The women of Amish,
looked at the English boy
in their midst, circling around him
and with a faint smile
on the eldest of them,
the matriarch of the small travelling
party deferring with her eyes
to the man in the black
iron pressed cloak and stiff-rimmed hat
and softly thanked the boy
for taking time to talk to them
despite their initial
worries, their concerns
of being caught
on camera, their souls in peril
at the thought of modern technology
eating them, devouring from the inside out,
It’s only murder after all.
You deny it of course,
you will reject the charges brought
and laid down at your defeated door
and hide behind the badge
of office and rank, you will draw
a smokescreen veil to further assist
the cover-up as the whispers
become louder and more vociferous,
that demand your head,
stopping short of a silver platter, why waste
the family
heirlooms as you wasted
the families, destroyed lives
and smeared a city
and all because you were able to.
Who’d be a boy today,
who would seriously want
to have the pressure of living
up to past endeavours by both
distant long ago relations, their successes
and their attitude;
why would we still install that engrained
outdated attitude into them
that boys are better than girls,
when if not equal then girls,
as Tiresias maintained,
have the true pleasure of life
and should be lauded as so.
Why in a world that needs more compassion,
more courage not to be driven by the pursuit
It was in the way he got off his chair
inside the café, the wind racing up
through the large alleyway
knocking the sign back and forth, the advert
for the all day breakfast, a small comedy
chicken with a wide brimmed Stetson,
the Midland’s answer to Foghorn Leghorn
holding a spatula, its feathers slightly
roasting away
and a pig with a creepy smile
and one trotter
out of proportion to the rest of the body
and wearing a flashy apron, emblazoned
with the words Francis’ Café,
You came into this world,
full of hope and fragile beauty
and not breathing; panic in my heart,
alarm that something
was most terribly wrong
as the nurse ran out of the room
carrying a small delicate, my flimsy, boy
and I watched helpless as technical
help arrived and slowly, surely,
you gasped for air and you weren’t
as breakable I had imagined
for the longest minute of my life.
You decided to not breath again
when eating tea one night, in a rush,
I have lost my tail.
As bereft as that small blue donkey
with rolling eyes and world on hoof
demeanour, my tail, never truly secure
with that pin in my arse and a body
that people mistake for a piñata, knock the stuffing out
of me and in their eyes they see
sweets and papers fall to the floor,
not seeing the illusion that they
have kicked the guts out of me;
is it any wonder I have lost my tail
and the voice of slow desperation
With a quill in hand,
I could tell thee how much they are loved,
and it would be believed, it would be honoured
for the feather would catch the late April
sunshine struggling through
the grime ridden window and would pause
your concerns for the day;
the ink staining the desk would congeal
and hard work would be seen to have been employed
in the making of verbal declarations of love
to your fair and beautiful eyes.
With a typewriter, an old fashioned
set of clunky keys resounding
His tale is over, borrowed
from his own father who sought a difference
to the world of industrial dirt
and the stench of flippant war
across Europe; the boy swam the great lake
beside his home in Hamilton, played
Ice Hockey and dreamed of fields, woods
and forests that would survive
all that he would leave behind
as he boarded the ship in Montreal
that would lead him back to another war,
one he would see erupt in yellow golden flame and damaging red
as Coventry burned,
Flashback;
It was what you gave me
as I turned on my phone
to see your remark
on another person’s page.
Ignoring my own held advice,
that I don’t have the right
to ever know
what other people think of me,
I read the short snappy sentence,
primed like a grenade,
three second rule blast
which tore my heart in two
and my head blown
to pieces on the rocks of someone
else’s insecurity, jealousy
a spread eagled whore
who likes to spread her
I used to think you were just a mean drunk,
a man who at the end
of the long arduous night
would pop open a tin
of cheap
nasty liquor
and sink them in order,
cans one
through to eventual six
and then to whom resentment
at the world, the sign of the angry
Capitalist, the dead on sarcasm boiled
in rich memory
of having been shafted by the poor,
the meagre and the deprived…
in your greedy eyes,
in your hard-up soul