a twenty fifth poem...'the bridge'

The sky is pink

Over the golden gate

And the steel grey- blue

Pacific ocean.

The last rays

Of evening sunset

Catching the red primer paint

On the towering bridge heads,

Wrought iron suspension cables.

Along the muddy shore

Sandals off,

Cool, wet sand between my toes.

At peace down here.

a twenty third poem...'it'

Have you ever fallen

For someone you shouldn’t?

But find

When you spend time

With them

They complete you?

When you know of so many friends,

Who say: ‘he would never go there!’

Yet, when she’s wiping tears from your eyes

In the small hours of a morning after,

Cleaning blood from an open wound

In the cut and thrust of an evening over,

You realise:

You

Just

Can’t

Help

 It!

a twenty second poem...'you, the wind'

It’s you 

The wind.

You

The movement of the wind

Over the grass.

It’s you

Who blows like silk

Into the room,

Weaving silence

Around my lips,

Where I sit

On this wooden floor,

Waiting for your kiss.

a twenty first poem...'my moggy'

My Moggy

Was run over

Made two dimensional

Squashed soggy

By a Fire Brigade Command Unit

In the middle of rescuing

A feline friend

That

My cat

Had gotten to know

Lived across the road

Got stranded up a cherry tree

In full blossom

Belonging to a senile, old woman

With full bosom

a sixtieth story...'misery or something better'

Here’s an interesting story.  Or at least interesting to me because I was there, and now, a few days on, it strikes me as meaning something.  Something that might mean something to someone else; something, without wishing to sound too grand, about people in general.

Last weekend I was at my son’s Christmas school fair.  The school fair was taking place in the old covered market.  It was on the spot where the pet store used to be when I was young, with kittens and puppies in cages and so on.  There were perhaps ten, eleven trestle tables set out with things the kids had made – jams, cakes, clay pots, one kid had made a catapult.  What anyone else would consider bric a brac.

My son hadn’t really wanted to go, but his teacher insisted, and so did his mother – my wife, and so did I.  In the end the fair passed off just fine, no tears, tantrums, and most of the jams, cakes etcetera actually sold! 

It was when I and some of the other parents were helping pack away the various tables, chairs, surplus goods into cardboard boxes that this interesting thing happened.  My son was with me at the time, wrapping left over slices of rum cake in paper towels to go into the Tupperware my wife had supplied.

My wife.  I told her what I am about to tell you over dinner that night, when the kids were upstairs but she didn’t really take in the meaning of it – we had just had an argument about something else, probably my getting a new job with better working hours, and she was preoccupied with that.

So, this drunk comes up to me, or at least that was my first instinct – that he was a drunk I mean, smelly, perhaps threatening, you get the idea.  He’s around five feet six, seven, quite sturdy.  I’m six feet three, also quite sturdy, so I wasn’t intimidated, but I did have my son with me. Anyway, he’s wearing a blue bobble hat, a large backpack and he’s cradling a can of special brew in a brown paper bag.  ‘Merry Christmas’, he says to me in a thick voice.  ‘And to you’, I say, and go back to my packing, hoping my son hasn’t noticed and the drunk will leave us alone.

‘Merry Christmas’, I hear him say again, and then he says something about Whitney Houston.  Whitney Houston!  Still, I ignore him, continue packing.  Then my son speaks up, ‘Daddy’, he says, ‘I’m done’.  And he is, all the slices of rum cake are wrapped and tidily placed in the Tupperware, he’s also put the lid on.  ‘Good’ I say and sweep my son up in my arms, protectively I guess. 

Now, however, the drunk has latched on to me, he thinks in his addled mind that because I have stood up I am going to engage him.  Of course, I’ve other ideas, but I also know my wife won’t be here to pick us up for a half hour, and something in me tells me we’ll be stuck with the drunk until then.

My father always used to say to trust your first instinct.  He had this catch phrase, ‘the more you think the more you stink’.  But standing in front of this drunk, who had just wished me ‘Merry Christmas’, with my young son in my arms, I was torn between an immediate desire to tell him to clear off, and what I tried to suggest to my wife was some kind of innate compassion. 

Sure, I felt a bit sorry for him at that moment, but it was nothing like what I felt when he started telling me his story.

He was from Romania.  He had come over with his English wife to start their new life together, only for her to meet someone else, perhaps even someone like me, and tell this guy to get lost.  In between sips of his beer he told me how he was ‘finito’, ‘caput’ – I think that means finished in Romanian, I don’t know.  And that he had a broken heart.  Whitney Houston according to this guy also died of a broken heart.  He put a rose in the local church when he learned of her death, or so he said.  Lit a candle and all!

My first wife, I should mention at this point, left me out of the blue.  I remember for two, three years I felt bad, low, unable to move on.  Difference is, I had a job, money, and friends.  Perhaps in that order.

Because here’s what our conversation left me thinking - that people have to be useful human beings.

This Romanian, we chatted until my wife turned up, my son in my arms half listening.  He had been kicked out by his wife, lost his job at the same time, had been roaming the streets for a month, would spend Christmas doing the same thing.  He showed me some photos of his past life, a holiday he had been on to Venice, pictures of him standing on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, sitting in a gondola, all of the touristy things.  He also told me he had been a soldier in Bosnia. 

When my wife finally arrived, she took my son and began packing things into the car.  I had a lump in my throat I have to admit.  I could see this proud man was helpless, heart broken, caput as he kept on saying.  I didn’t know what to do, how to be useful.  I tried to remember the name of a hostel  in town someone I knew had been involved with to tell him to go to, but couldn’t.  When it was time to leave, I gave him a note, told him to buy some dinner for the night.  After everything he had told me it felt like a token gesture.

And then, as I turned to leave, he asked me this.  He asked me what my telephone number was so we could talk again.  I knew this was impossible.  I knew my wife would be wary of someone who to her was a drunk – smelly, threatening – becoming involved in any way with us.  So I lied.  Said I didn’t have a telephone.  And we parted.

While my wife was cooking dinner over the gaslight stove later in the evening I realised why I had lied.  This man could not be of any use to me in my life.  And I could not really be any use to him, at least outside the old covered market with my young son in my arms, at least as things were.  We would not, perhaps never, be able to develop a mutual friendship, unless his misery turned to something better.

Or so it seemed then, and so it seems today.

a twentieth poem...'I'm not really there'

I am not really here –

I’m not really there.

I am at the foot of the stair, or five minutes behind,

Still in bed, in another time,

Another place.

Sad thing is,
I can’t remember your face

Though I can hear your voice, a willow cry on the wind. 

You call to me
Every now and again,

Between sleeping, waking,
Then

Dreaming. 

The German word for dream is traum. 

Traum translates back into English as wound. 

a fifty ninth story...'eddy's retina'

Eddy was a passionate young man, perhaps with passions just like yours.

He cared a lot about things.

He cared a lot about, and expected a lot of himself too.

(and frequently felt let down).

..Eddy also expected a lot of other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends, and so on.

You might say he was naïve in this way.

(He was).

It took dear old Eddy half a life time to learn that in spite of all the marvellous gifts mother nature had afforded him, he still had to rely on the relative gumption and general willingness of other people..

..Just like everybody else – How tedious!

Alas, some of these other people, it seemed, were less than (faultlessly) reliable.

And so Eddy brooded.

He brooded, and brooded and brooded.  Had Eddy been a prize turkey, he may well have laid an egg.

And the egg would have hatched and grown into something terrible; the egg would have become Eddy’s shadow.

A shadow of the dark and haunting variety, of the kind that follows you everywhere, stalks your dreams, chases you up and down the labyrinth ways of your mind.

‘Quit brooding, Eddy’, his friend Jemima would say.  Or implore him with the equally useless but well intentioned platitude – ‘don’t be sad’.

‘I’m not sad’, Eddy would lie, looking at Jemima and seeing the splinter in her eye.

Thing is Eddy could not see the plank of wood in his.

And the more he mooned over the irrationality and unpredictability of other people, and the ruinous effect their actions however well construed appeared to have on his existence, the more Eddy became convinced that planet earth was a pitiless place, a pit of despair.

William Shakespeare, in his most endearing enduring tragedy, Hamlet, understood Eddy’s malaise; Eddy being in the process of losing all mirth, unwittingly guilty of psychological projection.

The egg turned shadow, projected onto one human canvas after another, all of them belonging to other people!

People are this, people are that, people are XY and Z, Eddy would postulate. 

And he wasn’t wrong.

But he was only half right.

Eddy had begun to live in a room full of mirrors, where all he could see was himself.  No one else. 

Not even Jemima whom he adored.

And because of all of mother nature’s gifts afforded him when he was an egg growing in his birth mother’s tummy, he was too vain, too proud to see beyond the flickering shadows cast by all the other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends – dancing callously, he opined, around and around his retina.

Life: one, twice, thrice unkind.