My Father
is the most honest,
straight-forward man I know.
He instinctively
knows the safest, straightest
route from A to B.
It therefore came as some surprise
when one cloudy day in Crewe,
he said out-loud,
“You know son,
I think I’d like to buried
at C.”
Ian D. Hall 2014.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The last time former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion stood on the Everyman Theatre stage and spoke with candour, passion and an abundance of knowledge of the world of poetry, the award-winning theatre was a very different beast. In the intervening years since his last visit, The Everyman has become a place in which the world has taken notice of and in which Andrew Motion takes even more interest in the world that many of us perhaps take for granted or shy away from lest it demolish our faint unheard dreams.
Others might see you as the omen before the oncoming storm.
The loud-mouthed, certain and confident callous bellow
That comes full of wind and withered joy before the year weeps and grows old
And turns young at heart Old Father Time into a dour, disabled dying fellow!
They might see you and rage as you do, all piss and wind,
Shaking their fists in frightened fury at what you may have wrought
And the golden amber hue fading as they recount who against they have sinned
Their conceit in conflict now chastised in thought.
You are the modern example
of the Playboy whose morals took a long, lingering hike
one summer’s day in the Midlands
and you smiled at all as the cream sat proudly upon your lips
like a tomcat on heat and the hand
stayed shuffling and straightening, readjusting in your pocket.
Ah but you thrilled all with tales of money spurned
and like a poorly run casino you kindly splashed out
on things to keep the bloated creature named economy
happy, sated and desired as it kept you
Now that I’m older, still dying my hair
With many fears about why and how.
Will you still be sending me books on crime
Poirot, Marple, even Harry Lime?
If I’d not phoned till quarter to three
Would you have a search party at my door?
Will you still need me, no need to feed me
Now your 64?
I am older too
And because you brought me into the world
I will forever love you.
I was never that handy mending your clothes
The poisoner of the well is never
satisfied until he has
murdered the whole village.
If he could, he would add to the venom that seeps, multiplies,
grows in strength and adds to the imbalance of his impurity,
his lack of moral conviction and toxin fuelled hatred for others well being
by unzipping his fly and with great relish, untangling the so called beast
and piss in the drinking water.
The deep yellow nasty smell that he insists is not there,
the unnatural toxin
that runs through his own veins and makes his flesh burn
Middle Age I have found to be a painful reminder
of melancholy memory. I tell myself that I am not old,
nor scared of what is to come, the hurt of loss, the fragility of kindness,
that I have these greying bags under my blue eyes not because I am tired,
exhausted with continuous running and pulls on my time,
nor wish for a deep dreamless sleep every night
in which nightmares are also kept at bay without the aid
of a chain of garlic slices hung around my fattening neck,
NT. SHOP. MORNING. BRIGHT .
Nate (mid twenties) reads a newspaper as he walks out of the newsagents. The shelves are bare other than newspapers and cigarettes. A woman (mid fifties) bumps into him.
WOMAN
Prick.
NATE
Hang on you bumped into me.
WOMAN
Just watch it.
NATE
Oh get lost.
She backs away into the shop. Nate continues to read his newspaper.
HEADLINE IN NEWSPAPER
‘CARBON ASTRONAUT BLOWS OUT BRAINS LIVE ON AIR’
Of all the things I wanted to be
when I was young boy,
the jobs I imagined being able to do with a
certain degree of satisfaction,
never mind at all
the wage
in which was not even a secondary factor
in my overwhelmed mind
as I never thought I would be married
and father children
of my own in which to foul up their lives,
the most appealing was the life of a Hobo,
or the tramp
when spoke in English tongue.
If I could have had anybody as my first drinking partner,
the first one for whom the tempting taste of
bitter
in a dimpled handled glass, offered over
with great ceremony from a woman with biceps
protruding, bursting out from underneath a starch filled blouse
more obscenely than an unsightly black tar mole covered in three curly grey hairs,
who suspected I was underage
but knew I could control the art of a pint without making a scene
in the Bicester darkness and in the company of pre-cancer darts players cussing