Poems on the Internet

The king sent for his very wise men
to ask for a rhyme for 'W'.
They sat and thought for a very long time
but could not think of a single rhyme,
so he said "I'm sorry to trouble you".

When I lived in London and travelled by tube I enjoyed Poems on the Underground -- poems printed as adverts on the tube trains, sponsored by the Poetry Society.

I liked some enough to scribble them down as I travelled.

Others I picked up from our child's poetry books and other sources.

• Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

• The Traveller Raymond Wilson

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T. S. Eliot)
  for my father

• Love

• Dolor

• Hope

• life

• philosophy

• gardening and gardens

• flowers

• fairies

• dead birds

• not dead cat (for our cat Chimney who died in the summer of 1995 at the age of about 13)

• property developers

• Fears of Flying (Not really a poem: this was written by someone I knew a few years back, and I liked it so much I blagged a copy of it off him.)

• a piece I heard Maddie Prior do, decades ago, in a Steeleye Span gig on the radio.

• This one was in the news a few years ago when there was as a storm about it being set for study by sixth-formers somewhere. Typically the storm was about the f-word rather than the poet's bleak -- not to say misanthropic -- view of humanity in general and parenthood in particular.
  Nowadays it is probably some sort of offence in the United States (formerly "Land of the Free" :-) to transmit this by electronic means.

• These are for US senator Exon and other proponents of the Communications Decency Act; to the Munich authorities who leaned on Compuserve to ban certain newsgroups from their service and to Compuserve who capitulated and withdrew the newsgroups; to the German authorities who tried to ban access to a Canadian web site because they didn't like the content of some of its pages; to the French government who tried to ban a book about the late President Mitterand; to McDonalds who have tried to ban criticism of their company; to the Singaporean government who are trying to sanitise the internet in their country; to the Zambian president who banned a newspaper in his country; to the Chinese who are trying to set up The Great Firewall of China to protect their citizens from dangerous Western thoughts (whilst keen to open up their economy to Western trade) ... to NetNanny, CyberPatrol, CyberSitter SafeSurf and other internet censorship devices ... the list goes on ...