I have carried the love for you seemingly forever.
For forty years I have lived with you
in my heart, my very soul
and there has not been a single day
in all that time in which I have not thought of you.
I have stood by you, watched you fall from grace,
I have seen you tumble down and graze your pride,
I have seen you become the main villain
in your own deluded play and the performance
of a lifetime snatched from the jaws of defeat;
We are the diseased generation
blown apart
by those who sought to destroy
the revolution, who told us our ideals
were wrong, who told us we could not,
under any circumstances, be allowed
to live a life unoccupied by the thought
of the bullet and the bomb,
of the starving masses knocking
at the door, of propaganda bitten chewed,
enshrined and made law, offered on a rusty
plate, bacteria hiding, syringed
into each delicate flower adorning
the rim and scraped clean, licked spotless
I cried in front of thirty odd class mates
on the day that they sent Boxer down
and I took, begrudgingly, the teenage
ribbing and piss take
that followed for around a week,
until someone else slipped up
and they left me alone to brood
on the glue factory and death
of a noble horse.
It didn’t bother me when I
found out around the same time
sentimental age
that Native Americans and the cold
people of the North used
fish to make their glue, it didn’t impact
The fire in the eyes,
that’s what she called it,
a friend of long ago
who saw the small boy
defy the argument
and the pre-stated life,
only good enough to take a bullet
for Queen and Country,
she said that assertion was wrong;
the devastating and smouldering
inferno she saw beneath the blue
drops of water told her different;
she said you were an explosion
waiting to happen,
a volcano on the edge of an abyss
on the edge of Time whose wake
It is being naked in front of you
that makes me worry that you will laugh,
that you will misinterpret my words,
to the point of agony
or worse, see them as a reflection
of a dusty one sided mirror, engraved ornately
but still something to raise an eyebrow over,
perhaps even mock the attempt
of a strange tongues to which a man
who embraces oddness is bound.
I would rather appear naked in front of you,
for laughter is good for the soul,
On nodding terms at the bus stop,
I saw the flowers in his hands,
fading quickly but revitalised in part
by the expensive looking
bottle of labelled perfume
stranded in agony, almost strangled
and choked back as he explained
he was returning them, having cancelled
the holiday,
the short trip away.
Straying off the subject
so not to cause to distress,
I asked him about his life
on the farm up in the North, surrounded by trees
and the fruits of summer, the cold chill
We forget
that whilst we are the hero
of our own particular story,
that we are also only bit players,
occasional extras,
unseen scene shifters
and barely existing wardrobe mistresses
and silent fancy dressers
in everybody else’s time in the spotlight,
that whilst they deliver the cutting line,
the well rehearsed, sometimes spontaneous
ad-lib or the images of abuse in human form,
we are the unspeaking audience,
looking in from afar
and with no right to have our say
on how we would like the play
There is so much in the shadows,
the photograph of abandoned things,
shuffling old men on once glory filled streets,
holding hand written placards, nothing changes,
now filled with the discarded everyday
that rots insidiously
like teeth on sugar high diet,
old decomposing trains stations, haunted
by the clatter of memories
and stolen lovers kisses
watched by steam
and the jealous porter,
now all gone;
I love shadows like this,
faded memories I can linger in,
it gives me a melancholic high.
Grace Kelly always looked so demure
when photographed in black and white,
in sepia too she looked so cool,
the perfect face to fall desperately in love with,
the woman into which dreams fall and fail.
Yet in colour, you are reminded of the fragility
of beauty worn, of timeless vulnerability
and the crumble down effect
of pancake dish upholstery
served up in glorious Technicolour
and stereo fitted sound.
The woman of the century, the great
unknown of the silver screen,
radiantly stares from lofty heights
A dead wasp’s carcass,
half chewed by wind,
half spat out with ferocious intent
by the earthbound ants
that plough tunnels underneath the street
which one day will cause the turn of the century
houses to cave in and be swallowed whole
by the teeming mass,
lays rotting in a puddle,
its wings now no more than show pieces
to a time when it lorded over all.
Do not mourn the wasp,
it is nothing more than the Luftwaffe
in insect form and the ants