Flashback;
It was what you gave me
as I turned on my phone
to see your remark
on another person’s page.
Ignoring my own held advice,
that I don’t have the right
to ever know
what other people think of me,
I read the short snappy sentence,
primed like a grenade,
three second rule blast
which tore my heart in two
and my head blown
to pieces on the rocks of someone
else’s insecurity, jealousy
a spread eagled whore
who likes to spread her
I used to think you were just a mean drunk,
a man who at the end
of the long arduous night
would pop open a tin
of cheap
nasty liquor
and sink them in order,
cans one
through to eventual six
and then to whom resentment
at the world, the sign of the angry
Capitalist, the dead on sarcasm boiled
in rich memory
of having been shafted by the poor,
the meagre and the deprived…
in your greedy eyes,
in your hard-up soul
The old lady of Rock and Roll
clears her throat,
smiles benignly to the audience,
a sense
of sorrow in her face
and as she is about to give
her final rendition,
her glorious epitaph to a worthwhile
dream, the Thunderstruck
and those with Big Balls
in jumps a man
instead
who can’t sing a note
but carries on the illusion
to the sound of guns
not cannons…
A Rose that falls
so desperately low
does not salute the worthy,
Normal,
who would want
to ever wish
themselves
to be stuck in that
frame of mind and desperate soul;
why be normal when you can be odd,
unique,
completely original
with just the attachment to the rest
being that you love them.
Why can’t you be normal
I was once asked,
why can you be like A,
because S is such a more interesting
letter I thought,
curvy, fluid, rounded,
not fully like an O,
but then
I wouldn’t want to be that complete.
I saw a sun explode,
obliterate in the night sky
and whilst nobody
else saw it at that moment,
I knew that worlds would end.
Somewhere deep I felt
the hundreds of thousands
of possible deaths,
across millions of light years
and I trembled at the fragility
of a single life taken
at dawn
just within the blink
of a savage’s eye,
murder by celestial means; death
decreed by sunlight fading thousands
of years ago.
I see a distant sun explode
Silence
and hands on heads,
no talking
whatsoever
and I do not
want to hear a
peep
out of you,
any of you,
till you learn some manners…
Our arms outstretched
having mastered the art
of class room sign language
by the time we were eight
and the deflection of the hammered down
metal measuring device
across the bare biting knuckles,
scrapped skin
bleeding as the monstrous
and over-zealous uncrowned ruler
struck again and again
and the headmaster would be lethal
The whisper that Time
says goodnight in
is only as forceful
as you wish
it to be, as beautiful
as you allow it and as outrageous
as you dare it, Time cares
not in the end how you take
note of the whisper, only
that you hear it, only that it will
be heeded, walk not into the light
without having first kissed
the whisper, without gently
asking it to remove its feminine
blue trilby and the decaying rose
between its polished teeth
I should call you, I should really,
I should call and ask how you are,
I should see if you are O.K.
and fighting the fight as well as the world
but I am quite scared that for whatever
reason, I will find out you’re fighting me.
The role of dastardly villain does not sit well
with me, I cannot twirl my moustache
and talk of plots in soliloquy to an audience of one,
rather play the heroine, the damsel tied
to the tracks and the locomotive
Breathing fresh blustery
April air as I admire the view of
the rusting Iron Men dotted
along at intervals and in which
fixed steely glazed eye
turn their gaze to wind farms
and the Irish coast
over horizons and the seabed
churning as a lost shoal of fish
dance beneath the waves
of amber under relentless sun
to come it is hoped in Summer
I look inward
and reflect upon the amber hue
of disappointment, of days passed
and slept through memories,
Navigating the Tube,
the Underground from over ground,
by map which is quicker
than the journey
you plan to take
was once a joy, as it lead to
days out at Queens Park Rangers
or Arsenal or even down to the
Hammersmith Odeon to see you play, however
now I will be stretched for time
and it is only because
I have to get home
that I contemplate the Sunday dawdle
and the Thursday evening madness, otherwise
the bus, so I can see the route