Deposit fifty cents in English
and you will see the Queen
of New York strip, pull back the latch,
take in the scene and I promise
that the eyes will widen
and the legs will turn to jelly
for behind the peep show here
in the greatest city on Earth,
for about a minute,
you will feel royalty,
you my English friend will understand
the true meaning of being
the King of Times Square.
The Peep show, vaguely understood,
randomly implicit, silently mistaken,
I reach out for driftwood
splintered and damp but at least buoyant
a life preserver
in place of the straight
talking jacket,
splintered, fractured driftwood
as torn as me, as breakable
in this tempest sea,
I’m breaking apart as the water pulls me under
and I can feel the suffocating nausea rise
as the sea lurches, tossing
me hope,
breaking my spirit in a matter of waves,
the waves that wash down my throat,
that I spit out bone by bone,
that I cannot, like an old ancient King,
I have no idea who lives
underneath the beard,
I haven’t seen their face
for a generation,
a third of their life,
I haven’t had the pleasure
of getting to see the craggy lines appear
on fermenting grey skin
except underneath the eyes
which have become sterile,
magnified and indifferent
to everything besides love;
but what need is there of love
when you are hiding
the kiss beneath a mop of underside hair
that keeps your chin warm
in winter.
In amongst the cackles,
the small wheezes that sound
like someone learning how to play
the saxophone,
buoyed by codeine
agitated by symbolism
and wracked with the fury
of an inward tempest,
I found an excitement
that could not be displaced
that would not lay still
and somehow I knew
upon this April morning,
cold and damp, fitful and feverish,
that my head, fit to explode
like an unwanted atom bomb
lost in transportation,
I knew I had an idea…
I gave in
Hunched over a Maths textbook,
not filling in Algebra equations,
refusing to bow down to going beyond
angles as they at least
were useful when playing pool
against Andy Bell in many
a Bicester public house,
the cover of the book
instead a hive of activity
in reprinting lyrics from memory
and my own tentative steps,
laborious, protracted and the topic
of conversation between headmaster
and pupil, between careers advisor and
stubborn boy who didn’t want
to anything but write, act and produce
It has been a long road, diverting
along the way, works slowing me down,
to a crawl,
sometimes to a full stop,
never losing sight though of the objective,
to prove them wrong, to show
that a poetic verse or even just a rhyme
is not the same as taking the easy
way out, that I am not
a waste of space.
Ian D. Hall 2016
The skin, admittedly once ravaged
by a disease, adult eczema,
taken to extremes
as it ate into my hide,
on the back of my neck, through my scalp
and deep within sweat glands and fur,
is nothing to the leper you have made me
become…
…the glory
in which the smile never leaves your face
like some twisted marionette, string
-less, pompous, arrogant
and once divine to the point of deity,
bow down to the clown
as I once did,
now this leper, confined to the fringe
The meaning of Easter seems lost
now to commerce
and the chocolate making machine
as some perhaps suggest
that a rabbit died
at Calgary, sentenced to be
a hot cross bunny, to take up our sins,
it’s the only explanation
that can be sought
when realising with certain eyebrow
raising deflection
that to complain about Watership Down
being on the little square box
“Today of all days”
is to have offended the Rabbit god,
I scratch my head in wonder at their
acceptance and their knowledge
I must find you a new name,
for Black Dog implies
I can have you put down,
that I can smile and take your flea
bitten arse to a lonely place
in the woods and let you howl
all you want because the only
creatures you’ll attract
are the woodpeckers, black bears
and worms.
But what is the point in it all,
the dream of existing, of being,
when the woodpecker can peck
just as hard and the black bear
is as hungry as ever,
Why are you not banished from society,
you take up room and smell of disgust
and yet there you are still being rammed
down our throats as if your very being
is somehow natural, ordinary, as accepted
as broccoli, as native as rain, as seasonal
as a hot day in August
or six months of winter,
I detest you, you make me ill to even
think of being near you, I would happily
find room on a cargo ship,
put you in the middle of the ocean