What is there to do but whisper your name,
for to say it loud is like asking the Devil
to sit down with me and sup on tea and dine
on roasted flesh
of fatted calf and potatoes,
empty but for their skins
blighted by your ignorance.
I find I care not where you are
and yet out of the corner of my eye
I see your leftover remains
and I know you will be forever close by
despite my best efforts to ignore you now,
We are all alone on life support
with only the wires of modern life
keeping us company,
the small ticks of reassurance that someone else
is out there thinking of us
as they hope
we are daydreaming about them,
the only time the wires buzz with any sign of
life is when existence is made to pulse
rapidly, when survival is paramount
and when the wires countdown to possible extinction.
I switch off my life support during the day
but at night, when the darkness is clearer
The noise that springs from the excitable crowd
gathered for the evening performance
is shattered as the glass baton
comes crashing down
upon the lectern and the stern faced conductor,
well past his prime but ready to give
one last Winter serenade,
asks the free form Jazz Band to take their mark
and the collision of cultures
begins in earnest.
The whisper of aged musicians,
is stopped in its tracks as the rising force
of a solitary sax maniac
rises above the temper of glowing terms
Home…
I tramp the streets of my youth,
where I first kissed many a girl
who flirted with me and their school uniforms
leading the way to starched Nurses apparel
and the women in the beguiling
dazzling dress who I wished for nothing more
to be in attendance of…
I tramp the streets where teenage mood
swings caught me off guard, where the Garth
became my back garden, where an altercation,
one-sided and full of badly installed testosterone,
the first of two beatings I took, left me nearly
What was it I came here looking for,
the opportunity to seek redemption,
for reaching Middle-Age with some resemblance
to passing, fading youth still intact,
before, like dust that gets lodged in the corner
of the eye, that sticks determined to the vestige
of the previous day, it is dislodged
and flicked casually without
a second glance
into the awaiting gutter on the street.
I once came here looking for ghosts,
I came here for a memory of you,
the sweet taste of bitter regret,
What makes a place a home town?
Being born on a particular street
or hospital ward in a town is surely
just an accident of birth, like being proud
to be British, when stuck on an island
somewhere in the Atlantic makes any difference
to what you are like as a Human being,
being proud to British when pride is such a
bizarre state of mind, being proud for
choosing the exact moment in which
to escape the warm confines of the womb
when had your parents decided
I’m feeling disoriented,
out of sorts with the world
and seeing things I wish not to see
I may as well look in a mirror, to witness
the events in a different light,
the slant,
the obscene askew
and I pray for my soul
that I shall not become
the Jekyll and Hyde
in the seeking game.
Through a mirror darkly,
not one cracked from side to side
nor from bottom to top, but one
fractured and splintered
from front to back
through
He is a hero of mine.
He is one of many granted, not all of them male,
not of all them perhaps the typical heroic type,
some have even let me down
as I have let them down
but I have never stopped loving them
for in each person, I see the hero
trying to burst free, trying to live up to the ideal
set down by the first
and it is a heroic nature that eludes me
completely and without favour.
You are a hero, you are someone I admire
There are pencil shavings on the floor
where I missed the bin
and there they will stay until my penance is over,
the same can be whispered for the remains of a rubber,
quietly judging me, assuming superiority
and remarking upon
the desperation, the vile responsibility placed upon my shoulders
as I hunch over a plastic typewriter,
plastic keys, plastic words, plastic hack
and I wish the pencils would sharpen
themselves and the rubber erase itself
out of existence…
…for in their world I am trapped,
You called it a chat about tidying
up your affairs of state, the long way off
day in which I would be left alone
to deal with the phone calls
and the letters
and you sat back in the gathering cold,
arms folded and I saw in your eyes
that perhaps it was not as
long away as I thought.
We talked of football,
nearly always the same topic of conversation
we had always had, spliced occasionally
with talk, mostly from me,
of theatre and of visiting home.