…and all they wanted to do was kiss,
dance the night
away in some safe, secluded spot
and forget the world, forget the hate
and the day…
and the day
that should have driven by joy,
by finding a love, a sensual kiss
with someone so beautiful
instead turns red, turns violent
and where desire once filled the hall,
where attraction and solidarity
filled the air,
bullets now fly and tears, the sense of insanity
reigns in bitterness and recriminations
and the tears rue the day that Government decreed
Accused of everything under the sun, blamed for all and sundry and sometimes with truth in their words and the charges – the responsibility is truly being mine alone. However, more often than not, they are just the unfortunate side effect of being the scapegoat, of being the person the finger gets pointed at when trouble brews, when the ugliness of jealousy steps into the heart of a person, when envy and hate are allowed to fester, to breed and to accumulate in a kind of toxic soup, bubbling under the surface, never truly revealed until the bitter taste of poison cramps their stomach and the foam of any residual innocence is long since evaporated.
There was a certain elegance in the way the action of throwing these valuable prizes into the air that caught the attention. It was the flowing motion that they were raised, almost as if offering the precious, often fought over with the resulting small bruises and black eyes to match, the lifting of some ancient artefact to the Gods which proclaimed that the holder, the bearer of such gifts was a step beyond that of the lowly Hamlet gazing into the hollowed out skull of Yorick, they were the exuberant interest of every boy in the playground.
There was a reassuring ring of Time having been unspoilt, having not moved in the decade since I last dialled the number that was scrawled out on a rough piece of paper, torn at the edges, almost in the shape of a child’s jagged, over physical idea of what shape an island lost in some storm tossed sea should be like. Hurriedly torn from a freshly bought notebook, the lack of thought in the action that would ultimately lead to the early demise of the re-pulped paper, by my mother as she passed me as we exchanged a Christmas Card on the train, the ragged island now sat comfortably on my desk before me, pride of place for a phone call I never truly wanted to make.
It’s not that I’m mad,
surely that is beyond
the easiest of conversations,
for you have to be mad
to work with words here.
It’s more in the way that I cannot
find the Hamster
that flew off the wheel long ago
so that I can at least bury
its final remains and give the poor creature
the final shred of honour
befitting the way it held its own
in the company
of the down but not outs
and the sensationally fallen.
That poor Hamster
They buried me this morning and by all accounts it was a very moving service. The memory of my mother’s loud wailing echoed around the dirty soil, infiltrating its every pore and molecule, bypassing every worm and mole that had stopped and bowed their heads in perhaps a kind of animalistic worship, the kind that at some point would turn into the possibility of food and further enriching of the mud that would surround the casket.
I need my next fix.
I need the needle to come gently down
and give me an escape route out of what could be
a boring existence,
if not for my not so-secret vice.
The odd burning cigar still lingers here.
Long gone is the bitter recrimination of a pint savoured and destroyed
and the gentle relaxation of something intangible
has not been taken for a while
as my friend in Oxford I haven’t seen.
I need my latest fix.
I first visited the dealer on my own far too young.
You were the first of a select few
many times
and have remained so
both our lives.
From being my first friend, my beautiful comrade in arms,
the first who was the better part of me and
the shoulder for my head, your unwilling soldier sending
the S.O.S. out to be rescued, to the girl I asked first and who
quite rightly
turned me down. The woman with the fire in her hair
and in her stomach, the guts of a warrior, the compassionate heart of a nurse.
The heavy Midnight air still lingers even at 4am,
it shifts and pauses, floats and stops but never moves
far from your door.
Exhaling the drag end of a cheap nasty cigar
and blowing a kiss to the tendrils of mist
that collect at your feet, numbing them ahead
of the perfect summer’s day to come,
you are reminded that
for inside every good man
there is a villain that the public
want to see emerge,
a Captain Hook for their imagination and mouth
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Martin Freeman, Bob Odenkirk, Keith Carradine, Joey King, Susan Park, Stephen Root, Helena Mattsson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Lorne Cardinal, Jennifer Copping, Jade Davis.
When the Devil makes the most of the innocuous then you know it’s time to be really terrified.