SAYING IT IS THE HARD PART
The secret is to be casual;
Matter-of-fact words can
Sometimes inflame the senses;
Not straight away, perhaps,
But later, when the hurly-burly
Of conversation has had time to sink in
Maybe the trick is not to be seen saying it;
‘I love you’ is such a difficult phrase
To force between clenched teeth
There’s a lot of controversy about cop- killer Harry Roberts being released soon. Some might remember that he shot dead 3 policemen during a robbery in Shepherds Bush in the 1960’s. Well, I was mistaken for Roberts during that time he was on the run; (he was subsequently discovered hiding out in Epping Forest). I was working in Barnet – quite close to Epping forest- in a pub and one day found myself surrounded by armed police in the public bar. Someone had reported they had seen Harry Roberts in the bar! Of course when they saw me and checked me out they realised it was a mistake. One of them said to me before they left, ‘don’t worry too much but you just saved yourself from being shot’! I needed a stiff drink after that I can tell you!
Oddly enough that wasn’t the end of the matter. In the late 1980’s, when I was living in Leytonstone in East London, I worked with a guy named John Roberts, and in the course of a conversation with him in the pub after work one evening he told me that Harry Roberts was his uncle. It’s a small world.
THE SHOOTING SEASON
“Let the slag have it Harry”, said Jack
“The bullet hit him just below the eye;
He slumped to the ground;
I could hear my heart thumping;
The air was electric”.
Those callous words are B movie speech
Yet the episode is of immense distress
A policeman – one of three-
Gunned down in broad daylight
On a street near Wormwood Scrubs
On August the twelfth
The glorious twelfth
The first day of the shooting season.
KILLER
The cigarette smoke hangs like tear gas
In the mean little honky-tonk
But nobody really gives a shit
Because Jerry is in town.
He arrives without fanfare
And seats himself down
Gimme my money and show me the piano
And don’t try and act the hound
This is rockabilly, baby
Forget about Elvis and Johnny
Jerry has just kicked the door down.
Jerry can conjure a thousand songs
And play each one seven different ways
He can make your high heel sneakers
Dance the legs off every other cat in the place
I aint no phoney
I ain’t no teddy bear
And I don’t talk baloney
As I say to my bass player
I ain’t no goody-goody
But I was born to be on the stage
It was all I ever dreamed of
From the very earliest age.
Jerry plays it slow and mournful or hard and fast
He once told Chuck Berry he could kiss his ass
And across the arc of bad-boy rockers
Who have come and gone
Jerry is the only one still rocking on
Sure, there were some bad times that caused his
Rocket ship to sputter
Like the year he crashed a dozen Cadillac’s
And was heard to utter
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane
You broke my will, oh what a thrill
Goodness gracious great balls of fire
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LACKENDARA
Ah Lackendara
You heard the voices too
At Paschendaele where you
Cowered as the big guns
Bombarded your world to silence
Blasted your thoughts to kingdom come
And left you forlorn
On that ragged outcrop
In the foothills of the Comeraghs
The fox and the curlew your only companions
The gurgling Mahon Falls
All there was to quench your thirst.
For thirty years you trod those hills
Taking little notice
Of ordinary life around you going on
Your presence on the mountain a constant reminder
Of mans’ inhumanity to man.
FALL
Autumn mornings are best;
The sun smiling low over the gasworks
Flighty leaves browning the common
Kites lark-high over the tree-tops
Coffee and a roll in the old rectory
And you by my side
NO THANKS
If I left you now, what would you miss?
Grumpy mornings, silent evenings
And taken-for-granted pause between the emptiness;
And hidden behind the tall tales, adultery;
Mental maybe, but real nevertheless
You dazed me in the park one Sunday’s summer afternoon.
Your smile was electric.
Later, you hid your patience well
When freedom was dragged from under my feet.
You ticked of the (waiting) time
And I repaid you with monologues of deceit
There are those more deserving of your kindness;
Less selfish, less angry,
And less possessed of my bloody-mindedness.
You bore your cross to the edge and beyond.
Always hauling me back to the fold.
Snatches of love were your only compensation,
Were I a better man I would cloak you in gold
NORTH CAROLINA TREES
Tall pines, straight as railway sleepers,
Stun me with their skinny beauty
Some of these were old
When Abraham Lincoln was barely knee high.
And it is even possible that George Washington
Touched one or two as he rode by.
Durham was young when these pines first sprouted life
As were Raleigh, Charlotte, and Queensboro et al
Perhaps it was the Redcoats who seeded this lush terrain
Beauty shipped all the way
From England’s green and pleasant land
To conceal the carnage of their long and murderous campaign.
PLAY ON
Ensconced here in contemplation
Your presence overwhelms me
Arms outstretched, yet never chiding
Even knowing my ways were wrong
Burning both ends speeds up damnation
I can see that now;
Lust living in the wings
While the songs sang themselves
And courage dredged from the bottle
While the melody lingered on
Music was my life
But you changed it all;
Your song will still be nectar, Lord
When all this is gone…
Some writers should be avoided like a swarm of mosquitos. I am thinking of the likes of Martin Amis/Will Self/Salman Rushdie etc. I would probably have put Howard Jacobson in that category until I read my first book of his – ZOO TIME – recently. Brilliantly funny, waspish, and with prose so sharp you could cut yourself. Ostensibly it is about writer Guy Ableman and his obsession with his mother-in-law, but really it’s about writers and their obsession with the writing profession. No one reads any more according to Guy; his publsher, fearing the same, has committed suicide, his agent is in hiding, and his wife, Vanessa, is writing her own novel, which together with his unruly passion for his mother-in-law combine to make this the best novel I have read in years. 5*****
CHANGING TIMES
We are murdering time
Now is no good
Maybe what happens next will be better
Life is someplace else
Perhaps on our poncey phones;
It’s like eating in a restaurant
And discussing the menu
From somewhere else;
Everyone is on edge
Like we are slipping a cog
Or like musical chairs
When the music stops
You change your life
Doesn’t matter if you get it wrong
It’ll be shit whatever you choose
My Writing Life 