Nobody's ever asked me where I get my ideas from. I guess no one cares. But if they did, I'd say 'I steal them'. All my best stuff, in fact, all my stuff, is nicked from old dead guys and my contemporaries on the performance poetry scene. I rely on the fact that I'm a crap forger to disguise the theft. Up until now, it's always worked.

Another Tim Clare Original

Don’t fall for those honeyed homonyms
Funny dot com simulacra
Demand genuine Tims from your video retailer!
Make a solution
Two parts Appletize to three parts piss
Fling a flask of it in a faker’s face
His mask will slip like a pancake
And break, hissing
Listen
Counterfeits are stitched by blind Cambodian orphans
Apportioned unfortunate living conditions by foremen who force them past exhaustion
With coarse cotton thread
They sew pale flesh to head
Bind black frightwigs to fresh-boiled near-white pig skulls
Poor, unseeing mites
They think they make footballs!

Always check for the seal of authenticity –
Brown mole beneath the ballsack
Reject low-quality knock-offs
Say fuck off back
To the piss-poor purgatorial sweatshop you first emerged from
Awful slow-tongued homunculus
I’ve drunk the pus of bag ladies sweeter
Than the sad, ditchwater arse-crimes
You pass off as poetry
Go hunt for half-rhymes under a bus!

Thus the bloodline remains pure
But behind closed doors
Lies more than meets the ear
Sure, justice is blind
But let those with eyes hear
The near-silent violin
Of a felon
Filing the serial numbers off purloined sestinas
Respraying metaphors

O what a racket!
I’ve got this city sewn up like a wound mate
Cut and shut couplets? I glutted the market
Laundered one-liners I smuggled in fruit crates
Magistrates shut up, quills held to their temples
While eager goons ransacked the Wordsworth Estate
Pictured with heads of legitimate business
My verses get printed on pristine white presses
Sensitive rocker bombs hidden in Gutenberg Bibles
Get shipped to my rivals’ addresses
The kingpin, but no one can pin a thing on me,
My fingerprints missing from curious incidents
Furious officers hiss at the absence of evidence
Sure it can’t all be coincidence

But I know that nobody lasts long on the major list
And Morrissey told me the fate of the plagiarist
How quickly the sweetest of scams becomes flavourless
One day, some young punk ‘ll pull the same stunt I did
Shakedown the penthouse my bent verse provided
‘The code to the safe, mate,’ - click - ‘where did you hide it?’
My wife and my child tied up on the veranda
While robbers inside nobble every last stanza
I don’t lift my head cos I know what their plans are

They shoot to kill
I’ve no last words
But the silence is beautiful

And I still wouldn’t quit for all the bikes in China
I like this life, never found one finer
Yes this Lazarus business is a hazardous regimen
But the gift of the gab is a marvellous medicine
And I know that next week I might well wind up dead again
But I’ll rise from my slab reinvented like Edison
That greedy thief whose ten year plan
Filching bright bulbs from rivals’ heads and then selling them,
Lit up a nation and made him a legend, when
People call him ‘crook’ I say it’s irrelevant
Though I know he pinched patents, electrocuted an elephant
Not every change is heaven sent
That might sound strange to better men,
Yes, I’m a sorry specimen

But they’ll never ken the forger’s glory,
A stolen story
Told in tomb breath by a tone-deaf revenant
Raw, angry, stinking,
Like a womb-slick infant delivered in deliberate gory detail
Into this bright cave called life
Cos I might be a thief
But a thief is a midwife

Poetry does nothing
Poems change no one
I don’t care about that
I just want to put a show on
Prance like a prat
Chat out my colon
And so on
And so on
Conman patter round bootleg merchandise
Hand over coin you can purchase a paradise
Even believed it myself once or twice
Step up,
Find the lady.
So is it art? No.
Is it criminal? Maybe.
A trivial pursuit, perhaps,
But I know where the cheese is
Keep getting nailed then coming back just like my name was Jesus
Now words I stole from holy books
I preach to my believers
Cos many took my name in vain
But they were just deceivers
False poets
Late night heavy-breathers.
Hello? Who is this?

So put down your receivers
I’m done effervescing
If you love ‘em then thieve ‘em
Here endeth the lesson