Skinhead

 

Ben Sherman’s, buttoned down

Levi’s turned up, braces locked tight

Doc Martins laced high

Harrington’s for fight, or flight.

 

Heads bristling

Legs loping

Fists clenching

 

Richard Allen

Pulp fiction

Barely 200 pages

 

Finished in a session

A blinding whirl

Of boots and girls

 

Knuckles and rucks

Birds and fucks

Chancing your luck

 

Woodbines and beer

A snarl and a sneer

What are you doing here?

 

They linger and hover

Awaiting some bovver

Some gnarling and gnashing

Some fun Paki-bashing

 

While tranny radios play

Infectious reggae tunes

To dance to in rooms

Of tight terraced houses

In Party Seven carouses

——————–

Stripped

To a place
Where there is nothing
Everything is beyond

Coarse rocks groan
Under the weight
Of my abandonment

Somewhere flotsam floats
Mocking my suspension
In the darkness

Deaf, blind, mute
Only a salty taste
And the tides caress

Safe at last
Lost
Within an ocean’s vastness

 

Church

I don’t care much for Church

Our Christening Party outnumbered

The congregation many times over

And I wondered who was joining who

 

His robes older than the pews

The vicar conjured bonhomie and boredom

Unfamiliar hymns blared amplified

As if volume was enough to disguise bland dirge

 

There were no notices

Perhaps no-one cared anymore

 

Hiraeth

I yearn, my body aches

To return

To a place which

Is no longer

There

A longing

For something

To assuage my soul

A soul

Which has been

Rent asunder

 

Orange E Mail – An Epitaph

Orange e mail stops today
Wednesday the thirty first of May
They’ve had enough, they didn’t ask
They just decided they could no longer be arsed

 

The Akashic Records
Suspended in a place,
Beyond earthly reach,
In a store of infinite space.

Where everything is known,
From east, south, north and west.
Where everything is shown

To those who wish to look,
Before now and after,
Recorded in a book.

Past Life Fragment
It was as if I had always been there
That I had known them all my life
My untaught hands knew what to do
I did not need to learn these things anew

 

Travel
We journey to experience,
To discover.

To learn, to taste new foods,
To hear new sounds, to see new sights,
To touch for the first time.

Yet however far we travel,
The past is never far behind

Goose Fair Nottingham

Amidst the tumult, I grasped her slight hand, tightly,
Cheers, laughter, song and wild gasps
Filled my soul, filled her soul, I knew
A dizzy euphoria, an intoxication, I sensed
Such rapture transcended our temporal happiness
It gathered all the joy that surrounded us,
And had ever surrounded us, and had ever been,
And was yet to come.
It gathered it all in a celebration of what was now,
What had been, and what was to come
In a moment

Ophelia
You promised, you threatened , you left
Without saying goodbye
Girding your skirts in crumpled dark clouds
Yet holding onto your tears
”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another”
Midday morphing into a ghostly orange hue
Daytime and night time maddeningly askew
Great huffs and puffs scatter boughs and branches
Strewn like discarded flowers tossed aside by a disinterested lover
You said we should call you Ophelia
We know what you are, but know not what you may be
Passing momentarily

Ruby
A silent world of fear
Where to say nothing
Is better than to say something
I did all the talking
She nodded, and smiled
I almost heard a giggle
As I teased her
I called her puppet spot
Walking to the park
She clung tight to my shadow
Afraid of the bright light
Of the world beyond
As we raced to climb the grappling ropes
Her frenzy to reach the top first a soundless scream
Exchanging exhausted gasps
She gleefully looked down
I asked whether she knew what stoic meant
Of course she did not
An innocent beauty
Incarcerated in a brutal cage
Struck dumb in a cacophonous world
She could not say goodbye
Nor could I