I miss those days when I could turn heads,
And woke up each morning in other people's beds.

Partly awake
Mostly asleep
Tap tap tapping
Upon a glass keyboard
At twelve qwerty three
On a Monday morning
When I should be snoring
Not fighting boredom...
Fighting sleep...
Boring old sleep.

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

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

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.

Why were you late to school?
Sir, I rescued a cat from a tree.

And why were you late to school?
Sir, I put a cat up a tree.

It was at this point the teacher suspected a conspiracy.

It was a dark and stormy night...
...or was it a light and sunny morning?
I cannot remember.
Anyway, it was November...
...or was it September?

'Tis a boring tale anyhow.

THE END

We heard a creak in the attic
I sent my wife to investigate.
She's still up there,
Negotiating with our new-found tenant
Who is totally unrepentant
For having snuck into our home
And setting up camp.

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

Irrelevant years of existence
Vast drowned numbers
Swimming with the fishes
Your blue-hypnotic drowns my eyes
Offering nothing

I dive into your cold embrace.

Such distant voices,
Like echoes from a recent past,
Calling over rickety field fences
Gently swaying the flourishing corn,
Diminishing as it nourishes,
So that the hearer only hears
A ghostly murmur and not the cheers.

Sat on a leatherette sofa waiting for my order.

The kitchen looks to be in some disorder.

The staff are flirting,
The customers deserting.

Leaving me still sat on a leatherette sofa wondering,

Where in the hell is my order?!

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.

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.

Was it never more than lust
Looking back at all the fuss?!
Let me white-out 'love' from my biography
And write out 'lust' on that paper's scab.

And when I think back on those romantic notions,
It's clear that all those loving feelings I thought I had
Were triggered by lotions and potions
Perfumes, cocktails and blind devotions.

But now, with the benefit of hindsight,
I see the cheap trick youth plays on the mind;
Naivety conspires with shallowness,
And confuses lust with love!

We are peak humans.
We get what we need,
We demand what we want,
We buy, we buy, we buy.
We dispose, dispose, dispose.

Where it all goes, no one really knows.

Sure, some of us stop and think,
Knowing we're close to the brink,
But most of us continue to
Buy, Buy, Buy
then
Dispose, dispose, dispose.

Still not knowing where it all goes.

So here is my early apology,
To you, my son and daughter,
For belated action,
For consuming and burning,
For breaking your world.

He's not been well,
He's experienced a living Hell,
But he's got guts
And, over time, he's realised
It's not him that's ******* nuts.

Santa's house has many rooms:
One for every Elf.
They have sprays for farty fumes
And dusters for every shelf,
There are bins by every door,
And brand new hoovers for each and every floor!

Now all the Elves know their chores,
They've got them in their heads.
But tidying up is such a bore,
They'd rather go to bed!
Still, every room is clean and neat,
Because everybody knows Santa's always on the beat!

You see, Elves know they're super lucky...
They work each day for Ol' Saint Nick!
But if their rooms are ever mucky,
They'll be in for lots of stick.
For all that Santa asks of an Elf,
Is that their room is good for their health!

So every December night,
Ask yourself a simple question...
Would my room give Santa a fright?
If the answer's "yes" then hear the lesson...

An Elf's room is never messy,
Because they want a great big prezzy!

Ink dried quick
Art's potential energy
Music = MC²

Art can bide its time
Protected by the brave
Until primed

To explode off the page
Out of speakers into minds
As a weapon of mass attention

My wonderment is on hiatus
I have no time for the timeless
The age of starlight is a luxury
Unaffordable for the foreseeable

Children alter everything
But nothing really changes
I still occasionally glance upwards:
Orientation courtesy of constellations

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

Y bryn oedd ei gartref
And he lived and thrived there
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 he embraced and so peace was his.

Ar y bryn fu farw.
A few feigned to mourn to satisfy their curiousity,
Wanting to view the corpse of the man on the hill,
A man who was and wasn't one of them.
And so a dissonance struck the town:
He was one of them but also one of wild nature.
He was miserably poor but enviably free.
And out of such confusion was his half-hearted monument raised.

You dug today
Some mud and clay
With two-year-old hands
And a giant *****.
You dug today
A new place to play
Filthy, muddy wonderlands;
Just the place for an escapade!

Each passing day is an investment
A sacrifice of the present for the future.
As for the past, frivolous times forgotten,
Consigned to the bin of social media
Doomed to be infertile digital compost
By the time you are ready to bloom.