The minstrel, once wandering upon many high seas,
now happy in contentment, leans over to hear the pleas
and thank you’s for bringing Neil Sedaka to life
upon a Sunday afternoon for the city and its colourful wife.
It’s the richness of the voice, the sadness in the detail
and the desire to bring some freshness to what else the month makes stale.
The delicate sound of a raindrop pouring on silk is full of love,
tickles the ears and brings praise to the lord of the voicebox from up above.
Will they check the law courts and swab the dock for flour,
Come away happy, pose for pictures, wig arrested,
the lawyers all standing round being tested
and the chambers closed down in hours?
Will they go to go to the Golf course lunch for retired heads,
swab the tees for signs of powdered chalk
and entertain the local paper with absurdist talk
and have the private hospital closed for abuse of meds?
Will they roll up en masse at Parliament Hill
and with convenience in mind forget the hate crimes,
Who would be a poet, writer or scribe in the modern world?
How much more exciting and soul destroying
it must have been in days when Kerouac could slump over a typewriter
and bang his head in withdrawn frustration
on the polished and
d
e
n
t
e
d
desk.
The pile of A4 paper to his left , ever dwindling, never being pregnant with word
upon word, upon life sentence, instead cluttering up the floor
in a moon scarred landscape that defeats the purpose
As I watched the youthful sounding Yorkshire Poet
on stage in the furthest outpost that Lancashire once provided
but its self the gateway to boundless enthusiasm
and the cradle of civilisation in the wild, tempting lands,
I thought of you.
My stirred thoughts crammed with metaphor, with simile and symbolism,
the passion of friendship that flowed in the duck shaped earphones you
handed over with smiling mocking bow on my fortieth birthday
and the thank you that passes between us when needing
to crib from each other’s notes.
She exhaled her smooth silk smoke over me and I lost my way
in a fog, a haze of riches of electric touch upon
the one crumpled silk stocking she was wearing and I remained
there for several nights.
The distant sound of a saxophone beating against the lips of a master
as she asked me time and time again, whether sugar, was I alright?
I told her she was fine, it was me I worried about and the stinking sleepness
I felt as the bed heaved and swallowed and caught my breath and
How much more entertaining
to slowly the strangle the sleepless Goose
that laid Golden Eggs, than to remove its head
from its neck and find the plump belly only contains
unspent grit and the remains of the previous day’s feed.
By placing an ever tighter grip with one hand
around the stout, formally resolute bird’s feathery neck,
and in the other
the sense of the caring fatherly figure protecting the Goose
from the ravenous wolf, forever telling the scared bird stories
of wolves and fox with mange in their fur and steel
I would write a sonnet just for you,
something comparing roses to your sweet breath
or the clouds in the sky, anything to hide a solitary clue
of how you wish me nothing but ill-fortune and possible death.
I hold a candle for you at all times of the day and night.
The wax cascading down, tear by tear
and soon snuffing out eventually your guiding eternal light
as the days turn to months and finally a goodbye to the year.
Oh I wish I could say I still miss the way you were
The dinosaur presented to you this evening
has had the most awful of press.
Uncaring, even abusive towards its young,
beast like, carnivorous and rotten I stress;
A constant whimper in the Universe and one that destroyed
its home and yet was capable of inspiring us to greater thought
and to whom even now after all scientific data has been agreed upon
sees Dinosaur deniers take paleontologists to court.
“We shouldn’t teach our young about these absurd creatures” they decry
they try to denounce the dinosaur as an evil spread by science
You were the thrill of a childhood wrapped in sickness.
Months of endless childhood complaint
in which the hero and heroine captivated me and in which an adventure
was of my own undertaking.
A bout of Bronchitis, battled on one side like a punch bag
with its stuffing flowing out onto the cold gymnasium floor,
the victor raising his hands in mocking tones
high above my head and placing the sickly taste of camphor oil
on harsh felt pillow and scratchy woollen blankets and taunting me
with the knowledge that as I grew older I would not
Whatever happened to jelly and ice cream?
On any child’s birthday the sound of screams and ripping paper
as the parcel gets torn hurriedly with glee across a new seam
and the children’s delight at the once yearly caper.
What happened to children being given what they need,
with one really great present making them smile till Christmas
instead of cutting open a money tree and watching it bleed,
the politics of early consumerism driven in early on mass?
It is as if as a society we have said that yes the children our future,