Who lived with his mother in Liverpool 3.

She kept a shop and she sold fried fish

And chips as crisp as a person could wish,

So people said you’d have to be dippy

To go anywhere but Li’s mum’s chippy

For fish and chips or hot meat pies

Or pickled cukes of gigantic size.

Out in the back room all day long

Chinamen sat and they played mah-jong

With their faces turned into scowls or smiles

By the clackety-clack of the falling tiles.

And Li came back from school each day

And helped his mum in the following way:

He peeled the spuds and he poured them in

To a sort of tumbling mechanical bin,

A type of rumbling electrical barrow.

They went in round and they came out narrow.

The slicing machine! When you come to grips with it,

Start with spuds and you end with chips with it.

One day Li was churning them round

To that deep old, hungry, grumbling sound

When he was amazed to hear a song

Raised from the slicer, loud and long:

Oh, I am a spud, a very old spud,

And I do not wish to die.

I’ve missed the boat and I’ve lost my coat

But I do not care to lie

In a number of bits in a pan that spits –

Without ever knowing why.

So Li was quick as the flash of a fin.

He whisked that spud from the slicing tin

And he set it up on the chip-shop shelf

Where this ancient potato sat by itself.

And when the Chinamen came to play

Each one of them wished the spud good day:

‘How are you doing? All right? OK?

Warm enough there? Good. That’s the way!’

At night it was off for a roll downtown

On a piece of string that Li swung down.

Now, some keep dogs and some keep cats

And some have zebras and some have rats

But Li, by city wall and hedge,

Walked with nothing but a singing veg.:

Oh, I am a spud, a very old spud,

And I’m glad I did not die.

For I’m free to roll on an evening stroll,

Which nobody can deny,

And there’s no spud in or out of mud

That’s quite as happy as I.

It sings it once, then it sings it again.

Li’s mum thinks the boy’s insane!

Freeze

Pocked snow, cold-Christmas-pudding earth,

The tracery of winter trees,

The sky in danger with the dusk,

The mare’s breath steaming in the freeze,

The sliding panes of river ice,

The olive water underneath,

The violet blade of last of light

That draws the darkness from its sheath.

Let’s Hear it for the Limpet

If there’s one animal that isn’t a wimp, it

Is the limpet.

Let me provide an explanation

For my admiration.

To start with, it’s got two thousand tiny teeth

Beneath