The sound of a gentle drum beat fills
the crossroads of Holy Corner as the onlookers,
buoyed by the return of a yellow ball of fire
and source of much anticipation of what it will mean
to the rest of the year, are amused to see one man dressed
in a sponge outfit and one looking like a badly drawn
rat square off against each other over pitch and punter
and the sound of fight, fight, fight, is overheard
under the breath of a radical student believing in secret
Nothing had changed save for the faces
being a little older than what I was prepared for,
nothing was different except the for the skyline
having been hijacked by a view that was out of place
and nothing had altered at all,
except for my perception of a world I hadn’t seen in three decades.
I looked around me and what I had left behind
and the sweat ran down my forehead, blistering
as it mixed with tears of regret, kept hidden
and just what might have been had I the courage to say no,
…Yes, of course it wears you down.
It grinds away at you till at some point you forget
to breathe, you forget that there is more than one
emotion possible and you have to force yourself to grin
like one of humanity’s D.N.A. sharers and
spark life into your soul by doing something stupid,
in other people’s eyes, because you’re in danger
of letting go, and there is no one around to catch you
because they have no idea you’re going to fall.
Perhaps it’s not that life is to be lived
The arms around me are so close
and I can smell the delicate squirt of perfume
that lingers around you as you invite me
to remain the fifteen year old boy
who was in love with you
and who thirty years later still crumbles
and goes weak at the knees when I think of love
as pure deliverance and a teenage angst poem
dedicated to you, unseen
hidden in the pages of a diary in which your name
appears scrawled over and over again.
With our youth all around us,
May’s beauty is at end
but this is not the end of the year’s story
for as she wraps the string of pearls given
to her by Jupiter’s wife
in recognition for accepting what Tiresias could never
in either guise deliver, Junius’ further accession
to the pride of womanhood is to name herself
Queen of the northern isle again.
Her sister in the South is restless and blows hard
to turn the world on its axis, the diametric twins
of Junius and December
at odds with each behind
The room is silent
but I cannot help but hear the sound
of Billy Joel extolling the virtue of keeping faith,
the Piano Man with the tender voice that packed
several punches with each octave and tremble
on his lips, implores me to listen to the sound
of nothing there at all.
I head towards a home, one of many I have had
but one in which I didn’t appreciate till
I had been there a couple of years and the argument
I had one winter’s evening still pains me to recall.
Revolutions have fought over less
and the French aristocrat, the English Knight and the
descendent of Mohammed agree on one thing,
the corruption of the battle field must be cleansed
and fire stormed right down its roots
and if takes the Marshal in his white Stetson and polished badge,
his deputies rooting through the rubbish of thirty
years of wasteland dust and paper trails that lead to one
man dressed in black and spouting his own gospel charm,
to help them bring down the despot of the so called
There is a certain romance lost
when a communication comes out of the blue,
the modern love of the instant message received and crossed
is nothing to having a significant day made superior by a letter from you.
The hand writing, sincere, legible and carefully written,
has been pondered over, adjusted and cleaned by scraps
of paper unseen left by her own bin, tossed in by anguished hand and nail bitten
fingers as she gropes for the right, beautiful word, outlined by doodled maps.
The old scribe, worn out by years of writing
down the thoughts of kings and masters, of stable hands and squires,
the relentless drives of the damned and the dead, finally
finds solace in a discreet request from the much loved
daughter of Pharaohs to meet by the banks of the Nile as
she slips into the country unnoticed by spies
as she ends her long self imposed exile which had left
the country in tatters and the old scribe with no patron
or friend.
It’s difficult to remember you with clarity,
your face is but a shadow since you’ve gone,
you have left me with a feeling of emptiness, insanity
prevails as I think of you; the quick sprint in the Marathon.
You are missed as anniversaries are greeted at the back door
and the feeling of the incomplete fills my veins
the missing in life always leave a space that’s sore
I miss you in the ether now, your face, more losses, no gains.
But whose fault is it really that you are not here,