Goodbye cruel year, I’m glad you’ve gone away.
Out of my bedroom I watch as sparrows,
And blue tits, hop about in top branches
Of the red berried cotoneaster.
They queue in turn for the nut dispenser.
Sometimes they wait whilst two fat woodpeckers
Eat their fill in a highfalutin way,
As if the birdnuts are their property,
Strong arming smaller birds out the picture.
It’s not cold enough for the birds to eat
Any cotoneaster berries yet,
Perhaps in mid January they will.
Meanwhile hundreds of people die each day,
We’ll all be vaccinated come Easter,
So news editors blare in their headlines.
By then we might bury forty thousand
More coronavirus nineteen victims.
The madness of twenty twenty goes on.
Meanwhile a nuthatch arrives, pluckily
Shoulders greedy woodpecker to one side.
If we could emulate nuthatches,
And shove bent politicians to one side
Perhaps new normal might just be better.
Robin Redbreast watches and sings alone,
Spring ain’t far off, he doesn’t like bird nuts.

Harry Rogers, in the Yellow Room, December 31st 2020.

Dance along edge of disaster
In hobnail boots whilst stupified
On heady fumes of Brexit deal.
People seriously question
Parliament’s ability
To make a correct decision
About health and safety issues.
Tens of thousands dead so far,
Spreaders are rife across the board,
Schools, full to brim, collapse each day,
Staff and pupils self isolate,
Again and again and again,
Hospitals pushed to the limit,
Rules that change on weekly basis,
Track and trace that will never work.
False hopes are raised about vaccines,
Cabinet goons claim victory
Against covid before it’s won.
The whole charade was bound to fail,
From herd immunity madness,
All the way through on off lockdowns.
This is no disaster movie,
Families are losing loved ones,
Each bad move Tory shit mistake
Echoed by Starmer, fucking fake!
Pandemic news gets worse by hour,
All this shit to regain power.
Mutation infects really fast,
The race is lost, the future’s past.
Still at least we ain’t got no-deal,
The hero’s done it, so unreal,
Pupils will train to test themselves,
The troops stand by to webinar,
The time to save so many lives,
Came and went in the blink of eyes.
Health experts cry catastrophe,
Still we are nowhere near the peak.
One year on and nothing can work,
Except for a total shutdown
Of public, private, everything.
No more deaths, zero tolerance,
The only way we can survive.
Some say fears are paranoia,
Maybe Boris needs a lawyer.
I wrote of pandemonium,
Nine months ago, right near the start,
Now army stands in every city,
If I’m not wrong, there won’t be pity.

Harry Rogers In the Yellow room, 30th December 2020

All those long lost, still, warm, thick summer days,
When butterflies struggle to flap their wings,
Ants retreat down into cool deep dug nests,
Birds shelter beneath leafy canopies.
When the air is as an old overcoat,
Engulfs your body, and fills up your lungs.
When thin clouds form above valleys below,
Imperceptible wisps and swirls at first,
Pressure rise and heat pulls moisture from earth.
As billowed white pillows turn darkest grey,
That thick earthy smell of rain on the wind,
Before the storm at the close of the day.
This is how it feels at this point in time.
Climate change, and economic failure
Joined in an obscene troilist tango
By a souped up, mutating, pandemic,
Are on a crash course to global meltdown.
This, the collapse of capitalism,
Was never forecast to happen this way,
Never in one almighty, chaotic,
Cataclysm of human stupidness.
Who can comprehend the sheer negligence
Of elitist global politicians.
The fucked anarchic internet structure,
Infects people’s minds with software somas,
Leaving them in thrall to techno wizards,
And their addictive artificial worlds.
Such atomisation negates action,
At the very moment when mass revolt
Is needed far more than ever before,
People are enslaved to online servers.
In the real world thin veneers peel away,
Destitute nouveau jobless, brought low by
Furlough, lockdowns, floods, fake news, false prophets,
Bamboozled by naked complexity,
Cannot survive without charged up smartphones.
When we should all be coming together,
Millions of thumb twiddlers clutch consoles.
Whilst public services vanish into
Private thiefdoms that suck our coffers dry,
Gamer junkies wind up almost insane,
Burnt out by adrenaline addiction.
Meanwhile, all around, the latest version
Of the new world order is fucked this time.
MSM looks like a Matrix remake,
All frontline services stretched to limit,
Yet, despite all of this, how we long for,
Stormclouds to break,rain and hail to cease,
That line of red tinged gold to appear on,
Horizon, and slowly explode into
Giant sunset where roses tinge with gold.
To attain this we need revolution.
Xanadu has to be more attractive,
Than Fortnight, Fifa, Scrabble or TikTok.
If we cannot tear these people away,
Sunsets and gold roses? Not anymore.

Harry Rogers, in the yellow room 25th December 2020.

Cold blows cancerous wind from evil den,
These are not lions, neither are they men.
Thugs besmirch our game whilst they boo the knee,
One more sick day in F Troop history.
Such cretinous shits, with borrowed salutes,
Who only act in packs, with blood on their boots,
Are vile, stupid, nazis through and through,
Coarse fronts, but we are many, they are few,
Fake football fans think they rule through fear,
With twisted logic, their pathetic cheer,
So last millennium, such stupid boys,
With clapped out chants and fat, farty faced noise,
Those swastika tattoos, that razored hair,
We never liked them, though they don’t, WE CARE.

Harry Rogers in the Red Bedroom, 6th December 2020.

Sing out the good news, by this time next year
This could be over, we’ll live without fear,
It’s sad that many died along the way,
But we ordered vaccines, now you must pay.
All our Tory friends have done rather well,
Selling fake systems that took us to hell.
We’re halfway through what looks like a mad plan,
To turn UK into Afghanistan.
Convince the people its all their own fault,
Then turn on each other and pay them nought.
Across the pond it’s exactly the same,
Bent politicians high on the blame game.
No one can leave so don’t call a cab,
I Roll up my sleeve, prepare for the jab.

Harry Rogers In the Yellow Room, 5th December 2020