The night you were in town,
I could not get to see you,
was that planned,
was it just the latest
in a long line of inside
out misunderstandings,
that if I bumped into you,
if I should set my eyes
on your supposed beauty,
would I just crumble
into dust
or would I rise like a tiger
in the cage, mad, bad and dangerous
to approach trapped and with my own eyes
blazing, burning bright.
The night you came to town,
The Christmas seasonal jumper,
knitted who knows where,
on sale, colourful,
advertised on line,
a few happy smiling faces
no doubt, a few jokes
and dig in the rib expense
as photographs are shared
in the immediate world,
secretly hoping to make it big
as a meme;
a Christmas jumper,
be it still September,
and sharing space
with the devastation
and ruin that has torn
Puerto Rico apart.
But it is O.K., Christmas is here
always early.
How long since you were on the map for anything,
small hamlet off Dogpool Lane,
squeezed between Stirchley, Selly Oak
Edgbaston, Moseley, and the Bourneville dark,
it is hoped
that W.H Auden drifted and mused along
the once leafy roads as he conjured
a rhyme of two along the Pershore Road
or dreamt of ducks at the top
end of the old potato fields
where children would force the Rae
to go round a makeshift dam.
Chinese Burn in make shift
Playground and the illegally drunk
I know it is in the mind,
these long dragged out
moments of disrepair, of broken
down machine inside fragile skin,
but that doesn’t help,
for those thoughts
of neglect, of bottomless
Universal humour
are always willing and able
to give me the broken eye socket,
the bleeding eye and bruises;
I know that, but still
the blows keep coming.
Ian D. Hall 2017
It is a cold harsh place,
this Warwickshire town,
not one for me,
placed there
undeservedly,
once, cycling there for work
and feeling the chill, placed there
again and the frosty atmosphere
afforded this poor son
of Birmingham;
I don’t know how Lady Godiva
kept her private life
warm.
Ian D. Hall 2017
I bought a ticket
to go home
for the funeral,
it rained for a while
as I chose times and the ease
of passing
over one or two station stops.
Your mum was important to you,
I would have changed
at every station
if it helped at all.
Ian D. Hall 2017
I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes,
that were fresh the day before,
I cannot find the strength to stand,
let alone take myself in hand
I should kick myself, slap myself
with force, anything to keep a grip,
however, it is not through ill discipline
or the want to change
my apparel, my attire, my kitbag,
I just do not have the power
to think of good things in which
a change of clothes would help.
I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes,
It doesn’t matter, I am still
It was a kind of funny old day,
I remarked, as the bomb went off
and we felt the tremors
on the other side of the world,
several more
and we knew that
because of the sumo fight
between the fat kid
and the child with fat head,
this playground tussle
which saw a few suns born
and disappear in the blink of an eye,
there would be no reality television
for viewers to gawp at that night;
shrugging my shoulders,
I didn’t know whether
Upon the news
of your passing,
I wept, I called out
to the Universe
and raged,
how I thundered and spoke obscenities
not used to the shape
of my mouth,
the taste of wrath and lightning bolt fury
scorching small white soldiers
ready to take arms in battle
and bite and gnaw at the heart
of that which dared
say it was your time to breath
no more;
upon the news of your silence,
the world stopped making sense.
I laughed, it seemed
for the first time
as I was saluted as the God
of tits and wine,
a mock celebration of finally
reaching more than half way
in a novel with my
hopeful name attached;
they, those three of the four musketeers
from Uni days, raised my spirits
before they came crashing
down as I remembered
during the night
what event was to come.
Ian D. Hall 2017