Stand-up comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown has won the poet laureate award for 2017. The controversial blue funny man won the coveted prize after one of the competition’s judges discovered one of his poems written on a public toilet wall in Middlesbrough.

Brown said “I’m thrilled. I never thought a working class comic like myself could have a poem recognised by such a prestigious literary organisation. It was a happenstance

thing really. I used to pen little ditties inside my favourite public toilet cubicle in my home town. I noticed other visitors had expressed their thoughts by using a felt tip pen to write on the walls, and this seemed to bring out the poet in me.

From the outset the competition judge was hoping to unearth another ‘I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud’ by William Wordsworth, ‘Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, or ‘And Did Those Feet In Ancient Times’ by William Blake, so it was sheer random luck that he managed to spot my poem amongst the public’s untidy cluster of transitory doodles such as: ‘I want to slam my skanky rod into your slop corridor’, ‘I want to drill my rancid flesh baguette into your sewerage crevice’, and ‘I really want to hammer my filth pipe into your slimy scum dungeon’”.

I gazed up at

the night sky, picked

a star and wondered

what it meant, and then

as if to tell me it

flickered like a signal –

like a message sent.

–

This star so

silent, so lonely

lit, and I will never

touch it, but

it has touched

me and this is

my epiphany –

–

I don’t know

where the stars

were born or even

why they’re there,

but I think they’re trying

to tell me that

the answers are in

Gladys Sprocket’s fanny hair.