Follow the yellow brick road

We both knew all the words

To each of the numbers

And most of the steps

But neither wanted to be first

To break into song

Cowardly as the proverbial lion

Surrounded by the judgement

Of our peers and their puerile

Forays into social exclusion

At a dumbed-down video sleepover

Where MGM was not associated

With Leo or Slats,

Black and white was ‘boring’

And they had never heard of

Noir, or the Studio System

But could recite the calorific content

Of black coffee, chicken soup

And the price of keeping

On their uppers

Slim Pickings

I cannot watch another film

Filled with wispy heroines

And their ‘to die for’ figures

Those dreams were snuffed out

Alongside Diana’s candle in the wind

Like Havisham’s Estella

They are conceived in spite

To break lonely hearts

No, give me a fat-hearted flick

With plaster food on every table

And I will feed my soul

In comfort

Tabloid Catechism

Spite and polish will make her shine brighter
The author can buff with insults and see how quickly
She loses her inferior interior, slickly she grows
In favour of a sickly exterior shell that glows
With borrowed pride in her rented hide she’ll ride
Surrounded by critics and dealers to feel her, peel her
Unseat her, to beat her and shape and defeat her
In poisonous rows of inelegant prose the photos
Nipping her waist and in ever more haste
To keep blowing her nose, and her manicured toes
In uncomfortable shoes, body-conned to abuse
Shamed with glamorous phrases, ungenerous phases
More strokes of the pen to keep her, steep her,
Drowning in ten shades of newsprint, our views print
The choice of the people, the lawyers, the troops
With the focus of every new interest group
The murkier water of sister and daughter
Whose under-age pictures proclaim they fall shorter
Their innocence sold for a penny a piece
To shift Sunday supplements, pay off police
With the politics slanted to left or to right
You can broker new peace or prepare for a fight
And consistency needn’t concern you this year
Your excuse is the public reflection of fear
There’s an honesty to it, this devilish deal
An emotive hard-pressing of Biblical zeal
We wrote it, stand by it, will bribe to keep quiet
Our right to the sale of page three and her diet
What’s Mystic and listed and sicker, more twisted
What’s darker and deeper than truth that’s insisted
We’ll publish it, dressed in the finest of rags
And polish with spite all protesters and slags

The Cuckoo and the Nightingale

Tinkle on the ivories
You’re waiting in the wings
Listening as others wheeze
The skinny croaker ‘sings’
She got the job through hours spent
Mouth open, on her knees
Her sound resembles native Kent
While dulcet tones that please
You warble on, just marking time
Stood, shuffled to one side
The notes that soar not hers, but mine
A gift they chose to hide
So as dramatic climax nears
On anorexic face
Fat lady singing through the tears
While mask remains in place

Di A(na) Bolique

What are we to do these days?
Eating is our latest craze.
People suffer dreadful guilt
Over sustenance they’ve spilt.
Yet food is not in short supply
So I don’t understand the why:
Some stuff their faces, comforting
While others starve just to stay thin!
No, I just cannot fathom it
Such depth of feeling over shit.
Where once we ate to stay alive,
Fed our bodies to survive;
Now boutique-style, we pick and choose
And body-mass we vow to lose.
Each New Years Eve that comes and goes,
We weigh ourselves and try on clothes
To chart our progress over time
And wail about our new waistline.
I’ll never get the reason why
Some choose to eat and some to die.