The thin strip of bright light
Offers an entrance
To transcendence
The moss and lichen
On the winter branches
Suggests time longer than time itself
Daughter, mother, granddaughter
Capture the generations
With life; with old life, with new life
Beside the visual
Also the ethereal
And the ancestral
We can think of rooftops
And cafés by the quay
Eating Pastéis de Nata
Those thin strips of bright light
Equanimous, as forms
In need of suspension
To feel for disbelief
Parting from dissension
As the cure to find relief
Lift the lid off this attention
Learn to search upon your knees
Gift the gifts of freed ascension
Learn to sail upon the seven seas
In the midst of the passing
Called up by images and dreams
There to find by the final lashings
Nowhere is ever what it seems
In the need of right direction
To feel alive for all he pleads
Apart though from exemption
The cure is in the founding deeds
Lift the lid off this confession
Learn to fall beside the reeds
Gift the gifts of clear impression
Learn to rally by counting trees
In the midst of those harassing
Carried on by the poet’s screams
There alone in the final romancing
Nowhere is not at all what it seems
I cannot
And I do not
And so there is a sense
Of the waste of it all
I care not
And I shall not
And so there is a label
For the flakiness of it all
I am here
While the rose red trees
Refreshed by wind and rain
Are in my neighbour’s garden
Their bearers cannot
And shall not
Be with us today
Lifetime’s toll has taken them both
Though I do remember that innocence
And joy
As we talked of poets
Sat in their floral armchairs
They are but memories
Though memories of a youth
Spent searching for passion
Copulation sometimes mistaken for love
From thirteen to twenty
A seventh of life thus far
Heartbreak and heartache
One night and then the next
From youth club to dancehall
From football to bar
Friendships and egos
As batteries for life
The Albion
With Led Zeppelin on the jukebox
Where I walked in barefoot
On return from the Isle of Wight festival
The West Riding
Where local football stars, internationals too
Turned up on Saturday teatimes
Straight after the match
The Burns Tavern
One of our technical college lunchtime venues
Where Syd Brown would eat
Three rounds of pie and peas
The Mandarin Restaurant
Three-course lunch
For seven shillings and sixpence
Served to the more refined students such as I
The Starlight
A dancehall of renown
A place for meeting girls
In the lottery of the lights-out, contra-rotation circles
Lord Jim’s Discotheque
Where Steve from tech (mostly absent from tech)
Was a DJ, he also was said
To deal a few uppers and downers on the side
The Amsterdam Bar
Save the best for last, where the gay proprietors
Would don their Shirley Bassey costumes