NOT FADE AWAY?

As I approach my eighth decade, the number of friends and relatives now deceased is high. Each individual is remembered, of course: that's their immortality. 

When my generation and the next are gone, however, those memories will die with us.

REMEMBER ME

A much-loved childhood friend, who died too young,

smiles from a faded photograph today:

along with other snaps, his sits among

dead parents, aunts and uncles, an array

of family pets in amber, monochrome,

all trapped forever, or till I’m deceased,

like insects, in this stout, unwieldy tome.

Should I feel shame that somehow I have ceased

to think of him, to mourn his tragedy,

his early exit, unrehearsed and swift,

he who, back then, meant everything to me?

Has fickle memory cast him adrift

as one does a glass bottle in the sea,

its message, scrawled in hope, remember me?

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ 

ALL CHANGE

This one's autobiographical but it all happened so long ago that I suspect that the other participants may well be pushing up the daisies by now. 

TEENAGERS

That rotten night, the party in full swing,

a teenage girl, with whom I was in love

or thought I was, who’d kept me on a string,

discarded me as though I were a glove 

and danced with my best friend. I felt a fool,

humiliated to be cast aside

so publicly, for she was cold and cruel

as only teenagers can be. My pride

took such a hammering, I almost wept,

but love’s skin-deep so, when the music played

a new girl asked me for a dance, I leapt,

and, having danced for half an hour, she stayed

then, three weeks later, I moved on from her:

it’s no holds barred when you’re a teenager.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ 

NO FLY ZONE

A story poem this week. 

MOZART          

The photograph is monochrome

and taken years ago at home:

where home was then, although not now.

It doesn’t matter anyhow.

What matters is the image there:

a teenage girl with long dark hair,

unsmiling with, upon her arm,

a parakeet, her lucky charm,

named Mozart. How she loved that bird.

We joked, at times, that she preferred

her Mozart to the rest of us.

No matter: it was ever thus.

His wings were clipped: a bird earthbound,

he always seemed to be around

He lives now with our brother, Tim,

who tolerates but dislikes him

for he associates Mozart

with that thing which sets us apart.

Her early death brought misery

to Tim and me, her parents … she

stepped off a ledge, ten stories high,

but, like poor Mozart, could not fly.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

RAINED OFF

Ah, those teenage years: what glorious Hell they were!

RAIN

I sometimes think of that day in the rain

we walked out unprepared for the downpour

yet when it came you viewed it with disdain:

you thought inclement weather was a bore.

We sheltered under trees and huddled close,

two teenagers, both still at school, so young.

You, full of life, in love, and I morose

and gloomy, powerless to hold my tongue.

My mood infected your mood that last day

and it grew cold as you heard me complain

about some lad you’d met and my dismay

that you had planned on seeing him again.

That moment, looking back, defined us then  

and afterwards we never met again.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

SCOPE FOR HOPE?

Sonnet-style, recently-written and self-explanatory ... all those hyphens!

HOPE

When all the bulwarks of our life have gone,

our property, our sanity, our health,

it seems the vestiges of hope cling on

with hope-against-the-odds our only wealth.

Though candlelight seems such a paltry thing,

the darker grows the room, the more its light

expands. It is that light to which we cling

while we endure a black, unending night.

Remove hope and the rest comes crashing down

in smithereens king’s horses could not mend.

It means so much, that short, four-letter noun:

without it, into limbo we descend.

Cling on, like moss, to hope when all else fails.

Who knows, a stroke of luck might tip the scales.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

 

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

“Happiness is waking up, looking at the clock and finding that you still have two hours left to sleep.” — Charles M. Schulz, American Cartoonist.

AWAKENING

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake,

a land-drawn fish, I struggle into day:

with otherworldly eyes, I come awake.

On feeble, unaccustomed limbs that ache,

I climb from crushed bed-sheets in disarray.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake.

How strange it is each morning at daybreak:

the early light, the birdsong cabaret.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.

Sweet is the element I must forsake:

on waking, that safe haven slips away.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake

into the chill of morning to remake

myself again but better in some way.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.

We speak of death as sleep for kindness sake

though dreams are bright while death is surely grey.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.

 

SAVAGES

As with men, so with nations.

          

CONFRONTATION

The playground tactics I learned long ago

emerge again: that fight or flight response,

the pantomime of swagger, a dumb show

of surliness, the studied nonchalance.

How suddenly we find ourselves again

reverting to the primitive, the brute.

Beneath the suits are savages not men

prepared to fight to settle a dispute.

Now I face you as you face me, enraged

at what we see as stupid stubborness:

two grown men, antlers locked, and both upstaged

by female laughter. Swiftly we suppress

our burning anger, back away a pace,

unhurriedly, so neither loses face.