…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
The single hair that holds the danger aloft
is but a trigger in the minds of those with envy in their heart.
The crown unsettled, as if troubled by feet of clay so soft,
is not to be worn by one whose for lust of power is but a start.
I will not envisage a crown upon my head
nor will Damocles push me into the arena bold
for when all is not done and never mentioned, never said,
will my heart be cravenly sold.
I will not hang
by an open doorway, or even one
where the door is slightly ajar, glass bottomed, for fear of the label,
lest I hear your secrets tumble out of your mouth
and into the ears
of those less worthy of your undisclosed closet life.
I once heard my granddad through the floorboards,
a big man, a wise man, act as the secret man in red
with Reindeer slippers on his feet and stag like antlers
scratching down the back of any bus driver
The message never gets across,
I cannot blame it for failing, for like the desperate man
telling his heart to stop gripping tightly, sucking
the very breath out of him and as the feeling of dizzy peculiarity
washes over his mind as if complaining about all the wrongs
the heart has thought, I ignore it,
as the message gets itself becomes ignored.
The message, one of such ease to take in, one that requires
so little thought on the receivers part, is tossed aside
as if written on a paper napkin, stained with curry sauce
I do not sleep well, for your silent voice still sits in my head.
The darkness of the night,
lit up by the neon, plastic-looking sirens
of an ambulance
and the police cars who came screeching to a halt,
running over the dead
hotdogs, battered burgers and remains of candy floss, dropped
on the floor, trod on with contempt by the man who lost
his girlfriend’s respect because the sight of the gun
was off kilter and the way she told him off
for being pathetic, meant that the candy floss had to pay the price,
The Prince of Denmark is no fool,
and yet the aggressive bear
that sniffs and breathes the perspiration lingering
at the back door of the Prince’s castle is enough
to send the guards out, armed with spears, to fight the shadow
of what passed as cold deep frost, this bear
never hibernates.
The bear, perhaps a relic or offspring of another terrifying creature,
the type that heroes are born to fight and have mead
run over in great abundance as the fires lick the mantelpiece
and scorch the legends of
The Bikers rally that took place in Philadelphia that day
was but one highlight from a journey out from Media with
my dear friend Carole.
The city of brotherly love became the place where friendship
blossomed and now after more than twenty three years
I know she is still looking out for me and taking the lost
lonely lad she found isolated on a bench in a bar, surrounded by hundreds
of all-American types, drinking, laughing, shouting for the unseen
team to score in a game I didn’t understand properly, out for a walk round