16 Shorts

SELF DESTRUCTION

I have often sat and wondered
Why I haven't got a wife -
It's because I've sat and wondered
When I ought to get a life.


DROP DEAD GORGEOUS

Though you say that love will make us,
Heat us, burn us, shape us, forge us,
You are one of nature's fakers
So why don't you drop dead, gorgeous.


NEARLY FULL TIME

I try to make a telling pass,
Move forward though I'm playing back,
But as he scythes across the grass
The referee is wearing black.


THE LESSON OF LOVE

Friends cannot ever be lovers,
Lovers can never be friends.
That's what the whole world discovers,
This is the way the world ends.


RHYTHM AND BLUES GIRL

You're such a teasy, vexy girl
But I would like to trust in you:
You're such a squeezy, sexy girl
So I would like to thrust in you.


NO GOING BACK

Just when we start to feel at home
The world deprives us of our breath:
Our life is not a palindrome,
But one-way street from birth to death.


LABORATORY LIFE

We cannot call ourselves "myself,"
We have no soul inside,
We live in test-tubes on a shelf:
We are the clone that cried.


THE POWER OF SEX

There's a message in Oedipus Rex,
It's the terrible power of sex
And the too many lives it has wrecked
(Better off in a celibate sect).


PEGGY SUE

Once I knew a girl called Peggy,
Lovely, lissom, lithe and leggy.
She broke a leg so I said: "You
Know who's to blame, so Peggy, sue!"


MONK'S HABIT

I thought that the world was my oyster
When you said that you'd be my girl
But now I inhabit the cloister
For you were the grit, not the pearl.


LOVE'S REASONS

Throughout all the changing seasons
Love's the thing that has its reasons:
True devotion, constant duty,
Total worship of your beauty.


BACK ON DRY LAND

I tried to walk on water
Now my feet's back on the ground
She was someone's daughter
The best I've ever found.


DOUBLE OR QUITS

My life is in trouble,
My conscience is rubble,
I try to do better
But problems all double.


ACROBAT

She can twist or stick like glue,
She can swing and she can do,
She can dance and she can can-can,
Somewhat better than a man can.


SPRING TIME

You realise your effect on me -
You're like a spring-time willow tree
And how your hair, so light and blonde,
Reminds me of a bracken frond.


HUNTINGDONSHIRE

I was born in a place that no longer exists,
Full of mystical marshes and good marshy mists,
Where the fenlands are wet and the atmosphere wild
And the man in the moon hasn't ever once smiled.

Andrew Belsey

If you've any comments on his poems, Andrew Belsey would be pleased to hear from you.