With a quill in hand,
I could tell thee how much they are loved,
and it would be believed, it would be honoured
for the feather would catch the late April
sunshine struggling through
the grime ridden window and would pause
your concerns for the day;
the ink staining the desk would congeal
and hard work would be seen to have been employed
in the making of verbal declarations of love
to your fair and beautiful eyes.
With a typewriter, an old fashioned
set of clunky keys resounding
His tale is over, borrowed
from his own father who sought a difference
to the world of industrial dirt
and the stench of flippant war
across Europe; the boy swam the great lake
beside his home in Hamilton, played
Ice Hockey and dreamed of fields, woods
and forests that would survive
all that he would leave behind
as he boarded the ship in Montreal
that would lead him back to another war,
one he would see erupt in yellow golden flame and damaging red
as Coventry burned,
Who would be an icon in 2016
when Time suggests you have had your Time
upon this Earth, making people
laugh, sing, think and knowing
they have had some privilege of sparkling
nobility shine in their lives,
for it turns out that 2016 was just a murdering
git in heavy disguise as a year,
the black mask covering the demonic glee
of celebrity assassination as the poor,
genuine 2016 is locked in a basement somewhere
in Munich, no access to the news
and only given bowls of water
Flashback;
It was what you gave me
as I turned on my phone
to see your remark
on another person’s page.
Ignoring my own held advice,
that I don’t have the right
to ever know
what other people think of me,
I read the short snappy sentence,
primed like a grenade,
three second rule blast
which tore my heart in two
and my head blown
to pieces on the rocks of someone
else’s insecurity, jealousy
a spread eagled whore
who likes to spread her
I used to think you were just a mean drunk,
a man who at the end
of the long arduous night
would pop open a tin
of cheap
nasty liquor
and sink them in order,
cans one
through to eventual six
and then to whom resentment
at the world, the sign of the angry
Capitalist, the dead on sarcasm boiled
in rich memory
of having been shafted by the poor,
the meagre and the deprived…
in your greedy eyes,
in your hard-up soul
The old lady of Rock and Roll
clears her throat,
smiles benignly to the audience,
a sense
of sorrow in her face
and as she is about to give
her final rendition,
her glorious epitaph to a worthwhile
dream, the Thunderstruck
and those with Big Balls
in jumps a man
instead
who can’t sing a note
but carries on the illusion
to the sound of guns
not cannons…
A Rose that falls
so desperately low
does not salute the worthy,
Normal,
who would want
to ever wish
themselves
to be stuck in that
frame of mind and desperate soul;
why be normal when you can be odd,
unique,
completely original
with just the attachment to the rest
being that you love them.
Why can’t you be normal
I was once asked,
why can you be like A,
because S is such a more interesting
letter I thought,
curvy, fluid, rounded,
not fully like an O,
but then
I wouldn’t want to be that complete.
I saw a sun explode,
obliterate in the night sky
and whilst nobody
else saw it at that moment,
I knew that worlds would end.
Somewhere deep I felt
the hundreds of thousands
of possible deaths,
across millions of light years
and I trembled at the fragility
of a single life taken
at dawn
just within the blink
of a savage’s eye,
murder by celestial means; death
decreed by sunlight fading thousands
of years ago.
I see a distant sun explode
Silence
and hands on heads,
no talking
whatsoever
and I do not
want to hear a
peep
out of you,
any of you,
till you learn some manners…
Our arms outstretched
having mastered the art
of class room sign language
by the time we were eight
and the deflection of the hammered down
metal measuring device
across the bare biting knuckles,
scrapped skin
bleeding as the monstrous
and over-zealous uncrowned ruler
struck again and again
and the headmaster would be lethal
The whisper that Time
says goodnight in
is only as forceful
as you wish
it to be, as beautiful
as you allow it and as outrageous
as you dare it, Time cares
not in the end how you take
note of the whisper, only
that you hear it, only that it will
be heeded, walk not into the light
without having first kissed
the whisper, without gently
asking it to remove its feminine
blue trilby and the decaying rose
between its polished teeth