The Warrior of Poetry: The Poetry archive
The Poetic Warrior Returns to his Poetry after Illness Welcome One, Welcome All
An epitaph to the feline friend of Mason Cult.
Stone cats in the sun will they ever live again, feral destiny was never good my squashed cat friend has expired. His short coil now ended abandoned flat and no more, now his coat is his, all his soul has sped away.
We noted him, we will try to remember him, but I sense we will all be stiff one day. Our thoughts will be as rigid as our bodies it a price we pay for gods gift short or long, that is mortality for Pluto the tomcat he is dead.
A story from Mason Cult on the impact of withdrawing rail services back in the day by Mr Beeching. Longing for the sound of the train, but there is no track for I have to go a long way back.
Dark evenings in a moonlit village where street lights had not arrived, the smell of farms and heat from barns, as you walked on by, the sound of feet, ones that you recognise a village, a communal den of rivalry, conspiracy and gossip. So I dream in the core of that old village overgrown and derelict, on a chilly evening the time was moving close to 7pm an image of the thirty children came too me, I had been still, waiting, listening, the best I could for the persistent chuff and pulse of a tiny steam train with few carriages, coming ever closer to the village station and the scattering of cottages and farm houses bringing back the first brave who were tasting the smoke of industrial towns and the many new roles.
I was too young to know of decline but sure enough my family village died in a remote valley high enough up for snow to stay longer and steam trains to time there journeys. I woke up and looked for a sign, a derelict rail track sighted stretching and winding through a distant hillside, remains of hotchpotch dwellings, windowless and tattered linings of decorating paper flapping inside the weather raped cottages, old carbons in a naked fireplace waiting for the camping fraternity to pass by and re-engage the flue, in glow and imagination retrospective tatty artifacts to remind the transient visitors that living hearts and souls did beat, as longing as yours, existed
at two thousand feet up a hilly train track in 1959.
Brazier under the canal bridge flaming holes fiercely flaming pluto John and pancreatic Pete sit as meditating beings of a kind… road kill rabbit rolling on an abstract metal rod flame head billowing from a redundant oil barrel, bright the shadowy duo poking the urgent flames with intent, they are hungry beyond any food banks.
The charmed simplistic brotherhood of the fire keeps a talking culture alive in the reality of poverty, permeation so disengaged from an expanding world of White Diamond and Eight Ace lager, taking over there one known world that is burning itself out, as they gaze at the final flames under a canal towpath bridge with the sound of faint but audible friendship . Pissheads, happy pissheads, causing no harm to mobody, rule Britainia.