A week or so ago, I saw my own breath as I was cycling to my early morning padel lesson at my local leisure centre.  That is the nearest that we have got to ice in Castelldefels for a long time.  I have seen snow in Barcelona (though that was some years ago) but we are by the sea, the air is mild and we do not have naturally occurring ice!  So this poem relates to my past.
     Living in Rumney in Cardiff in the early 1960s, the garden of our house ended in a raised wall and over that there was an uninterrupted slope down to the bottom of the valley and the meandering River Rumney.  We didn't keep that view for long and soon what land could be built on was, but the valley floor was a large area of flood plain which was basically grass covered alluvial mud, drained by irrigation ditches called 'reens' and (inadequately) protected from the river by raised banks.  In other words it was an ideal area to walk the dog and safe from development.
     Although Cardiff is colder than Castelldefels, it is mild for Britain and seeing ice in the reens was always an experience, as was seeing the weeds, grass and reeds be frost coated and look strange and beautiful.
     I was a tall and solid boy, cursed to be in the second row in rugby in primary and secondary school, so ice had to be solid to take my weight.  Parts of the River Rumney used to freeze, but rarely entirely.  The Rumney is a tidal river where my old house used to be and brackish water has a lower freezing point than fresh.
     Standing on thin ice is about a combination of memories rather than a specific one and I think that its subject matter is concerned with words and definitions as much as the seasons and winter ice.
     It has taken me a number of drafts to get the poem to its present state and I am sure that it will change again before I am fully satisfied, but I think it has reached a level of development which justifies printing it for others to see.

Standing on thin ice

What is the season’s point

unless it is to change your world?

Its offer shows a way

to question what you thought you knew,

and look again at everyday to

count the differences that count.

My memory of outdoor ice

is never clear and pure.

On sluggish water sumped in reens,

stopped by the cold, and sheeted by

a shot-silk milkiness, it tattered

to the edges where the

pokers, knives and pins

stood silently aloof

(ghost-dusted growth)

like Christmas gaudiness

Miss Havisham could never have

in her small, time-stopped world.

But there and then, a

frost-poised moment,

invitation just to step

on faith and stand

with confidence on memory

of what was there before.

To feel the skin you’re on

freeze through the skin you’re in.

Meanwhile, the dog,

a city boy’s excuse to walk

through strangeness crisped,

pranced on the bank

and would not join me

on my crazing spot

to share a new perspective

from the water’s top.

Were I to take you back,

I’d never find the point

along that muddy brook.

It was a moment in a word,

and not a place.

It isn’t Knaves or Jacks

that limit sight;

its knowing both are

different and the same

and very odd.

I have given the reference to Miss Havisham and the 'Knaves and Jacks' a considerable amount of thought.  I feel that they fit and the poem justifies their inclusion, but I am also aware that they can overbalance the piece by dragging in something which is altogether more powerful than my words might be able to contain.  I suppose that I considered the risk was worth taking - though the final judgement on that is not necessarily mine!

Childfree

The notes for this poem were written, not in my usual notebook, but rather on the backs of two small receipts.  As the first of these scraps is labelled ‘1’ and the second ‘3’ I fear that my musings that occupied receipt ‘2’ are now lost to posterity.  Still, I worked with what I had left and wrote the following poem.

            As I have referenced childlessness and loneliness before it would appear that this poem is part of a sequence that can be studied to bring out dark fears hidden well in my psyche, but posted blatantly in my poetry.  A continuing concern with family and isolation might well be able to be illustrated by judicious quotation from the existing poems.  That might well be true, but I think that I would like to cite evidence and suggest alternative readings before too many of you start delving into what you might think is my unconscious.

            The title is a clear indication of how the poem might be read.  It is instructive to compare the title, Childfree with the more poignant ‘Childless’.  I think that using Childfree as a focus will give a very different reading to the poem, especially by concentrating on the second word in the title!

            I would also remind readers that ‘I’ of the poem is not necessarily an exact equivalent of the ‘I’ of the writer.  It is true that I, the writer, have no children – but I would suggest, for me, that is a statement of fact rather than a statement of loss.

            I will not deny that this poem is founded on the observation of an actual experience of mine in which I watched the families around me (and the smokers within those families) and felt myself distanced from what was going on – but the self-pity that is suggested in the two lines towards the end of the poem,

                                   I’m the only one alone,

                       and nobody’s concern

                                   was not the overriding emotion of the moment, though it does seem to play a crucial role in this particular poem. 

            And why shouldn’t poems have a life that is a development beyond the limitations of their production!

 

Childfree

A paean to The Family!

This outdoor café’s noise

is proof of that fecundity

where laughing progeny

preserve in youth and age

the borders (firm and

mutually covert)

that keep the years

together quite apart.

The smoke of adult cigarettes

held, finger crooked, is

pose with built-in elegance and

keeps the filth away from kids

but not from me, for

            I’m the only one alone,

and nobody’s concern.

But pen-scrawled fragments

draw all in as part of my own

silent tête-à-tête.

I think the ending with the three lines separated makes an effective picture of the writer as voyeur/puppet-master, with the words on the page being the augmented reality created by the poet.  Or it could be read as complete self-deception, the social ‘saving lie’ of someone living through words and not through life as it is really lived. 

            I think that I can live with the ambiguity!

This is a poem of imaginative observation.  In other words this is a result of my scribbling as I am drinking my post swim cup of tea.  Most of the notes I write are banal in the extreme - but I continue in the fond hope that 'something' will come from a sort of mini-freewrite.
     The inspiration for this poem was a young lad kicking a ball by himself on an empty enclosed football/basketball outdoor court.
     He seemed (to me) to have all the stereotypical teenage angst writ large in his dress and movements and so I watched, in what I realise now was a slightly voyeuristic - or, as I like to term it, 'poetic' way - as his time in the leisure centre ball court played out.
     I was fascinated by the fact that the arrival of a group of kids, about his age, made no difference to them or him: they set about playing football and completely ignored him, as he did them.  And so on.
     Eventually I saw the beginnings of a poem and I have been working on it since.
     I like the title!  I toyed with the idea of using capitals for each of the words and eventually decided against it, as I did the idea of using hyphens, so the title is as it is!
     There are elements in this poem that I have played around with, but I think that it is time for a period of reflection, and time to put the poem 'out there'.
     I am still not convinced by the Classical references, but I think the poem gains from them.  At the moment.  The section in italics is another area where reflection may well make a change.  The ending of the poem, seems to me to make connections throughout the piece, but, again that is something that I will need to return to after time.
     In the scale of things, I think you have to admire a poem which makes a literary case for using the words, 'butt plug' in a constructive way!  I hope!

One man football

Unpeopled space is emptier

when you’re the only person there;

a team of one, with no CG effects

to make you multitudinous.

He kicked the ball, each sullen

Sisyphean punt too hard for

truthfulness, but sounding large

enough in that court’s silence

by percussion on the Perspex, chain-links,

wood, to fracture barriers.

He dressed in scooped-out,

stolen sexiness (drop armhole vest

un-filled by adolescent skinniness)

and blazoned, not with conventional

rejection via jagged leaves,

but with Nihilistic chic:

a shield of white convexity;

eye-empty sneer above

high puffy cheeks; sardonic smile;

angelic wing moustache, and

butt-plug goatee stuck beneath

a thin, tight mouth. 

                       An elegance.

Not comedy nor tragedy, but

disconcerting – just like the lad’s

defiant hair, so tidily en brosse.

Three young, ungainly Graces

drift uncertainly on on-line skates

in line and hand in hand in strict

descending order of their height.

No apples, but a weaving dance

that links us all in their erratic

movement’s thread that could

be broken by a single stone.

Then others came and emptied him

from emptiness.  He went and sat,

Achilles sulking, back against the

hangman’s posts, cross-legged,

enforced spectator in a sport

that he was not allowed to join.

Unmoving.

            All except his head.

That turned in wary observation

as if he could, but did not want

to see.

I do not know what wearing a shirt with the 'Anonymous' face on it means to a young kid.  How many political ideas does such a person have - or is the face merely a design element in a cool shirt?  It used to be that a single representation of a leaf of pot, looking like a funkier graphic of the Canadian maple leaf was enough to set the older generation frothing at the mouth.  But hash is so passé nowadays that it barely manages to get recognition let alone an outraged response.  the 'Anonymous' Guy Fawkes face is something which is more provoking and more resonant.  I think.

I think the force of the poem is contained in the last stanza - and I am still working out what I think I meant with it!

I am not sure if it is an affect of age, but I find myself thinking of what I cannot know of what I have experienced.  Those everyday realities that passed you by because you never realised that you ought to have considered them.  So many things about the people you care about are just like the oxygen you breathe, it is so ordinary you take it for granted.  Right up until it is taken away.
     When John Donne said, in one of his sermons, that he was diminished by each Man's death, he was absolutely right.  I am now at an age where my parents' generation is largely gone.  Not only their memories and the details of those memories are gone, but their memories about me too are gone with them.  I have written about this before in the poem, 'What dog was Rodney?' and it continues to fascinate me - and disturb me, because what is gone is gone.
     It was while I was thinking about the opening question in this poem that the form and the subject matter began to form itself.  The central incident was one where I was actually more concerned about the reaction of my mother to my dog Penny's injury than the reaction of the dog.  Who I have to admit, made the most of her 'baddy' with the sort of resigned fortitude that only yellow Labrador bitches can pull off with real style.  Penny also complicated the whole concept of memory by herself being fairly indiscriminate in which paw she offered for sympathy at a later date!
     The last stanza expresses something I do believe, or at least something which needs consideration.  I seem to make a distinction between 'maker' and 'scribe' and I write of 'just a narrative' which suggests a whole area of debate about 'writing' and some sort of truth which I rather pointedly do not develop.
     I really like the ending!

Lost

What is the nearest thing in your

Life Time that you can never know?

Those unrecorded facts for which

there is no witness left alive to testify?

Did grandfather Powell ever wear cologne?

What was grandmother Rees’s favourite book?

The metal post was on the right

of that long path that led up to the field.

No more than a few inches high.  I think

that it was used by Gramp to mark out space with

rough green twine for flowers or for veg and,

hardy perennial, was left from year to year

to help re-draw the ordered battle lines

between the cultivated and the weeds

that filled my grandfather’s non-working years.

Released from city life,

the dog bounded to unaccustomed green,

and in her flight, an edge of that small post

swept through her foot.

Her bundled, limping run back to us all,

within the echo of her almost human scream,

punched pain to nausea.

The garish red along the yellow of her fur

from flesh gash-gape drenching a paw so delicate

it could have been a charm; and so much blood

from what turned out to be a cut so small;

but deep enough, that when the fur grew back,

it didn’t coat the gristle that was left.

And then for all her life,

enquiries for her ‘baddy paw’

would cause a lean (to left or right?)

and she would proffer (left or right?)

and flinch it back from soft

attempted human touch

to play the game

of her remembered pain.

Now she’s contained within a history

that I re-write as maker and as scribe.

But in the interest of truth

I cannot bring myself to plump

for ‘right’ or ‘left’ – because my choice

would make her just a narrative,

and not my dog.

I must admit that I am surprised at how long this poem turned out to be.  I thought, when I started that this was going to be another of my sonnet-like efforts but, as you can see, it turned into something longer.  Whether it is more substantial I leave for the consideration of the reader.

For reasons which are as complex as they are uninteresting, I find myself taking Padel lessons.  Padel is a sport which may or may not have originated on British cruise ships and is a sort of mixture of tennis and squash.  I have bought myself a padel racket, though that does not mean that I am committed to any sort of continuation of the game, but I am having individual tuition and very taxing it is too.
     I know no one in Castelldefels who plays the sport.  Which is to say, I know lots of them, because I see it being played every day - but these people are not in my social circle.  And even if they were, what the hell would I say to them?  How would I keep up with the inconsequential chatter that is such an important part of the gamesmanship which surrounds each sport?  In a foreign language!
     And the game is only played in doubles!  I am a truly awful doubles player, for all the reasons that people might suspect if they know me!
     So, the chances of my making a go of padel are none to the square root of minus one.
     Still, while the lessons go on, and go on they do, I am giving it my best shot.  I have a young and unrelenting teacher who leaves me wishing for death at the end of each hour's lesson.
     The following poem came out of a post-wishing-for-death cup of tea and the notes I was able to make.
     The cowlick and colour of my hair are both real, or perhaps I should say 'were'!  I wanted to use the word 'archaeological' in the penultimate line but, try as I might, I could not get it to fit.

Sport?

Tirednesses compete.

And in the no-man’s-land that borders pain                    

I cling to that kind calm that comes

when you don’t want to move – 

and you don’t need to, too.

There are no aches unless you shift.

And in the stillness, where the pen’s

the only thing to budge,

you can pretend that you’re

re-living all those facile times

when squash and badminton and swim

could flow together in an effort’s ease;

and where exhaustion was a momentary joke;

and fuel was a pint of Brains SA,

or just a change of scene, or talk.

Now knees remind me

of the past-tense points

in games with no rematch.

So why the present lessons

in a strange and hybrid sport?

And, one beyond the classes,

I’m not going to play?

There are some reasons

that I could adduce –

and real ones to wit.

But I so much prefer to think

my stumpy racket, sweat and hurt

are resignation redefined

to match the fanned-out, cow-lick swirl

of thick, dark brown, unruly hair

whose forehead site is

clear and plain

on my smooth scalp.

I was reading today about the British 'Golden Generation' of which I am part.  As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I am part of a generation of British people who have (apparently) in Mac the Knife's phrase, 'never had it so good.'  We have been sucking money and resources from our fellow countrymen with reckless abandon with everything, up to and including our University education paid for by others.  I would point out that my yearly University grant was sixty-six quid, which, even all those years ago was not enough to live on.  My parents paid for me to get through University and they subsidised my teacher training year too.  Jobs, I have to admit were plentiful - getting a job during the vacations was easy, and professional posts when I had done my training were numerous.

     We were lucky and now we are retiring and we all know what problems that is going to create.  But, in retirement, we are not going to be like our parents.  We are not, we keep telling ourselves, ever going to be as old as they were!

     This, obviously poses problems.  How are we going to grow old?  What does that even mean?

     I suppose the poem above is a rumination on the process.

Brains is the name of a brewery in Cardiff - my home city.  SA (aka Skull Attack) are actually the initials of the original brewer. If you should ever be in Cardiff then I recommend a pint of Brains SA without reservation.