I
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

II
There is intent when the addict mutters --
Estranged in his unhappy gutters --
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

There is derision in the dealer's call --
Osmium-heat in an unimpeded fall --
"You can't change who you are."
Greed could tear down a star
To sculpt into a Cardiff shell.

Warrant breeds within a child's yell.

III**
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

I
I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am nowhere

II
Where the sun severs the street and
Slowly, methodically,
They come, they come.
Electrifyingly stupefied in the dawn,
Tenantry not bound to cause and
Helpless as marred lead in the wind,
Stuck to strata and
Battered under **** pale-green
Thinned on spread fingers.

III
There is intent when the addict mutters ---
Alienated in his nettled gutters ---
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

IV**
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
And I am nowhere

As a child he remembered Cardiff as a city with red asphalt roads and yellow trolley busses. On a Saturday morning his grandfather used to take him in his black Sunbeam Talbot to the grand building of the Council of Music for Wales. There Charles Dixon presided over a large office on the third floor in which there were not one but two grand pianos. At seven a little boy finds one grand piano intimidating, two scary. He was made of fuss of by his grandfather’s colleagues and – as a Queen’s chorister – expected to sing. A very tall lady who smelt strongly of mothballs took him into what must have been a music library, and together they chose the 23rd Psalm to Brother James’ Air and Walford’s Solemn Melody. After his ‘performance’ he was given a book about Cardiff Castle, but spent an hour looking out of the windows onto the monkey-puzzle trees and watching people walking below.
 
50 years later as the taxi from the station took him to the rehearsal studios he thought of his mother shopping in this city as a young woman, probably a very slim, purposeful young woman with long auburn gold hair and a tennis player’s stride. He had just one photo of his mother as a young woman - in her nurse’s uniform, salvaged from his grandparents’ house in the Cardiff suburb of Rhiwbina. Curious how he remembered asking his grandmother about this photograph - who was this person with long hair?– he had never known his mother with anything but the shortest hair.
 
He’d visited the city regularly some ten years previously and he was glad he wasn’t driving. So much had changed, not least the area once known as Tiger Bay, a once notorious part of the city he was sure his mother had never visited. Now it was described as ‘a cultural hub’ where the grand Millennium Opera House stood, where the BBC made Doctor Who, where in the Weston Studio Theatre he’d hear for the first time his Unknown Colour.
 
Travelling down on the train he’d imagined arriving unannounced once the rehearsal had begun, the music covering his search for a strategic seat where he would sit in wonder.  It was not to be. As he opened the door to the theatre there was no music going on but a full-scale argument between the director, the conductor and three of the cast. The repetiteur was busy miming difficult passages. The two children sat demurely with respective mothers reading Harry Potters.
 
The next half hour was difficult as he realised that his carefully imagined stage directions were dead meat. They were going to do things differently and he had that sinking feeling that he was going to have to rewrite or at the very least reorganise a lot of music. He was then ‘noticed’ and introduced to the company – warm handshakes – and then plunged into a lengthy discussion about how the ensemble sequence towards the end of Act 1 could be managed. The mezzo playing Winifred was, he was forced to admit, as physically far from the photos of this artist in the 1930s as he could imagine. The tenor playing Ben was a little better, but taller than W – again a mismatch with reality. And the hair . . . well make up could do something with that he supposed. The baritone he thought was exactly right, non-descript enough to assume any one of the ten roles he had to play. He liked the actress playing Cissy the nurse from Cumbria. The soprano playing Kathleen and Barbara H was missing.
 
He was asked to set the scene, not ‘set the scene’ in a theatrical sense, but say a little about the background. Who were these people he and they were bringing to the stage? He told them he’d immersed himself in the period, visited the locations, spoken to people who had known them (all except Cissy and the many Parisienne artists who would ‘appear’). He saw the opera as a way of revealing how the intimacy and friendship of two artists had sustained each of them through a lifetime chasing the modernist ideal of abstraction. He was careful here not to say too much. He needed time with these singers on their own. He needed time with the director, who he knew was distracted by another production and had not, he reckoned, done his homework. He stressed this was a workshop session – he would rewrite as necessary. It was their production, but from the outset he felt they had to be in character and feel the location – the large ‘painters’ atelier at 48 Quai d’Auteuil.  He described the apartment by walking around the stage space. Here was Winifred’s studio area (and bedroom) divided by a white screen. Here was the living area, the common table, Winifred’s indoor garden of plants, and where Cissy and the children slept. As arranged (with some difficulty earlier in the week) he asked for the lights to be dimmed and showed slides of three paintings – Cissy and Kate, Flowers from Malmaison, and the wonderful Jake’s Bird and White Relief. He said nothing. He then asked for three more, this time abstracts –* Quarante-Huit Quai d’Auteuil, Blue Purpose, and ending with *Moons Turning.
 
He said nothing for at least a minute, but let Moons Turning hang in space in the dark. He wanted these experimental works in which colour begets form to have something of the impact he knew them to be capable of. They were interior, contemplative paintings. He was showing them four times their actual size, and they looked incredible and gloriously vibrant. These were the images Winifred had come to Paris to learn how to paint: to learn how to paint from the new masters of abstraction. She had then hidden them from public view for nearly 30 years. These were just some of the images that would surround the singers, would be in counterpoint with the music.
 
With the image of Moons Turning still on the screen he motioned to the repetiteur to play the opening music. It is night, and the studio is bathed in moonlight. It could be a scene from La Bohème, but the music is cool, meditative, moving slowly and deliberately through a maze of divergent harmonies towards a music of blueness.
 
He tells the cast that the music is anchored to Winifred’s colour chart, that during her long life she constantly and persistently researched colour. She sought the Unknown Colour. He suggests they might ‘get to know the musical colours’. He has written a book of short keyboard pieces that sound out her colour palette. There is a CD, but he’d prefer them to touch the music a little, these enigmatic chords that are, like paint, mixed in the course of the music to form new and different colours. He asks the mezzo to sing the opening soliloquy:
 
My inspiration comes in the form of colour,
of colour alone, no reference to the object or the object’s sense,
Colour needn’t be tagged to form to give it being.
Colour must have area and space,
be directed by the needs of the colour itself
not by some consideration of form.
A large blue square is bluer than a small blue square.
A blue pentagon is a different blue from a triangle of the same blue.
Let the blueness itself evolve the form which gives its fullest expression.
This is the starting-point of my secret artistic creation.
 
And so, with his presentation at a close, he thanks singer and pianist and retreats to his strategically safe seat. This is what he came for, pour l’encouragement des autres by puttin.g himself on the line, that tightrope the composer walks when presenting a new work. They will have to trust him, and he has to trust them, and that, he knows, is some way away. This is not a dramatic work. Its drama is an interior one. It is a love story. It is about the friendship of artists and about their world. It is a tableau that represents a time in European culture that we are possibly only now beginning to understand as we crowd out Tate Modern to view Picasso, Mondrian, Braque and Brancusi.

He said I’m the wrong shape. I could do with putting on a few pounds and, almost as an after thought he said, you’ll have to cut your hair – yourself.  I know she was an artist, and a mother, and a gardener. I had to admit to him I didn’t know any painters. My cousin Julie’s a sculptor – same thing he said – but I had to tell him I hadn’t yet looked at her painting, only what he showed us in his presentation.  He then told me exactly where in the National Museum of Wales I could see one of her paintings – Gallery 14 – and its from this period, a Parisiene picture. He suggested I might go to Cambridge and spend a day at a place called Kettles Yard. There are more Winifreds there than anywhere else in the UK, and many pictures by her close friend Christopher Wood.
 
Oh dear. This is difficult. The only thing going for me seems I’m about the right age and I’ve have children, though mine are older than hers in the production. I was so surprised to get this part, but as Michael said over the phone, your profile fits. Except for the weight and the hair, and I know nothing about painting. Why should I? Jeff told me, the composer Morton Feldman once said if you haven’t got a friend whose a painter, you’re in trouble. I’m in trouble. But he has very kind eyes and when he touched me gently on the shoulder after Lizzie and I sung that shells duet I had to look away.
 
Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-millennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation….
 
They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper for ever in our ears,
‘The world that you inhabit has not yet been created’
 
Mind you, I don’t envy Lizzie being Kathleen Raine. Now that is a difficult part, even though she’s only in Act 2. Raine was definitely odd. He says I have to understand their friendship, because there was something about it that made them both more than they were. I don’t understand that.
 
Jane and the children are amazing already. Martin (my ‘other’ half Ben Nicholson) said they’d been rehearsing with Robert because his wife (Robert’s wife Debbie) is at WNO and they were scared about this one. I’ll say this for him he knows exactly how children interrupt, constantly. It’s clever the way he uses the interruptions to change direction of the dialogue. Conversations are often left unfinished. The bit when that ***** Barbara visits the apartment unexpectedly is brilliant. She’s completely demolished by these kids of her lover.
 
But those letters . . . he said, can you imagine your husband writing to you over a period of 40 years? Quite a thought that. David wrote to me a few times when I was in Madrid for Cosi just after we’d met, but it was all telephone calls after that. Why waste paper, time and a stamp. But I take his point – their letters are so beautiful – and they were separated for God’s sake. He’d gone off with another woman, and even brought her to Paris. And you could not have two totally different women – she ,slight, chain-smoking, work-a-holic, sharp-tongued with that Yorkshire edge, and me with ‘a quiet voice, trying always to be gentle and kind ‘– W would be called an earth-mother these days. She was a kind of hippie, only she had money – mind you most of those hippies of the 60s had money otherwise they couldn’t have done drugs (heard that on Radio 4 last week in a programme about Richard Brautigan). But they wrote to each other almost every day.
 
Dear Ben,.
            Do you know there are several kinds of happiness, and there is one sort which I have found. It is the sort that is within oneself, enjoying fresh promise, and taking all the experiences of life that one has been through, so-called sad ones and so-called happy ones, to make up understanding that is further on than joy or sorrow. I have been extremely lucky – I have had ten years of companionship with an ‘all-time’ painter, working in the medium of classic eternity and that has been better than a lifetime with any second-class person – isn’t it - I have found it so…
 
Best love Winifred
 
What’s clever about the letter sequences is the way the two-way correspondence is handled as a duet and right in the middle of it you’ll get a flashback – like Winifred suddenly remembering her first meeting with Ben.
 
I heard this voice
In the room next door
I couldn’t breath, I couldn’t move
I knew, I knew for certain
This was the man I would marry.
And when we were introduced
He seemed to know this too.
 
We gaily call this an opera, but it’s not. It’s something else. It simply doesn’t do what you think it’s going to do. Even when you do something for a second time the accompaniment doesn’t do what you expect and remembered. It’s this open-form business. Something else I know nothing about. He mentioned Umberto Eco – now I’ve read Name of the Rose. When Braque or Mondrian or Jan Eps visit unannounced I have no idea which one it’s going to be – these guys just used to turn up. Sometimes two at once. W didn’t invite them. They came for her English hospitality (home baking I think) and her beautiful apartment come studio – beautiful, because she made it so. Her French was appalling, and this is difficult because I speak quite well, and now I have to speak like an idiot. Bridget  (playing Cissy the Cumbrian nanny) having her French lesson is a hoot, and with the children correcting her all the time, it’s lovely.
 
He was very sweet when we broke for lunch. Sara, he said, as I collapsed into an auditorium seat to find my bag and mobile, Sara, we’ve got to find you a painter to spend a day with . . . so you’ll know how to stand in front of an easel.  I phoned Sarah Jane Brown who has a studio in Cardiff and she’d love to meet you. Here’s her number. She paints flowers and landscapes – as well as the abstract stuff - just like Winifred. Her tutor at the RCA actually knew Winifred. And with that he disappeared to a dark corner of the theatre and unwrapped his sandwiches. You can tell he’s not into break discussions with Julian or Michael. I think he’s terribly shy. He’s interested in the cast and so he picks them off one by one. Julian I know doesn’t like this. I think everything needs to go through me, he said at the end of yesterday’s rehearsal. Who does he think he is?! Lizzie reminded Julian he was the composer and what he doesn’t know about this whole period and its characters isn’t knowledge. Liz thinks he’s a sweetie – and she’s sung his Raine settings at Branwyn Hall last year – with Robert who was his MD with BBCNOW. Liz knows Julian hasn’t done his usual homework because he’s got this production in Birmingham on the boil. Unknown Colour is a distraction he can do without.
 
This afternoon it’s back to the mayhem of those ensemble scenes in Act 1. They’re quite crazy, but I’m already beginning to feel I can start to be someone other than me. Did you know I have this lovely song? It’s quite Sondheim . . .
 
*I like to have a picture in my room.
Without one, my room feels bare
however much furniture is there;
Pictures play so many roles.
My room has too much going on in it
for something extravagant.
In the morning it is a sanctuary,
in the daytime a factory,
in the evening a place of festivity,
and through the night a place of rest.
 
I want a window in it,  
And a focal point, something alive and silent.
A bunch of flowers on the window sill?
Yes, but they will wither.
A cat curled up on the hearth?
Yes, but it will go away and prowl upon the rooftops.
 
A picture will always be there.
It will make no sound. It will wait.
If it is true I shall never grow tired of it.
I shall see something fresh in it
when I glance at it tomorrow.
It will always be my friend.

The marchers make their way today
through town to Cardiff Bay
with whistles, shouts and banners up
for sweet old Mary Jane
they're marching for her freedom
all ages, colours, creeds
have come in joyful spirits
to help us free the **** 

The rich, the poor, the movers and shakers
the blowback kings and part-time partakers
the rollers, the tokers, the bongers and such
the teenage goth stoners who've had way too much
skin up as they march while making their point
and meet up with new friends while sharing a joint.

Then down at the bay side
when the bands start to play
they'll **** in the sunshine
till the end of the day.

It was, as the New York Times all but sniffed
(Even then, a haughty mix of bluenose and black ink)
Further proof the poor, misguided Upstate rubes
Were no more than ample fodder
For any tinhorn, two-bit confidence man to take for a ride.
Fair enough—it was, to the careful eye and unheated psyche
Clear as the azure blue sky that,
Despite the best efforts of acid wash and a year underground,
So obviously a statue as to be absolutely laughable,
And yet the vox populi came in waves,
Not only one-gallus farmers from the fields nearby,
But from the great cities near and far
(Chicago, Philadelphia, and, yes, even New York itself
To throw Hannum a quarter to view his gargantuan grotesquery
Just as described in Genesis itself, he noted solemnly
So many, indeed, that Barnum himself was divinely inspired
Not only to purloin the giant, but its prior owner’s epigram
As to the frequency of the manufacture
Of his too-credible customer base.
While there was (briefly, at least) some mystery surrounding
The origins of the brobdingnagian mass of stone,
It remained (to some, anyway) equally unfathomable
Why scores of folks would careen in unsteady coaches
The full length of the Catskill Turnpike,
With its questionable lodging and uneven roadworthiness,
Or patiently suffer the mosquito-laden flatboats of Clinton’s Ditch
All to spend the cash equivalent of two trips to the county fair
To see a perfectly good hootchie-kootchie show
Simply to gawk at an unevenly carved rock of questionable authenticity,
But that explained quite simply,
As the public always gets what the public wants.

It can’t be TOO hard- being a duck that is.
My stomach growled watching a tot feeding a duck in the castle garden,
then my famished gears started turning.
Right.  That’d be nice- I could go for some bread and a swim.
Ducks don’t even have to work for food- not these ducks
-they get fed.
I have to shop for bread,
and that’s not the half of it.
First I have to get to the bread,
which means risking it in my tired van
or sitting on a bus with a perfect smelly stranger
or pushing my luck crossing a bustling street.
And then, if I’m not way-laid…BREAD!
But I can’t just stuff it down my gullet,
and sure as day nobody’s gonna feed it to me.
The worst that can happen to a duck
eating bread
is getting its head wet…or choking on fruitcake.
Just when I was feeling particularly underprivileged
on the food chain,
I thought of my great grandfather
and his wooden decoy duck bobs
still sitting on my hearth back in Indiana,
and I thought of the dogs he used to chase the felled birds
and I thought of the bullets and the sharp October air, and the teeth,
and I felt silly.

The play is written to be staged in a pub or a large cave like yurt in Cardiff.  Its action and dialogue provides characterisation, with sound and lighting being used to establish context.  The setting a darkened pub corner that is  modelled on The Bunch of Grapes in Pontypridd.   There are only 6 characters, five speak in haiku-ed verse with the exception of the Drunk who acts as my 'Greek Chorus'.

- Hand-in-hand she enters to **** her thumb in a corner

- Chocolate ice cream soda demanded from Daddy

- Joking banter ceased slowly as the regulars all begin to quaff their brown pints

“Balll uut eass swept -
Chimrrrrr, Chiirriica,
war is never won”

- Church quiet, the village pub listened lips clamped tears swelling

“ ***** cut swapped with eyes -
Chimerica, Chimerica,
war is never won”

- The cornered hero of two Afghanistan tours is seen regressing into childhood*

The set darkens slowly then after 30 seconds a spotlit conversation in lines and stanzas begins.

Haiku and tanka that inspired the coming play include:

******* -
thoughts sought, taught and wrought,
testosterones
Fighting aggressive games,
Afghanistan camouflage


Globalism and War -
cloned greedy conspiracy,
that third tower
Titled selfish-self-grandiose,
deliver warring terror


Springs cut Irises -
dripping vital red not purple,
far from my window*

.

the working girl approached him
a busy cardiff pub
stockings and suspenders
gave his leg a rub

hundred quid, i'm yours tonight
whatever you desire
heart beat like a big bass drum
his calvin kliens on fire

could not believe his fortune
what a stroke of luck
so he made her paint his house
and clean his ***** truck

A ******* the train with witch's hair and dark eyes
Stared at me as if I was hiding a secret in the curve of my lip
Or the space between my eyebrows
Or in whirlpool-pupils
I wonder if there is something of the occult in the way I walk
Like a dead woman who adores the crows that pick at her bone marrow
Is there something in the hollows of my eyes that suggests
I am not afraid of the demons summoned to hunt me down
On my morning commute?

Cardiff still sleeping
The light rain kissing the dark pavements
Delicately in the dim, secluded lamplight,
As lovers do,
Willingly oblivious to the odd lonely commuter,
Who frowns at the fresh, wet passion
From behind bleary eyes behind grey spectacles behind the wheel behind the grumbling, soggy rubber on the road.

Cardiff's lover must too
Make their commute,
The slow, grey flight is blown with such intent,
The wind is cupid and knows
Crops must be watered
Rivers filled
Valleys and hills alike await their romantic precipitation.
And the rain loves to please,
Turning yellows green and greens brown
And commuter's smiles upside down
(if they have smiled in the last ten years...

...sometimes I wonder if I have)

So, rain, peck my cheeks and run through my hair gentle fingers,
Speckle my glasses with moisture from your cool, close breath and whisper silence-quenching lyrics on my window with your pitter patter and I will dream and I will wake again to the early dawn rain and I will turn to you, open my mouth and taste your gentle kiss on my lips and tongue and I will smile.

I've never been to China

I almost went to France,

I missed a flight to Russia once

I only missed by chance

Rome's intoxicating

The air there is sublime

But, I've never been there either

I just didn't have the time

I missed a train to Scotland

Bypassed Wales, and well Why Not?

There's nothing there in Cardiff

Other countries haven't got

I thought about the islands

Bui I do not  like the sun

So I thought about a cruse ship

Still, I've never been on one

Alaska, has the mountains

forests wide and big brown bears

But as you can imagine

I've also not been there

I thought about Hawaii

but I never made that trip

I thought about the hula

And I thought I'd  hurt my hip

I booked a flight to Cairo

Never went as you could guess

Saw a story on the news one day

And Jesus, what a mess

The pyramids had scaffolding

The place was full of sand

So I stayed home and watched telly

And then that trip was canned

I've never been to Ireland

or Cuba or Ceylon

And at the rate I'm going

It won't be long before their gone

I've thought about the Norway fjords

and lovely Swedish parks

but I've heard that all their fjords are filled

With big man eating sjarks!

I've never been most anyplace

I ever set to go

I'm not sure why I stayed here

I really do not know

Next week I have a trip planned

I'm not going to Spain

And then a fortnight after

I'm not going again!

English countryside rolls
by like butter on banana
pancakes. The heat of
history keeps me cringing
with a full stomach. Aches
softly convalesce veins
from head to toe,
concentrated in the solar
plexus as I become the weary, dreamy traveller with little left
to seek, hoping that every closed door will lead to you wrapped in a duvet taco shell. Every bed is half-empty, so I fill your gap with a warm pillow and whisper, "I love you, Amanda. It's a softer heart at the end of every highway."

She was almost tempted
To jump from the bridge
Despite the crowds that
Passed, despite the coldness
And filth of the water below,
But she didn’t; she walked
On and slit her wrists in the
Hospital corridor instead;
In some dark place no one
Noticed until the blood
Followed her footsteps
Like a worrying child.

Two men stopped her
And took her to nurses
Busy at some sideward
Desk; found her in the
Corridor, they said, blood
Everywhere, doesn’t answer,
Though, we’ve tried that,
Won’t say a dickybird,
Maybe she’s dumb or deaf,
One man suggested, standing
Back as if to see her better,
Watched the young girl as
If for the first time, taking
In the blood soaked jeans,
Tee shirt, hands and arms
And turned away, nodding
To his companion, with a
One of those druggy types,
No doubt, suggestion in the
Slow movement of his head.

Then she was gone, taken by
The nurses behind curtains,
Low voices, murmurs; their
Interest slipping away, the
Men moved on, chatting
How Cardiff would do in
The next match, and don’t
Tell the wife about the girl,
She’ll get the wrong idea,
Then there’ll be hell
To pay, one said, walking
Through the doors into
The afternoon sunshine.

She was almost tempted
Speak, to say how the devil
Tempted her to jump, how
The voices told her what to
Do, but she said nothing,
Just watched the nurses
Dab at her slit wounds with
Wads of bandages and frantic
Touches of their hands, while
Up on the ceiling, she noticed
A fly buzzing around the naked
Bulb, looking for a way out
From death; just like me,
She thought, just like ****** me.

We love urban, ice wrapper choc full, dense with matter, cream the power runs through, finding space, each cell. Unit, one by one, stacked upon deck, pile, floating concrete and multi access path. Crank each floor, glass patent steel, glint the Thames, Humber and Clyde, a boat in the reflection, slum cleared gentle penthouses on the other side. Dogged, ***** not allowed, Barking, Hackney, Toxteth, Little Ireland aka Cardiff gone. Dodo, hatchet, escalate poverty, high rise cool, the high rise flat.  Crowning glory, a sea of chiming memories, stirs the tenement cat. Swept beneath the paradigm, catapult off the parapet, somersault into a different time, moonlit skyscrapers, street sweepers become the concrete and the fifty foot glass dancers, cross between the cargo arches, gargoyles and shields bring them to the ground. The twisted metal of prams and brand new cars grind, traffic in drones, and the city drowns. Strip turn central, gorgeous girl, Hoxton lad, a touch too Dad, deposit on a Liverpool street pad, generation retro spinning fractal, money linear pavement uber yellow, scuttling insects and street martins, skylarks flying Saint Pauls cross and ball bearings, shopping centres unending. Biting into Cheapside, the hidden livers, gold delivers, pure to stay the shivers, the office block rises. Sharp bends, the bridge divides, shark rides the sky, dumps the bank and pierces its side, docks in every city worldwide, rivers pink with the ticklish blood of regicide. Pumpish, Victorian, sweet and blue, the older the City the quicker the glue. Mortar rectified a moment to ***** and overawe you. Shock, new wave architecture, backhanded awe. Brum pill wave beast eat your heart out, find another Chinese storm, currency blizzard, scales hardly balance, aha you had it, now you simply own. Own the moment, the pebbledash, corrugated roof, outside toilet and underground transit. We love urban, your moment we cherish and drain, there is nothing we can’t refuse to understand, too complex to refrain. Bounce as we ride the terrace and its suburban long train. Take your sweetheart on the nightbus, ****** him her, the hier of your plane, that’s where they will love you in the memories of the life near the top floor, and the final flight you were too drunk to gain. Seventy Two, you’re only thirty and you’re on forty one. You’ll fall back or you’ll begin ascendency. Shrink with wisdom, pick up the building, a tool, dreaming of scaling London, young a journeyman, jousters young son, learned, resisted the gun. I’ll fight with two hands, pile bricks or guide with a pen. Draw your city, write my memory, bind moment with every fragment, underpath, cycle through. Lights fading, jumping colours in the district where the girls who live the density beyond you and me, each element boiling their hearts and steaming potent New York’s paths. You had poetry in the apron of your mother’s lap, golden syrup and milky sap. You love urban, fifties bubble contrast in your seventies shunted through urban oasis and with that unknown factor, uber bijou, ‘Finding Nemo’ flat. We are urban, you are fashion, you are the generation that copied that, found the culture in the swinging city, post uni shack. Seven Eleven, Atlantic side heaven, promised more than double checking your watch before bedtime. Look at your daughter, she’s got ‘more than’ you hoped for, already in the palm of her sleeping hands, waking up to a metropolis only she will understand.

Myfanwy Price plopped in the armchair, sipped at her drink, gazed at the ceiling with a slight squint; spotted a drawing pin that broke up the off-white space like a boil on the buttocks. If Joshua Jones thinks he can drop me like a hot coal he can think again, she moaned to the room in her alto voice that clung to the air around her dark-haired head like a bad smell. Thinks he can do that to me, does he? I’ll show him, she mused darkly, holding the glass above her head, peering down at her slippered feet that lay there like sleeping puppies. After all I’ve done for him, the po-faced prat, she muttered, bringing the glass down to her lips, taking a sip as though it were poison. Just like her dad, dreary as dripping, chapel bred born and dead, at least in the head, she mused, crossing her legs disturbing the puppies, peering through the glass, imagining Dai Davies coming through the door of her bed-sit with an armful of flowers and chocolates, a cuddly kiss with a promise of more, as the evening sky grew dim as her brother Bryan, the kiss lingered in her mind and over her fantasy lips. Mum was right about men, she groaned, wondering if poison was too quick for Jones the Bones or whether she could smother him with a pillow as he laid sleeping in that squat flat of his, where she’d slept once in the single bed that smelt of onions and rotting flesh. She scratched her fleshy thigh, gave a sigh, pulled a face at her reflection in the darkening window, wanted more than wanton ***, the sight of Jones the Bones hanging from the window with his trousers round his skinny ankles, his buttocks bare for all of Cardiff to see and stare. She stood, poured herself another drink, placed a record on her gramophone. Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue, a daydream of being in his manly arms, and being squeezed, and adding her alto groan to that of young Buddy’s baritone or tenor or whatever. She waltzed the room with her partnered glass gave it kiss and squeeze. Remembering her dad’s stern face; his sermon voice that rattled timbers, she kicked her leg like a dancer, spun it round and round until it got dizzy; plopped in the armchair with a fit of giggles; spilt drink on her dress that seeped to her drawers; sniffing and sighing she poured it all down in a drunken swallow; watched the evening sky darken like her mood and tangled hair. Jones the Bones would pay, she sighed. He’d not lay her aside like an empty glass; go off for another to kiss and cuddle in his dingy flat with its onions and flesh, rotting and foul, she mused sadly, rubbing her breast, pulling her bra that had slipped in her dancing. Mum was right about men, with their ***** thoughts, their wanton ways, wandering hands over hills and stays. She stared at the glass; with a deep dark sigh, she crossed her legs; let the sleeping slippered puppies lie.

WAITING FOR THE TRAIN
                                                           ­                                                                 ­      
As we sit here in the the sun,  we all love to see her run.
The tide is getting low, a little farther out is where I go,
Just holdin my position in the show.

The train set is sure to be some fun.  
As sure as the sun will rise and the salt gets in your eyes,
The train set is sure to come.

When you hear her coming down the track, just be sure not to turn your back.
Cause as every cardiff ****** knows, the train set is why you’re here.
Just wait until you hear that  whistle blow.

She’s screamin down the rail,  with one foot set tight on that new pintail,
first look left, then look back, She’s lining up, she’s right on track.
Just wait until you hear that  whistle blow.

She looks so sweet heading down that perfect line.
with the sun  setting behind the peak,  underneath her shoulders we sneak,
just wait until you hear that whistle blow.

What's the smallest living being on earth?
a graduate of music school
First class degree won with some leeway
but that can't pay for my MOT, no way
four hundred and thirty seven quid and 26p to pay
for new suspension ball joints and wishbone, wiper blades and an emission test pass grade
and now my car has scraped a "pass with defects"
I hope someone made a wish as the old bone cracked
as they took it to the tip with the entire contents of my bank account
I wish I was back home again, scared to answer the phone again
but now every phone call I'm praying for a gig.  

For nine grand a year I wonder how well she would do in the next few tests
if she'd have a long career ahead after a short rest or if she would still be run into the ground,
one day kicking the bucket at 90 miles an hour on the M4 back to Cardiff; I recently found
she won't quite make it to one hundred.
One hundred miles an hour!
Such power, so close, but no cigars for me any more - I can't even afford to smoke rollies.
When I'm seventy I'll start again
whether I want to or not, I need that one lifetime guarantee.
If I make it to seventy.
Hopefully boredom, rejection and ******* aren't causes of early mortality.

I was on a train out of Chorley
Happy to be sad to be leaving
Smalltalking strangers with a great accent
Hot and uncomfortable because my super cool leather jacket wasn't breathing.

Lancashire, you've made me think!
Actually, trains make me feel pensive.
Or was it Mrs Barton?
Bumbling and hypersensitive (in a nice way)

"Remain vigilant through your journey"
"Do not leave your heart unattended or it may be destroyed"
We'll get into Cardiff at zero zero six teen
That's technically Friday; there'll be drunks to avoid.

We're past Crewe and I know
Younger me made the right decision.
The path I sometimes hesitate to follow
Is bold, beautiful and scenically inefficient.

It twists and turns, trees stream
Past the train's windows
The sky looks lovely tonight
A candyfloss cloud for each of my woes (only three or four obstruct the sunset and they make it shine all the softer)

Mother of a lover, you said
You thought you'd never see me again
You often think of me, and will "follow me".
Facebook makes it easy to pretend.

If I were to bottle this it would be

Fleeting moments of such deep joy it’s hard to recollect the moments of utter misery,
Of which there were more.

It would be bitter loneliness without the sweet tang of friends,
The ache of realising alienation isn’t about being alone.

It would be waves
Crashing into rocks after washing over us
Curling our ankles on pebbles
Tripping but running headfirst anyway
Toes in the sea.
It would smell like sun cream  
With the coarseness of sand
Salt and sun and summer.

It would sound like jazz time on a friday afternoon
Blues, show tunes and improv.
Empty balconies,
Wind
Leaves
LMTs
Conversions I listen into but don’t join.
Thunderous silence.

It’s white walls awash with laughter,
Paint fumes and flying
Fresh puddles
Stifled tears
The longing for something more.

The ship docked on the small jetty by a beach of white sand
lining the front of a jungle full of horrid noises and every shade of green.
There were a few huts that had been constructed by the natives
in anticipation of our arrival in this hot new land.
We were informed by the ship’s captain that they had been paid
with small gold coins that they would likely trade with other natives
for exotic fruits and sharper weapons and a few weeks’ peace.

The first night was a struggle, the air was as stifling during the day
and I don’t think any one of us managed much sleep.
The morning came as cold comfort as the sun blazed unobstructed,
beating relentlessly on our heads, feeling much closer than it did back home.
Gloria Noone, a middle-aged woman who had boarded in Cork,
had a look of perpetual fear on her face, the look of someone
who had experienced nothing but ultimate terror during the night,
and I had assumed it was just because of a lack of sleep,
but she soon informed us of something far more sinister than dreamlessness.

After a couple of hours of nocturnal turnings and curses,
she left her hut during the night and walked along the beach,
away from the jetty and out of our makeshift village.
Not long out of the village, she had the unnerving sense of being watched
and expecting to see a native by the jungle’s edge
she looked towards the mass of trees and saw horror.
An unearthly creature stared back at her, she told us.
All black fur glinting in the moonlight, teeth as large as great knives.
She swears it spoke to her, in English, repeating her name
with a deep, gruff voice that seemed to come from the whole jungle.
She ran back to her hut, silently, terror paralysing her voice.

Gloria stayed in another hut owned by a couple who had an extra bed
due to their only child dying of disease just before we set sail.
I could not sleep, as I assumed correctly that others could not either
because when I left my hut in the night, others were on the beach.
A man called Ivor, a giant from Cardiff, called me over
and said that he and a couple of others would walk down the beach
to where Gloria had spotted the creature and they would wait for it.
He invited me and I agreed, four of us leaving the village behind.
Ivor, Daniel the ship’s captain, Robert, a forester from York and myself,
a former teacher from a small village not far from Edinburgh,
sat down on the sand in silence waiting for horror to arrive.

We did not have to wait long in that tropical heat for terror to invade our hearts.
We heard the growling of a jagged throat and snapping branches,
all turning our heads in unison as two blazing orange eyes scanned us,
a tongue licking its nose and an almost human smile spread across its face.
Hello, it said.
Lovely night, it said.
I am hungry, it said.
Ivor, it said.

We jumped to our feet and ran as fast as we could,
screaming for everyone to get on the ship, and hurry.
I could hear the muffled steps of the beast behind me
and although I could not see it clearly when I glanced back,
I could make out just how massive the creature was.
Its shoulders were at least as high as a thoroughbred’s
but it was built like a massive cat, like a panther I had seen in a zoo.
It laughed and kept repeating Ivor’s name, putting in little effort
in keeping up with us, toying with us as cats toy with mice.
I could make out the others in the village running for the ship,
and as they reached the gangway that entered below deck,
Ivor screamed an awful scream as the creature brought him down.

The three of us stopped and turned, unsure what to do.
Ivor had already gone limp as the creature crushed his skull
and bit through his spinal cord, launching the top half and his head
into the air as the creature turned his attention to Ivor’s legs.
He chewed the meat ravenously, occasionally looking up at us,
standing completely still, mesmerised and horrified at the spectacle.
Run, it said.
Run, they said behind us.
We ran.

As we reached the ship, the captain unwound the ropes from the bollards
as the rest of us ran into the ship, grabbing the gangway,
ready to slide it back in as soon as the captain was on board.
He came running in, shouting at us slide the gangway in
as he continued up to the deck towards the whipstaff.
The hatch closed, we all went to where the captain was
but I left the group to keep an eye on the creature.
It was standing on the jetty, next to the hatch,
the top of its head so close to the railing I was leaning against.
It looked up at me and the smile returned to its face,
the blood of the Welshman smeared over his huge teeth.
No wind, it said.
I am hungry, it said.

I turned to face the captain and the rest of the group,
tears rolling down my cheeks as they creature jumped over my head
and ravaged the rest of my friends and villagers.
Legs and fingers and heads and arms and bones and meat.
All over the deck.
All over the deck.
All over the deck.
The creature stared at me, smiled.
Run, it said.
I am hungry, it said.