Hunched over a Maths textbook,
not filling in Algebra equations,
refusing to bow down to going beyond
angles as they at least
were useful when playing pool
against Andy Bell in many
a Bicester public house,
the cover of the book
instead a hive of activity
in reprinting lyrics from memory
and my own tentative steps,
laborious, protracted and the topic
of conversation between headmaster
and pupil, between careers advisor and
stubborn boy who didn’t want
to anything but write, act and produce
It has been a long road, diverting
along the way, works slowing me down,
to a crawl,
sometimes to a full stop,
never losing sight though of the objective,
to prove them wrong, to show
that a poetic verse or even just a rhyme
is not the same as taking the easy
way out, that I am not
a waste of space.
Ian D. Hall 2016
The skin, admittedly once ravaged
by a disease, adult eczema,
taken to extremes
as it ate into my hide,
on the back of my neck, through my scalp
and deep within sweat glands and fur,
is nothing to the leper you have made me
become…
…the glory
in which the smile never leaves your face
like some twisted marionette, string
-less, pompous, arrogant
and once divine to the point of deity,
bow down to the clown
as I once did,
now this leper, confined to the fringe
The meaning of Easter seems lost
now to commerce
and the chocolate making machine
as some perhaps suggest
that a rabbit died
at Calgary, sentenced to be
a hot cross bunny, to take up our sins,
it’s the only explanation
that can be sought
when realising with certain eyebrow
raising deflection
that to complain about Watership Down
being on the little square box
“Today of all days”
is to have offended the Rabbit god,
I scratch my head in wonder at their
acceptance and their knowledge
I must find you a new name,
for Black Dog implies
I can have you put down,
that I can smile and take your flea
bitten arse to a lonely place
in the woods and let you howl
all you want because the only
creatures you’ll attract
are the woodpeckers, black bears
and worms.
But what is the point in it all,
the dream of existing, of being,
when the woodpecker can peck
just as hard and the black bear
is as hungry as ever,
Why are you not banished from society,
you take up room and smell of disgust
and yet there you are still being rammed
down our throats as if your very being
is somehow natural, ordinary, as accepted
as broccoli, as native as rain, as seasonal
as a hot day in August
or six months of winter,
I detest you, you make me ill to even
think of being near you, I would happily
find room on a cargo ship,
put you in the middle of the ocean
I claw at the fringes of life
as the shadow of Ophelia.
The spoilt daughter of Polonius
may have gone insane
but she will never reach the depth
of what my charming existence
has become, the strangled hole
of fantasy, the bitterly guarded memories
she shed as she slips into the water,
Hamlet bound to the end,
in the murky river, knotweed, unheard,
fast flowing thoughts of increasing vanity…
She left me by the shoreline in despair
as she lay still and her heavy
What was he doing in the Adanac House,
the conjured ideas and the stories
he would recount and regale me
with as I sat on my young backside,
at his feet, staring up at this giant of a man, always
knowing in the back of my mind
that I could never match him
in spirit, endeavour or deed,
indeed as he swam Lake Ontario
as a young man, before the Birmingham Blitz
came calling and the chance to drive
a tram through dust laden
post war streets and roads, psychologically
They duel for supremacy,
thrusting through the pain
of psychological split personalities
and yet as they are
one mind,
one body,
they pray to altars that are inaccurate
of their true desires, that their belief
in each other as the sub-dominant
creature and that the latent one
underneath is the true face in which to wear.
The contest will always be uneven
as the illusion is far
too engrained, no middle ground
in this fight, where they can be no
blood spilt as both duellists
There are times I happily forget
that you exist at all,
outside of nightmares,
the broken shafts of disturbed light
and the mental scars of abuse;
I happily forget the put-downs,
the anger, the snide comments,
the destructive silences,
the tailor-made insults,
the one time you hit me,
the mean demands,
the malicious lies,
the spiteful kicks,
the way you left me in a hospital bed,
the wickedness of your games,
the cruelty,
the cruel devices and heartless devious nature