Walk With Me

Crimson vermillion

The lanes are not mine anymore

Limes, lemongrass

The hereabouts are thereabouts

Cobalt sky

Summer is summer everywhere

Mustard yellow

I can’t quite be there

Rose marooned

Almost, yes almost

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Ring Back

Sunlight in the morning

Doctor returns my call

Crystals and shadows

Photograph on the wall

What it is to rise early

What it is to feel ok

Cushions on the settee

A playmaker later in the day

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Futurity Lost

So how is Paul Smith coping, or Levi Strauss

Or Lee (I don’t know his second name) or Uniqlo

Or even Marks and Spencer’ I do know

That XXXXXX went to the wall

Just after I bought my last pair of denim jeans

It’s not so clear for the shirt part of my wardrobe

Yes there is Charles Tyrwhitt and M&S

Yet ever so many without a brand name

Or a house style to draw me in; I did try

Grieves and Hawkes, but, just like Pink

Their shape was not my shape

Though I do wonder how Jeff Banks is bearing up

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Presently Lost

I found the pen, and ink, but I didn’t find the book

And I have no desire to turn the house upside down

So the first good idea of the day is shelved

Put on the back-burner, held in abeyance, until who knows when

Yet already I have started composing the verse

To go with the picture, with the shadow, with the chiaroscuro

To go with the light out of darkness, or quite the reverse

As the white ink may have said, to the black paper

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Theme Tunes

Late Saturday afternoon, heading towards teatime

I went into an empty bar, on a college campus

I might remember where, in the fulness of time

I bought a lager beer, then walked over to the juke box

Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd was my first selection

Then probably Led Zeppelin, or John Lennon’s Imagine

Anyway, by the time Free Bird was reaching a climax my table

Was awash with other students, here on my summer school

And so it was, in those first few minutes, I had found

My companions, for the rest of the week of creativity

Of course some left our group, and others joined

But the nucleus remained, as if we too were a troupe

I only tell you this because last night, more than forty years

After the event, it came to me in a most realistic dream

If I wanted to find out where the bar was

How on earth would I go about it

For a long time Free Bird was on every juke box

In every bar, on every university campus

Not just in England but all over the world

But it was England, for I only once went elsewhere

That was to Sterling, Scotland; where the initiation ceremony

Was to sit in a circle and play rugby-style drinking games

So maybe it was York, or Reading, or Bath, or Durham, or UEA

I have left out Sussex for I know exactly what happened there

And I know that at Warwick I was on my own, working

On my master’s dissertation, with no escape to Lynyrd Skynyrd

And using the process of elimination it wasn’t vibrant Bath or UEA

Neither was it Reading, nor Durham for they were both very dull

Right now I have just watched a twelve minutes

And thirty two seconds Youtube video

Of Free Bird being played live in Atlantic city

One song supporting a cast of hundreds

One song entertaining a chorus of millions

One song spread out across so so many years

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