The ice cream van
Has today reached
The melancholic realisation
That the only kids who
Chase clocks for Mr Whippy
And lick the exhaust fumes
In nostalgia
Are the kids who are not kids
But who prematurely aged themselves
With lipstick kisses
And cigarettes
Lowered themselves into nooses
Of sweet-sixteenths
From the age of six

We are a generation of
Peter Pan inversions
We ran ashore
And beached ourselves
Beyond the lure
Of Neverland
We are a generation of
Failed cloud-catchers
Aspiring rainbow-clinchers
Secretly slipping our hands
Back into a dead air
Of former innocence
In the hope we’ll be able to
Retrieve the pieces we left there
We queue and scramble
Like gulls for
Inches we can claw back
Preserving our age in
Wafer cones
And bleeding snows
That glue between our fingers
Each 99 flake
Is a time machine
Which we spin like a music box
And wait for the rewind
Copper coins and sea stains
And we hope we’ll find
Some of the things we lost
But we cannot predict or realign
The atoms or twist ourselves
Back into them
So we sit and watch
The incorruptibility we once possessed
Perished
Sexualised
Corrupted
Pool in the March drizzle
Someone once said
That youth was a process
Of being torn in half
By the past that pulls you back
And the future that tempts you
Being too big and yet too small
Longing but fearing
But an ice cream van tells me
That youth is a process
Of trying not to drown yourself
In what you’ve never had
And when that ice cream van tells me to
MIND THAT CHILD
I can’t help projecting echoes
Of its wisdom
On to all who pass me by
Mind that childhood
Before there’s nothing left to mind

The notes of the song -
the quarter notes
the half notes,
eighths and sixteenths
triplets and all variations -

they form in my brain
through the speaker to my ears
and form a picture,
ever flowing and moving
that depicts, sometimes,
your face and your body.

Images of different sorts
some with color and some with out
that can relax and satiate
or do the opposite
and deviate
from the normal cooing
of my heart,
creating an anxiety matched by no other.

The pictures becoming what I see in front of me
as I walk around in life. My brain and nerves -
dancing along
singing their own words to the song
and making everything right
that was once wrong.

And I’m not sure if you will get this
and understand what I mean
but I know my thoughts will never be clean
of images from sounds
dancing all around.

That dark patterned line
crossing straight the moon,
centering the frozen sphere-gate
of a misty autumn night-sky,
is not a cloud to sink down on only
and float subtly for a while
< so I can feel the aura of your skin mixing with the mine >
but it is also a five line staff
and tells me an aurally perceived absolute secret so that ,
through my hearing ,
you will
rise,
glide,
twirl
and cross
other lines,
tune my gaze
and engrave a mystic score beyond your shine,  
plant each of  ‘you’s,
note by note,
in ones, halves, fourths, eighths , sixteenths and ‘pi’s
in the heart of each
<beyond the clouds away from my reach>
twinkling star  

so that anyone that could look up with a heart,
<maybe on a clear night sky>
would see a commencing song-
singing the dance of an ever weaving light-story
visible to those eyes with a knowing only that
<the knowing about a wish is
a wish that shall eternally be kept a secret>
has the enlightening technology to recreate a reflecting galaxy
with an authentic memory
that expands infinitesimally
<which we in our terms would say it expands by love
but in truth would not really know how
unless the terms are lost and we have got no time except to  > - be now-
be now
be now with me now
and now and only now
be now and with me now
and only now and now

Would you come and meet me then?
there?  
but I don’t know where… just there?
wherever all these sky lookers are
and be one of them, again ?  as we did once– on a terrace
one summer night, we watched our own story under stars,  among crowds while I asked for your light and you kissed me awake for eternity and so
would you let me kiss you this time - one more time
just for the last time  and forget that eternity  eternally this time?

He still felt deafened by the terrible noise
From the huge field guns that both sides had
Been firing hour after hour for four days. You
Could be scared to death just from the noise.

An eighth didn’t seem like much
Two sixteenths
Four thirty-seconds
Eight sixty-fourths
Sixteen one hundred and twenty-eighths.

Following his recent promotion to Colonel
He was sitting in his new office at his new desk
Hesitating to put his pen to paper
Resisting the inevitable sorrow to come.

He was writing down the numbers – thinking
Thirty two two hundred and fifty-sixths
Sixty four five hundred and twelfths.
Now the numbers looked much bigger.
When he reached
Five hundred and twelve as a
fraction of four thousand and ninety-six
He stopped.

The number now seemed insurmountable
Yet it was still that small fraction.
But he now had to write to that number
Of wives, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters
And tell them that their boy would
Never again walk through their front door.

An eighth is so much more than just a fraction.

©JRW2014

I always loved games but the only thing I was truly good at was being competitive
but that was the element of fun, the game become a job
and this isn't going where you think it is
but there I go again, twisting and turning some made up play around your feet
so carefully constructed you could see through the passes
I was really more from the drama side of it
memorizing my lines carefully like a beat I had to march to
I never sat on the bench, because I was always a starter
but i sat the fight song out and  I had to look up that football reference
because I thought I was rebellious, taking to jazz to play solos
whatever would dance out from my bell
but when the last bell rang on my last day in first
and I got drowned out by trumpets staring down the horns by the modest flutes
i lost it, like medicine that wont go down
a spoonful of sugar didn't help anything when I buttoned up that jacket for the last time
oh, I had a merry tune to toot
because like every good marcher, i memorized my part
first, before the rest, and after the tie to second
I didn't bother much to play in 8ths instead of sixteenths
I conditioned for years, and had very little time to rest
being competitive made this sabotage become a piece of cake
oooh when that tape came back
and you were buzzing like a bee to find me
and i'd smile at the cassette you were holding, because a mouthful of sugar will help the medicine go down
that's where our story comes to rest, no more measures on repeat
and the only reason I write it down now
is for the laughter we consumed when you knew
I made your audition different
because who had any sense you'd play first inline with the trombones
and the sound of it
would be a spoonful of sugar, that made the medicine go down

now hear this! sing this! you constant Cade, you
choral breakneck in a single sum of man,
brackbreaking in the chaos-rinsing rite of ashed religion!—

choke now, for you used me. a tossing stave to ward off sins
of fratting simpletons and their unsyncopated singing.
—all sixteenths through roughshod roads of wrong-be-gone righteousness.

and why? because i vaped some trebled color to the gray.

oh! what is the
madness-misering measure of a middle-aged man
who through the din of dampened doing, of desperate
dancing on two left feet and wrinkled writhe of witlessness in the mid of being been should shuffle off and coil himself into a crimson cross?

you did it why? for friends and for the fissure,
some bald breach of banality beyond the stoic peach—
and for a frosty flame?

what waste of was you were, and still accomplished are;
that god-grappled greed should unhinge your soul's Sophia
and ever the future fraught.

there is not bracker brine than your bishops ex-cathedra,
for all the feast you fête, and friends you turn upon a spit;
you're hungry for a food that's never fed.

poor witless starving pitchless sum; your death is all my make into an angel, as you so quickly from this earth will shred
and songs adduced unto the celebration same.

It was only gonna be a little three-hour jump
‘Till the barometer bottomed out and the Minnow went bump
But you make chocolate milk when life gives you turds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

When that sightseeing gig hit a bit of a snag
It stopped that tight trio from bein' everyone's bag
Because, Daddy, those cats are just too cool for words
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

TH III drips with sophistication,
But it don’t stop the man from syncopatin'
They trumpet like elephants ‘n twitter like birds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

It’s Thurston on the keyboards settin’ the pace
Little Buddy on drums, the Captain on bass
Wowin’ folks drinking coconut shaken-and-stirreds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

They blow sixteenths and eights and do it in style
Cooler than cats on any charted isle
Keep your Goodman Quintets and your Thundering Herds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

James Sebastian Middlemarch was a prodigy.
No other way to say it in truth,
And those who knew him and his gift
Were in agreement that he was destined to reach
The apogee of the musical world,
Though he, even at a very young age, discouraged such talk,
Sometimes offhandedly, but at other times
Quite insistently indeed, for, even then,
He had the constant, gnawing suspicion
That there was a disconnect between the harmonies
(Mad, excruciating, yet unspeakably lovely)
Which scampered unfettered around his head
And those he could bring forth on the piano or viola.  
Nonetheless, his aptitude pulled him along
Through longitude and latitude,
To Julliard, then Paris and Vienn, maixing with others
Marked by their provincial peers as The Next One.  

Through all this time,
The sonatas, concertos, and full-blown symphonies
Danced on in his mind without restraint or retreat
Yet, when he tried to corral them onto paper,
They kicked and bucked and spit out the bit
In spurious sixteenths and turgid quarters
Which cantered along in pedestrian time signatures.  
These pieces (the “sad imitations”, as he called them)
Were performed on more than the odd occasion,
But on smaller stages by undistinguished orchestras,
And those freelancers dispatched by features editors
In the Rochesters and Pensacolas of the world
(Small-timers themselves, yet wholly without sympathy)
Would cluck and sigh dismissively in their reviews
That the works were derivative,
With easily discernible bits of Strauss and Schumann
(Clara Schumann, according to one acerbic small-town wit)
Scattered here and there,
And they were unanimous in their belief and opinion
As to the minor nature of his presence on the musical landscape.

After some years, he stopped publishing his works
Which made him even less of an afterthought
Than he had been at his low-slung zenith.  
He continued to play with some regional symphonies,
Where he was deeply loved by his colleagues,
As he was modest in the face of praise,
But never sparing in dispensing kindness in return,
And to all appearances the frenzied siren airs
Which had ridden roughshod over his psyche for so many decades
Had ceased at last, but after his death, one of his sons discovered,
Squatting surreptitiously under a mound of ancient antimacassars,
Several trunks containing untold scores of sheet music,
(Updated versions of earlier work,
New pieces abandoned in exasperation)
Which sat in mute testament to the difficult labor
Of unfastening onself from the yoke of being ordinary.