Catching A Cold In St. Malo.

The St. Malo air was crisp on the July morning

that I heard down the crackling line

of the only phone

box in the towering vicinity

that my

Grand Mother had

suffered

a heart attack.

 

I had been walking for weeks, the chance to stop

for a while and take stock,

take the map out of the bag

and contemplate my next move, one that

unlike my time in America,

I was determined

was not going to end in a premature way

with the option to carry on not taken away

from me.

 

I had wrestled with the choice of heading East,

I had done west, now my eyes grew big

and drunk on the prospect of finding what lay beyond

the border of France, the chance to meet

women from a strangled Europe

and further into the unknown that I could have ever dreamed,

my morning coffee, dark and bitter,

the last of the milk having been pinched by the tent two down

before they made their own way back to civility

and I wondered how my call would be taken,

I wasn’t coming back having reached St. Malo;

I was carrying on.

 

The phone call stunned me, I had been gone

two weeks,

had walked and hitchhiked over

300 miles

but she was static in a hospital bed

with a touch of evil hanging over her,

the vampire that stalked her blood

for the last

couple of years

was ravenous and I thought of a dark day

when I would see her no more

and the black clouds rolled over the English

Channel with history’s Armada in its tow

and I felt the first drops of rain hit me

with anger as I made my way back

to the campsite, milk forgotten.

 

That day I listened to the piss down, hoe down

mown down warbling of the young German

playing his guitar and entertaining the two Austrian girls

who put Heidi to shame

and I saw circumstance and honour defeat me.

No one expected me back,

I was free to roam this world for eternity

if I so wished for who can ever ask a soul

to stop wandering when the need is upon them

and the sound of the almighty

throwing his weight around inside my head

and overhead and the lightning struck

just as Heidi smiled at the sweetness of her new found Hans

I resolved in the morning

to toil back across the sea and make my way

to Birmingham,

via the sea

Via Poole,

Via Salisbury,

change at Basingstoke,

in the end via my own bed

as I suffered my own bout of Influenza

after waking up with my head in a puddle where the rain

had found its way in to baptise me

and half drown me and the sound of Hans and Heidi

still running snot like down my throat.

 

My nan looked at me from her bed,

wondering why I once more had abandoned

my dream of seeing life, the near shattering experience

of seeing her there with the vampire

looking on with suspicion raging

in his dead soul fed eyes, terrifying me

and all I could say was;

it can wait.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015