Take your beauty away,
for I cannot bear the thought of enslavement
in your hands let alone the loving
smile you show me, a mortal man.
A man of weakness, of flaws and frailties
all bound up in the heart of a selfish tyrant
who wishes that she was free to sample
a world in which the Gods despise
and in which this slave is bound by misfortune
and terror.
Stupid, forever cursing the insanity
of choice, the meanest thimble protecting
the pricking of the set out time
The sleeping Welsh town once rose like Olympus
in stature, the air that came off the Irish Sea
pure and blessed
and whilst the salt combination of a world’s ocean
rocked against its brick stone valley girthed
and holiday hiding hole for many a child
from the docks of Liverpool
and the might of the Midlands’ industry,
Olympus now lays dormant.
Or so it appears as you scratch the surface of the giant,
its splendour not sleeping,
just neglected by those whose tastes have changed
The bumblebees danced their way
through the semi-alien landscape
of a town far from the pollen collecting
sites near their own loving hive and wondered
aloud in their own dramatic buzz-like,
black and yellow single stripe fashion
just how they had gotten so far-flung
in their quest.
There was no predator wasp of Time
to serve and yet Time still had mastery over their
flight path through the city streets
and in the male, Time preyed heavily,
Time had lost its charm
and a younger bee noticed
The caravan had looked as though
it had seen better times, possibly after the end of
World War Two and may have indeed been used
for target practice by some lonely, bored,
over fifty year old look out
on the Kent countryside
weary of the night ahead but too concerned
for the welfare of the desperate fox stalking the half
blind mole rooting
through the roots and undergrowth
to take a shot at the flash of red
and earn a couple of shillings
from a grateful farmer
I never knew he had the stomach
for such dining
but as looked upon my plate with curiosity,
and with what I took for the sniff
of disgust at my dinner
my youngest boy verged on manhood
as he asked to try a mouthful
of the once wheezing Haggis
that now lay dead upon my salver.
Outlawed across the water
and not seen with appetising relish in his Dudley
home, I had to commend my son
for at least giving it a go
and not taking aim with
I couldn’t find my way back home.
Lost in the myriad of same looking streets,
strapped of cash, not enough for a small bowl
of porridge, I ran back to where you were, but
you had left, I heard the disembodied voice
of a past smote dragon lingering but why was it your face
now, here in this lost frightening present
in which I focused and the same streets, all semi detached
houses, nothing unique about them at all,
I had never been lost before
and I couldn’t find my way back home.
There was a time when being ill
as a child was no fun at all,
shut up inside your room,
the curtains drawn, snapped shut,
the 1970s flowered patterns
almost falling off with a startled,
frightened look upon their stems
and a quiver of desperation as they shook
themselves to the floor.
The woe betide stare of,
“If I catch you peeking out through
the now flowerless curtains,
then there will be no soup, just dry,
throat grating, pain inducing, rasping,
Shall I compare thee to the Forever fly
whose sole purpose in life is to annoy
and spread disgruntled feeling and false rumour and lie
as if swirling around puppets, pulling strings on toys.
The Forever fly sits and waits, sniffing the air,
not waiting for the afterthought of humanity
but going after the pure and with creepy stare
demands that you serve him first because as a fly he is too busy.
The Forever fly, a mutated bluebottle with a decomposed smell
harbours deep resentment because he knows deep down
It’s not until you wake up on the floor,
nose bleeding and the hard-hitting sober headache,
not caused by where you landed, the skull too hard
to damage the wooden flooring
to any great extent,
but from the lack of
your
own
blood
pulsing,
writhing and wriggling
slowly through the veins and capillaries,
slowly, the snail’s trail dripping, slowly
to get to the head, to keep imagery alive
and to not look drunk,
The television had been reluctantly
placed back in my bedroom,
although hardly watched, only for three or four
programmes that I truly wanted
to see,
Doctor Who, Match of the Day, Top of the Pops
or the late night horror film which
took me through teenage years and the sound of the
Vampire scream as he burned to ash, smoke rising,
enough to stoke the fires of the imagination,
so no great loss in the scheme of things,
but I was desperate to watch the event