The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 14

Down to the azure sea

But this is England

Where I travel from the North, my homeland

To the South, for most certain the land of others

Traffic slows

Accident signs flash

Last week

About to be replicated

How soon before

Frustration sets in

Wasted time

Wasted life

Wasted in dreams

Wasted while awake

In front 

O'Neil Transport of Ireland

All green and shamrock

To the side 

Arwel Thomas' Heavy Haulage

Heading for the bridge back to Wales

Steaming past, quite slowly actually

A young couple in their Hyundai Sport Coupe

With twin chrome exhausts surely entwined

A green triangle

Backdrop for a lighter green circle

Both cut through with wavy lines

A logo of sorts

For QDS

Deliverers of land regeneration

Stop, go, stop

I joined the queue at 9:45

Already it is 10:30

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The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 13

This had been Jimmy's lifestyle ever since escaping from therapy. Therapy that relentlessly told him that he had to learn how to be quiet, he had to learn to care, he had to learn that others needed his mothers love, and that she needed to give love to others. 

In therapy Jimmy was relentlessly told that he was not alone, but that had to learn to be alone. Jimmy had to learn that when his mother closed her bedroom door, with her lover in tow, that she was not forgetting him, not leaving him; except for those few frantic magical moments when she too would be lost to the world. 

Jimmy

Named by chance

O how we danced

Yes how did I dance

Boy did chance take me

Pride and circumstance

Came to that dance

The chance of time

Rhymed to shape me

A singer

A poet

A musician

A lover

A sage

All tied up with the rage

The rage

And the repetition

Of the mindful metaphysician

Trapped in his bar-less cage

Morning, morning light

I drive as if on vacation, light-headed

Attractive blonde turns her hand 

From the opulence of her leather clad metallic Jaguar convertible

She smiles, mischievous

Gestures for me

To enter onto her pubic highway

Wagner, played loud

This could be Mulholland Drive

From the blue mountains 

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The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 12

shoulder fixed before. Jimmy asked that Harry go see his doctor in the morning, insisting that he report back to the rest of the band by tomorrow evening; but for now he would have to sit out this rehearsal. 

In the studio Jimmy told Harry to listen closely to the lyrics, to concentrate on the words and not the music, pressed him to seek out the possible sources for the songs story, prized him to measure, to feel if the darkness was balanced by the light. 

Jimmy stood aloof at the microphone, began with a whisper, stepped slowly as if following a rivers swell, before becoming a raging torrent of repetition; repetition without rhyme or reason, but louder and louder, increasingly more tormented. 

Occasionally Jimmy would kick out; it appeared to come from a deep subconscious, or was a reflex that no one understood; the musicians played along, clattering cymbals, thrashing guitars; then a fall back, to the soft sublime steel slide mourning wail, a sound from the deep; a lost soul sound that echoed Jimmy's cry, as if a wolf cub parted from its mother. 

Jimmy's mother loved him but she could not forgive his love of so many others, she was the mother who named him Benjamin, for all the wrong reasons. 

Jimmy had been unable to explain his insatiable desire for love to his mother; so unable were they to talk that instead they fought; and when drink was present they fought with intolerant passion, their hatred, of the desirous love of the others lovers caused wild explosions. As animals they scratched and tore at each others skin, settled only by the drawn blood and the mutual humiliation. 

But Jimmy showed no remorse, to the point that he became a braggart about his beastly disregard for his mothers dignity. It seemed he wanted to strip her totally of her precious dignity, Jimmy wanted to see her bare and bleeding, he wanted his band to see her bare, bleeding and in tears; he wanted all the hangers on, all the down and out and dead beats to see his mother bare, bleeding and in tears; stripped entirely, uniquely stripped by Jimmy of her precious bloody dignity. 

Jimmy lived for music and drink and sex (he called it love). He live so that all his waking hours were entirely consumed by activity.

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The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 11

You forget that you have been listening

As friends and silence drift and gently sway

Father and daughter laugh

This is easy conversation

The best of times

No more sitting on the fence

You forget that you have been listening

To tunes on the radio

Family preserved variations

Gulls back from the sea shore

Mottled cherry blossom 

Afloat on the breeze

That is all I could draw

Call it abstract if you will

But there is a go at tenderness

An attempt at insight

A feel for the message in a bottle

A search for a statement of intent

In between the French

And Spanish dictionaries

Serendipity plies her wares

Shadows of the sunset years

Angle-poise, poised upon the picture

Painted, painted just before the dawn

And that's where it stayed

Caught up in indifference

Trapped in some sensible profession

Shunted into the knackers yards

Left to become redundant, old iron

Until the sun rose on that cold day in December

Stillness, silence of the crystal, locked behind glass doors

Matched, as by the forces of equilibrium, by the matching cups and saucers

Jimmy yanked Harry's arm, you could hear the crack across the street
Passers by looked on with concern, had they never seen a dislocated 

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The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 10

By the apparent call for stillness

The artist looks up

With palette knife in hand

Speed painting, in a pastoral style

Back to that day by the river

Two boys at play

Discovered by a father often absent

All through the night the grasses remain

Grazed by ponies, sheep and foals

The forthcoming darkness and silence

Asks that rightful ownership once again descend

Not cured, but stable

Almost no palpitations 

This time of leaving

Death at the roadside

Stops instant

The self-indulgent postulations

I walk to the beach

Paul and Dawn get married

Sunshine dried earth

Cracks the pond-side track

The steel band serenades

Alone in the shade

Of trees and scrub

Sand, more as dust

Fallen timber refuse

Flung far from the Atlantic

In the Tennyson lounge

A pen & ink, of Happy Days

Linked to the wedding celebration

In the sunlit flooded garden

Beneath the gold statue

Of Napoleon on his crazy horse

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