Leaving home
An abandoned farm in the hamlet of Tafarn y Bwlch on the side of the B road that crosses the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales. I am not sure when it was vacated. A cooker and fridge visible through doorways without doors hint at some degree of modernity. The translation of the hamlet’s name, Tavern of the Gap, suggests a more communal and convivial past. The tree that appears in the photograph to be growing out of the chimney is actually doing so. A short distance away on a panoramic slope lies Waun Mawn, believed to be the first location of the bluestones of Stonehenge that were quarried a few miles downhill.
Man’s Shed
In the shed of my late father mortality raises its gentle terrifying reminding head among the stilled working the colonising cobwebs here in this inner sanctum of a man’s married years lie the abandoned hobbies the casualties of affordability and changing health golf clubs beginning to rust and accrete DIY liquids transforming into new uses a club is always a club no matter how it is wielded no matter where it is or how tamed one is a complete bathroom window frosted its opening obedient to a key that hasn’t turned for decades a trolley of peeling paint and complaining metal castors still compliant a primitive vehicle from my childhood upcycled then repurposed to shelve rough materials soon to be upcycled again I was sent there by my father to find a tool I could never retrieve today everything is uncovered in the light of vacating
Question about Fire
Where’s the fire? a fire in the belly spontaneous human combustion old ladies with only their lower legs surviving for the camera so you better learn to think before you think the season of cider and leaf fall enthuses and deadens I am happy to be so but the fires persist as if we did not kindling thinking Beltane way over lit up water when it returns to lakes to reservoirs of inefficiency Hitler and Stalin in full colour no thanks I prefer my enemies dead in hues of black and brushstrokes of white under heavy masonry so there’s no coming back I’ve got my pyre you’ve got yours
Y Dieithriaid/The Strangers
A kitchen table 1953 its wood surface lined by the scratching and scraping of five thousand meals gravitated around by people I haven’t met save through the study of dry documents lichen edited inscriptions and reverential anecdotes they’re gathering as if for an important event in the calendar of living I’m kind of hovering like I did in real life trying to listen in to the language of condolence the wording of commemoration the patois of those well known to one another the music of best china touching my 12 year old mother is here with the other females permitted at the house to help with refreshments and friendships but not at the open grave she will grow into a Bardot of the school bus the chapel pews the perambulating lanes the first job until marriage and me will alter that possibility that destination a member of the branch of the suicide sister in law is among the mourners death grief thief of time but healer of familial discomfort at the chapel in the forest among the crabbed literature of wreaths one dedication reads from all at Police House L-V- 32 miles and a half century away from the great uncle of the deceased who had ridden from those walls to collar the lawless of his day from the first day of that county’s constabulary these were the days of the start of our separation from our beginning our unravelling when we forgot so much of what we were and what was us our relatives and their dwelling places the reason for our being a time too when we became unfamiliar with horses their aroma their voices their muscularity their fidelity when we became a little less human a little less animal
Indentations
Eyes closed to the sound of a breeze combing fir trees reminds him of the curtain border of that cemetery hypnotic historic ultimately soporific a misspelt dedication next to where he left his parents his grandparents the dear ones snug in the clay returned to the earth on the edge of that village that gave him his scars the shed tears they all left only to come back the sadness not interred not boxed but marks on their existence decades of indentations runes they couldn’t decipher though fingertips unthinkingly traced them in the quieter seconds between the pressures a new face gets a new face that he will learn to wear with pride his split cheek beneath a bonnet in a pram a spider’s web of darning in skin a stitch in time that saved him from being bled dry like a wounded bird in a winter whiteness impasse and quietened his parents’ guilt that boy from Cwmcou with its free flowing sparkle Ceri a branch to the Teifi tree of life a tributary sacrifice that took the boy from Cwmcou but not Cwmcou from the boy carry me away carry me away bring me home I want to go home
Laws and Those Who Make Them
Our felon who has paid his fine allowed is thy shame the playing dumb your japes undone unearth untruths so uneven give us this day your daily lie and forgive us our press passes as we forgive those that press pass against us and lead us not into Trump nation but deliver us from Priti for thine is the comedown the sour and the sorry never so clever Amen
Prime Suspect
Our fibber whose art is craven furloughed be thy fame thy Brexit done broke times to come in Neath as it is in Devon give us this day our daily dread and forgive us our trust issues as we forgive them that are classist against us and lead us not into inflation but deliver us from shortage for thine is the kidding the poorer and the gory together or severed Amen
Where Did I Put My Country?
Jimmy Jangles would have liked to have been a highly-decorated warrior relaxing in a highly-decorated lounge but this was not to be instead he obsesses over his fetish for Dalek-like killing machines and how he is obliged to hand over money to bankroll violent regimes he doesn’t support by governments he did not help elect he tries not to get too hung up about about demarcation he has a door a gate a fence a scripture of passwords and a clear understanding of where his personal space ends he admits that he has at times fallen foul of the Trades Description Act existing on a small island in the middle of a tarn of sodium hypochlorite just like in the legends afraid to venture out because of the risk of corrosion of his disambulation he deplores TV programmes like Britain’s Got Talent the exaggerated melodrama of slightly delaying the announcement of which hopefuls have been voted in or out of this week’s show that pantomime pause a menopause by the men of pause perhaps it could be improved by replacing it with a different format such as Britain’s Got Tory Parties Britain’s Got Tax Avoiding Superstars or at a push Britain’s Got Tommy Robinson these would be much more sincere and entertaining especially if the same selection method is used closer to the current democratic process than he could ever imagine television as the new Tower of Babel that moved like a demented crab into boxes then flat screens and into our gibberish conversations he buys gin goblets from a budget foreign supermarket and is enchanted by the bell sound they make when brought together in a gentle semi pendular action he fills them up throws in some handy botanicals like consuming a boozy salad from a globe representing a swirling world without continents it’s nearly Christmas though it has in effect been since the last one for the last four decades or so at least he can forget for a short while that many worthy companies feel motivated to make modern slavery statements each Thursday he attends a workshop for those debilitated by post traumatic retail stress disorder the hours in shops waiting his hands glued to his pockets ignoring the signs the smells the sounds the eyes unnerved by showroom dummies sometimes feeling that they could be moving when just out of sight some of them appearing to have been posed grotesquely in unrealistic human biological positions still it beats working although it is in its way a form of occupation another usage of jangling useless time in the name of the market in an age of continuous austerity when he gets the shakes he closes his eyes until he is taken far from where he is back to the early 1960s the bars of a cot surround him the first feeling of imprisonment of containment of being too safe he's sleepy in this place too riggings of snow grace the corners of a sash window a draught making him shudder with cold his first encounter with winter though he doesn't yet know what it is and what it can do his unseen mother sings quietly to him something old something of that location before the rest of the world and its non stop jukebox would roar into the family life he gardens industriously and ironically now that the UN has given the soil sixty years he could cry and allow his tears to water his parcel of land at least he'll be long in the ground by then but he feels for the kids the birds the beasts the fish the insects the trees the flowers the forests the wind the sea the streams the rivers the lakes the lovers and the possibilities this morning his web photo provider sent Jimmy an image to remind him of this date one year ago a shot of an area of dampness on a ceiling the reminiscing of an algorithm the inhumanity of technology there's no contest even if the robots will take over as it appears they will he chuckles and recalls the word clusterfuck that crops up in his news feed rather often these days tonight he waits for a meteorite shower to arrive he knows this is an honour but he's a little impatient fretting that he's looking at the wrong patch of sky he need not worry for this has been done before and is still a thing of wonder
A New Beginning
I have not yet found God nor has He found me on another winter’s solstice but it’s a new day one that has never been before so it’s going to be alright the mounting illumination of its early morning a sky going through the shades of blue then pinks and reds there’s a ghost on my lawn a ghost of dawn maybe it’s only there before anyone looks that way before the stillness is scared off by the yapping of excitable dogs as I wait to be enveloped by a fog of unconsciousness waiting for no reason that’s worth knowing waiting for me to wake up to make up to shake up and when I have done so meet me at Durrington Walls where we’ll raise a glass of fortitude distilled from the bitter fruit of native trees in the new Neolithic new towns retreat into the light we have created until the sun promises to linger once more I guess that’s winter for you look to the future now it’s only just begun (Slade 1973)
Where Did I Put My Country? 