“It’s different”, she said to me, her eyes blazing
with the ferocity of one caught in the act of shielding
her pupils against the sudden rush of sunlight
that had crept over the green lush hill
full of potential and the intoxicating aroma
of diverse flowers flowing on the wings of Apollo,
not a rose in sight to pour scorn over.
“It’s as if the dance we had is the same,
the tune vaguely familiar and interesting, but the steps,
the ones we learned together, have now been altered.”
I let the flames devour the past today
whilst keeping each memory intact for future use.
I let an explosion of tight yellows and blues spread
and search for more fuel, more wasted ways to say
that the muse of words have been completely abused
and now they lay fried and buried, the words are dead.
I once hung upon them and revered them to show growth,
the patient delivery of a lead-lined pencil, the Time between Time
and the slow mark of a pact, the most solemn of oaths;
I haven’t forgotten your plastic incredulity
as you maintain that a person can live on seven pounds a day,
I just don’t want you to think that just because
the mere mortals, the poor, the generous hearted,
those that work to keep you in the lifestyle
of your choosing
the lifestyle of the miserable and the man who misses the whip
that he could have used in days gone past in the plantation
as he rides over the emotion of the down at heel or
perhaps more likely he wishes with some girlish glee
Sick, glorious bastard, you are divine.
You drive a hard bargain, I feel no benefit
to where you forced me, strong armed, to sign
and the knot in my stomach grows, you are the bottomless pit.
You beautiful fuck, the distaste aimed at me
you were always there haunting me in the background
even when fallen upon hard times and on bended knee
you would steal my dignity away and silence my resistance with noise and sound.
Yet my dear darling bone aching disease
I throw one hand up in complete
surrender,
the other is reaching for a gun
in which to take my life
first
before
the disease takes hold even more
and I have to have the one thing
that I never wanted to have
which was to lose
control
and have to have
someone look after me
like I was a child, incapable
of making my own decisions
and life
is
rendered
meaningless
and sought for destruction.
Oh Saint Esther,
what will you do now as they
dismiss you from their service,
your public face as you shop for the family linen,
worn out through expectation but with your secret
safe, as you hold your master’s balls
in a vice-like grip, as they know your closet wish,
your overwhelming desire to cause mayhem
with a flutter of the eyelashes and a pillow
over the family’s mouths at night
when they aren’t looking, just practising for when the big day
comes around and it is finally legal for you
There is a chill, a feeling of the super-natural
when I hear your anthem being sang by the citizens
of the flag, resplendent in red and white, the colours
of victories past and battle hardened men,
of women, proud, noble and strong, perhaps by design
the strongest of them all, but the ones with rose-like cheekbones
standing to attention when something humorous happens,
the ones for whom the tears fall silently as justice is done.
The first stirrings of your anthem were audible on a Wednesday night
So when does the mid-life crisis actually begin,
as I am sure that I am eligible to claim around now,
being too old to truly wear jeans
but wearing them just to rebel against
the condemnation of the teens
and the look of unruly disaffection of my grandfather’s
era who once married and with children of their own
reverted to looking as if they had stepped out of stage
managed Victorian costume drama and the stiff upper lip
kept the emotions in check.
I keep looking through the spyglass in my door
There were many who I held a candle to
in a world full of chalk dust, well aimed projectiles
and the despair of being told that you
were not good enough to breathe the same air
as the teacher’s favourite Rottweiler,
snarling, punishing with savage artistry
and then finished off with the red pen death
of being
wrong, wrong, wrong.
There were many, my diary attests to this unhappy fact,
who in one way or another made my life more bearable
when not in English, History or the love of the drama
I am not keen on fruit,
though I do have respect for the vegetables
that find themselves hurling their way
on to the dinner table, although I do sometimes suspect
that they are they there to devour me.
I am not keen on fruit
and only partake in the selection of the traditional three
Apples, Cherry and Bananas
from the conglomeration shop that once housed
a Greengrocer’s daughter
to ward off scurvy
and brittle bones
since losing the milkman in the 1970s.
To infuriate the huge supermarket grocer,