Reverie

Reverie

I was stressed in Chester yesterday

at the station, awaiting a train

when a jester suggested a game to play,

was I hallucinating again?

‘You’re vexed and perplexed and your hair is a mess so I’m here to make you a hero.

There’s a dragon that ought to be slain!’

He danced as I glanced at his harlequin pants

with his jingle-bell hat he just looked like a twat so I ignored him.

Feckin’ hipster.

Then, as he’d feared – it was weird! – a dragon appeared!

In my hand, there manifested a sword.

‘It’s as I suggested, my lord!

Be blessed on your quest, thrust your blade through its chest

and enter the wyrm where it’s flawed.’

It had great scaly jaws, and some pneumatic doors,

and a penalty for the improper use of the chord.

‘Welcome aboard.

Please keep all personal items with you at all times.

Items left unattended may be removed or destroyed without warning.’

The Waves at the Window

The Waves at the Window

A poor, bright boy; not athletic or gifted with size.

            He made the popular girls – and the bullies – laugh. Disapproving teachers believed he could do better.

            A job in a warehouse, seventy-six pounds a week; he never had so much money, but he was bored. They got him in the office when they heard that he consistently completed half of the following week’s orders every Friday afternoon.

            A team leader at twenty-one, a supervisor at twenty-three, and a salary exceeding twenty-thousand pounds – not bad at all.

            Anna, the girl he loved in school. They married and she gave birth to his first child when they were twenty-five. A second was born on his twenty-sixth birthday.

            He bought a four-bedroomed house in the village but had to drive, every day, into the city for meetings, meetings, meetings.

            He skipped lunch but gained weight anyway.

            For years his children would wave at the window until the eldest turned ten and preferred the extra fifteen minutes in bed, the little one always emulated his big brother. Anna ceased to offer up that cold, hard pucker in the mornings, hiding her face behind toast and coffee.

            She had an affair: a younger man with a degree; a teacher.

            On the same day his mother died his eldest was arrested for possession of cannabis.         

Cancer made him impotent but his libido left him when his wife did. The smell of liquor was on him in the mornings. Nausea, like the frosted oscilloscopic patterns on the glass partitions in the office, where he spends too much time, churned and subsided inside him.

            The itchy sting of piss on his thighs. The full moon obscured by a great flaming rock. Anna’s face. The fire bursts before it and tears across the sky, deafening. It strikes the sea thirty miles out.

            Beneath the fist of a furious god, the far edges of the city collapse under the force as it roars closer to the tower he occupies alone. The invoice in his hand becomes a futile mess in his fist. The taste of glass. The sharp punch of death. The waves hit the window. 

Things Will Get Messy Here

Things will get messy here

If you are watching,

and are still able to think,

you must be aware of what we are about to do.

We will burn you.

This is your last hour

before you are reduced

to something that can fit in a dustpan.

Something I can push a lollipop into,

bring it out with bits of you stuck on;

sherbet dip-dab;

your ashy flavour in my mouth;

strange cannibalism.

I won’t though, because that’s weird.

But we will burn you,

the decision has been made.

If you are listening,

and are still able to translate our arbitrary noises,

then you must be aware that we have burned you.

Why else would there be old friends smartly-dressed

shaking hands and kissing foreheads?

Metal in a Catholic church?

Cold sausages on cocktail sticks?

You in a jar on a trestle table in a pub?

Go on now

Get off on your next adventure

Things will get messy here.

A Fistful of Thunder

A Fistful of Thunder

Where have you come from, my wild-eyed child?

Oh, where have you come from, with your heart so beguiled?

I’ve come from a mountain, surrounded by fire.

Where the women all swayed as they sang in a choir,

Where the men built a ladder of thorns from the mire,

Where the children aren’t born, but are found ‘neath a briar.

And what did you see there, my wild-eyed child?

Oh, what did you see there, with your heart so beguiled?

I saw a big man use his fingers as pencils,

I saw a grey goat feast on horseflesh and lentils,

I saw a fat woman, who was graceful and gentle,

She had hammers and flowers arranged round her ankles.

And where will you go next, my wild-eyed child?

Oh, where will you go next, with your heart so beguiled?

I’ll go to the future, when the last vulture flies out

To feast on the apes as they scratch their own eyes out.

I’ll go to the past when the first mammal cries out,

And return to the present with a mind full of wise doubt.

And when will you return, my wild-eyed child?

Oh, when will you return, with your heart so beguiled?

When the bones of the mountain are ground into powder,

When the songs of the women grow louder and louder,

When the men on the ladder grab a fistful of thunder,

And the last child has gazed at the sunset in wonder.