Unbound 2017: A Taste of Babble On

If….with apologies to Kipling (Rudyard not Mr)
by Elvis McGonagall
 
If you can keep your daddy’s dollars free from tax
If you can grope women and put them in their place
If you can tweet the world alternative facts
If you can kick sand in every Muslim’s face
If you can have a “great relationship” with “the blacks”
If you can wear your arrogance like cheap cologne
If you can feed your empty soul with golden Big Macs
If you can blow your own tiny trombone
If you can contradict yourself inside a minute
If you know you’ve bought the race before it’s run
Yours is America and all the fear in it
And – which is more – you’ll be the President my son 
 
January 2017
“My whole life is about winning” (D.Trump) Sad! 
 
A full collection of Elvis McGonagall’s poems from 2003 to 2017 entitled Viva Loch Lomond! has just been published by Burning Eye Books

Love Poem, written in haste
(with Autocorrect on)
by Brian Bilston
 
O what Brave New Worm is this
that holes you, my sweet darting love?
I see you in the stairs that twinkle
up in the heavy above.
 
Your light shins down upon me
and sets my heart on fir.
You stir up my emoticons
and fill me with dessert.
 
I gazebo upon your lovely Facebook,
your rainy nose, sweet, unmissable,
the blue-greed eyes like limpet pools,
your petty mouse, juicy, kissable.

Come with meat, Angel of my Drums,
hold my ham, journalist into the night,
and together lettuce explore the worm,
over the horizontal and out of sigh.

From You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston, published by Unbound

Rose
by Vanessa Kisuule

I'm somewhere in the middle
Between a child
Soothed to sugared silence
With a spoonful of Calpol
And an old maid
Looking down the neck
Of a empty bottle
Wondering where her youth went
These are the sickly sweet times
Where solace comes
In the false promise of tomorrow
And a mug of cheap rose wine
Pour yourself a measure
You fleeting piece of glory
We have all the time in the world
And no time at all
So pull up a chair
Ferment with me

Vanessa Kisuule’s debut collection Joyriding The Storm, is published by Burning Eye Books