Happy Christmas, Ethel!

Ethel was my friend and I was proud to know him.
His mother called him Jud, 
the name she'd given at his Christening,
but no one else could call him that.
The last to try still carried a black eye.
No, Ethel was his chosen name --
or rather, Ethelred, although the red
had quickly fallen out of use.
Why Ethel/Ethelred? Why that?
His second name was Mudd!

He was a proud man and his chest would swell
whenever -- and they sometimes did -- his friends
would rattle off his full address: 
Ethel Mudd
          Furnace Man,
                    The Gasworks
                              Love Lane
                                        Tadnam --
where, as it happened, I'd been sent
to see what I could paint. That's how we met.

He watched me for a bit, then asked
if I would draw him at his fire.
Of course, I said I would -- and he went wild,
as if his team had won the cup. He asked:
And with that charcoal you were using, eh?
"Certainly," I said. 
I'm off to wash me face!
"You're not, you know! Just don't you dare!"
and then explained, as best I could
the soot was part of him and what he did.
Gave character. He didn't understand,
but did agree -- and liked the Portrait when
I'd finished it. And in your paintin' Guvnor,
show me at my fire? "Well no....

I drew you yesterday..." showed him again
the drawing that would go into the work.
"You're doing up your bootlace... you recall?"
Oh, he recalled alright, but floundered
when he tried to understand...
Why would I rather have him doing that
than stoking up his fire?

I pointed on the drawing to the way
his muscles tensed and shaped the back and legs,
the lines of stress that ran down through his form,
how figures in the background echoed this --
as did the open furnace door, its shadow
and the flames.... And I can do all that,
he gasped  by tying up my boot! -- I must
be quite a special man, at that!
"Ethel," I said, "You are, you surely are!"

We sent each other Christmas cards for years.

What we're told and what we learn

Moonlit.
Deep shadows cross the valley
stealing sight.
The five men plunging on ahead.
Trying to keep up,
I kick against a sleeper. Stumble.
Twice I nearly fall
before the blaze of light.
And in the light
(think: insect in a spider's web)
a rabbit staring straight ahead.
The ganger's coat flaps open wide.
Voluminous, down to his feet,
the coat seems made of pockets.
Enormous ones inside. He
picks the rabbit up
and pops it in.
As easily as that.
Then we move on. Not far.
The light again. A rabbit caught.
Five times in all before we're done.
The men are quite delirious. Explain:
the station master owns the land as as far as you can see.
The thought has made their evening perfect as could be!

Midnight gone when we get back
regain the carriages.
(Two are sleepers, one a diner.)
No time at all, I'm bedded down. Top bunk.
(Mostly the men have bottom ones.)
Then in the darkness: Spose youse guessed it, lad...
we all of us are gay... wondering...
Could youse be interested, eh?
Politely I decline.
Politely they accept.
No more is said, no moves are made.

For me, this has the force of revelation.
Not what the culture of the day
has led me to expect. The warning was
they'd force themselves upon me
or wheedle their way in.

All evening I've been winding back
the mileage counter from
my bicycle's front wheel --
fluorescent in the dark.
And why have I been doing this?
I've no idea. The why is lost in memory.
The doing, though, is vivid
beyond anything that day.
Is that not surreal?
Would you not say?

I reach the target number...
Done it! I cry, triumphantly...
which in the darkness, worries my five friends.

The men were working on the line
and living where they worked
when I'd turned up, my bicycle
unrideable,
the last train gone.
They'd offered hospitality,
as warm as any you might find.
They changed my whole perception
of how gay people are, what they can be.
I look back fondly, even now.
Yet only now the thought occurs...
But what if I'd said 'Yes'? --
and me still under age?

on not being positive...

I'd often thought one day I might,
but now the world's in such a plight
I don't know if I will at all --
I might just go and have a ball.
A ball is what I'm needing now,
a crystal ball to tell me how
and when and where and what to share --
and most of all, if I would dare.

I asked the guy behind the bar
who thought that things had gone too far.
He'd tried himself to do it once --
on Bournemouth Sands -- and felt a dunce
to see it all go up in flames...
thought me too old to play such games.
His last idea was Get out quick:
These Hooray Johnnies make me sick! 

A funeral man with horse-drawn hearse
said he had done it with his nurse,
a friend had tried it on the horse --
mainly using chilli sauce.
He'd heard of such things tried at wakes --
They're not all beer or tea and cakes!
He'd found it, though, a strange affair.
(Illegal now, so have a care...)

Illegal gave a certain frisson...
but not enough to go to prison.
I could have gone for it in France
(where it's become a form of dance).
I saw it on the Metro done,
and in the mountains, just for fun.
More seriously, the Eiffel Tower
was  venue for a bid for power.

So now I don't know what to do --
and indecision makes me blue.
My ex-inspector used to say:
Be pro-active every day.
Make your mind up early on,
then stick to it -- you'll not go wrong! 
But to the contrary, I'd find
I'd get a boost from change of mind.

The positives were plain to see,
but this conundrum puzzles me.
I'm certain now, I've missed my chance...
I'll wallow in insouciance,
although that isn't really me --
I'm serious, dynamic. See?
I pray you all, my friends, will find
the power that goes with change of mind.

The Seasons

It seems to me we favour most
the season of our age --
though truth to tell, the summer's heat,
for all the time that I recall,
would leave me cool inside.

My first love was
vivacious spring,
its joie de vivre,
its brightness, hope and colour sense.
It was a long affair. Perhaps too long.
But then again: no one got hurt.

So summer time was overlooked
and went without the small amount
of credit it deserved. Harsh of light,
bunged full of stuff,
it lost its shape.
Warm, staid and comforting,
its boring days
were friendly and reserved.
I kept it just for doing things --
other things, not things with it.

Autumn took me by surprise
(the way that summer did to Eliot
across the Starnbergersee),
but like a lover in my case --
like one I'd always courted,
but never thought to win,
who'd never shown the slightest heed,
but then had caught me willy-nilly
with dark and flashing eyes.

But now, ah now, 'tis winter time:
the season and my soul agree --
and if the body jibs a bit,
it always was a misery,
not liking this or that...
I bow to winter and its charms,
its stark and minimal delights,
its skeletons and filigrees
like blueprints in His pattern book
the Craftsman opens just for those
who'll revel in His Winter show,
and so reveals this time of year,
the elegance of structures,
the underlying rhythms:
His reasons and his rhymes.

Time happens

I didn't know that Time had time
to watch us as it ticks away --
or is it us it ticks away,
a smoke and mirrors party trick,
the way the quayside seems to leave
our stationary ship?

And if time closes Time's one eye,
will everything slow down,
will snores replace the former ticks,
and tocks turn into grunts?
Will what Time watches be but dream?
Will Time have dreams of us?

Our dreams are dreams of possible
when Time is out of town.
Things happen coincidingly:
the Eiffel Tower is London Zoo,
the train becomes a bicycle
before Time's eye can wink.

And is it tick and tock, my friend,
or is it snore and grunt
that brings the music to a life,
the rhythm to a dream?
For even ugly sounds can sing
transmuted by the ears.

...................................
I am indebted to Willow at The Mag for this image as prompt.

The Super Highway

Will future ages say of us
we were a new line of descent:
Arachnid Man who blanketed
the world in wonder webs?
If so, no wonder, they might think,
the world became so heated underneath!

Or will they call us Link Age Man,
and realise that all those threads
were Fred and Ethel, Jim and Beryl
trying to connect?

Ours is the Age of Connectivity --
and not of information, as we're taught.
Connecting has for ages
been what's super cool --
it does not matter much with what, to whom:
the globe is but a super room
where we can chat our stuff...
But you think not?

Well, things are changing slowly, so I hear...
the super-highway has been mugged,
become a tad less info' and touch 
more Hi ya Pal! --  With very little info'
kicked around... raw information
isn't what the kids are all about.

The web, some say, does for society
what our connective tissue does for us:
it binds, supports and keeps apart 
the body parts that otherwise would jar.
If we should lose the internet --
by some default of use, let's say -- society
would suffer all those stiff and painful joints.

Yet I was reading only yesterday
how youthful sections of the global population
now think the web is naff.
It's a Dad Thing, they will say.
Or worse: A Wrinkly Thing -- of course,
they still connect, web-wise, in other ways!

But if the Not Cool label sticks,
if others take it up,
the viewpoint spreads,
the web might just become
man's last big thing --
Perhaps we'll end up as the End Time Man!

..............................................
It is twenty years since the first text was sent.

A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese

Good evening, Evening Sunshine!
Have you wondered how my day was going,
alone and in a place we know so well?
I thought I'd mail you, tell you what
a strange experience I had.
Ghost of a place, I'd say. I could not
come to terms with it --
how nothing clicked the way it used to click.

I saw the waterfall where we first met
and walked where we have often walked before.
I thought I knew each blade of grass,
the sound that feet make on the boards
that oversail the wetland strip. You taught
me names of reeds and rushes there,
and how to tell the summer song
the robin sings from that he sings
when winter comes. I thought I knew
the pinetum's most distinctive  smell,
the sound of wind high in the trees --
do you remember how we once agreed
it sounded like a brook? You taught 
me how to recognise the song -- what bird
was it? the name eludes -- that sounded like
a little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese.
I had not thought until that day
how birdsong might have lyrics...

All this I had expected to be there
as ever was. Alas, I did not recognise the place.
How sad and boring rushes are! How colourless
are reeds! The planks across the wetlands
merely groaned from missing you.
I heard the robin in the usual place,
but could not tell without your high
accompaniment to paint the notes
which of his songs he sang.

And in the pinetum's highest trees
the wind this morning sounded like... 
the wind once more! I think 
the little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese bird
had gorged on Gorgonzola late last night.
(It's coming back -- the yellow hammer, yes?)
The pinetum had no smell at all --
how could that possibly be so?

Next time I go I will not go alone. XXX

....................................................................
Poems of hate and Hope at dVerse Poets (Poetics)have set Missing You as theme for today.

Lost Boy

Black shapes,
dark, predatory birds,
sky full of them, they fell
and swooped, I shrank
to half my size, ducked
dived, accelerated. Still
they came in ones and twos,
whole squadrons of them at a time.
Then Messerschmitts... machine gun
rattle, somehow soft, like Grandma's pills
spilled on the floor's linoleum.
Some scorched my ears... and I
a vulnerable Tiger Moth.
I flapped my wings, rolled side to side,
but still they came, their fearful hands
reached out like claws to savage me.

I vaguely heard
a Tannoy somewhere -- earphones playing up --
speak of a lost boy. I paid no heed --
I had no heed to spare!
was fully occupied with mortal fight
and frenzied flight. I'd swear on oath
that was the day 
I learnt the body swerve. 
Two came at me from either side.
I ducked again, enjoyed
to see the two collide.

It ended sadly, I'm afraid.
I crashed into a counter,
knocking over a display
and there above the wreckage, with
a Santa's Grotto-Christmas crowd-type backing, glimpsed
my would-be rescuers... and mother's face, 
the face that launched my thousand ships --
but on this one occasion killed
the fantasy stone dead.

Mixed metaphors

In a room that
is an ex-room
of bare walls,floor,
ceiling, piles of
dust and debris,
the decaying
skeleton of
a room that was,
there stands a chair --
a luxury
that's out of place,
or seems to be.
Stark contrast, then:
of vivid red, 
its velvet touch
surrounded by
shambolic room.

Such plushness speaks
in times of great
austerity.
What does it say
to you? What springs
to mind? blood? rouge?
boudoir? scarlet
woman? knocking 
shop? And do you
see which way my
mind is running?
I'm thinking: flight
of fancy. Dream.
A fantasist.

To me the chair 
is symbol for
the richness of
such fantasy;
the room denotes
its ultimate
futility,
its falling short
and leaving us
unsatisfied.

Tess Kincaid at The Mag provided the above inspirational image as prompt.

For Life and Love : a paean.

Semaphore (Samuel Peralta) in Form for All at dVerse Poets Pub challenges us to write an acrostic* poem -- a new departure for me.

Friends of Gaia gather round,
Open up your loving hearts
Return the love you have received:
Love the self, that first of much;
Inspire the tired, lack-lustre ones,
Fire them with the Earth's sure touch. 

Earth has bounty still in store.

All creation joins the song
(Nations clamour still for more),
Delights to greet each golden crop
Looks to man to mind the shop 
(Oh,shame, not all crops reach the shelves),
Violence is to ourselves.

Earth, begin again today!

.......................................................................
A tad too late for your Thanksgiving, I tried to find a related theme. *Acrostic = The initial letters of each line spell out its theme.

Out of its depth, the neighbourhood watch

Beware of dreams and other idle thoughts.
To this or that one they confide
the wonders of a great cathedral nave,
impart the inspiration for a masterpiece
in paint or sound, and on occasions have been known 
to disclose all the workings for
some new break-through machinery. 

By contrast, on the likes of me they lay
the burden of dark secrets not to be disclosed --
secrets I  would treat them well to be without.
Their latest confidence, bequeathed
through thoughts that I was not controlling at the time,
but letting them run free, was clearly worked out
in advance, before they saddled me with this:-

We have a squad of killer babies in our town.
There is no doubt. Coincidences come
too frequently. And each time I've been steered
their way to see. First time: across the square
a row of trampled snails... and there, six yards
beyond the row, a fluffy toy, a tiny, woolly lamb.
So, not convinced? Try this for size: next thing,

a hedgehog in the roadway. Dead, of course. The gardener,
who lives across the road from me, has said
it died of some toxicity -- and not a hundred miles away
a baby's dummy lay. What better instrument,
I ask, for one so young to use for poisoning?
Then just this last weekend, a fox cub we first saw
in spring... found in the gutter. Bloodied. Head bashed in.

This was the babies' top-most topping yet --
they still have not, to my uncertain knowledge, struck
an actual person dead. No doubt they're working up to it!
But now, apologies... the fox... how do I know? How am I sure?
Not fifteen yards away, a baby's plastic rattle. Split 
from top to bottom by the blow! And so, each escapade 
becomes more vicious than the last.

It's true I have not seen these killer babies yet.
Imagine them to meet at night, but have no clue
how they achieve these meets. Maybe the birds
are utilised... the cell is organised through tweets --
but that does not explain the no doubt ultra-strange
logistics of their meets. How could small babies manage 
them? And what are parents doing at these times?

How Much You Want?

The lift girl took a fancy to her blouse --
my daughter's. Every time we'd travel
with her in her lift, whether up or down ,
I'd see her finger it and smile.
Nice, dearie!, she would say. How much?
And every time my daughter would just smile
and shake her head, turn slightly pinkish
and the girl would ask again: How much?

I thought it strange. Though some clothes 
were in great demand, the blouse was very like
the ones the locals wore round town --
embroidered in the same half folksy style,
with just the motifs differing: hers Teddy
bears and dolls; theirs pine trees wolves and trolls.
(One hotel guest disposed of all her husband's clothes
and went home with a suitcase full of useless currency.)

Daily beside the hotel swimming pool
illegal currency exchanges on-going all the while --
and all beneath the noses of the far-
from-secret Secret Officers in far-
from-plain-clothes suits, with half-
mile-wide lapels - suits that only they could buy.
How much you want? and Give you... echoed
quite like laughter round the pool.

And then one evening during dinner:
a commotion. An Officer type Spiv --
lapels at 10 to 2 -- had arrested on the hotel beach
a young girl for soliciting. She'd cloned --
I swear to heaven -- the very blouse my daughter
still was wearing. Some sort of badge or sign
those motifs -- so the inference was that all the guests 
soon drew. My daughter didn't wear the blouse again.
......................................................

I will not divulge at this stage where in the world these events took place - thought some might like to guess. My daughter at the time was ten years old.

My Most-Remembered Lie

The one that haunts, keeps coming back...

Friday afternoon: the class debate.
Dicky Bird (Englsh, Literature and Grammar,
Lower School) has just this moment
introduced his theme (half-promising,
the way he always does, we all could be
M.Ps. one day): Meccano in
the School Curriculum?  And now,
by way of limbering up, 
he's going round the room inviting
us to say if we possess Meccano 
sets at home; and if so, which; and
how they figure in our leisure hours.
(Sets range from 1 to 10. Set 5 or 6
would indicate a lucky bunny.)

He gets to me. Set 10! I say.
The whole class looks with incredulity.
He offers me the chance to backtrack 
just a bit, but I am adamant. Set 10!
I say again. He starts to list out all
the parts set 10 includes. I nod at each,
stick to my guns! They start to grin.
Then giggle. The more they do so,
the more I nod. Truth is -- one version of --
I have set 8 plus set 9A. 9A
converts set 9 to 10 -- but not, alas,
set 8. I'm almost there, but lacking
set 8A. I have convinced myself --
almost -- it's near enough to pass for truth.

And I keep thinking now... perhaps
he saw the spark, perhaps he knew
I should have been an M.P. after all.

Meccano Steam shovel. Image fromWikipedia

Verdun

Verdun, an ancient fortress town strategically placed on the road to Paris. It has a long history of siege and conflict. During W.W.II it became a symbol of French resistance when it survived a long and terrible assault from vastly superior german troops. The painting by Felix Vallotton was contributed as this week's prompt by Magpie Tales

Sharp. Angular. The forms
man brings to bear. How
apt! Snapped shut or open.
Scissor-wise. Knives 
in pincer movements cut.
Shred. softer forms
that Nature spread
in kinder days.
Man's browns
have muddied
purer greens. Where pastures were
strange landscapes have replaced
their peace with heave
and blast of earth.

I say: if ever this great onslaught ends
(somewhere beyond the death of friends
I do not doubt),
then shall the landscape
fall into a silence, speak
the death of speech,
the death of sapiens. Only
the homo in us will survive.

I dare to say of this: if ever it should end --
the stuttering machine gun madness;
exploding earth and cries of pain;
then shall we hear:
no birdsong;  whispers
from no furry creatures
in the non-existent undergrowth;
no rustling of dead leaves.
No sounds beyond the sighings of 
the dead in search of graves.

If it had eyes, this landscape 
would lie silent, staring into space,
a dumb and broken thing. See now:
beyond the small hill's brow
shapes piled that might be corpses --
or fallen trees... or simply shadows
thrown by the light of hell.

I say again: if ever this great onslaught ends
there will be nothing left for light to show --
except the most impenetrable darkness
man has ever seen.

This be the planet

This is the planet that nurtured life
from the moment life began,
the way a man will blow on a spark
in order to kindle a flame.

This is the planet that welcomed life
and awarded it top spot,
gave it the keys to its atmosphere,
and the freedom of ocean and rock.

This is the planet that stocked its shelves
with all the essentials for life:
trace elements, carbon and vitamins --
and left it to fashion its prize. 

This is the planet that held its breath,
preserving what others had lost --
and preserved it well until man appeared
and fiddled with all the controls.

This is the planet that healed itself
with feedback, nudge and tweak,
until it was pushed way over the edge
into Chaos and Prospect Bleak.

This is the planet out on  a limb
in need of a settings change.
Its final, desperate hope is to
recapture its maker's range.

Peacemaker Extraordinary

He was big, much bigger than big,
a mountain from Jamaica.
Most days his voice boomed through the corridors,
shattering what peace there might have been.
The school was two thirds Chelsea fans.
The other third -- less one -- supported Arsenal.
Malcolm was that one: he would be Manchester
United to his dying day. He had
a string of names they'd given him, the boys:
Big Mal was one; Mal-ignant was another
(never to his face); Mal-icious yet a third.
He'd modelled himself on his childhood hero,
Malcolm X,* just recently assassinated, so
 a martyr now to boot -- and very much alive.

At Stamford Bridge the hero in those days
was Peter Osgood.** Monday after Monday,
Mal would enter like a conqueror. We'd hear
him chanting from afar: Osgood, no good!
Osgood, no good! No other person could
have managed that and lived. Amazing then
the staff should christen him The Peacemaker,
but so they did. Had he not stood between
those warring fans, between that mighty rock
and that hard place, our place of learning
might have been undone. You had to think
of bold Horatius before the wild Etruscans***
at the bridge -- not Stamford, though. Yet he
had one horde facing him, but not like Malcolm, with
another at his back. We never knew why Malcolm
made this stand, but all applauded that he did.

One Monday Mal was sick. A spate of fights
broke out that no one could control. I tried...
I campaigned long and hard that Mal should receive
The Nobel Prize, but nothing ever came of it.
.............................................

* here
** here
*** here

Peace is the apt order of the day for ManicdDaily's prompt at DVerse Poets

if art should fail humanity...

If you could find a place
where no one would find you,
if you could paper that place
with a paper to suit you,
if you could make a garden
to surround your lonely place
and live there like a hermit
'til you knew what human was,
if you could send a post card
delivered to my door
to describe in single syllables
what human life is for,
and if the world at large
could be invited in,
I wonder... would that open
your brave new world to sin?
And if you took to painting
would sin besmirch the vision
of your world seen at its best
or seduce you from your crusade for
explicit this, explicit that -- 
in which the vast majority
by definition don't believe.
(Blessed are they 
that have not seen
and yet believe... etc, etc.)

If you could keep your place
for both the secular and holy,
free of false dichotomies,
a land of god and no-god,
seeing god as both a shorthand
and a longhand form of art,
seeing art as sign and semaphore,
a dance with flags and dazzling lights,
unverbalised theology
bringing music to the sights --
a cannabis for scriptural faith...
And if you left your haven
to dance down dirty streets
would it all be out of kilter,
would you need the magic philter,
explicit sex and revelation,
to return you to your station?
If you could paint a tenet
for a faith that's yet to be,
would a fine brush or a wide brush
or a roller set you free?
Would you nurture a small parcel
or a landscape or some scree?
And if art should fail humanity,
where then would prayer be?

A Card in a Shop Window

Seen among the Lost Pet cards:

Have you seen them?

Two lost faiths,
much loved and greatly missed:
A fluffy kitten, black and white --
answers to the name of adam (meaning earth --
pristine, of course).

Also, a snow-white puppy --
comes when you call eve (life-
giving - as in the biosphere 
of all life, everywhere).

When found, they'll likely be together.
Please search the garden
and the potting shed,
beneath the apple tree, etc.

Private View

A hundred paintings on the wall,
all thrown together thoughtlessly -
enough they could be crowded in
with no blank wall to spare, now
looking down at people on display:
Conceptual Dressers -- are they? -- or
Performance Artists  maybe? Some
new genre for the in-crowd to go on about?
Motifs interchanged before your very eyes:
motives confused, confusing or Confucius-
like -- you'll know them by their too much
nibbling at their cheese on sticks, and too
much sipping of expensive wines. So where's
the art in that? the pictures ask. The people,
they point out, are frameless every one. And so,
these strangers who keep peering up at them,
these voyeur-viewers-concept dressers-per-
formance people with no boundaries,
all without straight edges set to crop 
them into manageable wholes and hold
each whole together, are one conglomerate mass,
devoid of individual voices, setting out a style.
You hear it in their talk, the formless way
it spills across the gallery, the vague
waft of the hand to indicate
where Post-Impressionism colonises
something known as  Luminism. or
a perfect balance is achieved
between Expressionism and ingestion
of the spirit. More Burgundy, like blood,
lands SPLAT! upon the floor.

..............................................

Linking to dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night #69

Choice and no choice

Too late to make a start,
to write my life the way it might have been,
like a poetic form grown line by line,
each line composed
of four or five well chosen words,
each line exact,
weighed in a careful balance,
balanced to a nicety...
A common fret?
No, more than that. The awful thing:
that this is always so,
a much for the young boy
as this old man.

No time to drive a rhythm through,
empowering life
to something more than prose.
That chance was gone
before you held a pen.

Not easy to determine
(as you yourself will know)
the sequence that the words should take...
Harder for the boy,
he cannot know
best order changes constantly,
that we
are all collateral casualties
of some world/universal order
that changes as we go
but can't be changed.

Not so:
collateral wounds do not exist;
all wounds are core, the end 
and very essence of a war.
The deaths,the man/the boy 
were choices someone made,
choices someone weighed,
thought justified.

The sculptor doesn't choose. He waits
until an idea comes to him, one that says
this XXX will fit your marble block
exactly sir. It's there
and waiting to get out.

Free choice a human right.
No one's pleading that he's
 Just obeying orders, not these days,
they're simply doing the wrong thing:
the philistine who helps to shape our country,
the rogue who goes to make our laws,
the shaman who with magic stone 
will keeps himself in power,
the leaders who start wars.

It's far too late for choice; it always was.
You have your block of stone.
............................................

I am linking this to Poet's Pantry at Poets United and to the Poetry Jam prompt Choice