I lose the nerve to ring you, for what can I say
that you think you already don’t know
and I know deep down that at the times that I call, your phone
will be gently snoozing in time with your need for sleep, if honour
lets you close your eyes for a single minute.
Yet you know you are going to have to ring them,
even if it’s to arrange to crawl on your knees
and be penitent, surely remorseful and contrite
for why are they suffering
when you keep yourself out of sight.
…If I had been born a girl,
would I put myself through the pain of later life
or given in to this drill like resonance that courses
through my spine, like a jack hammer gone mad
and which turns my sick to bile and my thoughts
to a looping insanity…
If I had been born a girl…
I would hope I would have even more compassion
than I hopefully am in possession of now,
and be able to forgive even those that are unforgivable in their actions
…Like when the dog farts and stares round for the intruder,
you shift the smell of blame of on your own shortcomings and feverish intent,
on anything that moves within your eyesight and dress your lies in robes of fur
covering the brown stain that appears on your underpants with money well spent.
The Cowering Chihuahuas and possessive Terrier smells just as fragrant
as the keen eyed Labrador leading the blind astray
and yet all are equal to the roundworm that feeds under the skin with skewed slant
There is still so much barbed wire surrounding the air between us,
gnarled and sharpened, it is only seen
when observed up close, through the flawed magnifying qualities
that a camera can capture on full zoom, or perhaps laid across
a piece of clear glass and seen through one eye, half closed, straining to scrutinise
the differences in opinion that has ensnared us, dangerously
and without feeling any empathy.
The barbed wire, svelt snake like, worm thin, scorpion sting,
is laid across mile upon mile of the territory marking out no man’s,
How easy to dismiss the five O’ clock alarm
and avoid by any means the next round of sentry duty,
how easy to roll your eyes, ignore the sound and keep calm
and once more doze in the arms of your chosen daily beauty?
How easy to dispense with the sound of a ticking bell,
the manipulative upstart of the daily uphill steep incline,
the kick starter which places you in Hell
and the sapper of strength, the dispenser of never ending decline?
How easy, I am never sure!
It was once said in the time of Prince February, the shortest
ruler with the meanest of dispositions, that Tiresias once exposed
the fallacy of droplets of Poseidon’s tears
outnumbering the grains of sand felt between the blue eyes of the tired
and miserable and multiplied
by the grains of sand felt beneath the hooves of the far flung desert camel.
February tossed this so called joke aside, as he wished he could
have done to Tiresias with his all-knowing twinkle in his eye.
“Absurd”, February was prone to mutter loudly as he paced the halls
…With one last roar of bitterness and pain,
King March lets go, of his life as he knew it,
of everything that went before and understood
Lord Tiresias’ wise words
that were concerned with pleasure.
“Pleasure, not this agony of Regal state in which
My subjects below me run into shadows, hide in corners
and bow to me because I force them too, because
I am damned to always believe them to be
nothing more than baseless, they do not understand the
relating pressure I feel as lord of this once
The last throws of his titanic, obliterating, rage upon him,
Mad King March sinks into solitude and reckless despair.
He had known all his life that his anger was wasted
on the faithful subjects who had grown to love him,
as they had every March before him, for Mad King March
understood that the time was at hand in which,
baring disaster, baring cosmic storms and ice so ravenous that would
carve death into the heart of the Universe, it was time to start
thinking of the future, the January babe, medieval child in arms,
If not for Miss Dicks,
school would have been nothing but a waste of time for me.
Not to say I didn’t enjoy the time locked in a classroom,
some teachers positively nice, doing their job, as Mrs Gray
did, with enthusiasm in the face of permanent adversity
but there were others
for whom teaching was surely just a way to spend a few hours
away from home and the drudgery of living
in 1970s Britain.
If not for Miss Dicks,
I would have gone on to senior school
Where does the time go?
When the clock goes forward by its incongruous hour
it sits in a bank somewhere off shore in an account
owned by a Time magnet, a man who twiddles his embalmed moustache
and thinks of the interest earned
on the sixty minutes deposited, we lose an hour, he gains seventy
million and will live forever.
When he gives that hour back in late October,
the month in which Time gets charged its annual V.A.T.
(Vanity Adulterated Time), we see not a single second