BACK TO BLACK

I had the good fortune to be in my teens when a revolutionary new musical sound arrived from the USA.
Bill Haley introduced Rock 'n Roll to the UK and popular music was never the same again.
My friends and I spent our pocket money on records by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and The Everly Brothers, and learned to jive to the electrifying sounds of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
Towards the end of the 1950's, however, a new voice emerged to captivate me.
Roy Orbison bridged the gap between the raucous music of my teenage years and that of the pure operatic tenors, whose voices graced my childhood home: John McCormack, Beniamino Gigli and Enrico Caruso.
Even today, a quarter of a century since his early death, Roy's fans are legion and each one has a favourite Orbison song. Mine is A Love So Beautiful. A perfect Desert Island choice. Click on the link below to listen.

THE BIG O

A rich voice, almost operatic:

cool as a shiny Cadillac.

The outfit, idiosyncratic:

black shirt, 

black jeans, 

everything black.

Behind big shades, stone-faced, he stands,

his eyes concealed. 

That voice, those clothes,

are richly dark. 

Admiring fans,

we each imagine that he knows

the thing we feel: a raw heartbreak,

undefined. 

When he starts to sing

his voice recalls an endless ache

for some unfindable, lost thing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjxVKRAXCjM&noredirect=1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjxVKRAXCjM&noredirect=1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjxVKRAXCjM&noredirect=1

THE ODD COUPLE

At a writers’ workshop a few years ago I encountered a couple of amusing poetic forms that challenge the brain. 

One was the Univocalic and the other the Tetractys: I’m still trying to work out how to pronounce that second one.

They operate like this. The univocalic poem uses a single vowel throughout and avoids all others, while the tetractys is a poem with five accumulating lines. Line 1 is one syllable, line 2 has two syllables and so on to a maximum of five syllables. A Double Tetractys is two such poems back-t0-back.

I like to play with rhyme and form and once challenged myself to combine the two: a univocalic poem in the form of a double tetractys. Rather an odd couple.

It didn’t quite come off because I needed to add a couple of extra five-syllable lines to complete it, but the univocalic element, avoiding a,i,o and u, was spot-on.

The result was Wren, of which I’m rather proud.

WREN

See

the wren,

resplendent:

her clever eye,

her sweet essence. Deep, 

let her sleep be deep;

there, let the green hedge

be her perfect bed;

the rye, the reed,

be her screen;

shelter

her.

UNA CELEBRAZIONE DELLA POESIA

October reminds me that the annual Poetry On The Lake festival will be taking place shortly at beautiful Lake Orta in northern Italy. The festival was founded in 2001 by poet, Gabriel Griffin, and has as its Patron the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who described it as 

‘ ... perhaps the smallest but possibly the most perfect poetry festival in the world”. 

A few years ago, I had the good fortune to attend the events there with my wife, the writer, Jane Mosse, and took part in an outdoor poetry reading on the wooded hill at Sacro Monte along with a number of acclaimed British and Italian poets, including the Poet Laureate herself. 

This poem, Suitcases, is one that I read on that occasion. 

SUITCASES

Crouching in attic gloom, 

where skylight beams 

illuminate their pool of silver dust, 

old leather suitcases doze like alligators 

dreaming their prehistoric dreams.

They sleep soundly having eaten up my father’s life ...

the photographs, the hearing aid and collar studs, 

the safety razor with its rusted blade, 

the letters and the wallet with the ticket stubs

... yet I am so afraid 

that when I kneel beneath the skylight 

to prise apart those sagging, alligator jaws,

the life that I will find compressed within 

will be too small to match 

my memories of him.

You can find out more about the Poetry On The Lake festival at www.poetryonthelake.org/

BIKE TO THE FUTURE

There’s something magical about motorcycles: a kind of primitive connection between bike and rider that seems to exist only rarely with cars. Perhaps it’s the stripped-down quality in a motorcycle that brings engine and owner into close conjunction. For many, a second-hand Yamaha or Kawasaki is their first independent mode of transport and, like one’s first love, it retains a special place in the affections.  

As a teenager I couldn’t afford a motorbike but my best friend, John Simpson, had an old BSA and we had adventures galore on it. I remember us roaring off to the coast at Helen’s Bay on summer days, hoping to impress girls. We wore leather jackets but not crash helmets and imagined we were part of the biker gang in Stanley Kramer’s 1953 iconic  movie, The Wild One. 
In recent times I owned a 750cc Yamaha and rode it on the island and in northern France. A beautiful motorcycle with swept-back handlebars, customised paintwork and a leather seat, it was a pleasure to ride. The roads in Brittany are ideal for bikers, with little traffic congestion and great scenery. Riding a motorbike there makes you feel young again. Nowadays, however, I wear a crash helmet  
Here’s a short tale (just 250 words) about one man and his motorcycle.

Marlon Brando in The Wild One

PEPSI

Pepsi Morgan thrilled to the power of the liquid-cooled 12-valve engine of his new motorcycle. 

The dealer described it as the purest riding experience money can buy. He was right. Pepsi roared down the dual-carriageway like a bullet.

No stranger to bullets, Pepsi had left Afghanistan a month ago: a hero, they told him.  Plain lucky, he reckoned. He’d seen some hot spots but Helmand was the worst, a killing ground.

Like all soldiers he’d become fatalistic. “If the bullet’s got your name on it,” they’d say and, yes, he’d lost mates that way. No amount of caution could save you. He remembered the patrol when Beezer got hit. A lone sniper. A bullet with his name on it, poor sod.

Pepsi had been lucky.  Got home, got out, blew his savings on a brand-new Triumph Speed Triple, the perfect expression of stripped-down, brute power. Right now it felt like a package of pure energy rocketing him into the future. 

He didn’t see the delivery truck that came out of nowhere.  The impact was like a bomb exploding inside his head; more powerful than all the bombs in Helmand put together. He was dead before he hit the ground.  

The broken motorcycle spun like a roulette wheel on the tarmac. The truck came to a halt twenty yards away. It was a big vehicle. White. The word “Pepsi” in two foot letters on its side. A bullet with his name on it. 

COLD SNAP

As a child I loved to receive seaside postcards and, back then, before affordable air travel whisked us away to the Costas, holiday greetings tended to be sent from popular Northern Irish coastal resorts like Portrush, located on a peninsula extending into the chilly Atlantic Ocean. This poem was inspired by the reminiscences of my elderly Aunt Marion, who, as a young girl, spent an idyllic holiday there with her best friend. 

I've used a simple abcabc rhyme scheme and octosyllabic lines in an attempt to recreate the animation that I recall hearing in my Aunt's voice as she told me about those far-off, joyous days.  

FREEZE FRAME

We leapt like mermaids, screamed and froze,

while breakers splashed our thighs with spray.

As the Box Brownie camera snapped,

we vainly tried to hold a pose.

Behind us, the Atlantic lay, 

endless, eternal, arctic-capped.  

And afterwards, we wrapped ourselves

in rugs to shelter from the wind.

We hugged each other, laughing, there

beneath black, jagged coastal shelves

where sea-pinks grew. Thus, we were twinned

in friendship: an aquatic pair. 

SHELL SHOCK

The death of a loved one is an amputation. 

C S Lewis,  A Grief Observed.

Loneliness is just one of the many facets of the human condition but, when combined with the grief and pain of bereavement, it must be particularly difficult to bear ... but bear it we must.

                                                                                       

CRAB

Inside a carapace, he hides,

a hermit, once an extrovert;

he, with his wife, a double act. 

whose parties, cocktails, dance-floor glides,

charmed friends galore. A massive hurt 

uncoupled them, left him intact.

Bereaved a year, he holds routines 

sacred; does his washing, Tuesday,

shopping for essentials, weekly.

Sunday lunch is tinned baked beans.

He moves forward in his own way:

head drawn in, crablike, obliquely.

WHAT A FELINE

To avoid the inevitable complaints from my cat-loving friends, I’ve decided to follow my previous poem, about our dog, with a cat poem. This is about a haughty fellow I sometimes see when walking in the Bordeaux area.

 OZYMANDIAS

A grey cat sits in a doorway,

sphinx-like, disdainful, elegant,

in velvet-textured light

that warms him like a throne.

He fascinates me. 

I name him

Ozymandias, Cat of Cats.

To him, I am irrelevant:

neither food-source, threat nor prey.

Nine cat-lives in a ninth of mine,

his gaze dismisses me: 

deems me invisible. 

You will stare 

till you turn to stone 

or shatter like glass,

Cat of Cats,

Ozymandias.