Antony Rowland
Manchester
Manchester I gave you fifty years and you gave me a crock of it.
Manchester twenty pence and your skyscrapers chipping the fog.
I can’t stand your piss-pot canals and gob-fulls of grey.
Manchester when will you sack Shaun Ryder, your main cultural advisor?
Go fuck yourself with your urban beaches.
I can’t get over last winter’s lack of happy-chappy comedy.
I won’t write my poem until you need a hanky again to cross town.
Manchester when will you stop claiming it doesn’t rain?
When will you jive naked in your copious hail?
When will you sing through your Victorian graves?
When will you brew a decent beer? Your only beer was Boddingtons, and you couldn’t even keep that.
Why is Alexandra Park so full of tears?
Manchester when will you send your eggs to Hulme?
I’m sick of your demands to be business-facing, enterprising, entertaining, client-focussed, integrated, impact-directed, market-orientated and community-centred. Fuck the community.
When can I go into Greggs bakery and buy a vanilla slice with my good looks?
Manchester after all it is you and I who are perfect, not Leeds.
Your industrial past is too much for me.
You made me want to be Eric Cantona’s car.
There must be some other way to bridge the Irwell.
Robert Powell is in Tadcaster I don’t think he’ll come back it’s not rocket science.
Are you nawty or is this some form of posse swaggering?
I’m trying to come to a semi-colon.
I refuse to give up my obsession with Peel Park haiku.
Manchester stop doing the pimp roll I know what you’re up to.
Manchester the elm leaves went out with French New Wave Cinema.
I haven’t read the Reporter for months, everyday somebody gets filched outside Sainsburys.
Manchester I feel sentimental about the urban beaches that never happened.
Manchester I used to be young when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke menthol cigarettes every chance I get.
I sit in my boudoir for days on end staring at the multiple piping system under the sink.
When I go to Peking Express I get drunk and eat the string piglets with dim sum.
My mind is Piccadilly Bus Station on a wet November evening.
You should have seen me reading Enid Blyton.
My collegial mentor thinks I’m a fucking nutcase.
I won’t sing Land of Hope and Glory, Land of Liverpool Too.
I have moments of clarity and vibrations from Saturn.
Manchester I haven’t told you what I did to the caretaker after he left some milk in my office, disturbed me in the shower, and then axed my desk in half during the night, the dirty fucker.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be determined by The X-Factor?
I’m obsessed by The X-Factor.
I stare at Simon Cowell every week.
His piggy eyes slink past me every time I avoid the newsagents.
I saw him in the basement of the Clifford Whitworth Library.
He’s always telling us about responsibility. Judges on the X-Factor are serious. They want us to do our best. Everyone’s better apart from me.
It occurs to me that I am Simon Cowell.
Simon, you’re writing poems again.
Manchester is rising against Simon Cowell.
I’d better consider the precint’s resources.
The resources consist of two dog-end rollies millions of mis-spent fireworks and twenty-five places to buy barms, not baps.
I say nothing about the night’s Manhattan Island nor the millions of scallies who live in my flower pots under the light of 500 Zippos.
I have abolished several lap-dancing bars in town, but they don’t listen to me.
My ambition is to be Pro-Vice Chancellor for Enterprise despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
Manchester how can I write about your bus station when you have a tendency to concrete over sunken rose gardens and call it art?
I will continue like Lester Piggott my haikus are as individual as his nags more so they’re all different sexes.
Manchester I will sell you narrative poems for £5 each, £5 down from my epic about the Manchester canal system which thankfully I could never finish.
Manchester free the posse five.
Manchester save Simon Cowell from a boiling-oil death.
Manchester that woman from Girls Aloud must never die or get fat.
Manchester I am the reincarnation of Ian Curtis only this time with a walrus moustache and George Michael earrings.
Manchester you don’t want to go to war with Salford.
Manchester it’s them bad Scousers.
Them Scousers them Scousers and them Yorkie twats. And them Scousers.
Liverpool wants to eat us alive. Liverpool’s power mad. She wants to take culture from our canals.
Her wants to grab Warrington. Her wants a City Life.
Her wants to drain our Ship Canal. Help.
Manchester this is deadly serious.
Manchester this is the impression I get from examining the walls of your lime- tiled pubs.
Manchester is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the Chophouse.
Manchester you tart, it’s true, I love you; love you, that is, like the happy in a happy marriage.
Manchester I’m shouldering your whiney condensation.