101. Al McClimens
Unemployed Waster and Sonnet Polisher
Al McClimens was born and brought up in Bellshill some time after Matt Busby and just before Teenage Fanclub. Now an unemployed waster, he is fond of a claret and hopelessly devoted to reading novels. After a long and undistinguished career in the NHS and later in H.E. he took early retirement to polish his sonnets. Don Paterson has never heard of him.
He lives in Sheffield, the capital of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, where he plans to grow older disgracefully. He will work for food. Please give generously.
His first full collection, published in 2021, ‘The Other Infidelities’ is available via Pindrop Press (www.pindroppress.com). You should buy it. No, seriously, it’s actually very good.
And if that’s not enough he has a more recent (Feb 2024) pamphlet The Placebo Effect published by Hybriddreich Ltd.
Poems
How to Write a Shakesperean Sonnet Crazy Blues and Twos Dead Poets' Society Daedalus in the High Peak And Then I Kissed Her
How to Write a Shakesperean Sonnet
…for whose dear love I rise and fall (Sonnet 151)
She told me in all seriousness that I could fuck her if I’d just write her a sonnet. Shakespearean, mind, she said. I don’t want any of that foreign muck, quoth she of a ‘dun’ coloured hue. I speak as I find, she went on. And you, sirrah, may hang your codpiece by my bed for the night. Now, take up thy pen and make sure it rhymes itself correctly, please. I’ll expect you this evening at seven sharp. Until then… I wrote the fourteen lines, metrically tight, neat as ninepence, the little ducks all in a row. And yes, we did the deed. It was…well, alright I suppose. Maybe I’ll have another go but perhaps a haiku next time, not a sonnet. Yes, I’ll suggest that and let the lady think upon it. < < <
Crazy
For Willie Nelson
He’ll be an architect one day, said Auntie Nettie, admiring my Lego brickwork house. Designed to my own spec – bungalow ranch style, two-car garage, wide lawn in front - it was, admittedly, one of my better efforts and I still had plans for a loft extension. At school that week, teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. She did well not to laugh. That was then – this is now. Now I want to build things with words, write songs where you can taste the desert air and hear the heartbreak echo in the arroyo where the coyotes howl. Now I want to be Willie Nelson. It’s crazy when you stop to think about it. But it’s true what they say. When I consider then and now, well, gee, it’s funny how time slips away. < < <
Blues and Twos
So she bought herself a sports car and a vibrator the day she turned fifty - lipstick red with wire wheels - the roadster, that is. The Magic Wand was black and took six triple As. In a month she had two speeding tickets and a fetish for sex in car parks. With the top down. Next she started driving naked. At night at first. Then during the day. The crash made the front pages. With pictures. Six months later she wore white in her wheelchair as she married the paramedic in a church ceremony that convinced her friends she'd lost her mind as well. It didn't last. Cripple sex was fun at first, he said, but now it was like bringing work home. He walked out the next day - 's alright for some. < < <
Dead Poets’ Society
So, we were stood there in the pissing rain in a foreign graveyard and, this is the good bit, she goes, Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water…I says, well, they reckon the rain in Spain falls mainly on the cemetery…I start to explain but then I remember we’re in Italy, I’m in the shit and I can tell by her look she’s having none of it. Still, two more days and we’re back on the plane… …in the hotel that night she says she wants to read me something. Wot, like a bedtime story, I say. She sighs. A bad sign. For once, just try listening, ok? Poetry, apparently. It was short. And now he’s dead. Bloke that wrote it. His grave earlier. It was a sonnet. Whatever that is. The only good poet’s a dead poet? < < <
Daedalus in the High Peak
They’re throwing themselves off Mam Tor again. And the maze that caged the Minotaur was built by Daedalus. They oh so lazily float, delicate as falling cherry blossom, a pretty mote in the burning eye of the sun. And he told the fly boy about his altitude. Kids, eh? They think the sky is theirs for the taking. It was late. Most had gone home or were in the tourist bars of Castleton while their 4x4s cooled their heels in the car park. A few moths hung on in there. It was almost too dark to shoot. Early stars were out for a gander, the blue of the night drawing a curtain down. The thread grew taught when I saw one about to put the moon in eclipse. The bull appears, snorts at the gate and the shutter trips. < < <
And then I Kissed Her
what do you get when you fall in love? gravity is implicated somewhere, somehow… answers on a postcard, please…and have you seen planet earth recently…what does it look like from the ISS…I saw two buzzards yesterday…those big lazy looping circles, the mewing cries, raptors in the sky with diamonds…I looked into her eyes…it was like being in a movie, like we had a script…I’m ready for my close-up…oh, please… an out-of-body experience…the ISS rocks around the clock…well, it’s one for the money…and what did the octopus say to the tiger shark…two for the show…here’s that sick squid I owe you…three to get ready…it’s all about perspective…as I said to the doctor…by the time you’ve read this the ISS will have sailed the Atlantic…for all the good these suppositories are doing…they see shadows envelop whole continents… I may as well be shoving them up my arse…yo ho ho and a bottle of rum bugger – I took her hand in mine… on the way home I saw a badger crossing the road… insert punchline here…I can’t remember old whasser name?... the ISS will be visible from midnight tonight – visible to the naked eye… and…I climbed up onto the roof…from the west until 1 a.m…and then… and there it was, blinking in disbelief… …me not them… I waved …just to the left of Venus …I asked what do you get when you fall in love…and then I …and all the stars…and then I kissed…and all the stars were shining bright… and then I kissed her… < < <