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the poet
After co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox for 16 years, having one of the highest-rated shows on BBC Radio Four, and winning many awards, Robin Ince resigned from the BBC over political differences. Two-time winner of the Bookseller Association's Author of the Year, he's also a one-time winner of Celebrity Mastermind – despite forgetting calcium is the main element in chalk. Robin's books include Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Bibliomaniac and I'm a Joke and So Are You. He's also written poetry collections Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth and Let the Quiet Ones Rise.
the poems
The Quiet One
Fingers relentlessly unpicking
The anxious alopecia of another woolly jumper.
Under the desk,
Skin picked to the quick.
Stomach sick.
Dread accelerates.
Thumb nail digs.
Wishing for a note to be an absentee
From another bout of insults and failures in PE.
Pierced by every slight.
Ponders possibility of escape …
The safest place?
The library, in the lunch break,
Seek solace in a comic book.
Is this forever
This shitty, shitty world that drowns you?
One day you’ll see
From all of that agony
Has come forth someone
So much more complex.
Intriguing.
Resplendent.
Make it through;
We're waiting for you.
You will be feted.
We will be magnificent.
Judi and the Trees
She talks of oak
and yew and ash
How woods evoke
The personalities of those
Both gone
And in the trees
Alive
How branch and bark
And leaf and sap
Can be heard to flow
And mycorrhizal networks yap
Nothing's still
In Nunhead cemetery
Out of a sun-starved tomb
A tree has found the room
To shatter the mason’s art
Struck free
The grave now falls apart
Long-gone names
The dates eroded
Moss thrives
Ivy climbs
Six feet under (maybe more)
Anonymous atoms under graveyard floor
Still feed the branches
Trees and leaves
You see in death, you can still achieve
Even the Hellbound
Have something growing Heavenward
Torch Song Elegy
for Gene Kelly
Late Saturday night
We reject the high life
The clubs and the bars
For warm brie
And broadway stars
Elated around the kitchen table
Plenty of Sondheim
No Mack and Mabel
Little bit of Judy
Some Shirley MacLaine
Another oatcake ... 'Oh!
We forgot Singin’ in the Rain!'
This is how we banish the Grinch
Singing along
To Hedwig and the Angry Inch
The delight in sharing what inspires
Sometimes a torch song
Sometimes choirs
This is how to spend the hours
In awe of Leslie Gore
In debt to Bernadette
Talking of the progressive might
Of Betty White
And how she made the other Golden Girls corpse
We ramp up the camp with each further glass
You know
Some nights, just some nights,
it’s even better than diazepam,
To sit with a friend,
And sing I am what I am
Publishing credits
The Quiet One / Torch Song Elegy for Gene Kelly:
Let the Quiet Ones Rise (Flapjack Press)
Judi and the Trees: Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth
(Flapjack Press)
Author photo: © Richard Davis