poems,
video,
etc.
something
Rob, who
speaks...
one clever friend who had steered him away from danger before;
more than one pair of eyes looked at him with malice
sensed his weakness.
His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction,
in this black hour his honour was his weakness.
He was losing his grip
he was heading for disaster.
In his dread and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain
an old man captain with a sailor’s beard
a skilled navigator finding secret routes out of
every archipelago.
In the dream it is one of these hidden channels:
you move through it like a minefield.
The banks are overgrown, strange trees emerge everywhere
a shroud for the ship
a green and choking garment
a death coat
drowning out the light
drowning even this little splinter of sea.
At least the outside ones can be seen
even if there’s no time to evade,
but the inside kind is basically poison
something bad (very bad) in the bloodstream.
You ask what’s wrong
you know something’s wrong
then you’re tired (very tired)
and you need to find a nest.
This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty.
He remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings,
he has always worn his uniform (a golden fleece)
but now it sticks and stings.
He thinks his strength is being stolen.
He’s just a bag of nerves
he imagines himself nameless and alone
...is this his vertigo or his vision?
He remembers the old ovations,
pictures the ovations to come.
He must get back,
he would rather go on even a dreary commuter train than become
a forgotten exile longing for reprieve:
in the mirror he practices cold business eyes
keeps thinking of her colleagues at the Institute
and especially the ones she calls the girls,
who look up to her.
When she stands in front of them she will dress smartly
and the outfit’s dowdy mirror will help her theories hit home,
even though they are actually bizarre!
There are roses in the corner of her eye
that need pruning with her shears
but she has to focus,
the lecture won’t write itself.
Her ambitious mind assists her,
she lets it fly telescopically out of the rose garden
into the specialist soul system
she has made her own area.
After all these years her son is still at the back of her mind.
Yes it is true that she cared more than anything about her career
and colleagues to look up to her...
and he was so serious
so severe
his eyes looked straight past her
he didn’t seem to trust her
even though a mother deserves to be trusted.
sometimes three of these truant boys,
you could call them urchins I suppose,
they have a touch of goblin about them
maybe they even frighten you.
They huddle together in their private games
they see the world as though with a single pair of eyes
and with it they notice things that others, hurrying along, overlook.
Perhaps he was a teacher once
this man who shuffles past every day or every other day
pensive pondering.
To them he seems sad,
they call it sadness because they have no other name for what they think it is.
They are only boys, urchins even, after all.
They are going to stop him one day
with a riddle they thought up in the huddle, which goes like this
what is it that we lose when we catch but keep when we miss?
There are still boys like them now