Sometimes I open the blinds
to witness the dark at four o’clock
in all its stillness.
But more often than not I keep
them closed, till the Sun insists
its alive and well, screaming
into the darkness that becomes
a whisper of joyful light by the time
it reaches my ears…
and yet every morning,
long before the birds
see the march of time and early worms
I question whether
I should continue,
every morning I ask if you
Listen my love
As you take my hand
As we walk gently to the town’s fair
I can no longer love you
in the way that you wish
under Wolfs Tone’s marbled stare.
You see my Ma thinks that we have
no future together
and I’m inclined to agree
for I seek a different life sailing the sea
beyond our small life
here in Bantry.
So she said her fond farewells
his face drowned in tears,
and the taste of bitter salt
I’ve been called boring,
I’ve been told I am miserable,
Weird, odd, names of derision,
Not our kind, useless,
Straight up to my face
That I was going to Hell,
That they wished I hadn’t survived
The experience of self-harm,
That I was a disappointment,
That I wasn’t loved,
That she wished she hadn’t turned up
To our wedding,
Three hours after saying I do,
On a train to London as we set off
The darkness hides the invisibility I wear
as a cloak disguises the cold that is felt
when my courage is stripped bare,
and the clemency I sought remains undealt.
Is it that you see me, but choose to ignore,
declaring to those able juice ridden ears of all my every crime,
faults, corruptions, misdeeds and more
that once friends saw good in me, destroying a rusting shrine.
I am cold out here. My skin has become shallow and worn,
I feel no warmth from the lit fires along
The black marble stones,
engraved without a thought
of personality,
just information,
barest glimpse, beloved,
much missed by,
called to Heaven,
and a stamped arrival
and departure date,
best possibly during, not after,
are forever on show and never revealed
as the cemetery lays
dormant and rusting,
standing still locked in time
but slowly crumbling…
save me from the forever eternal
I feel welling in my empty heart
There are times
when
I am so ashamed,
that I have to avert my eyes
to the damage
I
inflict upon
myself.
Vinegar drenched,
and salt infused,
eighteen months of food sobriety
in the face of pandemic and staple dinners
gone
in one
beautiful, grease kissed
moment
that saw proper fish and chips
fill my plate.
Ian D. Hall 2021
I tugged and pulled at the landing and stairs carpet,
threadbare, its fabric skin, hanging loosely
and unsurprisingly
it gave way easily, knowing its time was short,
revealing trapped dust of a decade’s footsteps,
up and down, occasionally falling, tumbling,
broken neck avoided by short distance
between point a and b…
The remains swept up, cleaned down,
a vacation in a vacuum and then in the bin,
to live and decompose in a thousand years
in plastic sweat, much like the carpet I had
I found a diary entry
dated
in black bold letters at the top
of the page, September 19th 1986.
In the mix of teenage scrawl
and practised finer examples
of handwriting to come,
I noted that
Pat Pheonix
had died the day before;
I also wrote, took some pain killers today,
is the discomfort new, or am I just
noticing it for the first time,
as my neck stiffened at an awkward angle
Your face,
it took a photograph
found
online,
hidden in the memory
of our old
friend’s wedding,
to remind me
of the great times we once had
at the Butt of Ale,
drinking,
on a Sunday afternoon
as the music rocked
and the talk
punched holes in the stillness
of Salisbury life.
Ian D. Hall 2021