 1993, something horrific happened. The horrific thing that happened was that I discovered Frank Kafka.

This opened up a whole new world to me, and I now wanted to be an existentialist, a writer of worth and note. Proust, Camus, Borges became my heroes, and I would watch the Booker Prize the same way that my friends watched the FA Cup Final. The result of this was that my writing became ever so serious and worthy and deep and, frankly, unreadable.

This lasted up to around the year 2000 when I started writing comedy short stories again. I rediscovered the art of silliness and whimsy and the joy of going to a writers circle and making people laugh. I won a few competitions, too. Nothing major, but enough to make me feel that this was something I could actually do.

In 2008 I discovered performance poetry, and then spent the majority of the next ten years writing performance poems and performing them, and amazingly, making some sort of career out of doing so. I finally got published and even ended up on the TV and this is still a surprise to me even now. You all know what I do. I make spoken word comedy shows and I take them around the UK and I’m having a whale of a time.

But . .

I’ve just taken a month and a bit off from performing. It’s the longest break I’ve had in ages. During this time, with no gigs to rehearse for or deadlines, I’ve been rediscovering the joys of short stories. And it’s all come back to me! The joy of creating situations and characters, the art of narrative, and even the joy of sitting at a desk and writing, (as most of my poems are created while standing at a music stand). Indeed, is quite forgotten how much like going into a trance it is to write short stories, to become absolutely enveloped in the story and the scenario, at one with the characters and their personalities.

So this is my big declaration. I’ve gone back to short stories! Ok, I haven’t left spoken word and I’m still creating new poems and material, but it’s a reminder that there’s something else that I can do.

The biggest thrill has come with how easy it is now to submit work to magazines. Indeed, this is something that I never used to do at all. And I am very pleased to announce, too, that I’ve already had two stories accepted for publication.

Spoken word and comedy performance poetry will continue to be my full time focus, naturally, but it feels like I’ve become more in touch with myself through writing comedy short stories, and more in touch with the dreams of the version of myself who would look out the window and see the rain and think, wow, I’m going to do some writing today!

Here’s one of my stories, on Ink, Sweat and Tears:

http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/pages/?p=20781