Football Poets

The Community Shield- football again, definitely.

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 You can feel it in the bones
Your red and white blood cells
Your leucocytes, your hormones
And chromosomes
Football in your face again
Overwhelmingly in
Charge of proceedings
Half times, kick offs
Corner kicks and free kicks
Choreographed in
August’s traditional paraphernalia
Its ornate embroidery of the
Unexpected
And then it hits you again
The Community Shield
This weekend
The enchanting curtain raiser
Formerly of course
The Charity Shield
When, in the green fields
Of notoriety,
Billy and Kevin once
Came face to face
With each other
Burning with fury
Animated with animosity
Shoving, pushing, staring
Deep into red retinas
Eye balling with genuine
Hatred, comical aggression
Worthy of Chaplin or Keaton
Then Bremner and Keegan
Storm away with righteous indignation
Electrical sparks of loathing
Shirts whipped off revealing
The Bremner freckles and the
Keegan hair predating the Hamburg
Afro, coinciding
With Our’Enry Cooper’s after shave
It was another microcosm of
The 1970s fashion fest
The 1974 FA Charity Shield
When humanity was much more benevolent
And Mud were simply clean
Leeds and Liverpool
It still occupies
A perfect corner of your
Saturday night nostalgic
Match of the Day mind
And so the nation braces
Itself for fun, frivolity,
Players and managers with
Understandable egos and pretensions
A Premier League season
The bagatelle of joy, pain,
Heartache, heads bowed and then
Lifted by false hopes
City and Arsenal
Back in the molten lava
Of fierce competition
Going hell for leather
Hammer and tongs
Jabs and tentative hooks
At first. Then vital points
Are accumulated, then thrown
Away, away, lost in the moment
Arsenal determined to get it right
This time
Rice, stiffening up the Gooners
Defence and attack
With insane millions weighing
Like the heaviest burden of all time
Pep at City has nothing to prove
Aiming for the stars for the quartet
Of the Premier League title
Champions League champions
That’s engraved into football’s
Fabled heritage,
Incomparably so
So Liverpool, Manchester United,
Chelsea and of course Arsenal
Your gauntlet has been laid down
Accept the challenge
It’s football again

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