Character

A character trying to be English
Is not a Welshman trying to be a Scot
For a Frenchman playing with the Irish
Is lost when the German is in Japan with a robot.
The Canadian playing with the American
Questions the Brazilian waxing lyrical with the African.
Then the Peruvian is selling coffee to the Columbian
Lost in strains of medicine with the Swiss and Portuguese.
The Queen of Spain pleases the Dutch
And the Maltese falcons fly south to Madagascar for the winter
The Australian demonises the British for his ancestry
While the Chinaman accepts the Llamas from Tibet back home.
These are the things my garden gnomes watch
While I hustle amongst the leaves and raze the lawn.

In such a way the world is a tripid thing to spell out loud
While the mature men travel and do business with the proud.

AI Summary

It’s a playful but pointed reflection on how national identities blur, clash, and parody one another, as people try on cultures like ill‑fitting clothes — the Englishman pretending, the Frenchman wandering, the German in Japan with a robot, the Australian resenting his British ancestry, the Tibetan llamas returning home — all watched by the poet’s garden gnomes as if the whole world were a miniature theatre; and in the end, the poem recognises that the global tangle of identity, commerce, ancestry, and pride is impossible to spell out cleanly, even as mature men travel the world doing business with the same old seriousness.

Sideliner

At home alone waiting for the phone
Connected by disconnected
Feeling like A.I. was one with the world
Still chasing the girls
Adrift on the ocean of too many botherings
Waiting for the Singh that sings
Of too many tomorrows
When he knows my sorrow
And the fat lady brings me to my knees in Church.

The way I lurched and waited for some comeuppance
To be brought back to the estuary of graduation
Where drowning was not an option
Like the possibility of the woman in the red gown
At an Oxford Ball
Save it all for (Jimmy) Sommerville College now
I need not know how:
>> The mentionables are removed for another crowned pleasing show.

O.S. is the best way to go
And not too personal into the showtimes and matinees
Very most performance in the technology of the U.K.
Aside from the Australian who can compare with transference
And transgender debates.
Will they still be my mates
The crew on London Thames
Boat parties and the men with the manes
Driving Miss Daisy
Sending me careless
{Crazy World}
One real woke true:
Is that for you.

I remember him well
The boy that did tell
Of my corporate weakness
And their high and dry light.
These are the days of too many frights
Memories and cave ins when I don’t sleep at night
Worried and awake about what happened? Why did the failed man address me at Port?

AI Summary

Your piece moves through the loneliness of waiting for connection, the sense of being “connected by disconnected,” and the ache of feeling adrift in a world that keeps shifting around you. You weave memories of family, church, university fantasies, London nights, gender debates, and corporate humiliations into a portrait of someone who has lived through too many moments of being misread or dismissed. Beneath the references is a deeper emotional thread: the longing for belonging, the fear of being judged, the confusion of friendships that changed, and the unresolved sting of a man who once confronted you in a professional setting and left you questioning your worth. The poem ends in a place of insomnia and self‑interrogation, where the past keeps returning in fragments — not to punish you, but because you’re still trying to understand why certain moments hurt as much as they did, and what they say about the man you’ve become.

Polarity

The poet’s boss
The landmine’s cost
Septuagenarian can see through
Walkabout Bar is new growth
Walk through sheet is coming up tops
Telling all with kisses who will sell up shop:
The Shoop Shoop Song
Snoop won’t be long.
:: Lunchtime laptop laughter
>> Writer’s block at 60 with daughter
How much can I write?
Don’t give up without a fight
Each verse is new to me
Yesteryears patterns were there for them to see
Over the hill of history
Noble Truths and Estate and Properties
The lines just got fiercer and fiercer
Free and fine
Rhyming and timing
Representing rhetoric
The current climate is changing
(Change without a face)
Words that spread around the room
I When will the last page come?
II Is all destroyed by four fingers typing and an adjacent thumb?

AI Summary

Your poem moves between wit and weariness, opening with the poet’s “boss” and the landmine’s cost before spiralling into a meditation on ageing, writer’s block, and the pressure of producing meaning in a world that keeps shifting. The references — Walkabout Bar, The Shoop Shoop Song, Snoop, Noble Truths, Estates and Properties — create a collage of cultural memory and personal history, showing how each verse becomes a small act of resistance against time. The poem’s emotional centre lies in the tension between the desire to keep writing and the fear that everything might be undone by “four fingers typing and an adjacent thumb.” It’s a portrait of a writer confronting the limits of his own body, the weight of his past, and the relentless demand to turn experience into art, even as the last page looms somewhere out of sight.