For over fifteen years he has been in loco parentis (or Poetry Father) for the Poetry Society's Young Poets Award writing week at one of the Arvon Foundation's writing centres.

Stripper

All they want today is skin and bony, wasted girls,
sunbed brown all over; not us pale and plump and tasty girls.
Body-hairless as a baby rabbit, anorexy girls, 
bleached and botoxed, siliconed and think they're sexy girls;
greedy, hard as nails, but needy glacial girls;
hard-core DVD and cum-shot facial girls;
lipo-sucked and nipped and tucked and cut up plastic girls.
Nothing down for home-cooked steak and kidney pie gymnastic girls.

I didn't need to spin round poles, nor sit on some fat git;
I had pubic hair, suspenders and tassels on my nips.
OK, there was the whistling: get on with it and show your tits,
the goose-bumps-and-grinding boredom, and the pay was shit.
But I was in the saddle, had them champing at the bit,
could up the stakes and raise the dead with the shimmy of a hip.

SO IT GOES

Odessa