You are cold to the touch oh moody one.
You offer so much potential but in your sullen distance
You sometimes forget that you are here to have fun
and a different face to your sister’s bleak resistance.
Like some petulant teenager rebelling against its parents scorn
you rage and blind, leaving a northern blanket of unfathomable white,
screaming to anyone who listens that you wish you’d not been born
and cursing them for their folly as they gaze upon you with hopeful sight.
The Medieval child, lauded over and acclaimed at the start of the year,
now will show its true colours to the world away
from its long since gone mother’s breast.
The old harridan who succumb to final old age
at the moment of delivery follows her charges fortunes now
as it gears up to become a teenager.
The January day is over and Janus rests content for another year
not to have to keep up the pretence of concern or anxiety
of what was before. His young responsibility, now old enough
They are retiring the reason for loss of faith.
As the bones will be taken down and will never
adorn the main hall in my lifetime, how Darwin must be laughing
at the peculiar notion that my evolution started not with
an ape or a monkey but with a dinosaur and now that beast
of my burden is leaving home, presumed missing.
Eight years old, dressed in green, no badges yet of note earned
and the first of many visits to the Capital undertaken
with a tour and my paid homage
The devoid of feeling, empty processed pea tin rattles down the street and
pushed along by the banshee like eruption of winds
that beat, beat…beat against the window
pleading to be let in, the tin can, the remnants
of its former glory long since spilled on the Bootle battlefield
shows off its ability to send
out a message in Morse Code to anybody willing to listen.
The signal is kept going, the odd momentary lapse
where the wind blasts it up against the side of half
We sat back triumphant, but exhausted and overwhelmingly drunk
in a small public bar by Waterloo Station
full of football supporters letting off steam
after their team had lost in the capital again
and part of our collective soul didn’t care,
but the devilish, impish, teasing part thought,
we could wind them up after winning our own battle
with all that sits on the coloured squares and overpriced
bars and a tin of beer outside Holloway Jail.
Our own private Monopoly Board challenge.
February 17th 1996 and the first train up from Salisbury
…And there is no room in the world for the sentimental.
No earthly place in which to stack the memories
upon high, layer upon layer like bricks laid out
on a spring morning in which to build an annexe.
Move on, like a fluttering unfeeling butterfly
already in the sights of the patient entomologist,
letting go of the nightly moth in his paw like grip
and ready to pin you down.
I will not but be sentimental, to be romantic,
certainly emotional and perhaps at times flowing
There is a shelter in the park that acted as a goal,
the football aimed squarely at whoever was unfortunate enough
to act as the keeper, imagining they were Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence
or in my case the great Gordon Banks or even
Bert Trautman.
Not that I often went in goal, I didn’t like diving
on to bare concrete and seeing my T-shirt
ripped to shreds in a strange, weird way of portraying machismo.
I made allowances when some of the girls that we knew
We might not ask you to go to war in a foreign field,
however in the hundred years since the flower of youth
died needlessly and with great pain, we have lied
to you over and over again, and I for one as an old man apologise
for what the world has done to you.
This flowering youth, every generation’s future bright young things,
constantly lied to, not just here but the world over,
until they become the embodiment of the lie to sell
on again and keep the splintered, creaking wheel
Isn’t it bad enough that I get told to think reverentially of you?
That by some magical decree of someone’s simple x, my life
is indebted to a system that is morally corrupt
and yet you now say I should mourn for one just as bad,
if not worse.
If I had been a turkey and voted for Christmas’ past
I could understand being placed into an oven and forced
to sweat, over and over as the thought of the carving knife plunged,
steel tipped into my breast…
The tornado of sweating souls slowly catches their collective breath,
but only for the briefest of polite respites, for the pulse
is gaining speed and the heart rate quickens in time
with the drum stick, the judge’s gavel, taking issue
with the ones at the side of the pit, ready to hit-out
but too scared to throw themselves into the whirlwind.
The Mosh, once in, never released, never to be forgotten,
never to disclose that what happens in the sweating bounce
stays in the sweating, feverish, testosterone fuelled dance.