As she talked of her past
So too she talked of her future
For fate ricochets endlessly
Through the tunnel of her narrative:
A sorry tale told of a trapped soul
Yearning in vain for an escape
As elusive as it is seductive.

Bwrw fama, arol dy' Sadwrn braf,
Penwythnos dwytha union r'un fath.

Like so much Beer Money
Jingling merrily in a pocket
The oafish group jostled,
Clanging and clinking
Calling and cursing
Up the unfamiliar boarded-up street
As, unbeknownst to them,
Their collective bird brains
Homed in on the nearest pub.

As I type
My body is investigating
A tiny fraction of a tiny virus
That has conquered a world.

Chest hair is really useful for creating a lather quickly.

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.

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.

These lines should allude to
My feelings at this present time.
So, filters off,
Stick to a simple structure,
No fancy words
To polish turds.
Let's drop the contrived rhyme
Truth-telling isn't a crime,
So here goes...
Life gets dull post-40
And, like my body fat content,
Time is spiralling out of control.

Toulouse or not Toulouse...
That was not the question:
We had already won.
We could not lose:
Not an attitude borne of arrogance,
But of having already succeeded,
Before a ball was kicked.
This was my peak as a football fan;
We had qualified.
Any further progress would surely bring about delerium.

My own journey to a win in Toulouse
Was a fantasy I'd never dared to dream.
It transcended celebration of sublime football,
It was about chest-bursting pride.
Our small, oft-forgotten nation,
Whose language was the oldest of all the competing nations,
Was centre stage, ready for it's ninety minutes of fame.

It is a rare thing in football;
That fans do not ask much,
That their team want to provide a bigger answer to the question posed,
Rarer still for fans and players to bond in such a way,
So that winning is secondary to pride,
So that the national anthem is always a sweeter sound than a victorious final whistle,
So that the players sing with the fans after a game:
Gorau Chwarae Cyd-Chwarae.

Failure had ritually followed failure.
"It's the hope that kills you":
An adage fully understood and seemingly apt...
Until football was shocked into reality,
By the sudden death of a double hero,
A death that left an ember of hope,
An ember nurtured with reverential patience,
Until it sparked and became Dragon's breath,
Fuelling a campaign that allowed long-harboured hopes to set sail,
Charting a course:
Cymru to Lyon via Bordeaux, Lens, Toulouse and Lille.

Our all new house
Is a 'House For Life':
It's a bit of a sty but has:
Toilets downstairs
Toilets upstairs
Wide access doorways
And low level light switches.
Trouble is,
It's made entirely of straw.
Worse still,
Our neighbour is a ****** wolf.

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.

Time's tight leash restrains ever more:
Youth runs without looking,
Adulthood takes in the views but not the meanings,
Parenthood siezes your social life and shakes it like a rattle;
A head-spinning temporal trauma
Leaving a void filled by nostalgia
- the middle aged man's worst enemy -
Sunny dazed days of drinking
In heavenly beer gardens,
Laughing without thinking.
But time yanks the leash,
Drags you back into today,
This hour, this minute,
To the ***** diaper
And your soiled hand.

Your secret stands tip-toe on my shoulder,
It leans in to whisper in my ear,
The teller, the story, the revelation
Intoxicate me,
Spin me dizzy,
Turn my thoughts fizzy.
Your messenger tells me you love me:
This was most unexpected!

Funny
Honey
Money
Bunny
Sunny
Dummy
Chummy
Mummy
Crummy
Orange
..­.****.

What Was The Point Of Life Before Children?
And other self-important working titles, like...
What If I Wasn't Developing Life Saving Medicine?

He has so much poetry within him,
But it's all based ON him;
Full of false modesty
And self-conscious irony,
He never deviates from the theme
Of HIM.
BORING!

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

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.

Just a little illness,
Something that gets me off my feet,
A friendly virus partial to good deeds
To leave me bed-bound for a day or three.

A minor car crash,
No one but me,
A harmlessish accident arranged by the Gods
To leave me bed-bound for a week or three.

A break is as good as a change they say,
So maybe a real hospital pass in 5 a side
- a wrist-breaker on crash landing -
So no more typing for four to six weeks.

The unimaginable that must be imagined
The flame in memory of the flames

Let the living live for the dead
So the truth of the dead can live on.

Voyager of 40 years
Escaping the pull of planets
Drawing on my urge for independence
Until, finally,
I leave the heliosphere
And all my thoughts are now mine to share.

Such happy childhood memories,
Of the sweats you made and sold,
All those wholesome confectionaries,
Reminding us of times of old.

Your staff members, young and old,
So happy to work overtime,
Never revolted or ever became bold;
To do so would have been a crime.

But, like my wasteline, you have expanded,
You have factories in many nations.
My childhood you may have branded,
But I love you without hesitation.

I do so miss the sweat smell,
That poured from the old factory,
That dominated the town in which I dwell.
When will you come back to me?

Those lucky people on shores afar,
Who work all day and night,
Making those millions of sweat chocolate bars;
Their grateful sweat and tears ALL go into your delights.

Now I hear that you are diversifying;
The clothing industry in those developing nations,
Will add to your sweat bottom line,
Perpetuating your sweat *******.

Crap! Have I been spelling 'sweet' as 'sweat' throughout this **** poem?

Today you experienced, for the first time...
Pins and needles.
In just one leg.
You didn't know what to explain -
Numbness is a hell of a concept to grasp for a young mind -
You could only stand lopsidedly,
Wanting to laugh out of panic,
Shooing away invisible electric bees.

But you're only three,
And it's a weird sensation,
That you'll never get used to.
Still, it was pretty funny,
Knowing you were fine
Watching you try to process a strange sensation
That always disappears eventually,
Leaving you to wonder, "what just happened?"

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.

You sat there, sure of your part in this play.
Smirked as he was dragged away,
Arms flailing, legs kicking and mouth frothing
As countless robotic guards carried him aloft.

A charade of a parade.

He was off to the unknown,
His life out of control,
Destiny scattered to the wind.

And so, it was was with such ease
That you released a butterfly-effect rumour
That gathered momentum
Causing chaos beyond your darkest hopes.

Where is he now?
In some granite and iron cell?
Living on a bread and water diet?
You do not know.
You do not care.

You stole the life you craved,
His Human Rights you waived
Not a moment's thought
Of this man's despair do you give.

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.

Abandon the failures,
Imperfections are unacceptable:
Loved ones were perfect in shape and spirit
(in imperfect, idealised memories).

Flawed not flawless,
These bespoke folk:
They are and are not that rotting loved one.

'Failed clone'
Society's latest stigma.

'Orphaned clones'
The lowest class.

The Starlings lent the tree a voice,
A murmured anguish: no rejoice.

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?

"Don't be political" the Maestro said,
"It don't age well and it sure as Hell don't sell"
So I gave it up,
Called a by-election on my insurrection,
Lost my deposit
But couldn't give a ****.
Now I switch off the news
To focus on my muse:
The little things.
Yep, meditating on the minutiae
Is where it's at,
"Embrace the boring"
The Maestro added
"Politics will leave them snoring".
So here's to the mundane,
The housing estates
Where cars clog the streets,
The lunch deal brigade
Staring at the sandwiches,
The workplace kitchen
Where hygiene standards vanish:
A land called Mundanity,
Where the seemingly sane
Are all insane.

Let the unimaginable be imagined
Let the flame burn in memory of the flames
Let the living live for the dead
So the truth of the dead can live on.