It’s hard being a shadow,
especially though I tell myself
I’m not an illusion,
that the ghost in me
that is ignored,
that is playfully abandoned
from time to time
exists and feels pain like a Winter’s breath
on a fading scar,
rising with pinched assault
and damnation in the dead
of lost cause night…
I am not an illusion,
a conjured trick of morphine,
a dream,
a nightmare that an addict once had
in bleak black and white stereotype,
the noir in the film…
The small stone,
misshapen by history
and the waves that lap at the Gods
smoking tobacco
as they hold back the Nile,
sits perfectly still
on the edge of my wooden desk
now
only serves to remind me that the world
is forever calling out to be explored
and whilst I have forever stained
its appearance in indelible ink
with the date of its discovery
and the place on the Nile
in which countless eyes
ignored its white dimpled shell,
The dragon in my skull
is breathing too hard
and making my eyesight
blur, seem distant and the claw
from the left foot is tapping out
Jazz moves in time to Beiderbecke
as the heat from its nostril
clouds over my right eye,
steam punk future,
one electronic eye patch
covered in soot and dragon grime, as Buddy Rich
smashes out hits
against my temple
the headache in perfect drum beast time.
The right eye,
never the same since the day
Once what moved in New York City,
I offer you to see, my lad.
I offer you up
to observe the flourish of excited youth
and play in what was up till recently
the waste ground of desire and poor human contact,
and yet it held magic, abiding spirit and conscious
unsurpassed, true beauty in a bubble.
I offer you my son
the chance to be an English man
abroad, to witness first hand
all that I saw, all that I loved
and all who took me by the hand
The tarnished anger in her eyes
never once betrayed the lack
of emotional pity that her voice
played tricks with;
that her brittle anger disguised
deep seated resentment for all things
that smiled.
The smile, confused and beautiful,
shrank her in wake
as she waged war, voluntarily despised
the tears of flowing radiance;
yet somewhere deep inside the smile
raised the flag of disarmament, of peaceful
solution, the smile would just not appear
in her presence, instead it would save
itself for someone empty of hatred.
The stone feathers barely ruffle
in the effigy to the fallen fowl
misled as the funny fatal flaw
in avian folklore recklessly finds
that the community that flocks together
far below them in the passageways,
the streets of the important town,
group together, finding friends like seagulls
perching, fiendishly watching, squalling
for the left over bits of fish dropped
from frowning Government semi-official,
offal like folk.
Ian D. Hall 2016
In what was once The Head of Steam,
the oldest friends stare at what was now
and smiled for having survived
the what could have been,
if she had said yes at seventeen
and the inevitable destruction
of youthful dreams,
for in the space that
was distanced by the sound
of Tuesday night shrill,
the feminine arsenal load of cheap wine
fuelled by the required by thunderous
glass and ear-splitting bitten down
eye, cross at the volume that such nights bring,
the two old friends know, that this moment,
I have bled
and no doubt will bleed again,
the only thing I am unsure of
is the reason why
and the moment Time decrees when.
I have bled and stopped the pain,
I have laughed it off
for that is what civilisation decrees,
that life doesn’t mind you suffering,
it just doesn’t want to see you
remonstrate, crawl into the skin
or take refuge
in the beautiful bosom
of Death, it’s not very gentlemanly after all.
I have gently kissed her, her silken skin,
The Pretty Things have been left behind
as the thin alluring Duke bids
them farewell, they are more than old enough
now to understand that nothing
lasts forever but that
does not stop the hurt they feel, the pain
they will remember, the beauty they will cherish; such Pretty Things.
Dedicated to David Bowie, a hero to all.
Ian D. Hall 2016.
The effects, the mementoes
you come across when
you have the moment in which to tidy
a desk. The half forgotten
trinket, lovingly embraced in the warm light
of day and sold by candlelight to the bidder
hiding in the draw.
I found something of you,
and for a while thought of happy
memories, of the laughter once
shared and the joy it brought us,
then I remembered with sadness
the argument over nothing,
your dogma beating my stubbornness
over the head with a thick