Worn out
The old black iron fireplace
Cries out
As it emits smoke
From its billowing mouth
Roaring
Like an antiquated warhorse
It fumes
While the black cast iron
Hisses
And steams back
On a flat brass plate of spattered grease
Waiting
For its turn to slide along the old wooden ironing board

Stressed
And stretched
With ink powdered soot
Its tarnished brass pole is brazed above its fiery mouth
Here dishtowels entrails down
Like yellow rows of smoke stained teeth
Drying
Decaying
In the catarrhal heat of its reeking breath

A relic

That had now outlived

Its time

To cast off the old iron
Fart
In a new one
That is top of the art
Mottled cream
That does not fart
That tiles the fireplace
With the warmth
And freshness of a new baby’s heart
And let’s do the parlor too
Because it is clean
Pristine and new

Change

The gaslight
Into electricity
Pop in
A bob
For gas
Change
Had become
A meter of time
But the accumulator
Still turned
The pages of Mrs. Dales

Diary

In the Fifties

A dusty chestnut horse
With a dock of dust
Would saddle the street
With a rump of soot
Coal on the cart
Delivered
By a Suffolk Punch
Fossilized
With horse power

In harness
The dray rolled to a stop
The horse came to a halt
Reigned in
The horse and the dray truckled
Its power
To trucking

Coalman

Picked up their slack
Sacked
With the hump
Hunched on their back
Shadows silhouetted the back entry walls
Stooped
Burdened and bent with goal bags of lead
Down
Long common back entries of piss and shit
Spinal
Shadows
Of sable soot
Soiled their skin with streaks of sweat
Day after day
Dumping coal into stone shelters of black hole boxes

Aside

Shelters boxed
In the carbon shadows of the war
It sheltered light
While it blacked out death
Dating the darkness
Was to embrace life
Embodied
Under a kinship of blackness
Families huddled
Under the warmth of it’s dawning
Light
Was locked
Into a sheltered black box
A timeless capsule
Storing its monolithic shadow
Into a metamorphic fossil of cryogenic

Life

In the Fifties

Returned
Garbage to the corporation
Trucks
Dun and dusty
Idling
In a defile of refuge
Blue bottled fly’s buzzed and squatted
Into a depository of depreciation
While dogged dusty dustman
Pulled burrowing bins from it’s stoned
Shitty sheath of hibernation
Edged with steel
The pestilent bin is ousted out of its black box cave
Leaving
A rancid orifice of empty light

Dustman

Onto the shoulder
The bin men bear their burden
Resting
On strength
Shoulder blades are sheaved with leather
Aprons
Befriend a film of foul and filth
Humped
With stench
His day his drooled with dust and dirt
Chained
In an armor of ash
Brushing the back entry
With a mane of dust
Brushing you off
As he tramps
Tramps tramps tramps
Down a never ending corridor of
Shit shit shit
Spinal
Shadows
Of dun dust
Soiled their skin with streaks of sweat
Day after day
Dumping garbage into a dumpster of darkness
Garbage
Eclipsed dustmen
Passing
Each other
Trudging down endless entries of humanity
Back and forth
Disparaging his burden
Into a faceless wall
He would write his ambulatory

Entry

My Old Man’s a Dustman

August 11, 1960
Life’s waste
Spills into shit
While piss pours
Down the gutter
Life drains
Into a sewer of vulgarity

By Lonnie D

Entry

My Old Man’s a Sanitary Engineer

August 11, 2001
Refuse
Life’s garbage
Is the wanton wasteland
Of soiled humanity
Return
Its wanting womb
To wanting fertility
Recycle and reuse

By Donegan L

Our Entry

Bright
And light
Clean and green
Aquamarine
Isolated
Six tight arsed veterans
Together
Side by side
Mooning the prefabs
With their cheek to cheek
Bricked backside

Walls
Of polished privets faced our red bricked backyard

Walls

Hedged with heads of heady
Green
Corridors of bottle green
Leaves
Tussled bustled
And rustled for light
Waves
Of breezes paused
And poured over gulping green privets
Shivering
In a shower of shade
They stood tall under the shadow of our backyard

Walls

Of sweet-smelling scents
Tossed their bouquet
To a welcoming sun
This short entry was sweet in verdure
Were vegetables grew
Behind a prefab door
Flowers bloomed
In an orifice of shit
Our little back entry was a misfit
It was a country lane
In a corridor of gray
Our back entry wall blushed
With the dawn of a new day

Six war torn terraced veterans

Muster
Their dustbins
Incited
For insertion
Accountable
For accumulation
Accredited for
Disposing
Defiled deposits of degradation
Into a depository of depressed decay
Walled up
With pride
Inserted for
Instillation
All bins
Lined up
With decorum
All was pristine
On our side
Of our back wall

Of World War
One
Two
And more
Dockside strikes

Before

The city port was plagued
With Black Death
And the thorny wars of the roses
Bloomed
With red
verses white
Pricked
White
Cotton
Gin
Flowed into a tidal basin of poverty
Blacks
Sweated
Traded with white
Rum
Brewed in
From a brewer of green
Industry grew
In a Glover of wealth
Making the city
A pioneer in public health
In the wake
Of the potato blight
The famished Irish left
Their plight
Celts
Flooded the dry docks
With their poetic spirit
Whigs
Poured poteen
Into a decanter of history
Were the schisms of change
Dispersed its light
Into a spectrum of society

After

World War Two
The city boomed
Babies
Arrived
Like a majority of others
I had just given labor

My vote

Is to return to the wonted road
Were your dad became an early boomer
So hold on
Back to Walton
With your imagination
We will hold onto our childhood
So hold on
To your Liver Birds
As we continue to fly
To the road
Were your dad was born
Listen
To a peaceful concord of pealing bells
Six bells chime

At Walton on the Hill
Ah! Me! What smiles and tears
Alas! What doubts and fears
Have changed in the years
At our towns end
Fond memories turn to childhood joy
So pure, so free from earths alloy
Again, I wish myself a boy
At Walton on the Hill

An old man’s reverie
John Wilson, Walton, 1891

Farewell

A gentle peck on the cheek
A wave good-bye
The Liver Birds headed out to the open sky
Soon to return
After their afternoon nap
To tour our great city
On their green feathered back

Remember

We were poor then
As she turns to her grandchildren
And we weren’t living

The life of Riley

Begins
In a blitz
1944
The wonton road
Was unique
And bleak
Because its core
Rose from a blitz of ashes
Prefabricated
Houses appeared from the war debris
Like the phoenix
Anew
Sandwiched
Between the old red brick
Terraced houses
Dressed the street in their two story
Nineteenth century
Drabness
Addresses
The twentieth century’s new arrival

The Prefab

As we once called it
One story
Squatted into a gradualist gown
Of green rice paper
Foam plaster
Walls
Resolute and rough
Support a mortarboard roof
Of pebbled tarmac
Standard grade
Standard level
And standard similarity
Alike
In an accordant uniform of friendly green
Boxed
In homely rows of pound note green
Light
Shone onto their allotted penny red gardens
That in its self
Shook the street
From its fallow doldrums
Most streets were tailored and terraced
In suits of flannel gray
Slates
Sheltered the standard roof of our nineteenth century house
Soon
After the war
Our blitz torn road
Became a hive
Were rubble brewed
Into honeyed cells of green boxed tea
Houses
Became a playpen of construction
Were workmen
Would work

With a kindly eye
They sheltered your dad
As they watched him play
Under a carousel of a sunny sky
He would build his own foundation
While the workman whistled
To Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah day

On Our Street Corner

Sunrise
Shadows
Baptized the new church
With cries of dedication
The spire would steep
Into a steeple of veneration
Roseate stonework
Bricked the sunset
Into songs of praise
Prayer
Mortised the mortar
Of its resurrection

Across

The road
On the facing corner
Of the churches outstretched shadow
Sits
A simple grocery shop
Inside
Standing stiff
Fixed
A closed-minded grocer
Stands rigid
Behind his uncompromising barrier
A skin bald headed man
With a chilling Germanic skull
Shaped and shaved like a Jerry’s helmet
Drilled
With sternness
He would interrogate your ration book
With the harsh efficiency of a Gestapo agent
Needless
To say
We did not shop there
Very much

On our side

Next to this stringent grocery shop
Unscathed
Six Veterans stood
Side by side
Towering the prefabs
With terracing pride
Surviving the Battle of Britain
Our house
Now stood in a virgin forest
Of green clover prefabs
Our house was one of the six wartime survivors
Who survived the bombings of the blitz

As Dusk Enveloped the Dark Night

Dawn

Is about to start
With a heavy cart
And a nosebag of hay
She drags her dreary red dray up the brae
Dawn
Trots away
Braided
In a matted mane of dusty-gray
She rattles
And clatters
With a feather of pride
Silhouetting the streets
With her brownish-gray hide
Dawn
Drops off
A dollop of dung
Steamed in hot bran
A walloping gift
For the old garden man
Scoop it up
If you can
As Dawn
Canters on
With her bridle chain
Burnished with brass
Our old mare of shire
Reins
In with class
As she rattles on
With milk in the glass
Dawn
Stops
With a weary sigh
And a hearty neigh
She nuzzles up
Into a kaki bag of golden hay
Husks discarded
Throughout the day
Dawn
Greets the neighbors
With a cheery neigh
And of course
A bottle of fresh capped milk

To Start the Day

The house whistles with pain
As we pick up the milk bottles
Inside
Larger copper kettles
Fester onto the heat of red-hot coals
Spitting
And sputtering
With steaming rage
Sitting
In a tantrum of torment
Kettles and pots
Sizzle on a black iron plate of rancid grime

Bootle

Is a borough
As Manhattan
Is to New York
Bootle
Like Walton
Is incorporated into the city
But Bootle
Is next to Walton
But not as old as Winston Tenebars
Walton
Whose history stems from the Doomsday book
It’s ancient
Much like me
Grandma smiled as she explained
This geography that was much like
Aintree
Confused

History 301

Bootle Docks
Are part of the Mersey Docks and Harbor
Board
For over thirty years
Granddad worked for them
From
Dusk
To dawn
Sitting
In a stationary crane
Overlooking the seaport
In a capsulizing crane
With leverage
He levitated his leviathan
Arms
Cradled his cargo
Shifting
Shadows
Silhouetted the shorelines of a somber skyline
Sullen
Shipyards
Slumber
In a shimmering light
Night
Ebbed away
As the coal-dusted river flowed
Into an open sea of duskiness
Bold-faced
Dockyards
Dotted the wharfs with dwarfs of light
Steamships
Slept
Under the stealth sound of a starry sky
Moored
Into a quarried quay of steely-gray
Berthed
In a harbor of floating dreams
At a low ebb
Granddad lifted phantoms
From a dreary day
He loaded hopes
From a saddled crane
He sat
In an elevated bubble of monastic monotony
Overlooking
A downward harbor
Dredged
With dreams
He saw his life
Floating

Bye

Cried Grandma
As she tearfully waved
In the wake of her passing

Memories

Lost
In thought
Grandma turned
Towards the undaunted dockside
Were the industrious warehouses
Once bottled despair
Into a Jacob’s biscuit bin of contained poverty

History 401

Stored
Its working class
Into alphabetic boxes
Stamped and sorted
Selected and separated
Into downgraded education

Warehouses
Filled with substandard grades
Repressed
Into submission
Submitted
To oppression
Boxed
Onto a rack of mistreatment
And stacked into degrading quantities
Packaged
With illiteracy
Stockpiled
Onto a drudging dolly
Waiting on downcast docks
Like dejected dullards
Dehumanized
Dragged out
Doled out
Delivered and dumped
Onto a downtrodden doormat of draconian democracy
Dogma

Politics

Public pontification
And social masturbation
Struck the docks
With strikes
Trade stopped
Unions started
Riveted
Under an umbrella of unity
Dockers marched
To the left
For the right to fight
The wrongs
Left by the right

Parties

Preen their political plumage
Primal peacocks
Fanned out
Into a predacious parade
Ruffled feathers
Turned into a cock-a-hoop
Cockfights
Would turn into a flock of flogging
Riots
Police
Plucked out the cocks
And padlocked them into cock pits of violence

Strikes

Dragged into despair
Dreams doled out
Onto empty soap boxes
Hopes famished
While families hungered for food
Dockers starved for socialism
Union flagged
Jack wavered

In Time

The pendulum of power
Ticked
To the left
And the unionized Dockers clocked in
To the workings of industry

Once
In a while
The workers broke down
When the working class
And the working party

Dispute

The workload in their work place
Was too demanding for their work day and their paltry pay
Work on
Said the working capitalist
We are not workhorses
Said the working socialist
Negotiate
The workload
With the work force
And find a workable solution
Workmen
Worked themselves up into a rage
This workplace is like a workhouse
We have our work ethics
And our workmanship is a work of
Art
Hollered out
We are not workaholics
No
You are a work-shy working class
Back to your workshop
And we will work on
A workable solution with our working capital

Workmate
To Brother Jack
I’m going to give him a bloody good
Work over
Strike
Chimed the unionist
Work-to-rule
Clock in
The employer
Clock out
Cuckold the employee
All
In a bed of featherbedding
Arbitrate
So let’s mediate
Or close the gate

Time

For walk out
Time
For lock out
Back and forth
On a picketed pendulum
Tick tock
Ticked off
A political time bomb
Ticked off
Tick tock
The mainspring of revolutionary
Change
In time
Would bare labor
And the Laborer
Would exchange

The key

In time
Would turn
And wined
Into the rhythmical pendulum
Of an English country setting

History 501

Prior to the depression

Twisting and turning
Into whirlpools of babbling blood
Leaving
Her bloodstained dress
To balloon into white froths of blasphemous blood

Sinking

Shrinking
Into a steaming stream of babbling baptism
Submerged
Into a brewing babble of bubbling blood
Savaged
Sheared into shreds
Her serrated flesh started to separate
From her bludgeoned torso
The head dripped with tears of blood
As it hung onto a threaded tissue of sallow skin
Were it flagellated
Into an absolving stream of dissolving blood
Ripped
And raped
Pillaged with cold clawing currents
The ghastly head sheared away from its host
Dropping off
The deathly body

Decapitated

The torso was washed away
Leaving
The deathless head
In a dampen shroud of brackish black bramble
Detached
The grotesque head
Spins and rinses
Into a whipping foam of cherry blood
Dislodged
The severed head is carried
Down stream
In a moonlit tureen of muddied water

Heading

Towards Walton Hall Manor

Richard
Mounts his fretful horse
And gallops into the cursing night

A Tombstone Curse

Shrilled
Tombed and scripted
Into
The frightful Manner
In the fifteenth century
Roger de Walton
Male heir
The last of the male ancestral line
Cursed the dour Walton Hall on his death bed
That no male shall be born in this Manor
And that the apocalyptic sprig shall inherit the meadow
To this day
The curse has come true

The original manor was torn down
While the second one became haunted
By the Bogart
Who
According to William Wakefield Heaton
A recorder of collected manuscripts
In 1880
A group of locals
Saw an apparition
On several occasions
The headless specter
Could be seen around the Walton Hall estate
Blanched
In a sacked torso body
It had long frenetic arms
That would flagellate into the night damp air
With flights of frenzy
The fleeting hands
Would claw into the darkness with its frantic feline fingers

One morning

A group of locals discovered three dead bodies
They were the landlords of Walton Hall Manor
Scratched and clawed to death
Mr. Thomas Leyland and his wife and his young nephew
Richard

After that
Looking at her grandchildren
As she freshens up her white frock
She says with a comforting smile
I need a drink
Lets all go to the Rice House Pub
As grandma takes a sip from her own suds

Cheers

To the Rice House Pub

Established in the eighteenth century
Andre Rice
Proprietor
Politics
To the public
House
Bedfellows
To the town
Hall
Meetings would stagger
Next door into Walton’s Town Hall
Meetings would stagger
Next door into the Rice House Pub
Politics
Poured from drafts
Into tanked up tankards
You could hear

The War Cry

Would echo with tamborine jingles
Drummed with salvation
The black army departed with a copper
The War Cry
Echoed into a parade
To Church Street
Across the road from the Rice House Pub

To the Brown Cow Pub

Shaking
And striking cymbals of Christ
Tally-ho
Symbols of tannery
Banging their jingles
Drumming their hides to the Brown Cow Pub
As patrons grazed in a Tantalus of barley
Spirits
Sallied into Salivation
Jingled
With Jesus

Christ

Thank God
The black army has departed
Cheers
Burped the patrons
And by the way

Who was the fuck who farted

In the dark corner

Jack

Sat
Shrugging his shoulders
The snoop-nosed gentlemen sipped
Sarsaparilla
With sophistry
He would sit in solitary
A sacrosanct sermonizer
Like a solipsist
A sop of society
Socializing
With a sorbet
Satiating you
With his sectarian sermon
He would sing
His synchronous song
To all the skeptics
He wanted to save

The Remnants of Walton’s Town Hall

Pours water
From its pitcher of welled up memories
Resting like a tombstone
Its coat of arms
Is walled
Into a capsule of captivity
Lost
Into the changeable echoes of time
Rice Lanes
Landmarks
Lie under the shadow
Of a gray concreted motor way crossing
Now

A Flyover

Echoes
With cheers
Posted
To the transient sky
Keylara and Shu
Salute their muted wings
With a winding cry

Accelerando

Their path
Gets higher
And higher
As they scale the sky
On a clavichord of clouds
Rising
Falling
And surging upward

Pianissimo

Two notes
Flecked
Like motes
On sheets of blue
Quaver
In a cadence of quietude
Lost
For a moment
Notes
Puff into fluted clouds
Were they sail
And swell into a crescendo of white waves
Nocturnes
Keyed in a melodic sea of harmony
Strumming the skies
Onto sheets of white
Pitching
Side to side
In a metronome of flight
Charting
The sky with a scroll of delight
Leaving
The melodious winds
To orchestrate their flight

Leggiero

A duet
Of dance
Pirouetting the sky
In a wind of melody

Scorrendo

Sailing
In a breeze of blue
Soft winds
Blow in the reeds
Of floating clouds
Billowing
Into an ethereal cloud of ivory
Suspended
Into a bluesy sea of harmony
They glide above a coast of ebony
Moving
Along on the mellow winds of a melody
Sustained
Into a muted cloud of ecstasy

Scherzando

An upper wind
Picks up the tempo
Plucked
Into a chorus of clouds
Notes
Blast onto a woodwind stage
Of rolling clouds
Wings beat
As notes scale the sky
With their upbeat assent
Swinging
In a rhythm of blue
Bee-bopping
On a white horn cloud
That is trumpeting through

Affannoso

High
On speed
Spinning on
A vortex of wind
Caught
In an eddy of euphoria

Canabbandano

Blasting
Shooting
Onto the silver edge
Of boundless clouds
Skimming
Surfing
Onto the white waves
That taxi
To cloudless skies
Swinging
Rocking
Into jamming clouds of floating dust
High
In space
Flying high
Into sonic skies
Swelling and surging
In a fusion of metallic blue
Amplifying
The stars
With your clarion call
Caught
In a crescendo of vibration
Out of control
Pitched
Into decibels of deafness
Cumulative echoes
Echoes
Resonate into ascending voids
Of suspended descent
Lost

Rallentando

Intervals
Pause
Into space
Notes left
On a ledger line
Of infinite motionlessness

Prestissimo

Boreas
Boom
Pulls the notes
Down
Down
Down
Into a downdraft of blasting winds
Notes
Spiral
Into gusts
Of pitching air
Dropping
Dropping
Dropping
Into down winds
Of sinking descent

Decrescendo

Falling
Falling
Falling
Into spinnakers
Of drifting white clouds
Lulled into calmness
Sailing
On a song of lullabies
Cradled
Into the soft chords of blowing reeds
Suspended
In sleep
Descending in song
Gliding
Gliding
Onto a Zephyr
Of floating winds
Coasting
Coasting
Onto cumulus clouds
Of cultural change
Bellows
Of melodious winds
Blow and drone
Into a brushing breeze of resonance

Dolce

Notes
Rest on sheets
Of linen clouds
Adapting
To the currents of change
The metronome
Will arrange the tempo of their soul

Sin’al Fin

Notes
Flap into applause
As Keylara and Shu
Bow

To Port

Sprites
In flight
Darting
And diving
Into a petrified forest of vaporized mist
The whooshing Liver Birds cut across
The sighing sky
Like a laser
Eyes
Pierce the uncaring fog
Genuflecting
His powerful head
Shu gestured

Ahead

Towards the emerald sea
Eyes
Grime with cloudiness
Wings befoul
With filth
Nostrils foul up
With the mephitic stench that distills from the River Mersey
Streaked with swill
It smears with scum
With a scouring of slime
Sledge and shit
Besmeared
The unhallowed soiled sea
Wiped away
Its defilement
In it’s ululating tide

Scoured

The rancid river turns
Into a latrine of excrement
As its flatulent bowels
Bespatter and explode into a turbid tureen of honey-brown
Turds
Dissolve into a sea of salted diarrhea
Leaving
The soiled shorelines with brown skids of crusted land
An estuary
Of encrustation
Importing
Exporting
Excrement into its ulcerated river
Unwiped
Unclean
Back
And forth
It swills
And foams
Into a mouth of halitosis
Were it froths
Into the famished waters of the Irish Sea

The Liver Birds turned their backs
To the leavened sky
Looking to the landscape of a Lancashire

Seaport

It stands on sandstone
That sips up the suds of the sea
Carved with strength
It’s built on an estuary
Were it cocks up its leg
To piss into the Irish Sea
A seaport city
Farting onto the River Mersey
Two hundred and two miles north
West of a cockney

History 101

In a short breath
Of brevity
War
In brief
If war is ever brief
Its port piers peered on
On and on
As shards of shells
Fell
Onto the sand castle shores of shoreline shipyards
Were warlike waves waxed and waned
In the wake of war
Its piers
Shore up into sheltered sandbags of shoreline salvage
As shards of shells
Drop
On and on
Its piers prevailed
As British ruled the waves
The Scouse would shout
WE WILL NEVER BE SLAVES

History 202

In a short breath
Of brevity
Peace
In brief
If peace is ever brief
Shipping
Yards
Of yarn
String and twist
Strands
Of ships
Sail down the River Mersey
An abacus
Of beaded ships
Sail along a reverential river
Blessings counted
On a rosary
Of black and pearly cotton beads
Back and forth
Strung along
Into a channel of sweetness
Steaming
To the crystal blue sea
Under the sugar cane of industry

Over there

Keylara paused in flight
As grandma
Yelled out in delight

In Passing

Unbent
Unbroken
Uncurled
Barrier
Bordered
Bricks
Plump
Line
Uniform
Conform
Horizontal
Rows
Red
White
Black
Yellow
Old gatehouse
Turret
Two
Square
Vertical
Buttress
Meron
Crenel
Cross
Arched
Window
Light
Lancet
Oculus torus
Above
Below
Direct
True
Pivot
Straight
Ahead
Open
Main entrance
Close
Wooden door
Fortress
Template
Mould
Form
Order
Shapes
System

Walton Jail

Prisoner
In Walton Jail
Since 1885
Prisoners wait
To enter the fortress wooden gate
Cubed with fate
Coiled with hate
Prisoners wait
Behind a censorial gate
And contemplate
Confined
In platitude
Last rites
Are served
In solitude
Somber shadows of sinister stripes
Light up the window
Out of site
Time
Tolls
For the morning light
When the dangling noose
Holds the prisoner tight
The trap door is open
The crowds roar
With delight
As the prisoner’s neck is broken
The gate of hell is open
With a heady heart
The crowds depart
Knowing that the prisoner
Has played his last part

Look children

Grandma motions to faceless hands
Waving from the nameless shadows
Of a loophole window
Return their wave
Like your dad once did
When he passed his time away
By playing outside the closed gate of Walton Jail
On a bright summers holiday

Let me tell you another tale…

Grandma’s voice suddenly fractured
Children hold on tight to the Liver Birds neck
Shivering
A disturbing turbulence
Traveled over the Liver Birds struggling bodies
Quills stood on end
As a sudden sharp blade of slicing wind
Sheared

From a sheath of frigid air
Keylara trembled
And quivered in its cutting gust
Frozen
In motion
Keylara spiraled
Down
Down
Down
Into a deep plummet
Struggling
With spirit and strength
She battled with fear
Down
Down
Down
Towards Queens Drive

Grandma

Screamed to them
Over there
It’s Cherry Lane
Oh no
It’s the Walton Hall Curse
This is not an air current
This is
The Bogart
Hold on girls
Shu will break your fall

Shu

Edged his way
Out of the menacing turbulence
With a forceful waving motion
He blasted
Through the icy currents of impregnable air
Like a guided green tomahawk
He swept under Keylaras wavering wings
Waxed
With wing
He did not wane
Under Keylara’s flaying body
Shu was able to stop the downward pull
With titanic strength
He held onto Keylara’s wearisome wings
While his body
Struggled with the dragging current
In an instant

He was able to grip Keylara’s sagging body
And pull her out of her spectral spell
With a tremendous thrust
Shu was able to pass the meadow
On Queens Drive
And veer away from the on coming traffic
On the west side of Cherry Lane

The Black Spot

An ominous location
For unexpected motor accidents

Sweeping
Up to the sky
Now safe in flight
Grandma told the children about the Bogart and the

Walton Hall Curse

Tale
Truth or myth
Its real to the people
Who once lived in the estate of Gilbert de Walton
In the twelfth century
Gilbert had a wild and unruly son
Sending him to Ireland in 1185
With the hope that he would settle his disapproving ways

Richard

Was his name
And he was eighteen
After a year in Ireland
He returned
Still a wild thorn
Bent on cruelty
He pricked with pain

Returning

With a young Irish colleen
Captured
For sadistic pleasure
He tied her to his horse’s stirrup
And made her walk
Run and crawl behind his hired horse
While he bestrides his black beast of burden
Through meadows and streams
With thorn and stubble
Colleens
Footing
Arched with fear

Submitted to pain
Footing
Soled with struggle
Succumbed into submission
The bonded colleen
Fell
Stumbling on a stump
The wild black beast

Fell

The rider in rage
Slew the subordinate
Colleen
Unconscious
Richard hacked her to death
With his bloody steel sword
He severed her neck
As her fair paled body writhed
Into a torturous sack of death

Still

Moving
With a sudden tremor
Richard dragged the warm Colleen
And kicked her into the thirsty stream
Watching
On the bracken bank of the bridle path
Now known as Cherry Lane

Adrift

In a haunting haze
The young alb scent colleen floated
Downstream
Like the beautiful Ophelia
Lost in a mist of entanglement
Her body
Dammed
Leaving
Her splaying strands of auburn hair in floatation
To splay into a snare of snigs and sprigs
Tugging and twisting
Ponds of blood
Haloed her hallowed head
As swift currents
Ravaged
And raped her stinking corpse

Thrown off a rocky red ridge
On the holy grounds of St. Francis De Sales church
God bless him
Taunted and teased
A mop of boys chucked him off
Left him

All alone

With a fractured right arm
He searched for me
Not home

All alone

He found my friend
Jessie
Took him to Walton Hospital
Right away
When I heard
I rushed to Walton Hospital
Without a whimper or a whine
The poor little bugger
Had waited in the emergency room for hours

Five
Hours before they reset his bent arm
It was like a bloody bamboo crossbow
It was
Six weeks into recovery
Were he could now draw and write
With his left arm
He gave me half a hug
A half more than he would give his father

A Little Bit Further

And you can see
A little bit of our Geography
As well as history
Their it is

Aintree

Was the place to be
And to work for William P Hartley
Knighted for philanthropy
He served his community
With geniality
Workers worked
Under an arch of sun
Hartley
Was the beacon for every one
Trademarks
Built on industry
He became the lighthouse for humanity
And that is part of Aintree’s history

The Liver Birds
Swept along the Cheshire line
Sweeping down
Landing
On top of Hartley’s Tower
A four-faced clock that overlooked the landscape
Aintree and Walton
Perched
Onto a purifying plant of processed pectin
Fresh fruit
Permeated the landscape
As it emanated onto the Lancashire Yorkshire Railway Line
Boxes of unrefined sweetness
Fresh fruit
Delivered to Hartley’s warehouse
Were factory workers would preserve the fruits of their labor
While English ladies would preserve their lives
While spreading these fruits onto a pastry scone
In an English Country Garden

Pausing

Grandma remarked
That her mom of eight children
A domestic
Would wash the white bed sheets of the Hartley household
Each week
Treated with respect and kindness
She washed away the blues


Overseeing
Hartley’s jam factory

Captain Jacob

A crackpot
But not crackbrained
Had a cracking good idea
He would manufacture crackers
For armies of people
This monocular Quaker would be up at the crack of dawn
Cloaked in black
Sported in spats
A harsh taskmaster
Who worked
At a cracking pace
Were he would crack down
On
Idleness and Catholics
His factory workers feared him
But not as much as

Farmer Rose’s Daughter

A young cracker
She was
But she was cracked up
Fallen lass
Unwed
With child
Hung herself
On Christmas Eve
At the young age of eighteen
Found
Hanging
Between the wooden frame of the old farmhouse door

Captain Jacob

A crackpot
But was crackbrained
Had a cracking bad idea
He installed the old wooden doorframe
Into the wall of his cracker factory
Crackers
An idea that’s not all cracked up to be
The tale goes like this
On Christmas Eve
Noises crackle and crunch into the cracks of the crackling night
The farmer’s daughter appears as a haunting apparition
Were she incarnated her spirit under the old wooden doorframe
Needless to say
On Christmas Eve
You don’t pull Christmas crackers
Under dear young Rose’s old wooden doorframe

Listen

Thundering
And galloping
Could be heard across Warbeck Moor
Colors
Royal and blue
Fall in a mire of pain
Neigh
People cried
No more
But on and on they go
Steadfast steeds
Stride steeples in a sefton chase
Brook no fear
Beachers Brook
Beckons near
Stretched
In a stampede of sweat and steam
Horses
And men
Fall and fly
In twists of writhing screams
While horses jump over heights of horror
Galloping
Chasing
Grunting
Gulps of grueling air
Astride
On a shattering saddle skin of tearing flesh
Jockeys clutch
Onto a rein of terror
Mangled manes
Strand into streaks of stinking sweat
Crops
Crack into whinnying whimpers of whipping pain
Bridled
In blinkers of black
The racehorse whines on
Over
And over
Beck and hedge
Jumping
Jumping
Over and over
Falling
Falling
Over and over
Breech and breeches
Bounce on diverts of dung
Shards of shine
Splash and splatter
As shitty hooves
Pick up
Matter
And clatter
On
On
And on

In mud and muck
Racing
Pacing
Into a packing hacking pace
All to win a bloody steeplechase

The Grand National

A lottery of shame
Leaving the tipsters to gain
And the horses in pain
All in all
Prince Monolula would say
Aintree’s Grand National is the steeplechase of the year
So let’s celebrate with a stout pint of Walkers brown beer

Cheers

Cracker crumbs
Fell from Shus beak
Fluffing off his feathers
Preened and cleaned
Keylara washed the marmalade off her beak
In the downspout of a downpour
Showers stopped
Wings in a yawn
Tail to the wind
A shake and a flutter
Turn your back
On time
To leave Harleys tower
To visit prisoners who have lost their power
To

Walton Jail


Birds eye view
Looking down
Straight across
Inner
Outer
Curtain
Walled
In
Square
Sharp
Corners
Confined
Compound
Surround
Wall

Will pledge protection
As it absolves the spirits from their confessions
Under its shelled cupola
A medley of phantasmagoric figures
Will appear
From their masquerade
They will join us under a reflected mirror of incandescent
Stars
Under the spotlight
The Harlequin will unmask the Harlequinade
Looking into the incarnadine ball
He will script your mind
To the phantoms of the past
He will incant the present
While spiriting you to the future
Listen
To the doppelgangers of the darkness
And enter
Into the labyrinth of light
Were your spectral spirit will explore
The spectra of life

Let the Play Begin

Act One

Of the tetra logy
Summer of the Son

Spotlights

Scene One

Under a marquee of moonlight
Stars script onto the silent stage
The white light
Unfolds to the whispers of the wind
The house curtain opens
As the tableau of time comes to life
The stage is set
And the scene takes place
On the white porch
Were a medley of characters
Will cast their timeless shadows
Under the moonlight of a midsummer’s night

Brown buttered gangly legs
Cascade
Over chalked white railings

Miasmic marionettes
Dangled
In a dance of merriment
Laughing faces
Hide
Behind cold classes of pink lemonade
Frosted to their face
Velcroed to their mouth
Gulping
Gurgling
And bubbling
Into a pink pool of crunching ice

Lost

In their laughter
She seeked refuge
With her fulvous cat
Rescued
From her tormenting twosome
She held onto her mottled friend
Nestled
Into the purring beat of her metronome heart
Reassured
She cooled off
With a tall class of ice cold lemonade
Sitting in silence
Her older sister and brother
Attempted to mollify their pestilent behavior
Towards her
In a diverting gesture
Her minatory brother cheerfully placed ice cubes into
The inside pockets of his cherubic cheeks
Like a bloated chipmunk he bantered across the white porch
Like a deranged rodent
He stopped
He surveyed
As his amiable eyes motioned towards the white wicker
A rocking chair
That rocked before the American Bandstand
And before the Comets rocked around the clock
A whimsical smile beamed across his mischevious face
A rubicund beacon
A forewarning
That he was going to lampoon someone
With his nimble-witted mischief
Flecked
With blue and green
His eyes flickered
Into a flight of fantasy
Eyes fixed
And locked
Under a visor of flaxen hair
He stood close to the white wicker chair
With a quixotic smile
He mounted his rocking Rozinante
Seated on the panel
He brandished a near by broom stick
His lance
Pointed towards his younger sister
He rocked and charged
His white steed towards her

Drooling
In the corner of the furnished shadows
A large furry mound of chestnut curled into wattles of panting flesh
Seeing
Mans best friend
He beckons him
Awakened
From his slothful sleep
He unfurled his bloodshot eyes
From the shutters of the darkness
And with a lethargic stride
He lumbered across the porch towards his woeful master
Like the loyal Sancho
He was secured into his squire’s intrepidity
The four footed
But not so sure footed
The doleful beast
Stood by his master’s side
Momentarily
Until
He falls
And folds
Into a twirling tawny ball
Of leaded wrinkles
Asleep

Again

The woeful Knight
With his lance couched
He rocked his Rozinate
Once again towards his little sister
Tired of his disturbing antics
And no longer amused
She leapt from the shadows of the stoop
Shocking her congenial cat

From the security of cushioned lap
With flagging arms extended
She whirled them about
Like the bellowing sails of a moving windmill

The young knight is caught off guard
He falls
Off his rocker
Tumbling
From his rallying
This audacious trifler
Rolls
Onto a sleeping Sancho
Unable
To get up onto his leaden legs
He was encumbered
By an awakened and startled beast
Sancho
Was now bestriding the young knights legs
Like a hugh colossal horse
The bloodhound shook his large furrowed head
While discharging missiles of dripping drool
From his slavering jowls
Side to side
East to west
North to south
Salvos of saliva
Showered
Upon his master
Drivels of drooping drool foamed onto his young masters face
Sleeping
Sancho
Was not amused by his masters knight-errantry
However
Loyalty overcame his master’s misguided misfortune
Therefore
The bloodhound rewarded his woeful knight
With a lingering languishing slobbering lick
This washed the risible smile
From the young knaves blushing face
The little sister laughed
While the oldest sister watched
His brother’s parody with fraternal amusement
And like the beautiful Dulcinea del Toboso
She smiled upon his youthful knavery
Atoning
For her younger brothers buffoonery
She walked towards her baby sister

And gave her a reassuring hug
At the same time

The French Doors Opened

Onto the white porch
From the kitchen doors entrance
Two elderly women appeared
Into the inviting shade of the cupola
Breaking away from her older sister
She bolted
Like a young spry foal
Towards her visiting grandma
She greeted
Her with arms outstretched
She held onto her tight
Like a tighting tourniquet
She twisted her gangly arms around grandma’s wide soft waist
A warm smile
A slight gasp
Came from her English grandma
Released
The longing pressure
Eased from her loving arms
Hugged
With emotion
She savored her young granddaughter’s joy
Bundled
Together
With the adage of age
Bowed
And Bonded
To the illuminant immortality of youth
Cheerfully
The other two grandchildren glowed
In the shadow of her incumbent light
Shadows shifted
Into the dappled shade of the white porch
Once again
The white wicker returns to an old rocking rocker
Cradling grandma

In Time

To see her portly sister
Escorted

To an inviting deck chair
The young knave
Sits his Grande Dame
Next to her royal highness
Grandma
Sat next to her “ Little Bugger “ of a grandson
As she laughed at his chivalric
Gesturing
And jollying
Much like the antics of her own son
Who was once his age

Settling In

Like royalty
Under the shade of the Sumac tree
The oldest daughter appeared
With two class tankers of cold frosted beer
Placing the drinks
Awkwardly onto the class table
She gestured
And with the aura
Of a celebrated actress
She gave them her celestial smile
And exited to the wings of the white porch

Aside

Striped
From its pervious white gown
It had waited
Disrobed
With the suns penetration
It had started to desiccate
Leaving
Rivulets of melting water
To carry its cargo of crystalline beads
Down
Its frigid shaft
Transient pearls
Trickling
Trembling
Drippling
Pebbling
Droplets
Meandering
Sailing
Across the sheer surface

Of its translucent membrane
Reaching
Its glacial edge
It falls
Into an amber abyss of foaming froth
Were it waits
For the parched lips
Of
A woman’s

Hand

Quickly appears
And grasps the cold beer
From the approaching lips
Of her mischievous grandson
In chastisement
She held onto him
With affection
She smiled
With disapproval
She held onto him
Together
The moment is shared
Smiles and hugs
Mark the matrix of motherhood

Moving

Into the dappled shade
She nudged her way
Into the glow of her approving
Grandchildren
Bathed
In warm shadows
Grandma held onto her amber orb
As she held court

The Storyteller

Grandma unfolds the echo of time
And like a flawless seamstress
She will spin
The yarns into tales
Stories
Will extrude from the threads

Of your fathers childhood
From the spindle of time
She will frame
And notch his life
With braids of fiber
She will twist
Weave
And draw out his winding story
Threaded filaments
Cut away
Piece by piece
Stitched and knotted
Into the open weave of his tailored fabric
Seams
Cross-stitched
Together
Embroidered
With the alb coat braid of a natural fiber
Patterned parts
Pieced
Together
We will follow the blueprint of you father’s childhood

Grandma has become a Cordero Storyteller
And like the Pueblo children
Her grandchildren will be her clinging listeners
Molded into myth
She will bond them with her tale
As she becomes the Storyteller of Cordero

Listen

To a concord of sweet sounds
Six bells
Chimed from the red sandstone church on the hill
Walton on the Hill
A township
Built on wells of water
And a bold river that borders its boundaries
With vessels of floating steel
Foghorns floated
Towards the Irish Sea
As the midwife delivered your dad
In the wake of its call

A large green Liver Bird
Watches
Under a blitz of bombs
Were he sees its deliverance
As he watches over its birth
He protects the port
Under a baptism of spray
He watches over its flock
Observing the tides of change
He watches the ships sail
Into the tireless shadows of a seamless sea
From its eyrie
He will illuminate the darkness
With a beacon of light
He will watch over the changing tides of

Time

Swaddled into spring
The midwife folded him
Into my open arms
As the dawn of the new day
Whitewashed the blackout of the night

The Liver Bird

Perked the curiosity of the young grandson
More so than the birth of his father
What a gross name for a bird
Grandma smiled
It was not a glandular organ
It was pronounced
Like
Saturday Night
Live
Err
Is human
To make a mistake
His older sister explained
Once again
Live-er
With a reassuring hug
Received
With an embarrassing smile
He continued
To ask how many Liver Birds

There were

Two

Perched like Lords
On top of the Royal Liver Building
They while their time away on top of
Great George
Who had a clock face bigger than
Big Ben
Who lived over two hundred miles from the northwest of the island
One Liver Bird looks across the port
One Liver Bird looks across the city
Each with a sword-bladed plant
In their eagle like beak
Unlike a dove
They were more like King Johns eagle
But they were very large and green

Imagine

We can fly
On those two Liver Birds
Two on one
Two on the other
With exuberance
The little sister asked
Can we name them?
Grandma captured her smile
Like the Liver Birds caught her imagination
Of course
You can name them
The grandson shouted out
With excitement
Mine shall be named Shu
And the two sisters yelled out
Ours shall be call Keylara
And our brother will fly with Grandma
With enthusiasm
Together
They all asked Grandma
Were shall we go

We will go on a reconnaissance flight
Uh

Exclaimed the young wide eyed grandson
A magical mystery tour
Sounded much better
Because they’re bright faces lit up like magic
Our flight
Will be our sojourn
We will take a journey
Into our imagination
We will fly
On the whimsical wings
Of a chimerical muse
Let’s begin
Our magical tour
Of reverie
And visit the childhood
Your father left behind

In Flight

Air rushed over them
Clouds
Parted and patterned into dreams
Eyes peeked
Beyond the white castle clouds
And into the blue windows of the world
The sun was warm
The air was calm
There were no dragons to slay
There were no goblins to fight
But there was a treasure to be found
And it was filled with the gems of childhood
Memories
Opened up
To poetic pinnacles

Dreams

Rose out of the mist
Voiding the valleys
They flew high
In the distance
On the horizon
Their dad’s childhood started to reappear
Eyes opened
Holding on tight
To their imaginary friend
They flew

Into the welcoming world of fantasy

Passing

Over Breeze Hill
Shu would fly over slates of gray quarry stone
Were terraced houses stood in rows of red
Shu would glide on yeasts of air
That rose from Taylor’s Bakery
On Rice Lane
Shu landed
And perched on Dunnies Gilded Gate
Keylara followed
Into the sweet scented smell of Schofields Lemonade factory
Landing
On a perch of steel
Watching
With nostrils of steam
She sees

A Green Wooded Barrow

Of fresh fruit and vegetables
Stacked
In pyramids of color
Embalmed in a burnish of glazed light
A touching sight
And a mummies delight
Is found in

The Green Grocers

Deft fingers
Waltzed though a meadow of green
Tapping
The cantelope
Reeling
In time for fresh cut flowers
To stalk the stalls with their scent
In readiness for a Sunday window parlor display
Elegance

Grace

Would serve and wake up
King Edward
Who slept in its turret of darkness

Tumbling
Crumbling
Rumpling
And mumbling
When awakened from his black eyed sleep
Leading
A falling disarray of spuds into an open trap
Captured
Scooped up into a scuttle of steel
Weighed in
Tipping the scale
Count down
Decision made
Roll them into the shopping bag
And carry them out

To the Fishmonger

Who lures
You to his window display
A pallet of Cod
Gawks your way
Open-mouthed
It scales the light
Hooking your eye
As you pass it by
Thinking to yourself
In a positive way
My God
Sorry to say
You will not be my catch on this holy day

Friday

Fresh Bass
Hung around with Herring
Smoked Kippers
Beached
Onto white slaps of salted ice
Stretched
To the limit
Flat out
In their bronzed tan skin scaled suits
Sunning next to silver slates of shellfish
Mussels

Mustered into tiny tubs of crystal salt
Ice
Would cool the mussels
And cockles would warm
Your heart

With Love

Sayers would bake you
Fresh oven bread
Cornish golden pasties
Hot meat pies and flaky sausage rolls
Dressed
In a corpulent front window of melting gold
Cream and chocolate
Trifled with color
Cakes decorated the window
Like an every day Christmas tree
Were your dads glowing face would lighten up
With a growling of anticipation

A Mundane Event

Becomes a social outing
As woman pop in
And out of little shops
Weighed down
With an uneven bag
Waiting to be filled
With the balance of the day

The Scales Would Tip

At the Butchers shop
Under a striped red canvas awning
Starched in white
Stained in red
Vested in crème
Striped in blue
Cherry in cheek
Pink in skin
Crisp in grin
Eyes are blue
The portly butcher
Is ready
To serve you

Fresh meat of the day
Rack of lamb
For the hot roasting pan
Black puddings
Soaked in blood
Hanging down
Looking good
Under the parsley shade
Of canvas green
Tripe with words
The portly butcher stands by his sausage machine
Minced with mutton
Weighed on scales
Wrapped with meat
Pounds exchanged
Over
A sawdust
Floor
Time to leave the roly-poly butcher
Through the brass bell ringing door

Outside

Smiling
Arm in arm
Women linked
Into a chatting walk
Headscarves
Wrapped around
The gossip of the day
Filling their shopping bags
With the dinner of the day

And in Dawns Early Light

Nostrils
Steamed with smoke
From a drudging chestnut mare
Carting
In a slow canter
It drags its dray
Filled with cold steel churns of fresh morning milk
Its large wooden steel rim wheel
Rattles on and on
Into a musk of mire
Along a windy gravel path
To a distant spire

Heseltine’s horse heaves up husks of hurling dust
Clattering
Hooves resonate
Into the misty morning fog
Passing
Through the old lodge of Walton Hall Hospital
Were it will make its final delivery
And like a gray elusive phantom
It will slowly disappear

Into a Dank Drizzle of Darkness

Bell top Bobbies
Uniformed in navy blue
Would appear
From under the alms of two bloodhounds
Were they would exit from the old Rice Lane Police Station
A holding cell
Were tears of gas
Once put little children’s pets to sleep

Aside

A kittenish friend
Tippy
Black like coal
A gift
From a little lonely old lady
Who lived in an anonymous terrace house
Dark dank and depressing
Were only a litter of kittens and a hot coal fire brightened

Her poor house

Was lit up with poverty
A face on a faceless street that led to nowhere
Greeted with a kitten
We entertained with a good-bye
Leaving
The old woman under a shawl of darkness
And Tippy under a soft talcum of white powdered snowflakes
We placed the tiny kitten under your dad’s wooly grey pullover
Palpitation
Purred with love
As your dad snuggled the little black kitten into his warm heart

At aged five
His first pet
Companion
In childhood
He held onto Tippy
With a loving rampageous smile
Childhood ended
With a lamenting tear
When a dear old companion was put to sleep
I cried for days in the alms of two stoned bloodhounds
With tears of tea

In the Grocery Shop

Were picture cards
Brewed from Brooke Bond Tea
Birds
Collected in leaves of tea
Holding onto his Robinson Golliwog
Your dad would sit on an old empty wooden tea box
Steeped in thought
He would pour over his bird collection
Of Brooke Bond Bird cards
While the purveyor of bulk food
Would take the stamps
From my mealy ration book
Tearing them out
He rationed my life
Into a canister of sugar and salt
Up
You
Would leave
Knitting your way

To the Andersons

A haberdashery of happiness
A tiny shop
Were a stumpy dumpy seamstress
Would knit the street together
With her colorful yarns of yesterday
We would weave
Down the road

To Turnpenny the Apothecary

Who measured
Life into grams of laughter

Stiff
Upper lip
Starched with pain
He dispensed gossip
With ponderable penury
He served
Blue bottles of milk and magnesia
With acidity
Yucky
Elsie the assistant
Loose
Lovely lips
Rouged with red
She dispensed love
With her pepserdent smile
She served
Puce bottles of malt and milk
With sweetness
Yummy
This scrumptious young strumpet
Sorry
I meant crumpet
Would give your dad a teasing wink
As he left the chemist shop
With a stupefied smile
He tripped

Into the Chandlers

Aunt Sally
Served you with a heady smile
Fragrance flickered
Throughout the sweet-smelling shop
Soap
Polish
Embalmed
The pungent shop
With the swathe of redolence
Potpourri
Bric-a Brac
Flotsam and jetsam
Wafted the shop into a sea of scented disarray
Bamboo canes
Bundled
Your dad with joy
Canes for crossbows
Canes for arrows

Canes for fishing
Rods
Were often bottomed off
With my old laddered nylon stockings
Often
I caught the little bugger using my precious new nylons
For his fishing

Rods

For punishment
Bamboo canes
Ruled the waves in British schools
And many a time your father felt the swish of its thrust
As he bottomed up to the teacher’s wrath

Sandstone and Brasso
Entertained the entrance to my empire

Aside

Brasso
For my big knockers
That knocks on the entrance door
Shine the brass
Like a good Lancashire lass
Scrub the steps
That lead to the door
Knees in prayer
Arse in the air
Sanding
Stoning
The steps bare
So passing neighbors won’t stare
As I wash the bloody steps
With my arse up in the air

The Sweet Shop

Windows
Iced with mint
Chocolates
Nestles with cream
Fry’s
Frost with peppermint
Black Magic
Pours from a volcanic display of magnetic sweetness
Trays of Cadburys
Erupt into an emporium of Turkish
Delight
Meets the children
As they dared to pass the sirens of sweetness
That glazed this window of tempting saccharinely

Melting

Into the Newspaper Shop

Few fags
Woodbines
Players Please
Graven
A
Daily Mirror
Tit
Bit
News of the World
For tabloid lives
And a reefer of Gold
Is a cigarette to behold

Quick

Into Sayers
For a few palm cakes for cheese and ham sarnies
And a yellow custard tart
For the old fart

11:30 a.m. on the Street

Corner

Close to Walton’s Town Hall
Across from the Old Brown Cow
Close to Church Lane
A doleful group of dour Dockers
Enter
The Rice House Pub
Bitter
Douse the scouse with a draught of beer
Daily
Downcast Dockers
Drift
Dart into the alehouse
Drinking
Darling a pint of draught
Double Diamond “works wonders works wonders so drink one today”
Doled out
With a dram of Dwyer’s
On the dole
Tracking the odds
With pint sized dreams

Screaming

To the ringing
Shouts of the Rice Lane School bell
Dinnertime
Glamorous scrambling school children
Scuff and scuffle
Out of there shuffling seats
Garnished
In a uniform of garish green
They scud out of the school
Into a shrilling scrum of stentorian shrieks
Yelps of yaks
Yapping in yowls of yells
Scuttling
And snuffling
Onto a savory street of seasoning smells
Whiffs
Wafts of fish
Float from Sumner’s chippy
Deep-fried
Fillets of Fish
Bask in a tanning gage
Of boiling bubbling batter
Chips ahoy
Shouted the salty school boy
Fish cakes
Mashed green peas
Floating
In an amber pool of vinegar
Salt
Please
Wait
I have other fish to fry
Creasy chips
Enveloped into a steamy hot Sunday Sun
Saturated
Into the News of the World
Warmed
Wrapped up
Into the bosom of Tit-Bit lives
Imprinted
Into tabloid Times
Soaking up the lard
With the Echo
Of gossipy People

Ending

A Gossipy Day
On Dunnies Gilded Gate
Shu and Keylara
Were about to leave the lodge gate
Once the grand entrance gate to a zoological garden
Now a rubber plant
Without a green tree
Now Dunlop’s tire factory

Tired of chatting and stalking the shoppers
The tireless Liver Birds
Soared
Into the sky
Looking down

Onto the Shinio Factory

Tired of working and ready for the pub
The cheerless workers
Polished off their time
Clocked out
With the blues
A collar of blackness
Circled the Delco soap factory
Washing up their time
Clocked out
Looking for their suds
Blue-collar workers headed home
Towards Queen’s Drive Public Baths
To bathe
And scrub away the pores of poverty
As their life was not levity
Because poverty was their gravity

Below

School children enter the Public Baths
Uniformed
Two by two
Columns of classes
Chat
Side by side
Holding onto their white towels and black cozies
Rolled and jammed
Into their weekly school swimming instruction

Aside

Turning to her grandchildren
And that’s were your dad learnt how to swim so well

Monday Morning

Launders the sky
With lines of linen
Starched
In sheets of white
Clouds
Rinse in a wash of blue
Sunlight filters
Into a lather of gray
Clouds
Squeeze out the light
As the Liver Birds
Roll them aside
Hanging high in a sheet of white
The Liver Birds look down
With children’s delight

What a sight

Onto a mead of green turf grass
Manicured into lawns
Squared
Edged and bordered with gullies
Dotted with white
Bolts of black
Streak across short blades of mossy grass
Bowing under a barrage of bashing bowling black balls
Big Black Balls
Bullied
The little black ball
Abandoned
Alone
In a patch of green

Aside

Once again
Grandma turned to her grandchildren
Your father
And his mates
Would often rescue that little black ball
Only to be chased away by the little old white pensioners
Little bugger

Dressed in white
Clouds
Wave across the Liver Birds
As they flew into a sun drenched sky
Heading over

Walton Hall Park

Once the residency of the gentry

Victorian houses
Once promenaded this public park
With pillars of prestige
The public now enters
Its bridle path
With its bounteous gardens of botanical blooms

Dressed

In his Sunday white short pants silk suit
Your dad would peddle his large red tricycle
Down it’s never ending pathway
With his debonair suited dad
And his fashionable beautiful mum
Me
Panting and running after him
Little bugger

Later on

When he was much older
In the Big park pond
He would pull his oar
As he rowed the wooden rowboats
In a frenzy of fun
Watching the birds
Cute little bum
Chasing white tennis balls on the run

On the smaller of the two park ponds
The Little pond
Had a convoy of flotilla
Were little model sailboats
Would sail and compete
Under the collective command of riparian landlubbers
Canvassed with sail
These portable yachts would crisscross the elfin pond
To the delighted cries of young and old
Around the pond
Like specks of sunshine gold
Bantams
Tossed and sailed on the whims and wisps of whispering winds
The Lilliputian sailboats skimmed the pond
With silken sleekness
They were ceaseless as they raced across the pond with prevailing pride


Bamboo fishing rods
Would net red breasted stickle backs
Frogs and tadpoles
Caught in a hosiery of nylon
Released into an empty Roberson jam jar
Beached into a sizable fish tank
To be harbored in your dad’s bedroom

In time

Tiny tadpoles
Would turn into mini black frogs
Overnight
Your dad’s bedroom would be plagued
With swarms of bloody black hopping little frogs
Needless to say he did not give them a nightcap
As they hopped
Jumped
Out
For freedom

That was the last time
The little bugger had live creatures in his bedroom

Grandma
Glimpsed into the direction of her eldest grandchild
A hidden smile
Reflected
To the time
When her four year old granddaughter
Took her pet
Newt
To bed with her
Wake up time
Newt
Was a shriveled prune
Mummified with the heat of her womb

Summers

Would stroll in
With concerts in the park
Stars would serenade
Under a band shell of brass
Music
Lovers
Would harmonize
Under a melody of moonlight
The baton would rise
To the music of the night
As lovers lie
Under a starry sky
Ignoring the canvas
As the audience passes them by

Concerts

Also attracted children
Summer talent shows
Were the pops of the summer
Became the songs of the day
Que Sera Sera

Quick
Over there
Grandma pointed

Walton Hospital

That’s were your dad spent the night in paris
Of plaster of course
The children laughed
At grandma’s sick joke

Bullied he was

Festooned
Into a fluted garland of red
Posies
Ring around the Rosie
Pocketful of posies
All fall down
As a musical winds chime
And breeze across their petticoats of yellow
Sunflowers
Clap together in a gusto of wind
Breathless breezes
Blow and whistle
For an encore
Rosie bows
Under a grotto of petalled rays

A seat of railway ties step
Up to a drooling dogs dwelling
Carpeted
With a welcoming mat of wild strawberries
The large black bear figure sleeps

Under

The watchful eye of an ever expanding wall of pale blue
Morning Glories
Which patterns her pen with a heavenly hue of olive green
Vine
Which weaves its dewy web
Into the nomadic shadow of a moonlit laced fence
Linked
To the outside world
The slothful Newfoundlander stretches its webbed paws
Into a nodding world of nocturnal dreams

Next to the yellow-bricked house

Ferns
Feather the foundation of the north wall
Fronds
Cascade into the sleepy showers of crested green arches
Pink Violets snuggle under their virginal touch
Arched
Under a tilted lilt of dropping dripping dew
Asleep
Hostas
Host the house
Collecting
Under their open palm
As Impatient plants hang around
Dolefully for drops of doling dew

Shades of the day
Become the blinds of the night
Drawn into the darkness of dusk
The flowers rest
In a lyrical spray of halcyon mist
Sprinkled
Showered
In its opalescent vapor of lustrous light
Pellucid beads crystallize into gems of cloudless dew
Linked with luminance
Forming
Into droplets of permeable pearls
Strung together into strands of silver
Clasping
Onto powdery petals of saturn light
Sailing onto a verdant pond of silken green
Transforming into an idle chain of idyllic illumination
Luminous beads strand into a languid bay of periodicity
Trickling
Falling
Slowly
And haltingly
Into a Halcyon pool of languorous moonlight
Vaporized
Into a nectarous mist of flirtatious fragrance

Flowers

Lilt and languish
Into the mist of the morning
Massaged into the blue of the night
Desiccated dry with a breathtaking breeze
Touched
With sensuality
A stirring breeze strokes its moist petals into a floret of passion
Moist with aromatic sweetness
The sultry flower twists and turns into licentious pleasure
Massaged into madness
The euphoric breeze continues to mount the frenzied flower
Into a rhythmic state of ejaculated exhaustion
Collapsing
Into the heat of the night
Their petals droop
Onto an ambrosial bed of dampness
Were they rest under a landscape of luminance
Asleep
Under the halcyon lull of a starry sky
Bedded down
To the nocturnal sounds of the sultry

Night

Awakens to the chirping of crickets
Who tune their wings to an orchestrated opus
Hoping onto its padded podium
The portly bullfrog would entertain his nocturnal abode
With a rendition of orotund croaks
And with a splash of splendor
Would disappear
Into the octaves of the night

A dark object

Overlooks this polyphonic group
In a masquerade of darkness
It hunches into a nest of chameleon branches
Scouting
The horizon like a black raven
It observes
Through its binocular mask
Eyes
Light up
Like two beaded beacons
Fixed light
Searching for prey
Floating eyes
That row on a sea of darkness
Navigating the landscape with precision
It shimmies down its wooden halyard
Scurrying
Across a wavering wave of silver grass
It boards a heap of trifling trash
Scavenging
Into a cargo of treasure
Dick Turpin of the night
Finding its booty
It scampers and scurries into a mass of maples
Quickly
Before
Scylla scuppers his supper
Camouflaged
Under a canvas of flagging leaves
It blesses it’s boodle with its ceremonial cleansing
Sitting
In its vigilant platform it devours its supper

In silence

Indifferent
To the passionate heat of the night
An insatiable seamy hermit of solipsism
Sucks up to its Host
Consuming its hospitality
It devours the host
To survive the day
In retreat
It slinks off
In a silky slime of slick silver
It will coil into a corporeal shell of sordid dirt
Safe in its soporific shell
It lives inside a benighted wall of sophistry
Isolated from the world
We’re its vulnerability is protected
Under a veneer of compost

Alone

It lives
With darkness
As it’s only companion

Flicking lights
Flex the night
With a spark
And a flash
Sprites
Lost
In an apparition of hallucination
Disappearing
Loons
In a fathom of vapor

Searching

Patrolling the garden
In its black and white uniform
Were it leaves
A definitive trail
That no one wishes to follow
Exiting the garden
To leaden whispers
This obscure phantom of the night
Leaves in an air of malodor
Only the threatening buzz
Of a dissipated mosquito
Dare follow the phantom of the night

A divisible wind

Swept into the heart of darkness
Overcome
With the anabatic anthem of youth
The sounds of silence
Swelled
Into the sweltering heat of the night

Uprising

Sweet scents surface the waves
On a blood-red band of silver stars
It fanned
In a fanfare
Of descending drafts
In a downwind
Its draconian coldness
Joined
A black mass of oppressed air
Caught
In an antinomy of cross currents
It struggled
Under its emancipated chain of incubated pressure
The inchoate draft subverted the blackness into submission

Divided

Dragging
And resisting
The draft would assimilate and dispense
Into a formation of jellied clouds of menacing gray
Hovering
Into a hazardous haze
It vaporized the searing landscape
From its baptism of fire
It cleansed the dank dwellings with its mist of vapor

Downcast

The drifting draft dispatched into the ethereal landscape of dissolution
Leaving
The sounds of silence
To swell into the darkness of the night

With the uprising
Of sweet scented music
Subverting the heat
A cool wave of bands surf the air
With the anabatic anthem of youth

Voices

Blowing in the wind
A trumpet
Reawakens into the somnolent sky
A distant echo
Weeps across a hushed mist
A stranger on a shore
It saunters towards the soundless sea of song

Distant

Voices
Tinged with the heart of darkness
Residual kinship
Overflowed
Into hops of resin
Were memories are grilled
On a barbeque of ashes
Rekindled
Thoughts spark from the embers of time
Were experiences would alight
With the flames of anger
Mortality was tinged with sadness
As the youth were engulfed into a waxen ball of fire
Falling
Like Icarus
Into a seabed of tropical death

Lost

Youth
Skimmed and summoned
To the nations hearth
Simmering
And stewing
In a sizzling skillet of sine qua non
Served
And sent away to a distant land
A living lottery
Selected
Singed
Scorched
And torched
Into an inferno of fire
Now
Charred
And cremated
Into a baptism of fire
To be cradled
Into a crematorium bag
Zip-coded
Onto the cranes of Ibycus
To lie
In state
Under a flagging shroud of honor
Lost
In Daedlus mist

Crying

Cranes would take up
The poets laureate
Reviewing
Their passage with poetic justice
Inked in red
Blotted in death
A Fountainhead of idealism
Capped
With the death of youth
Leaving
The antiquity of time
To rewrite their epitaph
On a cold granite of blackness

Celluloid pages

Overlay the music of yesterday
Tonight
Bulbous bursts of laughter erupt
Across the waken sky
Once again
Aquarian voices sing their apocalyptic anthology
Of rock and roll

Music

Would recall
A summer place
Were they would once sit on the deck of a distant bay
And joke about their hot fun
In the summer time
On a Georgian bay

Smoke
Billowed into their flowering clouds
Mushroomed
Powdered
Ash smoldered onto the ember of the cinerary night
Music faded
Into a tie-dye sky
While their wood stock whittled
Into a charcoal grave of elusive memories
Rocked into sleep
Voices harmonized
Into a cappella of farewells
Droned
Into the Cicadas call

Silence

Crawled under its miasmic moonlight
Leaving
Sultry shadows
To spell out the nights humidity

Fading

In the dusk
The night brushes away the heat
As it sweeps the silence into the dawdling dawn

Lost

In its Elysian elegy
It weeps across a hushed mist
Like a stranger
On a distant shore
It saunters across soundless waves

Leaving

Its haunting call
To trumpet across a somnolent sky
Lost
In its ethereal haze
Drifting into a draconian

Silence

Crept upon the darkness
Like shadows stretching out the night
The yellow-bricked house stands in a river of moonlight

Alone

In the past
A silhouette of time
Lulled into the present
Burnished
In moonlight
It filters its insomniac light
Onto the darkling objects
That sleeps
Under an overlay of sleepless shadows

A family

Illuminated
Under an inlay of luminous light
Stirring
And shifting
Under an illusion of dawns darkness
Were shedding shadows
Fade
Like the Cicada
Oblivious to the world

Outside

Like an ephemeral poacher
I come to light
As I incarnate my spirit
Into the sanctum of their lives

Alone

I stand in their past
In my attempt to atone

The future

I reflect
As I observe the past
Sitting
Under the strong burl branch
Of a sagacious white oak
Arched into its narwhal bole
Camouflaged
Under a canopy of silver green leaves
My eyes adjust
To the leaden light
As they follow the pathway
To the yellow-bricked house

Stopping

At the white porch
A soft haven of blue bathes it with moonlight
Under
Its band shell of stars
The white porch stirs under a stellar of starlight

The White Porch

Is festooned with crayola
Colors flute the white railings for its birthday celebration
The white porch

Hanging
Like a cluster of wrathful grapes
Fermenting
Into the blackness of the night
Soaking
In its skeleton
It marinates into the moonlight

Aside

Fallen
A granite birdbath
Lies
Cracked with time
A broken shrine
For visiting Cardinals
A ritual
Once filled
With a baptismal of water
A cantata
Once used for celebratory absolution
Now
Gone
With the suns dance of fire

In front

A graceful congregation of White Fox
Lilt
Tilt and wilt
Under the dying chorus of the Cardinals eulogy

Ascending

A hill
Once green
Now parched
A choir of eloquent red and white delphiniums
Bow their etiolated petals with emollient celebration
But tonight
The granite font was filled with an ephemera of emptiness

At the far end
Of the garden
A Norway Maple
Supports a stilted campanile
Shingled
With shifting shadows

It scaffolds the darkness under a pollarded bower of leaves
Framed
Into the moonlight
It becomes a chameleon of time
Gnarled and twisted
Its Hugh trunk braces its knotted bough
Onto the cedar shakes of a child's tree house
Like a Barosaurus
Its felicitous neck rests under a moonlit canopy of epidermal leaves
Waiting
For the young children
To peel off the darkness
With their peal of laughter

To the east

Of the cedar tree house
A commemorative Red Oak stands
Tall and gangly
It capes
At playful Pansies
Who often bask in the mid-day sun

In the corner

Shrinking
Violets
Wilt and wait
For the cool night to appear
While wanton wallflowers wait
To be picked
And placed
Into a Waterford crystal vase of cold crystalline water

Center

To the right
Of the vegetable garden
Two
Warring apple trees
Stand
Alone
Like two old curmudgeons
Guarding
A small patch of abandoned vegetables
Once inhabited by an invasive family of downy grey rabbits
Now
That the enemy has gone
They stand

Alone

In silence
Decorated
With a medallion of silver-bronze knots
The two wily veterans bow
Their amputated limbs over a diminishing legion of fallen poppies
Once a glorious badge of red courage
Now
A wilting carnage of carmine
Petals

Falling

Onto a swath of decaying Daffodils
Were warm whispering winds
Have gathered their leafage into a black bed of decaying death
Bedded with soil
Cradled in sleep
Winds
Chime
In the silence of the night
Where Canterbury bells lament
Into the peelings of the moon
Where small gatherings of Forget-Me-Nots
Huddle together
In a purple sea of lavender
Were Boltonias shed their tears of dew

Moving

Huddled
In a slow steady breeze
Dusty Millers
Salute the stars
In a wake of silver
Black-eyed Susan’s wave
As they parade down the leaden pathway
Under
A stellar of ticket-taped stars
They march into the waxen moonlight
Where their bold shadows fade into a silken mist of silver
Dust

The south

East of the yellow-bricked house
A kindergarten of Butterfly Begonias
Gather
Together
In a pod of posies
Watching
A Circus Rose perform
In her pinafore of petals
Sequined
Under a silken banner of spangled stars
Pirouetting
Under a starlit tent of a sleepy sunset

The White Porch
Summer
Time: 1:00 A.M.


Midsummer
A flotilla of stars
Sail out of their blue harbor
Sparkling
Dazzling
Twinkling
A regalia of starlight
Appears over a regatta of silent houses
Massed with maple
They canvas the boulevards
In a wave of green
Hoisted into darkness
Houselights
Flag and flicker
Into a stellar of dancing light
Leaving
Listless leaves
To heave
In the wake of the heat

Slumbered in sleep
Blanketed in dreams
Bathed in moonlight
Protected
In a silent gauze of naked heat
Cocooned
In a bedraggled sheet of salted sweat
Bodies sheer swells of sweat
Onto a sebaceous sheet of silver satin
Basted
With perspiration
Bodies
Simmer in a rotisseries of saturated sleep
Until
A panacea of cooling fragrance
Yawns
Across their balmy bodies
Succumbing them into a sinuous sojourn of somnolence

Outside

A Verdure of panting leaves
Drape the house
Under a parasol of mirroring shadows
Drooping
With droplets of dew
Weeping
For dawns redemption

Below

Under the depth of darkness
Sedulous roots
Search
Scout and seduce the secular soil
For its consecrated water

Above

Steadfast trunks stand tall
With stoic crosses that branch out
From an armory of steel-gray bark
Lanced
With a green shield of foliage
They stave off the fiery dragon
Dragooned
Into a purgatorial pyre of wood
They stand under a beacon of light
Marooned
In a mooring of moonlight
Alone
On a moribund mound of moraine
Parched
On sparing straw
Blades of grass now graze on droplets of dew
As empty trunks fill their viviparous veins
With hope

Darkness sprays
Into a monochromatic white
The nicotine opens the night
With its trumpeting fragrance
A reveille
For Major Hollyhock
And his wilting troop of flowers
Dressed
In a uniform of polished purple
He regimented the garden in a pride of color
Standing erect
He reviews the garden

In his petiole of spiked ruffles
Where he oversees
And protects
Primrose and Sweet William
From the encroaching sun
Shadowing their light
With shades of darkness
He sheds their shadows from the encroaching night

Asleep
In a bed of soil
Cosmos stretch their lacy foliage
Over a bevy of sleeping daisies
While White Carnations button the darkness
With an air of formality

Fanning
In a gentle breeze of scented sweetness
Southern Belle sashays into the shadows
Of a white colonnaded garden shed
Titillating young Larkspur
With her huge hibiscus
Disgusted
With her dissolute display of dalliance
Tanagra Lavatera
Flays her pink saturn petals
In a brisk breeze of distain
Turning away from the sultry hibiscus
She careens towards an aisle of Golden Marigolds

Gliding the sandy pathway
With a circle of platinum
Ringed
In a panoply of white
Baby Breath
Encircles a dappled train of mottled lace
Around them
A velveteen moss
Covers a damp grey slated pathway
And like a velvet antler
It branches off into the moonlit night

Crossing

It ends under an arch of thorns
Where a rood screen hosts a pergola of blood
Berries

The White Porch: Summer of the Son

The White Porch: Liverpool, England to Ontario, Canada – 1944 until 1963

The White Porch is set in Canada and takes place in the band shell porch of an Ontario yellow bricked cottage. The story unfolds through a medley of phantasmagoric figures who will appear and reappear has the story of a man’s childhood days parade through his memory of the times he spent in Walton, Liverpool, England during the years of 1944 until 1963. The tale is told through his deceased mother but played out with her grandchildren as they discover their father’s childhood days through poetic stories that is tinkered and swathed with humor, nostalgia, sentiment, hurt, love, joy, and his emotional steps for his search of self discovery. He has become the passive but attentive observer of himself as he watches the medley of characters casting their timeless phantoms onto the white porch.

This will be the first of four episodes of the tetralogy that will follow him from his birth in Liverpool until his life in Canada. This first episode will cover his childhood and teen years from 1944 until 1963 and it is called: The White Porch: Summer of the Son. The story will first meander through an Ontario garden that will lead up to the yellow cottage house and to the white porch were the medley of memories will unfold from the present to the past as told through the eyes of his deceased mother who is now the storyteller to her three grand children.

Before you start this sojourn along the pathways of childhood and adolescent in Liverpool I would like to say that there will be approximately 355 pages albeit the lines are very short as it written in a poetic style, while giving you historical insights as well as entertaining you with reflective thoughts and providing you with informative facts about those times in a less “ stuffy “ way. I will attempt to place 10 pages on the site every week (even though I have completed episode one of this four part story). This first episode will cover the times from 1944 until 1963 (childhood and teen years). Don’t forget you will not get into the Liverpool aspect of the story until around page 23 as the other pages set the stage in Ontario, Canada and the White Porch is the time capsule for all that takes place.

So sit back, enjoy and reflect upon this journey as you make your own twists and turns in all the directions that life has to offer you in your own journey of self-discovery.