As a perennial here
I’ve grown and died
with reasonably quiet roots
learnt colloquial voices
that let me pass in these beds

But frothing coasts,
shattered hand held heights,
cool plains of forever
and cobbled nooks
magnetise more with life

So bring me the horizon,
you wild world
and release me of my soil
commitments
so I can continue

I'd like this night shift better
If words were worth your time,
Or I had more command of them--
Enough to move your eyebrows,
Call all your lovers liars,
Convince you I'm your touching stone.

1.
I’m heading to the sea
in a slot not big enough to fit a holiday
so I’ll day
trip

I think I’m packed:
a mind still rattled by life and lockdowns?
check
a palpable desire for vistas unknown?
check
a rucksack of memories, of sand, of wafer cones,
of wasps, of crystalline, sweet wrapper lights on mad, unsafe beach rides, on windbreaks, on digging, on seaweed and brown British waves?
check

Let’s start this engine, then

2.
Should’ve gone before we left
the irony’s not lost on me
even though I’m now the boss of me
I’ve still had to stop in local circles
cos someone needs a ***

I’ll blame the coffee

3.
Frightening fast the local roads fade
the five and ten mile loops of life
are gone
and the roots we commute and commune on
rest bone rigid, obscured

Passing Crowland
impossibly flat plains
thoughts turn to darkness
and misunderstood witches lost here
until the smirk of Cowbit assuages

Only the Welland, alongside
still talks of home
til even she changes
speaks in wider verbs
tidal verbs of ebb and flow
showing thick mud beneath

These long, straight roads are deceptive
leaving meanders to river and mind
while hiding accidents in plain sight

4.
The road sentence ended
and after chewing a space to park
shoes changed to something wholly uncool
but fitting me well
first steps on the unsure grammar of sand
reminding that syntax here takes much more effort

a dune cleft gives a known view
I’ve never seen before
and then I’m through

sky and horizon blast me

for frozen moments I’m lost,
these common seas I shrug off in my head
smirk at
as nothing against turquoise
or rock raged waves
still bring tears
against my smile

I listen at the language in the shallows,
the rush and hustle,
and feel a glimmer of foreignness as I can’t make out the message
but I get the gist

5.
To honour holidays of old
I sat a spell in Wolla Bank car park
though inauthentically the rain didn’t fall

I was forced to imagine the windscreen steamed
and had no fish paste on white
as I’d paid full price to eat at a cafe
unheard of back in the day

I did read the car park info sign
about the clay pits around
where historical sea defences were mined
and that did the job of taking my mind back

and the closing thought of petrified trees
beneath the waves til very low tide
did its best to haunt

6.
Heading home
wistful I suppose,
though I’m not sure where I got all the wist

the sea is a keeper of memories
a chewer and cogitator
so when they return to the shore
and are spoken again
what you thought you knew back then
may have changed
deepened, softened
and hopefully your youthful idiocy
is allowed to be forgotten

if you came for the ride
thanks, as ever, for joining me x

-

lying on a closet floor
that stretches for over
two decades—

memories

messages, pictures and songs
from back in the day stored
inaccessibly in a rusting box
that has not functioned in years

and next to it, a laptop with a
deployed CD tray sits sideways
partially draped by a sheet

these machines may have
shared stories once,
but its doubtful they really
knew each other

—

miles away in a nursing home
a petrified brain rests in some
kind of medicated peace

while another lays quietly on his
side under a blanket watching
for the other one's last breath

hearing kids just outside
laughing into their devices —

he hopes for a chance to take
his last spin on –anyone's–
old record player...



s jones
2021

.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                   Yet Another White Sahib Dismisses the Dead

             "This is not abandonment; this is not an evacuation.”

         -State Department Spokesman Ned Price, 12 August 2021

While Afghan heads, like American guarantees
Roll in the dust of Kandahar’s grim streets
Our diplomats demonstrate their expertise
Executing again their skillful retreats

An elegant man at a microphone
Unctuously soothing the doubtful press
Denies that our client state has been overthrown
In a futile game of colonial chess

The dead cannot argue what Ned Price might say -
It seems their blood has blotted his resume

['Not an Evacuation,' Insists State Department as Pentagon Sends 3,000 Troops to Evacuate U.S. Personnel by Spencer Brown (townhall.com)]

Up before the birds
Have anything to say, preferring--
Except the owls--
Daylight to this protracted night
And none of them in the odd habit or need
Of recording that which might not otherwise
Be remembered, this linear
Declension of an oral pass along.
The cats are glad for an early meal,
Before returning to their torpor,
And my lover--whom I'm careful
Not to rouse--
Has better sleeping habits than
My own,
And will listen,
Once the birds are singing,
To this redacted song.

As local as shoe leather,
though laced a little differently
I still feel the pull of aul boody,
aul boy,
a voice of ancient things

this impossible centre of England
with the flow of Plantagenet
of Watling
of Nene and Welland
where nothing happens
but everything has

rich in silver willow
and tannery stink
still giving cause to think,
to feel Clare’s fears
as the inexorable tarmac is laid
and each day passed
as the hedged wren and dunnock
begin to explain
green and pleasant pains

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                    D­ressers of Sycamores

                 “I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamores”

                                          -Amos 7:14

Amos speaks blunt truth in humility
And being commanded from the fields to the roads
To remind us of our duties to God and His People
Is a disruption, not a promotion

We all dress sycamores in our own ways:
Carrying groceries, tending the sick
Plowing a field, repairing a broken truck
Mending a fence, taking a child to school

We should listen to Amos and to ourselves
For our service is noble if for the King

With no more thought than lovers give
To morning or the rising tide,
The future of the universe,
Or what it takes to tell the time,
The spectre covers all our bets--
The coins unseen, cash for the boat.
I'll not insist on innocence,
The taste of something not foretold.
Your wilderness has my regard,
Less charted than the deepest floor
Of any ocean riverfed,
Where rain is born again, again.
The beautiful need not delay
Such unrepentant leaves and wind.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                           The 7th of June, 1944 and 1970

My father beached at Normandy on the second day
(He was okay with having missed the first)
From there through France to Belgium in the mud
For a ****** Christmas in the icy Bulge

Munich, Buchenwald, Dachau, Zwickau
For me DaNang, Saigon, Ben Luc, Moc Hoa
I met a child in a Japanese army cap
But he wouldn’t sell it. We all have history

I wish I had that Japanese army cap
And that we knew what any of this means

if I would move out of your way
small good things oddly would appear
as I have ever less to say
and you could quell the late night fear
this mortal blanket tossed aside
quick ending of the fever dream
collapsing all our foolish pride
that separates us at the seam
sing now what you remember well
an old song of Kalliope
who shares the stories poets tell
born crying out of memory
i've cleared the space now find my head
so something better may be said

We fight a hard wired self-hate
perpetuated three generations deep
a shut-factory broken-toothed anger
that finds no solace in shop work or service

they had more, once

so kids get to swallow it too
drink it deep and let its grim bloat leach
into blood and skin and hair

we fight hard as hell
with teeth and tongues of tolerance
and claws to catch and hold
to pause, not patronise
to see that inertia is owned