My own meaning of life:
I promised to try and never do harm,
occasionally unsuccessful, botched even
or even been the disaster, the black sheep
I was always told I would be…
but as a whole
I have to believe I have been more respectable
than wicked and yes like anybody else
I regret bitterly the times when failure has been
the only option, for even in deep sad failure
must come hopeful good.
My own meaning of life:
To try and never be swayed by popular opinion,
She is beautiful,
for when she shook my hand
I saw nothing but grace
in her eyes and never mind
the face she wore
once before
now she was brave
and away from the sneering looks
of those to whom she would never
be completely free of,
she stood tall and with true
personality no longer hidden
in shadows,
she is the woman that captures
a heart, the stocking, sheer and black
holding up her innocence,
for she at least
in choosing to live,
I lock myself in
my solitary medicated confinement,
grieving Jekyll, erudite and calm Hyde,
and allow the room to close
around me, swirling like thunder
clouds, blackened and angry
but with the tinge of optimism
that the confinement will not last,
it will not allow the meekness of surrender
to bitter my experience,
for after all, the prison, the bonded jail,
is my own to suffer and nobody else
paid with their lives to see me sweat
out the pain of individual isolation.
Hollow incarceration,
What is there to do but whisper your name,
for to say it loud is like asking the Devil
to sit down with me and sup on tea and dine
on roasted flesh
of fatted calf and potatoes,
empty but for their skins
blighted by your ignorance.
I find I care not where you are
and yet out of the corner of my eye
I see your leftover remains
and I know you will be forever close by
despite my best efforts to ignore you now,
We are all alone on life support
with only the wires of modern life
keeping us company,
the small ticks of reassurance that someone else
is out there thinking of us
as they hope
we are daydreaming about them,
the only time the wires buzz with any sign of
life is when existence is made to pulse
rapidly, when survival is paramount
and when the wires countdown to possible extinction.
I switch off my life support during the day
but at night, when the darkness is clearer
The noise that springs from the excitable crowd
gathered for the evening performance
is shattered as the glass baton
comes crashing down
upon the lectern and the stern faced conductor,
well past his prime but ready to give
one last Winter serenade,
asks the free form Jazz Band to take their mark
and the collision of cultures
begins in earnest.
The whisper of aged musicians,
is stopped in its tracks as the rising force
of a solitary sax maniac
rises above the temper of glowing terms
Home…
I tramp the streets of my youth,
where I first kissed many a girl
who flirted with me and their school uniforms
leading the way to starched Nurses apparel
and the women in the beguiling
dazzling dress who I wished for nothing more
to be in attendance of…
I tramp the streets where teenage mood
swings caught me off guard, where the Garth
became my back garden, where an altercation,
one-sided and full of badly installed testosterone,
the first of two beatings I took, left me nearly
What was it I came here looking for,
the opportunity to seek redemption,
for reaching Middle-Age with some resemblance
to passing, fading youth still intact,
before, like dust that gets lodged in the corner
of the eye, that sticks determined to the vestige
of the previous day, it is dislodged
and flicked casually without
a second glance
into the awaiting gutter on the street.
I once came here looking for ghosts,
I came here for a memory of you,
the sweet taste of bitter regret,
What makes a place a home town?
Being born on a particular street
or hospital ward in a town is surely
just an accident of birth, like being proud
to be British, when stuck on an island
somewhere in the Atlantic makes any difference
to what you are like as a Human being,
being proud to British when pride is such a
bizarre state of mind, being proud for
choosing the exact moment in which
to escape the warm confines of the womb
when had your parents decided
I’m feeling disoriented,
out of sorts with the world
and seeing things I wish not to see
I may as well look in a mirror, to witness
the events in a different light,
the slant,
the obscene askew
and I pray for my soul
that I shall not become
the Jekyll and Hyde
in the seeking game.
Through a mirror darkly,
not one cracked from side to side
nor from bottom to top, but one
fractured and splintered
from front to back
through