Trains with no people
A church with no steeple
It's just not right
If they're not packed in all tight
Armpit-close carriages
I've seen more distant marriages
Clickety-clack travel
Yakety-yak shackled
Manners alight
It's just not right
If they're not packed in all tight.
The birds gossip away around TV aerials. Their daily chats, music to my ears. Yet I wonder. What if it is just chat? What if true birdsong is sung at a level, and at a beauty, we cannot hear or handle?
It's out of range. I strain an ear to Nature. We have yet to earn her trust.
My wife and I have a large mattress
It's known for its size and its flatness
I move in my sleep
Miles I can creep
It's why I sleep with a road atlas.
Time's a gift, the present
Use it wisely, or it stops
Don't waste it, for a second
Just playing with the box.
in my head
it's nice and bright
despite the dark outside
but in my head
I'm just 18
it's 1985
The smirk behind the smile
The jerk behind denial
Painting Priti pictures
Out of hate and bile.
You're sat there still at traffic lights
Wondering how they function
The reason that they have red lights
Is cos you're up the junction.
"Robots won't rule my life"
says me dad to me.
"But dad you've stopped at red lights -
since 1963"
FOR SALE signs on our hill. Giant, wooden flowers. They disappear into a line of perspective that suggests they go on forever. Maybe they do. I'm flushed with an urge to draw an I between every O and L on the TO LET signs. I reproach myself for such toilet humour. Yet, I smile.
I get my coffee from a pod
It's all quite science fiction
I can't forego a cup, I've got
Severe appliance addiction.
How hard to break is the line of life? That very thing that separates us from eternity?
I’ve often wondered how close I have come to death since, well, since I first found out about death when my aunty died in 1977. I was 9, or 10. I was very young. To suddenly have someone disappear from your life at such an early age is not unusual. The circle of life and death is announced to us all at various stages of our lives and mine first happened at 9, or 10.
Parents do a great job of shielding you from the outside world. They do such a good job that sometimes the outside world cannot get a look-in. But try as they may sometimes it peers into your world and shatters it in an instant. This was the case when my Aunt Lilly died of cancer in 1977. I had no idea what cancer was. I don’t even think I was told her cause of death, just that she was gone. It wasn’t spoken about. One minute she was there. The next minute she wasn’t. I must have been told that she had gone to heaven, and that heaven was great and everything, but if it was so great why was everyone crying? I didn’t go to the funeral. It wasn’t ‘done’.
Around the same time that my Aunt Lilly died I remember that we had a girl at school called Claire. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember her surname. Ashamed because she killed herself over the school holidays and she was my age, 9 or 10, and I can’t even remember her surname. I do remember a school assembly after the holidays where we were all told that she had died but then nothing. I found out years later that she had killed herself. I suppose now we would all have had counselling or at least a group discussion about the effects. But it was announced in assembly as if it were a forthcoming jumble sale, though to be honest, we would have talked more about a jumble sale. I never found out the reason why she killed herself at such a young age. I still wonder.
My next brush with death was a little later, I must have been about 11. I was still at middle school so it would have been about 1978, or 1979.
I was crossing the road at lunchtime in the days when kids used to come and go as they pleased through schools with no alarms, fences or security light. I was nipping down to the chip shop about 200 yards away. As I crossed the road I saw a lad from the year below me, a brother of one of my classmates. His name was Kevin. He was standing in the middle of the road and this confused me. He started to sway and stagger and I thought that he may have been hit by a car. I hadn’t seen him get hit by a car but why would he sway and stagger ? I walked towards him to see if he was alright. He collapsed to the floor. I now ran towards him and tried to speak to him. He was lying face up on the road. His eyes were open but he didn’t respond. I ran the twenty yards to the staff room and blurted out something about Kevin being hit by a car and then the grown-ups took charge. I remember blurs of bodies running towards Kevin, all the traffic stopping, and then an ambulance taking Kevin away. Kevin died of a brain hemorrhage I was later told by his sister. And then nothing. I don’t even recall telling my parents what had happened. I’m certain the school didn’t. Different times.
The next year. 1980. I was walking to school down the hill with a couple of pals. We always walked the same way there and the same way back. We chatted about football, Pannini stickers, TV and music. We were very ordinary. As we reached the bottom of the hill we looked up a side street. We saw an ambulance at the top of this street outside a house. It was too far away to see whose house it was and we did have a few friends who lived up there. We tried to guess why it was there and then went back to swapping football stickers and trying to guess next weeks number one. We were told a day or two later in school assembly that our friend, Robert, a ginger-haired lad who we used to play football with, had died of a heart attack in his sleep. Again, just a quick announcement at school and no further discussion. I really don’t think I told my parents. Such different times.
We used to go hunting for golf balls over a local wood. It was attached to a golf course and we used to wait for errant golfers to hit their wayward balls into the woods. We’d help them look for their ball, of course, before selling them one of ours we had found earlier, and always keeping the one they’d just hit stuffed right down our wellngton boot! This was something we used to do most evenings and weekends and there was a small gang of us involved in the fun.
One day in 1981 we were all prodding our sticks in the mud and dirt looking for golf balls when all of a sudden about 6 large men jumped out from behind the trees. We all dropped our sticks. It was very frightening. Although they weren’t wearing uniforms they informed us that they were police officers. We thought we were all going to be arrested for stealing golf balls! As it sadly turned out, we were in the woods at exactly the same time that a lady had been murdered whilst walking her dog. We later found out that it was the mother of one of our casual friends, Tina. Again, I don’t think the police even told our parents after they took our names and addresses.
Four deaths in four years and nobody spoke about them. I often wonder what affect these tragic deaths had on me at such a young and transformative age? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Not long after the death in the woods I was sitting at the dinner table in my parents house. I remember having, now, what I know to be a panic attack. I was taken out into the back garden but at the time none of us, my parents included, knew what was up with me. I continued to have panic attacks through 1981 up until 1986. They didn’t stop in 1986 it was just that this was when they stopped on a daily basis as I finally left school and didn’t have to endure the daily assembly where I honestly thought I was going to die every single time I attended. They were heartbreaking times to look back on. I had no one to talk to and no one could understand what was up with me. I didn’t know and I know my parents didn’t. Different times. I never even saw a doctor.
My panic attacks didn’t stop when I started work in 1986 but I managed to control them with alcohol. That is an entirely different story and one that deserves some time to process. Different times, again.
A man used to walk 2 alsatians in our road, hoodie pulled tightly over his head, dogs by his side in leashed obedience. He never spoke. He passed me the same time every day.
He walks 1 dog now and passes 10 minutes earlier.
Despite our silent, social contract, I hear his pain.
chimney pots
church organ stops
rule roofs and roosts
in my long terraced street
liturgies of crows
congressional
confessional
conspiratorial
in rows
white smoke
pours from a single chimney
no central heating cheating here
new wood for number 5
or the crows have a new Pope
Our street's row of back gardens sleep toe to toe with the posh street's back gardens. A fence marks respectability. I see flickering arrays of blinking bathroom lights. Ablution solutions. A switchboard of scurry. Shadows trapped behind glass. My private collection of the posh.
the seabirds tilt at the wilt of the light
some return to the kindness of land
some will take sleep atop waves in the night
finding comfort from Neptune's command
the low hum of seething traffic jams
queues of our congested memory
the clipping of horses hooves on stone
the whistling of the bell above the grime
the clopping of factory boots in line
the rag n bone man's scratchy call for time
ANY OLD TIME!
he'll echo
we'll rhyme
Our road's fading at the edges. In places the tarmac doesn't quite reach the kerb. Look closely enough you'll see cobblestones that were laid when the street was built in 1897. My mate insists it's the wear of cars parking. I know it's time waving at us from 1897. I wave back.
My lawn looks patchy and thininng. It could pass for a Before pic at a hair-loss clinic. Our holly tree's gone, removed when its roots began undermining our house. I won't miss its spiky leaves but I will miss its cool shade.
I sup a coffee and slowly take root in summer memory.
our streetlights were turned off for ages
when banks crashed across the world's stages
we walked in the dark
through street and through park
but the banks kept their lights and their wages.
I wonder who first taught the first bird to sing?
I ponder if they had just one song to bring?
Did that bird then share it 'cross land and 'cross sea?
We still hear that first song in dawn's harmony.
The birds are attracted to a ball of fat and seed I've placed in my back garden. It swings low in the wind from a string. Fighting to feed, scrummaging down in a flurry of feathers, the larger birds are thrown from this pendulum rodeo. It's strangely hypnotic, hypnotically strange.
A toilet on a lawn
Is not like sit-down mowing
Don't confuse the two
Mind how you go if you're going.
I was the magicians assistant
when the magician was Time
and they were awfully persistent
I sawed between day & night's line
I open the back door to greet the morning, only for the wind to slam it firmly in my face. The petulant day remains in manic rehearsal. Orchestral improvements in the dark. I return to the sanctity of a quiet bedroom. A dog's snore is my metronome, and I am his only conductor.
60 minutes
for Time's ferry
to sail from
Then
to sail to
Now
On return to the dock
at the top of the clock
it's all change
though we struggle to see
though Time provides us
with the right lens
the right time is
Now
but we're truly we
through memory
Remember?
See?
I wake to gelatinous clouds in an aspic sky. Moulded to morning, the birds await their cue as traffic awaits their queue. I know how this movie starts. I direct the coffee cup to my lips and the birds start to sing, accompanying the first beep of a morning commute. Action!
We've broken pavement in our street. Penitent monks, heads down, we walk carefully on it. They tilt in hope of replacement. The council cover some in black tarmac. Our street gives a rotten, uneven smile. In the posh streets they walk guilt-free. We continue to offer up prayers.
I'm re-reading Rebecca at bedtime. Would Cornwall lace my dreams with raw coastlines? Wild beauty? My subconscious briefly considered it. I travelled instead to our 1st holiday. My wife and I, holding hands tightly against the wind.
Last night I dreamt of Morecambe Bay again.
The light. Brand new. Giddy. Unsure of the morning, casting a ramshackle feel over a bedroom. Shadows rush to find hiding places in the blink of an eye. The dark recedes. The ham actor's final curtain call.
I throw mine wide open to no applause and exit stage left for coffee.
repeating tasks that are the same
to check for madness is the claim
I sip and sigh to find I'm sane
But just to check I'll sip again
Leaves, like life, blow in one day
Wrested from their tree
And just like that they blow away
To where we do not see
Trainers today are bright and light
Kids spend small fortunes of cash
In my youth I lived both day and night
In one pair of Dunlop Green Flash.
If I had a time machine
I already know what I'd do
I've already done it
Or will, have, do, done, it
And you'll have, do, done it, too.
Since Lockdown I have worked it out
We're all stuck on Life's roundabout
Waiting for the lights to change
Waiting not to be estranged
We're told that soon they will turn green
Once everyone the needles seen
And though we cry for Hugging's lack
Let's test the trace of Love's comeback
First cup of coffee: Holding untold means of contemplation, as if I'm rediscovering an imaginary friend. Together we play in mists of steam that rise from a warm cup. We taste the bittersweet joy of unbridled play. We part by splitting a memory and promising to keep in touch.
Time is just painting by numbers,
We all get a set, there's no rush,
Life shouldn't feel so incumbered,
We're all given such a broad brush.
Whenever off to Zoom I scoot
I always seem to be on mute.
I said
Whenever off to Zoom I scoot
I always seem to be on mute.
Hello?
Hello?
What does this key do?
đŸ”‡
Paper comes from trees we're told
What do they do with bark?
They stick it on the backs of moles
It's how they make aardvarks.
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