Do you remember the thousand winters
of huddled history- lost in a spring?
The laugh stained warmth on walls, flickering?
When you could speak warm-freely, before
the years of the mask or the fear of the touch?
When the cadence of centuries, your father or friend
or lover lent themselves to the cause?
Public house poets and writers all!
Go on, pour another verse into the swell-
one day, the future won’t be ours to tell.
Will we forget the fireside wanderer
who sits amidst the hops?- God’s own spot!
Once upon a night you asked him for a light,
but he gave you the stars, Pendragon
But now his trembling candle falters,
his loss on the wax, his vision on the wane.
‘It’s spring and I’m not young’, he says.
Go on, pour another verse into the swell-
one day the future won’t be ours to tell.
And there was music, always music
that danced itself across the world-
born again a thousand times a room, a night.
As a pagan, pilgrim, pisshead’s son,
a serene, sexy, sacred one-
who, at last orders, had you up against the walls
their songs tight around you, their fingers in your mind.
The hint of a caress, tells you never to forget
to pour another verse into the swell-
one day the future won’t be ours to tell.
Light of yesterday, lonely window,
a death of culture shrouded in a thousand phrases,
proud purveyors of the blame
or of truths that can’t be named. Though
some fell around me, on the pavement as I stood
slowly watching- the onlooker’s lament.
Silently, how silently, snow settles as dust upon The Bell-
gifts from a sky the colour of decay, of ash or regret.
Will we pour another verse into the swell?
For now the future’s not ours to tell.
thefrontliein 