Mission after failed mission of overtightened shirt cloth incomparable to the air-brushing wizardry of a celebrity book of spells; calorie-counted celebrity inspiration, feeling the burn; “one more minute, don’t forget to stretch and warm down”.

A plastic-propped peep into a better life where everyone is shiny and the right machine can make you God’s own barista without even having to watch the accompanying DVD box set.

All on the never never. ’til the never becomes the now.

In a surge of nature versus big business our crude seas wash over us in an endless tide of promises and slicked birds who drown in the failures of our present way of life.

In the background; an urgent pitch to call now and pay nothing for twelve months. A lesson unlearned.

In the foreground; stands a poet working out the best way to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a dog whilst he waits for his toast to turn tan.

So this is what we’ve become.

Beaks shoved forward, scaly necks stretched,
with mouths gaping, snouts snapping with an echoing snip from
the effort of land crawling just to lay their eggs with
eye-scrunching strain in hopeful clutches.

We stood and marveled with our cameras,
all red eye flashes and whooping fingers,
whilst the tide dragged at the night-time shore
trying to peel away stragglers from the pack of
unwary voyeuristic foreigners.

The musical swish of the wind-rattled palm trees,
made the bobbing fishing boats dance, painted in the yellow
ochre of candle lanterns that perched
like watchmen on the bows where it brushed just
enough of their pilots to make them appear like ghosts
dipping into the blackness as they
flicked out their nets
or dragged wicker pots from the stern.

A world away from this evening; the toes that
joyed at the sucking of sand dampened by the
warm foam of a receding sea curl now into the
unfriendly nylon pile of evening news and TV dramas,
readying for sleep before the chill of
tomorrow’s commute and office politics of
the punch in punch out, don’t-be-late
warning-mornings and the school runs
amongst the young mums parking heedlessly.

Funny how we’re all just turtles on turtle beach.

To the sound of screaming,
turns the eyes and the ears of the ordinary
agape in horror at the desperation of a jumper
as he splashes through the glass
fixing a final flickering gaze on tear-welling faces who,
with tightened lips let pass a whimper “oh no, oh no oh no”.
The rain of rock crashes chase away trivial reality,
the lattes, the must-do meetings,
the synchronization of calendars
in a kerosene flash; thanks to religious brutality.
There, urgent amongst the
surging clouds are those in
black turned gray. Gold-hatted
knights who shout for your own good.
Scared like the brokers,
fathers like the chairmen,
rushing like the insurers
but they choose to run the other way.

I often pause to think of others.
Like the couple on Beak Street I saw leaning
in against the March wind, pinching
still-fitting 1970’s smeary gabardine
mackintoshes around them like over-stuffed
sausage casings.

He; gaunt and with that sunken on-the-way
from this life look, she; rotund and
waddling with cheap home perm flattened
under a clear plastic penny market rain
hood whilst her free hand drags a
shopping trolley between them both like
an unruly and unwilling square tartan-coated pet.

She chose to wear those opaque tan tights
and they are so cliche, aren’t they,
with her seen-better-days blue brogue comfortable shoes
which shuffle shuffle and scuff along
next to the groceries and the gray nearly-ghost.

He looks like a man who has resolved to
hang on a day longer if he can, for her
sake, or for someone’s sake if not hers.
I’m sure it’s not for his.

His gaping-mouthed breath, like it
must sound loud enough to startle although
the bus window and the rattle of empty seats
mask it from me, sucks his cheeks in and out
with the effort and I see his eyes scrunch
up unseen as he keeps up her pace which he taps
out with a walking stick, stomp, stomp,
stomp like he is grinding out cigarette butts
with every step.

To where and why do they walk so painfully
in this bouncing rain?  What are their
names?  Is this yesterday’s sour wine of
relationships I see through the dragon puff
of diesel exhaust or a glorious culmination?
Or perhaps mainly their reality, unpoetic and
unremarkable except to someone like me who
often pauses to think of others.

Liquid solid flows with the puff, ochre stripes washed
grey with the powdering of divinity. The lines of his thoughts
across his brow, deep and drifting, running over to wash the beckoning
fingers of smoke’s fate, launching to drift on torrid
currents of time and fickle happenings, thrown back and
forth further and far from the loud “haaaaa” of the exhale.

Their prose and statuary, towering in their microscopic
magnificance amongst the whisps of their fleeting existence
unseen by those who did not look for them, breathed in to
be a part of those who did not make them; even those who
did not pause to question or care if they were likely to exist.

If, at that moment He should clap his hands or
spin to attend to some other diversion they might
scatter in the draught. It’s a fact; you can’t unscatter
smoke.

He’s got that blankie still. Rotted with the
drool of comfort years and glazed with some
real sweaty summers. Snuggles it close as ever.
An anchor in the squally seas of change.
Creaks those cranky joints together with
a huge Kirky-boy sigh and thumps himself
into the cloth with squeezed-together eyes.
I swear he used to smile.

Now he just rumbles on that blankie, day and night
with those wobbly-paw half-yelps of him
chasing down sleep sheep or some night rabbits.
Or he just guards at that bottom window and sighs
through his nose at the disappointments. Waiting.
Early days he’d point the flop from his ears,
whiskers shivering, and bob his head like Ali if he heard
a car coming up the road. It’s knocked the shine out of
his eyes, all that fruitless checking and weaving.

Now all Kirk’s got left is the stare-and-stare, glassy eyed,
into the distance. Not a flicker except a blink to wet those
big brown pleading pools. But he hasn’t given up even though I’ve
explained it all to him until we’ve both had enough and
wack down by your couch. I’ve written to everyone else
and told them, cancelled things, notified, crossed the T’s,
but, I just don’t know what to say to Kirk.
Kirk’s the problem.

I am tongue. I am expression of thought.
I am revelation of conscience.
I am identity and I am definer of knowledge.

You are the off switch of contemplation,
creator of false drama and
hanging moments, the appellant to
common denominator.

You are repellent of sophistication
for fear of losing the mass of imagined
uncomplication. You are budget and
the science of demography and driver
of simplified-greed buy one get two
buy five for three commerce.

I am tongue.
I am thought into words. I am description
of the indescribable. I am music of
the soundless mind. I am pricker to tears
I am stretcher of horizons. I am inner voice
surfaced into scratched black. I am
rhyme and reason and soul into poetry.

But you are to kill me.

These long-trodden ruts, with mud like pitch
by farming day and ankle-snapping wallows by
wartime night sucked at your boots and swallowed
the uncapped cigarettes of the part-time tommys
who perched, bayonets ready, over the vents of the
train tunnels. This Summer they bake stone-dry
undisturbed by you.

The secret corners of the meadows, like skirts unhitched
unbuttoned cloaks, let you pick, giggling,
your mushroom breakfast like that day we carried
them back triumphantly as victor’s trophies now
sit doleful and forgotten for wont of you.

And above the moor is the startled cry which
shrieks from the fluttering height of a hawk breed
called by a name none of us left can can bring to mind
yet it sprang to your smiling lips as easy as your
rambler’s stride outpaced us all; though you told me
and we rehearsed the right Somerset burr it passed
through my memory and out the other side.
I should have listened to you.

This Winter, when the hail fills the ditch
and the narrow snake lanes are drawn again
in pastel shades of frost and and the crows
shiver in the bare trees at the bite of a
bone-cutting wind, who will remember to crack ice
on the pond for the fishes if it’s not you?

When classes gather on rowdy trips,
chattering school days out poke at the
billhook and scythe on the hitch,
and with murmuring lips rehearse
the curls of a brogue tongue we’ve lost and
peer at the ruddy-faced sepia snaps of smocked men
crushed by the effort of lofting up those hand-built
hayricks, will they know one of the little boys was you?

Who is left to remember the willow switch
the strike of which peeled the smell
of the sweat steam from mud-dusty hide
to tear the plough through cake-crumb
soil with shrill pursed two-fingered whistles and
shouts of “here boys” and “walk on” to
plait the criss-cross pattern
of our farmland fit to burst later with Autumn
plenty if the who is not to be you?

How will we know the ways of every niche
to string the berry-bearing twine amongst
the nooks and crannys of glass or the bud
to tweak or root to lift and clumping ball
to split? The way to cast, broad and measured
in a cupped hand gnarled by ungloved labour
sleeps unwritten with you.

The joys of horse and rattling, rich
reward for boyhood toil, bucking cart,
riding high on the hay, your father pacing
at the rein; a tiny returning champion, skin
like leather; all now squared into an oil fairytale
to perch in maidenless parlours and picturesque
postcards who know nothing of you.

I knew you. I will remember.

I’ll reach for your hand without looking
to see if it’s there.

A slight movement,
light,
with a deliberate glide to a stillness.

We’ll turn to face each other on the
beach. Sunset fire in our hair.

Our moment,
together,
share an intimate look that makes time halt.

In our eyes is understanding, the fingers
that brush say it all.

Tidal current,
advancing,
we’re joined, inviolate, inseparable, betrothed.

The wash of the purest blue green sea
licks around our ankles, clear below an azure sky.

Vital moment,
fleeting,
cast off cares and make the bustle of life…stop.