A speck crawling from under Acrimony seen under the spotlight
A metaphor for the last ten years crawling down the hard shoulder
A tiny spider picks its way through books and is gone
I stare at the rain The stationary cars The Middle of England
Wonder how she’s doing What webs lay ahead What sticky yarns
The Lost Decade
Travelling on the Manx electric railway In Fog One minute coasting Could see to Ireland The next all blank like a page
Then a screetch as foot on brake Bad news from abroad Then silence Mist rolling seaward Beginnings and endings A horse on a cliff Cold black sea
The line ended We sat silent At a Victorian station Overhead cables fizzing in the rain Then a tired horse pulling Us along the esplanade
Ten years before dirt rained down On your sister’s coffin Even then I felt the cold wind blow In from the Irish sea Eating into our bones Then into our souls Until we could not find our way home
In fact I have been ignoring poetry, shelving it, filing it and generally pushing it to the back of my mind for the past decade.To start with this was deliberate as the combination of employment in an art school (note word art there not a writing school) and the first consistent art studio close to home promised great things…
But the best laid plans..mice and men etc.
The art school post ended in 2015 and although I still rent a studio I have been fairly incosistent in using it and the great rebirth of my painting career and the fame and wealth that would surely follow never happened.
A fairly shambolic attempt to reinvigorate my writing in 2014 on a M.A. in Creative Writing ended in abject failure as the reality of my age and what a modern creative writing course consists of collided head on….
Above and beyond all of these forlorn attempts to concentrate on anything was the gradual deterioration of my wife’s condition from 2009 onwards. Nothing, not an M.A. in Fine Art or international conferences had half the effect of living with someone who gradually showed more and more signs of a serious mental illness and addiction.
I have pretty much lost the last decade to being part of her battle with family tragedy and illness and thankfully despite the recent divorce she is still alive so far. I take nothing for granted now and take each day as it comes.
In that kind of time-frame poetry was the last thing on my mind and with the exception of some hastily produced mini-pamphlets my poetic career has remained parked in the drive until now.
So here I am 60 years old..none the wiser and a lot poorer with no gainful employment looking at writing again as the most ridiculous and least renumerative path I could possibly choose.
Welcome to the New World…same as it ever was..same as it ever was…
