I miss
I miss
I miss…
Your voracious appetite for the news
Even some of your more dodgy political views
Your stand-a-spoon-up-in-it treacle-thick tea
You living every Marlon Brando movie
The Godfather or the Good Father?
“…make him an offer he can’t refuse…”
Your limited capacity for holding your booze
Trying ANY food
Snails and quails eggs
Tripe and frogs legs
Wearing sweaty string vests
Prickly beard and hairy chest
Reading every bloody page in the Reader’s Digest
I miss them all though I never thought I would
Your singing that – let’s face it – was just NOT good
“I did iiiiiiiiit myyyyyyyyyyyyy…way”
But I’d give my right AND left arms to hear that today
Bobby Charlton comb over hair, thinning and grey
Year-on-year Duke Ellington shows
That oh soooooo long Cyrano De Bergerac-style Jewish nose
“A crag, a peninsular, a rock”
Watching Mohammed Ali box, box, box
Wow – could he box!
Holes in threadbare socks
That fungal nail infection in one of your toes
Potato dust-filled Spitalfields Market clothes
A temper like a terrorist bomb
With fallout radiation
Due to low levels of toleration
Some obsessive fixations
Knowing the capital of every single nation
Georgia
Guatemala
French Polynesia
Kiribati
Kazakhstan
You were a diamond geezer
And Scrabble on Sunday afternoon
Scrabble every Sunday afternoon
Dragging me out of bed to see Armstrong on the moon
1969, June
No - July
Hell - why, why, why
Did you have to die?
Teaching me to ride my bike on the golf course
Tongue-burning bottles of Horseradish sauce
Carrying vegetables in Hessian sacks
Back-of-a-lorry radios, cheap over-sized anoraks
And bogus jewellery that fell to pieces
Black Elastoplast for black people
(I can’t begin to explain that in a poem)
Getting excited about lawn mowing
That mile-wide grin when my kids were born
Ear splitting sneezes - “achooooooooooo!”
Gone with the Wind
The English Patient
Crumbly `old Dutch’ cheeses
Each year a new edition of the Pears Encyclopaedia
Being there when I needed you
A husband to a wife
A father to his sons
Loving your grandchildren with a hungry heart
Hating every single record in the Top 40 chart
Being with you and being apart
Listening to your late night indigestion noises
Through the bedroom wall
I miss
I miss
I miss
It all
Seeing my concert in school
Managing only backstroke in the swimming pool
Just being tall
Making a fool of yourself
Getting closer through your ailing health
And jazz
Jazz
Jazz
And more jazz
All that jazz
Your greatest passion
Never ever ever EVER following fashion
First hearing you use the F word
At 70 plus still ogling `birds’
Doing The Mirror crosswords
Every day
And not quite getting to grips with the idea that it’s cool for people to be gay

To me your paintings are priceless (but your poems are the worst)
If only you could hear me recite this verse
Sometimes you drove me nuts
Crazy
Maaaaaaad
But you were the finest of the finest
The Moet Chandon on the wine list
Clearly the kindest
I miss
I miss
I miss you
Dad