OLD RAY

As a cold and frosty morning
Turns into a sunny afternoon,
Old Ray wanders round old London town
With, as usual, too much on his mind.
Murmuring songs from way back when
His voice was always on the radio,
He hunches his shoulders
And digs his hands deep down
The pockets of an old overcoat.
A bit barmy and battered,
But still a well respected man,
Old Ray rambles the old familiar way,
His forehead growing higher now
Under one of Max Miller’s old hats,
With one of Eric Morecambe’s old ties
Under an untidy scarf half-hiding
That gap-toothed grin on the sardonic face,
Which some passers-by fancy
They half-recognise from the telly long ago.

Young Ray bought a big house in the country
Once, but he soon came back to where he belonged.
He couldn’t get away because it was always
Calling him to come on home,
Back to the river and the big black Smoke.
It may all be cleaner now, but Old Ray
Hurries head down, muttering past
The shining new towers of the City of London,
New songs humming in his old head
With memories of family and friends
And the way love used to be
And the sacred days all scattered to the fields.
But though they’re gone
They’re still with him every single day
And he’s going home, so what does it matter?
Over the bridge and along the Camden canal,
By the old school and dance hall and pubs,
Through the Heath and villages and up the hills
Of Muswell, Parliament and Primrose,
In the blessed, chilly evening light
To sit on a bench and watch the sunset,
Way across the dirty old river.
Flowing into the night


(2011)

This is my first poem of 2011.

I wrote this after watching what struck me as a very eloquent TV documentary about Ray Davies last year (one of the ‘Imagine’ programmes on BBC 1). As I write, Ray is, I think, 66 years old, which in 21st century terms is no longer thought of as ‘old’, but back in the heyday of The Kinks during the last century, it really did seem ancient…

Fans of The Kinks will, of course, detect many bits and pieces from the band’s wonderful back catalogue woven into this poem.

The lovely picture of Ray was taken when he was 50 and, actually, he hasn’t really changed much at all since then. So – not so old.

THE YOOF OF TODAY

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen,
They should – as every parent and teacher will tell you –
Never ever be heard, let alone be seen.
‘Kids! Who’d have ‘em? I rue the day they were born.’
They’re ignorant, arrogant and insolent,
Addicted to vulgarity, vice and vandalism;
Lazy, loitering litterbugs – that’s what they are –
Ill-mannered, leering, sub-literate liars
Who’d sell their grannies and little sisters for fivers.
They’re foul-mouthed, fickle and unfair;
Selfish, spiteful and obsessed with sex, sport and soap-opera;
And they grin and gossip gormlessly
As they barge and bully and brawl;
We say, ‘It’s just a phase they all go through.’
The phase their parents dread most of all.

Between the ages of dirty thirteen and sex-mad sixteen,
They live on crisps, cola, chocolate and chips
And when they’re not idiotically giggling, they’re venting their vicious spleen.
Moody, mardy malcontents all,
Who sulk and pout and flounce;
Cool fools, louche louts, fashion-fascists,
Snobs and yobs brave only in mobs.
Rebels without a cause, indeed,
Without ideas or ideals,
Prejudiced and unprincipled,
Knowing the price of everything
And the value of nothing;
Respecting neither the old nor the past.
‘Please God,’ their parents pray through
This phase they too all went through,
‘Please God, it won’t last!’


(1997)


Having worked as a teacher for longer than I care to remember, as well as being a parent, I do know of what I speak here. It was written during a timed assessment which took place in blessed silence with a class of 14 and 15 year-olds who had, over the course of the school year, made me a fervent believer in retrospective abortion…

I do hope, however, that no-one reading this poem – no matter what their age – will be left with the impression of it being merely an exercise in denunciation and wordplay.

VERSE NOIR (Here’s Looking At You, Kid)

Tell me, have I got this story right –
You know that serpentine story in black and white?
Is there a Big Wheel in moonlight turning
And black midnight oil burning, burning?
Is there a telephone always ringing
And a detective in a tilted hat singing?
Will there be a gunfight
And blood in the night?
I want you to tell me –
Am I right or am I right?

In Club Chicago, the band strike up that play-it-again song.
A girl there wears her gold hair short and her black dress long,
Her eyes sparkle through the smoke;
She rattles the ice in her vodka and coke
And watches a third man coming up behind an old has-been,
In the familiar shadowplay of that played-out scene.
(Well, she already dumped one sap for you, Jack,
Gonna leave you too, she’s a gal don’t look back
And this young dude collects blondes in bottles too.
Hey, your golden girl – she thinks he’s cute).
Outside in the rain, the private eye sees them leave,
His finger on the trigger at the end of his sleeve.
They melt into a cab as the lights go green –
Ain’t this that same old movie, same old scene?
Upstairs, later in a house on West Tenth and Vine
There’s two silhouettes in lamplight, closing the blind.
So, forgive me baby, if I don’t seem too bright
And excuse me while I stroke this ear on the right;
Won’t you tell me, sugar –
Am I right or am I right?

Now a saxophone plays in a monochrome haze
And neon nights dissolve into twilight days.
Over the street, a falcon circles the steeple
While he wonders if the problems of two little people
Amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,
Where she says she’s still his girl,
Asks him if he’s OK and he says ‘Top of the world’.
He thinks of the shots in the envelope and the piece cold at his side
And he wants to leave with her but he stays frozen inside.
In Technicolor, she whispers, ‘I love you’, he says ‘Ditto’,
And begs her to stay when she says she’s gotta go.
She says she’ll be back but then it’s time for time to fly
And wish each other good luck and goodbye.
But this movie, lady, is shot in black and white
And the screenplay is vague but the timing is tight.
Now, tell me, sweetheart –
Am I right or am I right?

In the fog, the plane engines hum and choke
And he has to get out now or just go for broke.
Though time and distance will drag them apart,
He figures that falcon may yet have a nightingale heart.
She has a lotta class but he don’t know how far she’ll go;
He shrugs, lights a cigarette, guesses he’ll never know.
He catches her wrist and says, ‘You’ll forget where we were, won’tcha,
But you know how to whistle, baby, don’tcha?’
And he don’t think she will but he hopes she just might…
You tell me, kid –
Am I right or am I right?


(1997)


This is one of my personal favourites and needs to be heard in the reader’s head as if Humphrey Bogart is narrating it. I’ve always loved 1940s Film Noir and we’re both fans of Dennis Potter’s TV plays. It did occur to me to add a filmography to this note but I think it will be more fun for people to try and spot the references for themselves.

THE BIRDMAN OF ABBEY PARK

More wanderer than beggar,
The Birdman of Abbey Park
Is a solitary mister
Like Dylan’s lonely hunchback,
He rests between trees and water
And listens to the birds talk.

Beyond the island and the weir,
Under windcheater and rucksack,
He appears mainly in dry weather
To loll on sloping grass the better
And wait for swan, goose and duck
To swoop and splash and honk and quack.

For unto him they will surely gather,
Though often in a blitz when he will chuck
Thick sandwiches at them like flak
Until the sirens of their beaks tire
And they wait, then merely loiter
As the Birdman sprawls supine and slack

Before stretching his long legs to kick
At the sky, or arching that lean back
Like the stone bridge that spans the river
Green with algae, lily-pads and weed-wrack
At the end of the time-flown summer
To await the winter’s cold, grey dredger.

Watch him on his gangling walk:
Shunning eye-contact, head thrown back,
The birdman has no eyes for ruins or lake
Nor for flowers or Pets Corner,
No eyes for book or newspaper,
No eyes for you and none for me neither.

About my age but angular, taller,
Imperious as a hawk,
Silent as the heron on the weir,
He heads straight down to the river
For his distant, never changing mark
Where he stays till he slips away in the dark.


(2009)




The Dylan mentioned in the opening stanza is our old friend Dylan Thomas again and I am reminded of his poem, ‘The Hunchback In The Park’ every time I see the Birdman. The rhyme-scheme is an echo of that in the DT poem although mine sustains the same two rhyme-sounds throughout.

One of the park-keepers told me that he’d been trying to engage the Birdman in conversation for many years but had never been so much as looked in the eye by him, let alone had a word back. I once took some pictures of the Birdman doing his weird calisthenic-type exercises but they mysteriously disappeared. Hopefully, I’ll catch him again and include a shot here just to prove that he really does exist.

I took the shot above in the snow just before Christmas when I saw him there in his usual place before the birds came to him. By the time I came back round, they had, as you can see, ‘gathered unto him.’

We’re very fortunate to have this beautiful park almost on our doorstep. It’s every bit the equal of London’s famous green spaces.

WINTER SONNET

This weather shrinks the soul: wet, cold and grey;
Freezing your face like a December grave;
It cannot but recall mortality.
You wait in the cavernous, empty nave
And wish for the bright, fleeting clarity
Of winter sunshine to stream through and save
The stained glass from the gloom of dying day,
To lift and light you up and make you brave.
The world turns and flowers yielded to frost
Will stir again beneath hard, ancient ground,
To remind you that some of what is lost
May rise up like a proverb and be found:
That what you can’t control, you rise above
And though seasons pass, what stays is our love.


(2010)

The last one from ‘The Seasons: A Sonnet Sequence’. When I had finished this, I became aware that it does somewhat recall Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and I considered reworking it, but then I thought, what the hell, there’s room for both and, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun anyway…

The photograph was taken in a church at Palma in Mallorca.

MOONSHINE

Old, grey ocean rolls in
And siren stars slink out.
Now the evening wears thin
And, with night, comes sidling doubt.

Crawl along the kerb of the shore,
Kidding yourself it’s all for experience;
Never satisfied, you always want more,
Cruising for some new, blue radiance.

There she is: ancient, vapidly proud,
Blue Moon playing her cheapest trick,
Gliding behind a rainy cloud
In the dark sky louring thick.

Skewbald charlatan rides, can disappear;
Two-faced, she can wax and she can wane;
She’s nothing but a chameleon-fakir,
Making idle fools wonder if they’re sane.

She’s just a grey, dead stone
Stuck up in a void of black-blue,
Pale, pocked and windblown,
With no more magic than me or you.

But still the old heathen exerts a pull,
Mesmerizes with her illusory rides,
Making us passive, making us dull,
Turning us to her magnetic tides.

All things pass in this way
And flat, black sand strikes chill;
While you hesitate to go or stay,
Moon’s false motion holds you still.

Swing back from this sibilant surf!
Tramp that guttural shingle – inhale!
Mount the steps, cross the turf,
Shake from shoes a riddle gone stale,
Kick it back where it splashed from
Then stride alive the peopled prom.

Never mind having come this far
Or where to go from here:
There will always be another bar,
Another smoke and another beer;
Wind in your face makes you feel free:
Toss back your head, shake that philosophy!


(1981)


Conceived in Llandudno during a comparatively happy period. Why then so much doubt and disgust lurking behind the puns and symbolism here? Maybe it was that lack of ‘magic’ mentioned in stanza 5. The magic would arrive after much misery a decade later and – praise be – it’s still there.

I like the ‘Pull your socks up, lad!’ air of the final stanzas (hence the poem’s second-person narrator) and the ambiguity of the last line: was the philosophy shaken off or shaken up, I wonder.

Of course, this was written when you could still smoke in pubs and long before I, at last, quit.

The picture of Lise was taken many years later by a different sea, in a galaxy far, far away (Koversada, Croatia, actually).

MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE

The photograph on my Mother’s headstone
Has faded whilst others nearby stay bright and clear,
But her memory remains, each shade and tone,
Despite her absence here.

On the shelves, old volumes sleep, long since read;
The spines of paperbacks slack and the pages brown,
But whilst many of the authors are dead,
I may yet take them down.

Skin wrinkles, bones ache and hair withers grey;
Getting out of that armchair makes me groan and sigh,
But the flame still burns strong within the clay
And the shadows dance high.

The oak in winter has froze like dark stone,
By the graveyard path it stands, naked and sere,
But the vernal pulse will climb its backbone
And wake another year.


(2010)


I’d had the first verse of this for months but didn't know where it was going. Then, one day whilst waiting for Spring, during the coldest winter in the UK for over thirty years, the rest of it suddenly arrived.

Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s passing so it is fitting that I include this poem now. A couple of weeks ago, I visited Gilroes Cemetery and was uplifted by the sight of a blaze of Autumn trees facing her headstone. The photograph however, was taken at the church of St. Mary De Castro in Sanvey Gate during that long awaited Spring and seems to compliment the poem effectively.