Who’d be a boy today,
who would seriously want
to have the pressure of living
up to past endeavours by both
distant long ago relations, their successes
and their attitude;
why would we still install that engrained
outdated attitude into them
that boys are better than girls,
when if not equal then girls,
as Tiresias maintained,
have the true pleasure of life
and should be lauded as so.
Why in a world that needs more compassion,
more courage not to be driven by the pursuit
It was in the way he got off his chair
inside the café, the wind racing up
through the large alleyway
knocking the sign back and forth, the advert
for the all day breakfast, a small comedy
chicken with a wide brimmed Stetson,
the Midland’s answer to Foghorn Leghorn
holding a spatula, its feathers slightly
roasting away
and a pig with a creepy smile
and one trotter
out of proportion to the rest of the body
and wearing a flashy apron, emblazoned
with the words Francis’ Café,
You came into this world,
full of hope and fragile beauty
and not breathing; panic in my heart,
alarm that something
was most terribly wrong
as the nurse ran out of the room
carrying a small delicate, my flimsy, boy
and I watched helpless as technical
help arrived and slowly, surely,
you gasped for air and you weren’t
as breakable I had imagined
for the longest minute of my life.
You decided to not breath again
when eating tea one night, in a rush,
I have lost my tail.
As bereft as that small blue donkey
with rolling eyes and world on hoof
demeanour, my tail, never truly secure
with that pin in my arse and a body
that people mistake for a piñata, knock the stuffing out
of me and in their eyes they see
sweets and papers fall to the floor,
not seeing the illusion that they
have kicked the guts out of me;
is it any wonder I have lost my tail
and the voice of slow desperation
With a quill in hand,
I could tell thee how much they are loved,
and it would be believed, it would be honoured
for the feather would catch the late April
sunshine struggling through
the grime ridden window and would pause
your concerns for the day;
the ink staining the desk would congeal
and hard work would be seen to have been employed
in the making of verbal declarations of love
to your fair and beautiful eyes.
With a typewriter, an old fashioned
set of clunky keys resounding
His tale is over, borrowed
from his own father who sought a difference
to the world of industrial dirt
and the stench of flippant war
across Europe; the boy swam the great lake
beside his home in Hamilton, played
Ice Hockey and dreamed of fields, woods
and forests that would survive
all that he would leave behind
as he boarded the ship in Montreal
that would lead him back to another war,
one he would see erupt in yellow golden flame and damaging red
as Coventry burned,
Who would be an icon in 2016
when Time suggests you have had your Time
upon this Earth, making people
laugh, sing, think and knowing
they have had some privilege of sparkling
nobility shine in their lives,
for it turns out that 2016 was just a murdering
git in heavy disguise as a year,
the black mask covering the demonic glee
of celebrity assassination as the poor,
genuine 2016 is locked in a basement somewhere
in Munich, no access to the news
and only given bowls of water
Flashback;
It was what you gave me
as I turned on my phone
to see your remark
on another person’s page.
Ignoring my own held advice,
that I don’t have the right
to ever know
what other people think of me,
I read the short snappy sentence,
primed like a grenade,
three second rule blast
which tore my heart in two
and my head blown
to pieces on the rocks of someone
else’s insecurity, jealousy
a spread eagled whore
who likes to spread her
I used to think you were just a mean drunk,
a man who at the end
of the long arduous night
would pop open a tin
of cheap
nasty liquor
and sink them in order,
cans one
through to eventual six
and then to whom resentment
at the world, the sign of the angry
Capitalist, the dead on sarcasm boiled
in rich memory
of having been shafted by the poor,
the meagre and the deprived…
in your greedy eyes,
in your hard-up soul
The old lady of Rock and Roll
clears her throat,
smiles benignly to the audience,
a sense
of sorrow in her face
and as she is about to give
her final rendition,
her glorious epitaph to a worthwhile
dream, the Thunderstruck
and those with Big Balls
in jumps a man
instead
who can’t sing a note
but carries on the illusion
to the sound of guns
not cannons…
A Rose that falls
so desperately low
does not salute the worthy,