Life’s eternal joke;
kick you in the nuts
when you having a glimmer
of a nice day,
then acting as a sweetener,
a smile of lopsided joy,
allows you three numbers
on the lottery only
to remember what it is like when your
ship docks at the wrong port
and your ceiling comes crashing down.
Ian D. Hall 2018
Your train comes in at just after eleven,
slow pull up on platform eight
old friend, a memory calling
at stations in between, past towns
we never visited, houses
and farms we would never see inside,
closed curtains cutting out the view,
our life open to exposure, scenes from
a life cut open
and bleeding slowly
on platform eight.
Ian D. Hall 2018
If for nothing other
than my own amusement
or schoolboy yucks,
may I implore,
or be so bold
to ask if the next body of gravel, dust
and surrounded by water
discovered in the world,
a sudden baby clump of Earth
driven out of the sea like Surtsey
in ’63, could be named
Noman…
Ian D. Hall 2018
When I was a boy, you were one
of the men I wanted to be, punk attitude
wrapped up in a skin of pounding music,
and whilst I could not play bass,
or any type of instrument, I still wanted
that naked, fire driven approach, to be angry,
to dwell in me; mean, moody and magnificent,
a bad boy with a good heart, now I
watch you on stage and you slap your bass,
you treat it rough and I think
can I do that with words, a Kerouac love, mean
And now the meadow’s black, burnt
to a cinders that will not
see the ball or the glitz and glamour
of the magazine, the photographer
squeezing out one more frame,
one more plea of pout baby, look
down the lens and think of England
as you smoulder and create electricity,
the meadow is black, corrupt, shameful,
shameless, the meadow primed for real
estate development to sell more dreams
of home ownership, till the banks come knocking
at the door, rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat, economy
to scale, a large slug festering, dripping coins
Thirty years without you,
It has gone in a blink of an eye,
yet still, you remain, in my thoughts,
larger than life, the story man,
Adanac and the green painted door,
The Story Man, a ready tale
of heroism that I have tried,
and failed,
to live up to.
March 1st 1988, ironic to die
on a patron saint’s day, we all do
though I guess, have to pass
through the gossamer thin web and veil
eventually, it is though whether we
The snow drifts silently down,
feather touch, soft and beautiful
against the flash of the camera
which lights up the scene in Sefton Park.
An everyday photograph of a park bench
in winter, deserted, surrounded by claustrophobic emptiness,
by time standing still and in the distance
a bell calls the man home, a clock
striking midnight, magic happens
in dark lonely places, as the man
pulls his coat tight around his snow covered shoulders,
and it wouldn’t be till the morning,
when the man returned to the scene
Bin bags galore, lined up drunkenly spewing
the whiff of loaded down hoarding,
a symptom of the black I have been touching,
holding close, I want
to let go.
No council name or number
blazed across the thin plastic coating,
an advertising sign
coated in the decay of years
that the item inside has been lost
but holding ground, a black hole swallow
and burp now tied together with string,
a promise in the knot that this is the last time
I hold such antique thoughts and treasures
Standing end on end in graveyards,
The near dead adorn their resting place
with words, with their sentence
of death inscribed
and dated, stamped, remembering the last time
they were thought of
fondly, with fingers quivering
with anticipation, their spines
still erect, still perfect,
but like anything that breathes life,
soon will fade, soon will lose their meaning,
their passion
as younger, more tempting words
are echoed and brushed against
closed dreaming eyes and the smell
of the new and intoxicating
…and I set the grass on fire
out in the meadow
in the hope of raising smoke signals
so you might see my concerns,
you left me without defences, no timber
to build shelter, no army to stand alongside,
only hope that once the short fuse
was lit, that the grass grew black
and blazed for a second or two
before burning out
you might find the signal
as it melted away
into the clouds above.
Ian D. Hall 2018