Love out of season

Image by Luke Price on Flickr

When I first met her

In the springtime of life

Our hearts melted

Like the last snows.

Our love grew

Budding like the early leaf

In new green hollows.

When we strolled together

In the summer

Our lives entwined

Like ivy 

On the garden wall.

Our hope blossomed

In the sunshine of our eyes

And swelled

In the warmth

Of our touching.

When we parted in the autumn

Our tears and feelings

Fell spiralling downward 

like the leaves

Useless

Leaving our hearts bare and cold

Damp upon the forest floor.

And while the winter

Knocked upon the door

Like the early winds

We drifted

Irreparably apart.

1600 hours

Steve Wheeler (c) 3 October 1980

Beside the seaside

Photo by Andrew on Flickr

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

Where the oilslicks are lapping at the shore

Oh I do like to walk along the promenade

While my feet dodge the hypodermics and the tar

Oh I do like the sickly smell of ozone

And the sewerage that washes over me

There is nothing to compare

With breathing in polluted air

Beside the seaside

Beside the sea

0030 hours

Steve Wheeler © 8 July, 1997 

Wish list

I thought long and hard about beefing up my act

by trying to be streetwise and removing the tact

I thought about using a drum machine

and dressing in a style that was moody and mean

I tried to show I had my finger on the pulse

with a Liverpool accent, but it came out sounding false

I tried to hit the stage like a sex machine

but that didn't work because my shirt wasn't clean

The working class hero was another ploy

but it all fell flat and I started to annoy

I wanted my persona to be witty and wise

but a leopard can't change its spots no matter how it tries

I wanted my words to be smart and incisive

but it sounded insincere and it proved to be divisive

I wanted to appeal to the nation's youth

when all I really needed was to tell the truth

Steve Wheeler © 15 December, 2016

No picnic

Image from Pixabay

If you go down

To the woods today

You'll find

That they're not the same.

The trees are all gone

The land is stripped bare

And you and me

Are to blame.

For everybody in the UK

Is going down

For a Big Mac today

Today's the day

We're swapping the forests

For beef steak.

Midnight

No picnic by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England on 2 August 1993 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.