Football Classics
In the world of half-time entertainment, food is all.
Heaven’s pies, cow’s tea, dogs bloodied on a sponge sub.
As we catch up with scores elsewhere,
pixels of sound pepper God’s stale-priced air.
What is that? Is that a harp?
We lose ourselves across a map of sticky footprints,
meditate our way back to a stand of plastic thrones
to see the teams, readied, players steaming in the cold,
stringing their puppet legs up and down waiting on the ref.
The sound still rules over us, ripples through the crowd
like fingers that tickle the big screen awake, to show
the ref, in his room, plucking the fuck out of the king’s strings,
that golden ear we’ve only ever seen against the darkness
of a weeping cold pint of Guinness.
Peter Raynard is the editor of Proletarian Poetry (www.proletarianpoetry.com) and a member of Malika Booker’s Poetry Kitchen. His poems have featured in a number of magazines, and his collection, The Common Five-Eighters is forthcoming from Smokestack Books.