It was a table.
Have you got that?
A table.
Good.
I don’t know how many
legs it had,
or if it was metal or wood.
And it probably had something on it.
About so high.
Oh
and it was French,
and had the art
of disappearing when confused.
Nobody asks
what it is that has me
brushing wet sand kindly
with a flattened palm,
whilst
cradling a dead log
like a baby seal.
With sanctity I sit
in blue and white,
on the beach,
head suitably tilted.
Madonna and log.
It,
eyeing me fondly
smiling as I lullaby
it.
Him.
And if I can hold us together
in the simple song I sing,
the red raw gut-wrench
just might stop
and still itself
in the not-Now.
Carnaptious
was a favourite word
to describe him drunk
on whisky.
When he’d snap
you’d hear the lead crystal
clunk the table
and his palm would slap
the rhythm of his arguments out,
each syllable another nail
to bang,
to put the lid on doubt.
And later in the night,
as the liquid pulled
the upside-down menisci
of his lids,
and the last of the drink
slid down
and swilled in his gut
and pooled there, we kids
would hear the late
night news
berate him,
and we’d wait
to catch the light-switch click,
a match for the darkness
which would stick to our hearts
in stale silence.
Teenagers,
burning moths
screeching
(Multi-coloured bulbs
flash past,
blazing)
yelling their fears to laughter.
Excitement,
twitching in the creaking
muscles
of greased-up machinery.
Rusting 1950s iron
pushed to its whirling limits.
Rawk-aaand-roooooooll!,
Where age-old fun
gets spun
for a week
before it has to leave town,
because
once you hit
your teenage peak,
You gotta go!
The funfair, the nightspark,
it is what we think we once were.
No Ticking but the Tide
Come cold October
there’s a wintry feel to the coast.
Where the wind howls hollow through,
slicing pale grasses; and the incessant sea
keeps coming in the repeated strokes of a comb
on a bald head: habitual and pointless.
Gulls echo and bob above the sea, kite-like.
The sand, interred with each succeeding wave,
one wave, rolling in forever and again,
passes the time ticking off endlessness
and in its’ emptiness there is no measuring out of clocks.
No ticking but the tide.
An unpeopled beach is ageless, so I’m told,
and this imaginary headland is beyond time,
but perfect in unsullied nature.
The only time I see this scene
is with eyes shut,
remembering the tide is a Mexican wave
and never moves forward,
only jumping up and down for effect.
A gargantuan morning gapes at me,
wide-eyed and blue-skied.
It has showered in the last throes of dusk.
It has towelled down,
and its air
is tingling with wet freshness.
It drips crystalline light
through my bedroom window
on the rosy, wakening wall.
It pinkens my lids
and warmly
washes me to wakefulness.
And before that first thought
dawns and yawns and stretches
rehearsing the doings of the day,
I am given a view of the old Sun
flashing me its picture of youth.
Instamatic summer.
I carry a copy in my wallet of necessary feelings.
Umami-
Delicious taste
Or anguished disappointment,
Depending on whether
You are Japanese
Or Irish.
So, we sway,
oddly, this uncomfortable day,
finding our rhythm at last:
an uneasy one, jostled by cobbles
on our journey to forgetting.
Upstairs front,
shoogling the past’s prow,
this way, that,
me holding you,
me not letting go;
the bus shoves us
together.
You encased next to me, my daydreams swim in a
childhood’s wake, where, happy on shoulders
your hands manacle my ankles, making it
Now again. And no yearning for youth
or past is this, but a rueing of
understanding’s ebb;
(Did the silence set
before the
shorthand
of football
talk?)
Our mechanics had ground to a halt long before I
ascended to teenage inarticulacy. (Can you hear the
bus purr when it rests?)
Getting off at the old stop
and following a quarter century of scuffed
heels, dragging me into your history I turn
detective, rediscovering us when new.
Before faults opened and
closed our possibilities.
I scramble the fence posts down to the
Clyde-side. Down to the river’s edge.
Force an imagining of you
as a boy with faceless
friends, swimming.
And let you fly.
You rain down, a
drizzle of dust
sprinkling the
brown water,
sinking
to silt.
Amen.
No moving forward or going back.
I rescrew the urn’s lid waiting for
an impossible word. And know,
with you swimming, there’s no last bus home.
The decaying mansions of English language
rot and recede
into truculent teenage grasses with each unspoken year.
The hired help have let their hair go wildly unmown
and surrendered their threadbare uniforms,
content with Nature’s neglect taking its timely course.
When the architects and master masons of linguistics
survey their forgotten plans in the heaven of English literature
they are not dismayed, but patiently sit and sit and sit.
The pristine edifices of the classics,once grand and clad in deferential brick,
stand scaffolded and unread,the doors unlocked, ajar,
a hopeless invitation into the library of the English canon.
Sniff at the dusty cloak on the carpets of grammar,
run hands on the ghostly sheets thrown over the disused armchairs of archaic words,
let ears catch echoing plinks on the out-of-tune pianoforte of the perfectly crafted short story.
Sound out bathrooms of formal poetry creaking with the rusty plumbing of metre and rhyme.
Whereas, in the vibrant gardens, the temporary outhouses,
hastily arranged huts of slang and idiom are adorned
by the green living grasses of new forms, creepers of half remembered dreams,
mulching leaves of half-shaped thoughts, forests of half-forgotten loves
are writhing in living incompleteness,
biologies which will in turn harden and fossilise with overuse.
And then, we can rue the passing of our once organic lingo.
The park woke.
Trees yawned and stretched,
whilst off the lead,
a freed dog ran razor-like
through the soaped-up jowls
of misty morning grass.
Its glad barks
echoed
the sleepy greenery
like pebbles popping a once still pond.
Milkmen and posties,
the border guards of a new day,
skirted the outside pavement
with bottles and bags,
and flickered past railings
in silent tribute
to Eadweard Muybridge.
And as the dog
froze and cocked an ear,
figuring the hum of a sleepy car out,
it dawned that the birds had slept in,
again missing the sunrise.
