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
He is a hero of mine.
He is one of many granted, not all of them male,
not of all them perhaps the typical heroic type,
some have even let me down
as I have let them down
but I have never stopped loving them
for in each person, I see the hero
trying to burst free, trying to live up to the ideal
set down by the first
and it is a heroic nature that eludes me
completely and without favour.
You are a hero, you are someone I admire
There are pencil shavings on the floor
where I missed the bin
and there they will stay until my penance is over,
the same can be whispered for the remains of a rubber,
quietly judging me, assuming superiority
and remarking upon
the desperation, the vile responsibility placed upon my shoulders
as I hunch over a plastic typewriter,
plastic keys, plastic words, plastic hack
and I wish the pencils would sharpen
themselves and the rubber erase itself
out of existence…
…for in their world I am trapped,
You called it a chat about tidying
up your affairs of state, the long way off
day in which I would be left alone
to deal with the phone calls
and the letters
and you sat back in the gathering cold,
arms folded and I saw in your eyes
that perhaps it was not as
long away as I thought.
We talked of football,
nearly always the same topic of conversation
we had always had, spliced occasionally
with talk, mostly from me,
of theatre and of visiting home.
The Paris sunshine stretched out the morning
as though sheets of puff pastry
had been laid out and baked under a blasting
furnace and the fluffy flakes had found
time to build a type of intimate imitation
that the day
would be memorable.
The hotel was not the type of place
in which to soak up culture
and the talk of visiting Sacré- Cœur Basilica, success,
and finding the remains of Jim Morrison’s past, failure,
so the local French Arabia café became the pit stop
The epiphany came during a day at the cinema.
Not like the one in which the iron nearly hissed
and spewed out all manner of expletives
as I realised that I had escaped and was now safe,
nor the one behind the bar
one evening as the slops of Guinness,
the foam of a wasted pint
and the mix of running tap water
congealed to make tar like mess,
the unfiltered keyboard with all the letters missing,
as I realised to be free, first I had to walk out the door…
I want to stand in History’s shadow
and place the aged and disfigured photograph
of a previous voyage next to one
taken today,
the same spot, the same pose and perhaps
the same smile from bright blue eyes,
but withered by Time, the crunch back position
held aloft by determination and bugger it attitude;
I want, I desire, covet in all its glory
to stand where history’s shadow once fell
and see the world from that angle
once more.
From that crooked display of fighting Time,
I ventured along to a fireworks display but twice,
yet somehow the ritual of putting up an effigy
on a stoking hot flame, of the misreading
of ceremony that has been tainted and abused
long enough,
especially as the value of Government has fallen
and who now has not wanted to say
a big fuck you and place a single digit,
perhaps with closely chewed nail standing out
as the nervous realisation
of our collective plight takes hold,
who now would not want to see Parliament ablaze…