The roar from the crowd inside Wembley was one that sent down chills to those of us gathered outside, desperate to part of something that we thought would never happen again; England in a semi-final of a major tournament, the opposition, the old enemy, as my Dad once glorified in shouting at the television whenever an international match came on television, his absurd way of shuffling forward in his chair and then standing erect with his head bowed as God Save The Queen, a man of the old school, good, forthright, obedient.
Category Archives: Monologues
A Snapshot.
It was a black and white photograph that drew me back to this town, one that had seen better days, mirroring the photograph taken at random on a night out with friends, who some became lovers, of all now, except for me, are either dead, or long since found out the hard way that we are the children whose parents were the product of meaningless catchphrases or suffocating intoxicants designed to blot out us of their forged, forgotten dreams.
The Memoirs Of The Invisible Anarchist.
She should have turned back. What was the point of this journey? In my mind I realised that she could have been anyone, she might have been telling me the truth from the moment I boarded the Greyhound bus in Cleveland, she could be on her way to Paris to study art by the Seine, to see the world in the same way he had desired, needed to do. The bus was certainly cheaper to get to Philadelphia where she said her sister lived, to pick up her tickets to fly to France and then go on to study the fine art she breathed whilst spending her free time underneath a bridge or two, perhaps sitting within a tossed baseball of the Eiffel Tower or sitting drinking coffee in one of the numerous cafés that lined the Parisian walkways.
When The Devil Closes Your Eyes.
1.
The air is cold and damp. It seeps though the pores of my skin and rushes in like its being chased by the Devil, ice-filled flames and stuffed down my throat with arctic weathered pitchforks as I breathed in and out; struggling to make the clouds of steam warm my hands when I blow on them as I walk the streets of a city I had last visited, on a purely pleasurable basis, some five years before.
A Short, One Sided Conversation With The Dark.
….so here we sit in the gathering dark, the reveal is coming, the hero is played by you, shall we read on?
No one else can see you you know, you don’t exist to them, you are an empty space, the void in the background that they dismiss as easily as a walk to walk or a drive to the shops, however in the dimmed light, the blinds pulled almost across to the point where only the barest chink of light can make it through and the black-out curtains hide the deepest shadows in suspended grief, I see you, I can hear you breathe, you think you are silent, that as you sit there in the dark judging me, contemplating the best way in which to bring me over to your side, I hear your thoughts, whirring round like a Catherine Wheel, fizzing away, the whizzing along, racing round and round in circles…I hear them, each dark reflection, each deliberate opinion you wish to put upon me, I hear them and I reject them…just.
Beyond Rainbow Bridge.
It is easy to say goodbye, you just have to pack whatever it is that you cannot live without and then without looking back, walk out of the door, never slamming it, never displaying anger or rage, and stroll off in to the distance…it is easy to say goodbye in such a way, after all eventually you will be found again and perhaps all the hurt that you felt will have disappeared into the ether, lost in the maelstrom of emotional distress and misplaced resentment.
The Temptation.
Accused of everything under the sun, blamed for all and sundry and sometimes with truth in their words and the charges – the responsibility is truly being mine alone. However, more often than not, they are just the unfortunate side effect of being the scapegoat, of being the person the finger gets pointed at when trouble brews, when the ugliness of jealousy steps into the heart of a person, when envy and hate are allowed to fester, to breed and to accumulate in a kind of toxic soup, bubbling under the surface, never truly revealed until the bitter taste of poison cramps their stomach and the foam of any residual innocence is long since evaporated.
Timber Wolves.
I had put the forests with their delicate shades of autumn dying feast behind me and the land of my Grandfather into perspective. The stories he had told me as I sat helpless, intoxicated by adventure and a noble spirit inside the frame of a now large man, weathered by time, eaten away by the wrongs he had caused his family, triumphant in the blasts of heroic failures and the conquering of young delusions and milestones, all were lapped up by a young mind powerless to stop the imagination from flooding over in torrents; wave after wave of images that he brought to life with a sensitive and yet commanding air, I now had buried in the forests where the buses refused to go and where the Timber Wolves sit waiting to harvest the dead.
92.
I blame my dad…well initially I blame him. I also blame the man who should have become my husband and my best friend Jack. All three of them, the father, the turd and the holy spoke. It’s why I am here this evening, here freezing my backside off watching my team playing against Oxford United in the F.A Cup. My company as you can see, is a fairly warm pie, a Thermos flask and a rucksack containing a fairly well read and crossword attempted newspaper, a new note pad, envelope, pen and a diminishing book of stamps in which at some point I will write to the man who should have been my husband two and half years ago that I completed the challenge laid down before me. I shall write, much more kindly it has to be said, to my dad who decided to stay at home and watch some old tosh on the television rather than see me complete the task….that’s not fair as he went to quite a few games with me but a few weeks back he slipped over in the ice outside Wigan station and broke his leg, and I shall write with glee and pleasure to friend Jack and tell him he is not the only stupid arse to complete the ninety-two.
Panini Days.
There was a certain elegance in the way the action of throwing these valuable prizes into the air that caught the attention. It was the flowing motion that they were raised, almost as if offering the precious, often fought over with the resulting small bruises and black eyes to match, the lifting of some ancient artefact to the Gods which proclaimed that the holder, the bearer of such gifts was a step beyond that of the lowly Hamlet gazing into the hollowed out skull of Yorick, they were the exuberant interest of every boy in the playground.