You be my ocean
I’ll be your peach
You be my peach factory
I’ll be your peach
You can sort me and slice me
In the seas, I’ll confide.
I’ll fit into your can
I’ll cushion your tide.
Naiveties and Nursery Rhymes
Words, poems, rhymes and songs
Author: Steve (page 2 of 3)
You be my evil mastermind
I’ll be your cat
You by my Ian Botham
I’ll be your bat.
I’ll purr at your plans
And help you hit fours
You can spoil me with linseed
And pamper my paws.
Little Baby Willow
Needs a tiny bed
Needs a tiny pillow
For her tiny headLittle Baby Tiny
Fits in a hand
All new and shiny
Tiny but grandBaby Willow Little
Tiny tubes long
Breathes so brittle
Fragile but strongWillow Little Baby
Was a probability
Perhaps then a maybe
Now she’s a realitySleeping On Her Pillow
Bendy little bones
Little baby Willow
Tiny Willow Jones
Somebody has to be the baddy
To make this little game work;
To hatch a cunning plan;
To hide in the corner and lurk.Don’t make me be the baddy:
I wanted to be a brave knight.
I wanted to rescue the princess.
I wanted to turn wrong into right.I’ll strop and have a paddy
If you make me the evil one.
I’ll stamp my foot and scream
And stop you all having fun.I know! We can use Daddy
Then we can all be the good guys
He doesn’t look much like a baddy
But we can pretend he’s in disguise.
What is a deputy headteacher?
It’s a leader
When the leader is away
Stepping in,
(Sometimes)
To save the day.
Speaking with authority
That is delegated
Often berated
Ofsted rated
And never sated.
What is a deputy headteacher?
It’s a behaviour preacher
The headteacher’s creature
A supporting act
To the main feature
A shouter, a screecher,
A lesser performance
Than the headlining band
A dotted line drawn in the sand
Of Performance Management
(The cardboard cage for Leadership)
And hands on hip
This deputy stands
Dotted line fading on shifting sands
A guide with a flickering lamp
One foot in each camp,
Both driving and conducting the bus;
Requiring limbs like an octopus.
What is a deputy headteacher?
It’s a rota maker,
Temper faker,
Confiscator
“Have it back later”
A blusterer, a badgerer
A business manager
Teach and mark
Take kids to the park
An acronym guru, an E.V.C.
Knowing A.F.L. and A.P.P.
With S.E.N. and I.E.P.
Being merely tools for P.R.P.
A deputy headteacher
Is out of the classroom forty percent
(Sometimes)
Yet one heartbeat away from the top.
To some, the deputy is heaven-sent
To others, the deputy must repent,
Or simply give up and stop.
What is a deputy headteacher?
Is it a mouse who’s learning to be a rat?
Or a cat
Who hasn’t quite got the cream,
Not quite living the dream?
Is it a dog without a bite?
Or the penultimate step of ambition?
A sub-aspiration?
A role in its own right?
Or is it a not quite?
An almost? A maybe?
Is the emphasis on ‘head’?
Or ‘teacher’?
Or ‘deputy’?
You can’t brush your hair
With a teddy bear.
You can’t clean your teeth with a cat.
You can’t wipe your nose
With a garden hose.
You can’t destroy a city with a hat.
You can’t make a bomb
Without uranium.
You can’t poison a water supply with juice.
There’s no shock and awe
In a kitten’s paw.
You can’t wash your face with a moose.
You can’t define life
By your level of strife.
You can’t compare normal with horrific.
You can’t laugh away
The terrors of each day:
You have to be decidedly more specific.
You can’t say a lot
By saying what it’s not.
All you do is add to your delusion.
Don’t get in a tizz…
Just say what is.
It’s guaranteed to reduce our confusion.
I had a difficult problem
I didn’t know what to do.
I mulled it round my head.
I puzzled it on the loo.
It coiled round my ears.
It burrowed into my brain
It stuck between my teeth.
It made my feel insane.
I cogitated, deliberated.
I chewed it like a goat
I inhaled it deeply
I gargled it in my throat.
I categorised and vetted it.
I organised it into groups.
But like a circus animal
It had me jumping through hoops.
I stewed and I considered it.
Then let it drift for a while
I put it on the backburner
On the bottom of the pile.
But just a few days later
The problem came again
It was bigger than before
And like a crowd of angry men.
I hadn’t taken it seriously
I’d forgotten the “Lazarus Rule”
It’s a rule for sorting problems.
At work or home or school.
Leave a problem at your peril.
At most leave forty winks.
But if you leave it for four days
It really, really stinks.
So I told it to some people
As if that would make amends.
But that just made it worse:
They gossiped to their friends.
But problems can always worsen.
And I hadn’t finished yet.
I wrote it on my blog
And put it on the internet.
Then the problem overtook me.
It swerved into my lane.
And slammed on its breaks.
And turned into pure pain.
—
Pain is only temporary.
It often goes away.
And just like old Lazarus
I lived another day.
It’s good to learn from problems
And the challenges they set
To turn it into hope
And to deal with regret.
To shrug off unkindness,
Callousness and curses
To look to each morning
And their new mercies.
I wrote this with my daughter Elizabeth as we ‘ferried’ from Weymouth to Jersey.
Being on a ferry
Better than a cherry
Great big boat
Staying afloat
It’s windy up here
Fills us with fear.
Hair blown about
Water spout.
Being on a ferry
Kind’a merry
Great big boat
On England’s moat.
Ships in the sea
We can sea
Sailing free
Like our ferry.
I don’t like the way ‘F’ sounds
Eff.
Phhhh.
Phuh.
Effeffeffeff.
It’s clumsy at the end of a word.
Makes rhyming difficult: like life
Only really rhymes with wife
And strife, I suppose.
Oh and knife – that goes.
‘F’ spoils beautiful
And starts that word we don’t like to say.
But it does have one redeeming feature:
‘Frog.’
The Frog Tile I made a few years ago
Back in 1950, before Zombie movies and their ilk had had a whiff of mainstream, C.S Lewis gave us a quote that would make all zombie hunters proud:
“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
Mr Beaver, The Lion and the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis 1950.
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