Remember the sandwich of youth?

On a drizzly beach with actual sand,
the grit crunch making things somehow better
for the supermarket cheddar
and margarine on sliced white

Let the memories come

The loved ones flinging frisbees,
or playing impossible cricket matches,
grand unplanned architecture,
studded with dead shells,
monuments to a hopeful utopia,
collapsed by the heavy-heeled truths of vengeful siblings
or everyday tides

Sea air makes you hungry and tired,
content,
like life and years try

I get that beef fat and butter
in this day and age are a sin
and contribute to the decline
of myself and this earth

But, my lords and ladies,
I am weak
and beholden to the
grease shined smile
on stuffed chops
as my euphemistic dad ***
becomes ever more so,
ballooning to a middle age where
there be dragons

I plead mercy,
and perhaps some ice cream

No anticipation is as great
as finishing seconds of a chicken pie
then looking forward
to what Paul will cook next year

We coulda been anything that we wanted to be
but our unshaped dreams
saw us in smokey cinemas
or waiting for VHS rewinds
to learn songs or follow twists
as humans wrestled with being flawed,
at the dark end of the street,
facing the devil
or dodging foam in a fake speakeasy

Feel the good cheer,
like they say in the poem

Away, not home,
this continental heat.

The air pretends
this North Atlantic rock
is worldly

The smiles of the natives
lean manic
as we clutch at multipack lager
and disposable charcoal,
grasp at the living myth
of a cloudless sky
and give ourselves to these gods

Our worship sees us sacrifice
meat and skin,
both burnt to early hours regret
and delicate, bathroom sorrows

A sporadic bacchanal
whose scarcity ensures
that be it working week,
weekend or holiday,
feverish
we’ll pay the tithe

Sunstroke and/or hangover
prove penance for our lapse
from the frigid, three bar
Protestant norm,

but these exotic gods will beguile again
even as the blistered skin still peels

If I could save time in a bottle
my clumsiness would see me spill it

As memories soaked into the rug,
loves, losses, laughs and deaths
would mix as they spread,
to send remembering askew

Not so much a blank slate
as everything old and new blended,
same highs, lows, pains and leaps,
felt and forgot together,
so the never-neverland of you
is and never was

Person Man Woman Camera TV

As much a testament
to current reality
as any babbled, 24 hour, rolling drivel
from partisan spokesfolk
who affix the yoke of profit
by making and driving the wedge

In the wide awake courtroom,
alone, maybe 3 A.M.
you can hear the truth,
have the human faculties,
can see the evidence,
even if the verdict hurts

It’s less painful than making eye contact
with a mirror image who allows
the lies
the loss
the inhumanity
just to heal a bruised ego
and still not sleep easy