A tragedy miles of time away
But pain is a stubborn stain
Counselling never washes it out
New love never puts it out of its misery

It is a stubborn ****,
Rooted in composted memories,
Finds nourishment in unwelcome recollections;
The slightest trigger allows it to blossom.

Cartwheeling at the order of the winds,
Power to the people with the tumbling of your limbs.
A last throw of the dice by your makers,
A Quixotic endeavour to undo the damage;
Damage wreaked by the furies of their forebearers.

When you grow up I'll tidy the house
But for now it must remain in disarray
For I have no strength for a losing battle
Or another full time job for no pay.

Eyes sting
Words fail to form
The plea of the mind
Echoes in the closed mouth
Fingers linger above a too-bright screen...

The looming grey of your promise
Hangs heavy above our heads
As does that glimmer of hope you hide:
Hope forever present but rarely seen.

Our interstellar messenger
To no one in particular
Sports two naked figures
Representations of a civilisation
That will have destroyed itself
Long before these astronaturists are found
...and probably judged.

But it makes me smile to think
That such a thought-out diagram
Of a male and a female
Was judged by some
To be "sending **** to space" 😂

I took you for granted,
The mass of grey
That makes me rebel,
That makes me obey.

No matter
My silent partner
Present like deep waters,
A distant rumbling ignored.

Dry husks on close inspection.
Deadish, brownish black,
Plucked from petaled homes
Bagged in airless packets,
Left desiccated in a supermarket,
Their blooming potential undervalued.
No seed of resurrection, surely?
And so, this doubtful, non-starter gardener,
With nothing to lose but a pound,
Purchased and potted and planted
And watered and waited
Until the miracle of green emerged.
A determined rebirth
Sprouting from apparent death
And from the curiousity of a man
From whose soil those seeds found purchase.
Happy now is that newly-qualified gardener,
Surprised at nature's resilience,
And who declares to young and old
"Behold my Marigolds from B&M"

Your shrill sound echoes down the sickly fluorescent corridor.
I try to ignore you.
Its jauntiness jars.

I feel I shouldn't like your racket.
It bounces off the pain-bearing walls.
It exacerbates my claustrophobia.

But perhaps your music is soothing to some;
High happy notes inspiring hope of recovery
Or of a deserved restful sleep enveloping dear ones.

But I hear only the low notes.
Out of time with my quickened pulse;
A foreboding soundtrack to my deliberately slow steps.

But, I know you play for no pay.
Busking in this hospital for practice and charity.
And I know too, you do good both night and day.

For your primary instrument is a sharp sleek scalpel,
Wielded by your steady, practiced hand,
Rehearsed and well-versed in surgical concertos.

But, out of hours, your instrument of choice lends you a voice,
Allows flourishes and improvisations,
Best avoided during operations.

But, were you aware that for visitors like me
That the clarinet would take on a life-long significance,
Taking me back to bittersweet memories of visiting my Taidi.

Now, though, I am older and a little wiser,
My memories of him are more than just of hospital visits,
And I wonder, could I ask one thing of you?

Why no Rhapsody in Blue?

What would life be
Without that twenty-three?
No seasons cycling,
Birthing, rearing, draining and renewing.

No heralding cries of labour
Harsh lives lived and vacated
To summon the next new cry
Of life unasked but bestowed.

That such a celestial charade exists,
Governed by an arbitrary number,
Amuses and disturbs me
As we would be naught without that twenty-three.

A child assumed adults' superiority.
Hero worshipped older members of his family.
Absorbed opinions overheard over pints.
Tried them on for size at school,
As he did an Uncle's cool leather jacket
- comforting, macho and confidence-giving -
But he outgrew the jacket,
Cast aside those learnt opinions,
Tough, stubborn opinions
With rugged exteriors
Lined with seductive silken narratives
That, thankfully, perished over time.

The grip of sleep holds him tight,
He'll never know he died,
Never know he did not wake.
Such a fine line between life and death
Never knowing which might be your last breath.

To split a universal truth
Through the prism of poetry.
To write with mercurial mystery,
Employing cryptic non-sequiturs
After succinct statements of staggering profundity,
Is what I dream of as I contemplate
The enormity of my mediocrity.

I watch an artist create
Something new from nothing.
I turn to the writer
Who conjures life and lives,
Realising fiction from nothing.
I face the other way to weep
In envy at the distance of talent.

Ar ben y bryn
Sits a paint-brush-thin monument,
A crooked rocky record built by unwilling hands.
This cockeyed testimony announces a difficult man,
A man befriended by nature
Whose oakish form turned in opposition to his kin
To take root on stony ground,
To prosper on infertile soil
And shelter under nature's canopy.

Y bryn oedd ei gartref
And there he thrived
To the annoyance of the conformists,
The chapel-goers, the gossipers, the rate-payers,
Those who could not abide his ragged clothing,
Sweat-stewed, blood-patched remnants of cloth
Hanging rags of garments and barely-there shoes.
Loneliness was his hope and so peace was his.

Ar y bryn fu farw.
A few feigned to mourn to satisfy their curiousity
Hoping to spy the corpse of the man on the hill,
A man who was and who wasn't one of them.
And so a dissonance rang through the town:
He was them but not them,
Miserably poor but enviably free,
And so, his half-hearted monument was raised
On a foundation of contempt and begrudging admiration.

You wake
You play
You eat
and repeat.

I wake
I work
I snack
and repeat.

Our routines compete,
Neither of us admit defeat.

I have my contracted commitments,
You have your play prerogative.

But let's call a truce
And negotiate over a little juice.

Still the dunce turns up!
Lesson after lesson
Week after week
Term after term.
What has he learnt?
How to hold a book?!
He cannot be taught
So I only chastise.
But still the dunce turns up.
Will mockery **** him off?
No, the resilient peasant still turns up!
No great expectations have I of him
He only seems to leer at me
Yet plays the fool with others.
His grades a stubborn average.
To teach would be to encourage
But still the dunce still turns up!

What to do with that patch of earth?
Dig in with unlaboured hands
With fingers the opposite of green?
Doom vibrant plants to early graves
In a macabre memorial garden
Of flowers dead and dying?
Toil in futility to yield only
A commemorative patch of Earth
For this reluctant gardener's outlook?

You play with your fringe
Curl it behind your ear
Oblivious to the miracle
That bought you here
A fast five years ago
"Time flies" parents often say
But I remember every day,
Not as a blur
Or through half-shut sleepy eyes,
But with high definition
And surround sound.
Yes, I remember each question asked
Each tantrum and cuddle
But most of all, each kiss on the cheek
As you slept the gentlest sleep.

“Why me? Why no normal boring ****?”
Questions you've asked all your young life.
The miraculous odds of your conception
Offset by the misfortune of love unfit:
A birth of promise ultimately deceived.

Resilience failed to blossom.
'They' know little of your chronology of pain
But still ask the 'magic wand' question
In vain hope of solutions:
Solutions for you, their problem.

You test for trust, seeking attachments.
Instead, they humour you
Treat you with kid gloves
So your adolescence is a bitter surprise:
You’re no longer the person they can infantilise.

When I see your 1940s weekend -

Your 'war was fun and cosy' pretence

Your clichéd polyester and fibre glass mockery, 

Re-enacting an imagined happy-go-lucky camaraderie -

Forgive me for not joining in

As I happen to feel it a cardinal sin

To idealise and romanticise a decade

Made up of austerity, rationing and air raids.

Believe me, I've read a little social history:

The 1940s were not idyllic or crime-free

Just as now, there were heroes and villains

Among the soldiers and the civilians.

Yes, heroism abounded but so did black marketeering

Yes, there were brave sacrifices but there was also racketeering

And those city-wide black-outs were a gift

To those who would rob and grift.

Your jolly nostalgic tribute is an annual celebration

Celebrating your own fabrication

Of a time when the machinations of war and a crazed ideology

Saw the near extinction of entire minorities.

Look, I don't wish to be a party pooper

But don't step into the shoes of a made-up trooper

So, please, remove your rose-tinted glasses

To remember that beyond your nostalgic narrative of the routines of the masses

People lived with the daily fear

Of the likely deaths of people they held dear.

A family outing in ice cream weather.
My sisters and I in the backseat.
The brown fabric interior of our Cortina chafing our legs
and dad's cigarette chafing our lungs.

At the beach, the lazy ol' Sun kept watch,
slyly burning us as we pretended we could swim:
A childish farce that was nearly our downfall
when my searching feet were grabbed by Gravity.

Panic rose from toes to head as the Sea birthed me back to air.
Just long enough to note that nature's forces were in cahoots:
A kidnapping Current, a magnetic Gravity
and a Sea hooding me with saltwater cloth:
All combined to set a course South of maternal reach.

Of course, a mother's instinct kicked in.
A non-swimmer herself, she nonetheless set off in pursuit,
aiming to liberate her son from Mother Nature's conspiring forces.

And what was my younger sister to do but follow?

Now greedy Nature had three in its grasp.
Three fifths of a family doomed to drown.

As fatigue struck me dumb
I made a naïf's deal with Death
(a simple choice, no game of Chess)

And so, enter, the young heroes,
(partying only moments before)
who dived in to wrestle our would-be Killers:
Saving three fifths of a family
and the grief of two more.

Oh, the irony that a respiratory virus
Forced a breathless world
To stop to take a breath

A long long week
A short weekend
My body feels weak
My spirit has weakened

Days and days of deadlines
Time speeding up as I age
Getting closer and closer to red lines
And all this to chase a meager wage

But trusty Saturday arrives
Hugs me with duvet respite
Yet lucid dreams that I contrive
Reawakened my mind all night

But sleep demands company
So even on Sundays you'll hear my alarm bleeping
For to succumb to sleep's Siren bewitchery
Would see me forever sleeping

Twisting joy
Marbling its way
From head to toe
Infusing every corpuscle
Sending muscles into spasm.

Lies surf on her very breath
The words spill out spit wet
Only to writhe on the ground
Like fish out of water

Not one for the truth is she
It is devoured in her mind's womb
By its own deceitful twin
The Serpent of her soul.

Lies surf on her every breath
The words spill out spit wet
To writhe on the ground
Like a fish out of water

Not one for the truth is she
It is devoured in her mind's womb
By its own cerebral twin:
The Serpent of her soul.

Are you religious?
No
Why?

Are you religious?
Yes
Why?

Deconsecrated, inevitably 'haunted'
This ex-Church shorn of dignity
Whose stone is soaked in prayer
Stands forsaken in its field;
A laughing stock among the villagers
Whose descendants walked a weekly pilgrimage
On a well worn path to its open door
Seeking succour and assurances
That hardship would be rewarded
But whose rotted corpses
Are visited but once a generation
By Daredevil schoolchildren
Irreverent spirits on their own pilgrimage
Buoyed by bravado
Nervous of the paranormal
With not a thought for the former Land Lord.

Our bed, a family fortress.
Your mother and I
- Puppet King and Puppet Queen -
Surrender our thrones each night
Lowering the drawbridge,
An open invite to you junior marauders,
Swordless and wordless
As you slowly storm the ramparts,
Kicking and flailing,
Before you fall asleep between us.

Buzz of costly light hurts
Pockmarked rocky currency
Buys a quiet night