Poems

Not the yellow brick road but footprints in ash. Not the fullness of time but a mother’s empty arms. Not the birthday gift but sudden loss unwrapped. Not the echo of laughter but fierce residual grief.            ************** When hope goes into hiding it always loses face as school becomes a wilderness of broken desks and dreams. No lesson now is left to teach that does not hold a gun and lie in wait for innocence to end it on the street.            ************** Not a house still standing but the memory of home. Not a promise of peace but a leader’s empty words.

The years have taught me to take a B roadwhenever I can dodge the stress of work,and celebrate not hurrying alongto a deadline, meeting or appointment. Switchbacks and hummocks, valleys and bridges,warehouses and workshops, churchyards and pubsinstead of never-ending hard shouldersand motorway tarmac’s relentless thrum — longer, slower, even meandering,B roads let their tales unfold, mile by mile.They stop me pointlessly churning overwhat might happen at my destination.

Tilt of a planet brings the spring,buds and flowers burgeoning. Summer and sunlight feels so strong,mornings bright and evenings long. Enter the autumn’s yellow flakes,rust and bonfires, leaves and rakes. Into the winter on we gowith no escape from wind and snow. And what is season number 5?Nothing. Nowhere. Not alive until the spring again arrivesby resurrecting other lives.

I’d not go out there now if I were you –  not unless you have a taste for fire falling in flakes, for clouds of dust that leave an acrid chalky residue on wigs and epaulettes. If I were you I’d be inclined to stay inside at least until the ground had ceased to shake, the roads to crack – unearthing bad things we buried not that long ago. We’ve all been out enough by now to know it’s not the best of times to feign disinterest now the pillars of the temple are askew, now slates are flying, bridges burning and the big cats have bust out of the zoo.

A burden to the kind and noble I now depend on other people I did not want to feel the stroke which left me paralysed and stuck making noises instead of words blurting out sounds that sound absurd but I know what they’re meant to mean although I’m now a dud machine and cannot move with motor skills now brain is damaged in the skull from lack of oxygen and blood my face collapsed and mind went dead it felt like sudden suicide and sometimes now I wish I’d died.

The gurgle of a tap becomes the street’s first song, a busker tuning up for crumbs of daylight.                   His mother’s shadow tiptoes in, bends to his ear, hers the white dressing gown, the light breeze on his cheek whispering                    ‘Jack...   Jack... We have to get up early.’ ‘What’s a pearly?’ Beyond the window’s dinosaurs  streetlights go out, a robin sings. On a glazed road, shining, a snail’s odyssey begins.

The moon trails its glitter in the Thames. A Welsh Elvis sings If I Can Dream and the party begins.                                              The old slip away to soft chairs, drink tea.                                                    The young spin with the silver globe’s stars on the ceiling, arms raised, in the current of their joys as if love had ushered them downstream through arches to the sea.

Prisoners of war and victims of hunger they reach for food through invisible bars. Their homeland a prison, they gather together wherever aid workers arrive in the street. Their empty bowls are upturned helmets held at arm’s length as if begging for peace. Victims of war and prisoners of hunger, either or both are a world without end.

We pause while he takes out the window from his shop. The fancy way he handles your likeness makes us stop; the way his violet glass reflects your better side, sharpening with sunlight the tongue in cheek you hide, until two yellow gloves release you from the glare, tip you out, conceal you up sleeves of dusty air, where either I must follow or, back before you’ve gone, be thankful that he’s left me this frame to rattle on.

We shall both have hats showing we are wonderful,And mine will be big and blue as the sky,And yours will be the same colour as the daybreak,And on the moment that we die,We shall hang them on the peg whose name is HeartacheAnd never for one moment stop to wonder whyWe both had hats showing we were wonderful. So I shall to the hatter and you’ll go to the milliner,And mine will be a hat of sturdy felt,And yours will deploy all manner of fine fabric.And while we’re waiting for them, we shall meltInto each other’s head without a panicAnd learn all of the places each has dwelt.Yes, I’ll go to the hatter and you will to the millinerAnd we shall both have hats showing we are wonderful. Wherever we shall walk, the people will say ‘Ah,There go the fancy couple in their hats!

For D.M. Your morning caller on your corkscrew willow,  herald-on-high, swaying on the tip-top branch, purveyor and articulator of the drear backyards and garages of the new-build housing estate,  a mad planner’s rash, built spilling-out,  in bricky flood over the salt marsh. Trilling exultant blackbird, who,  when you buckle under baleful neighbourly   pressure to prune the tree, that looks endlessly  a free-flowing fountain; (the only tree anywhere to be seen) is gone.  And the morning is bare, silent, empty.  And what is a morning without song.