Entry

June 03, 1953
God bless the Queen
Coronation Street party today
I saw Marie’s knickers today
Our gang made a steering cart
Everton for the cup

August 12, 2001
Fuck the Queen
Like I fuck Marie
This entry is filled with Shite
Just like the fucking Catholic School
At the end of this sodden entry
Bring back the prefabs
Fuck you
And Everton too
Liverpool for the cup
I hate

To Go to School

Your dad would use the back wooden door
That leads into the entry
He would see his mates
In this catchpenny corridor
Him and his mates would meet and make
Steering carts
From discarded old prams
Large wheels
Would harness his orange box dreams
Comics
Swapped
With American Heroes
Whose world evoked the American Dream
Football and Movie star cards
Pink
Clean
Mint to the taste
Bubbles
Of beano
Stuck to the tummy with bubbles of laughter

On top

Bricked
Shelters
Of coal
Joined to the entry
Wall
Flat-topped roof
Stacked
With old furniture
Mattress
Chairs
Sofas
Carpets
And anything else that would burn
In readiness
For the straw man

Guy Fawkes

Night
What a sight
Burning the bloody street
On firecracker night
Bonfires
Lit up
From dusk to dawn
Like a Catherine Wheel
Ball
Of fire
Would light the night
With a firecracker of fright
Were the children would scream
Dove tailed
With delight
When the Schoolhouse burnt
Under a lava of volcanic light
Snap
Crack
Nip and hiss the dust
Twist
Turn
Rip rap the floor
Writhing bodies
Strung
With crack
Whip the night
In a powder of fright
Flashback
Rockets
Hissed
Swished
And whisked
Into spores of sparks
Bursting
In to mushrooms of darkness

With a plume of dazzling light
It flashed the night
With children’s delight
Fireworks bloomed
From sparks of powder
Fireworks boomed
From powder to flower
Children
Silently
Stood under a sparkle of stars
Faces
Once flushed
With the promise of the night
Now fades
Into an afterglow of tiredness
Children
Softly
Sleep
Under a sheet of stripes
Still
Lost
In the dreams
Of a fiery night

Leaving

Ashen carcasses
To Lie in a debris
Of torched carnage
Fallen
In fire
Engulfed
With flame
Stained with smoke
Tinged with death
Skeletons
Singe the soil
In a charcoal carrion of peeling skin
Defiled
And discarded
Scourging the soil
In a cassock of death
Dust to dust
Left
Abandoned
Like a blackened shell
Once
Filled with fire
Now
Empty with death
An ephemeral dream
Lost
In a baptism of fire
Children slept
As gaslight faded

Into the Fifties

Black cast iron gaslights
Towered our terraced house street
Purple flames
Flicked its saucy tongue of yellow light
Peering
From behind a prism of beveled glass
A beacon
Cast in steel
Arms outstretched
Into a street of darkness
A gladden scarecrow
Protecting us
From dusk to dawn

Aside

During the day
Your dad would often scurry up its spine
Until he started to look like Billy Bunter
Tubby little bugger
Loved his sweets and treats
Too much

Entry’s Enclosed

Backyards
Enclosed toilets
Yards
Stored brick shelters
That once stored life and fossils
Now
It stored
Spores and junk
Whitewash
It clouded poverty

Bleached to the bone

We sat on a wooden throne
Starry-eyed
We sat outside
In a starlit room
Of chalk and lime
Wiping our bums
With the news of the time
We would flush
Our cares away
With the yank of a chain
The world dolloped downs the draughty drain
Of course
The cold damp dank winters would play havoc
With your ablutions
Many a time
My plumbing froze up
When I sat on the throne

Come On-A My House

Rosemary Clooney, 1951

Friday

Bath night
Hot water boiled
In copper kettles and cooking pots
Hissing
On a mantle of steam
Sitting
In a sputter
With spatter and splash
Waiting
With grating whistles
Engulfed
On red hot coals of sallow fire
Wailing and waiving
Cast
Onto an open iron fireplace
Blackened
With perdition
One by one
Their torrid soul
Is picked
And poured
Into a casket of tin
Filled up
Into its fiery rim
Your dad would be the first
One in
Me next
Last
In luke
Warm water
Granddad
Cleansed his ivory boned body
Under the last pot of hot baptizing water
Granddad left
His mark
Around the rim

Bath over

Drag the dirt out of the house
To the back entry yard door
Empty it
And watch
Sunlight spread onto a cold concrete floor
Were
Some
Sodden
Suds
Spill
And wend
Into wayward cavities of clogging slime and cloying grime
Collecting
In the latrines of cracking holes
A water hole for visiting voles
Pooling
Like yellow piss
In a froth of flotsam
Its putrefies
Into a putrid pond of postulated pus

Sod it

Brush out the dammed drifting dregs
Sweep the spillage
Down the drain
Thank Christ
It’s going to rain

Sunlight

Split into the small bedroom
That overlooked the tiny backyard
Beyond
The back entry wall
Your dad could see a meadow of houses
In flower
Prefabs
Bloomed
From a pasture of ash
Sun shone
Each day
Into his shimmering bedroom

He played

Alone

In a Spartan bedroom
Filled with teeming treasures
Memories
Locked with leaden
Soldiers
That battled
With imagination
Hornby trains that would tunnel under a Meccano bridge
While plastic hens laid golden eggs
And wooden puppets dance
In the midday sun

While distant voices

Fall
And fade
As the dying sun
Tucks in the children’s prayer
Summers sweetness
Rests its weary light
While small children sleep
In Gods good night

Asleep

In a land of Nod
Were Bill and Ben
The Flowerpot men
Watch Andy Pandy
Put Sooty to bed
While little Noddy
Sings Sooty to sleep
With the jingle
Of his jiggling head

Weed

Reading with Rupert
Was Dandy
But Dennis
Was a Menace
And Beryl
Was a Peril
And Corky the cat
Was lots of fun
But Desperate Dan and the Tiger
Would make Rover run
A Boys Own bedroom
Was a Beano filled with a Film of Fun
For a small boy who owns
His own chimera
And your dad had
A playful one

Other Bedrooms

Stem
From the narrow damp dark landing
One
In the middle
Small
Stark and dark
Once your dads
But now Granddads bedroom
Sparse
Still
Small
Solitary
And dark
The front
Bedroom
Large
Bright and light
My bedroom
Furnished
A bedroom suite
That matched
The fifties
A large rosewood wooden wardrobe
Without the Lion and
Witch
At times your father thought I was
Which
Reminds me
He would often hide
From the Lion in the wardrobe
In the corner of my bedroom
I had an elegant dressing table
With a pink crystal vanity that matched mine
A cozy double bed
Were I use to duck my head
Under an eider
Down
On the bedroom floor
A blue flowered rug
Bedded the floor
Two light bright windows
Draped in lace
Looked out onto our front faced road
And into the backside windows of the terraced houses

Across the road

Jessie
My close friend
Would look in
With a wave
We could see each
Other
Than that
Our view was now unrestricted
Because the bloody big bombs
Had demolished
The tall terraced
Houses
Have gone
Now prefabs
Mutate
The landscape with light

Now

I Look Down
From my bedroom window
Onto a graveled roof top tarmac
A runway for wayward airplanes
Circled with hula-hoops
Lost
In looping the loop
Balsa planes
Crashed
And grounded
In a hanger of Olympian rings
Red
White and blue
Balls
Flagged down
Onto a flysheet of tarmac
Shelled-shocked fireworks
Canonized into a carcass of carbon
Entrails
Spilling out
From fly blown bike tires
Black spots
On convoluted pink flesh
Twisting its rubber soul
Into still pools of black rain
Broken treasures
A killing field
Lost on a memorial plane
A tabloid
Of tarnished events
Laid onto
The landing

Down stairs

Into the narrow vestibule
Right
Past the living room door
Right
Into the front parlor room door
You step into a live in curio
Fine furniture
Laced and crowned with Royal Daulton
Silver-plated framed photos all over the place
Seldom in use
With nothing out of place
Flowers
Stand tall
In a brilliant array
Exhibiting
Their finery
Into the sunlit dapple of a window bay
Bowing
In an altar of light
Watching
The view
As children
Pass their time
In play
Fresh
Cut flowers
Embalm the parlor
With
Fragrance and flora

Musk and motherhood
Gathered
Around an antiquated
Upright piano (second hand)
And silver plated spoons
With an upbeat smile
And dancing bones
Great Granddad
Would entertain us
Fingered to the beat
He would shake up the parlor with his jitterbug feet

The parlor celebrated

The events of a family
Christmas
Anniversaries
Courtships
Death
Laced with privacy
The cloistered parlor was the place to be
To play and pray
In the wake of the day
This
Was the parlor
And its point of view
From the bay of its window
It had captured you
In life

On the street

Prefabs
Seedlings
In their variegated bibs
Dressed the street with their newness
Of their openness
To

Stuart Road

Baptist Church
Stands on the corner
Blessed
With wine red bricks
It reaches out
To people who pass by
Emerging
From its solemn shadow
Rejoicing
A congenial couple
Step into a congregation
Were they receive their daily bread

From the grocery shop

On the opposite corner
The strident grocer watched
As he rationed their lives
With his stamp of approval

Children play

Neighbors chat
Under the watchful eye
From our parlor window

Six valiant veterans
Hold on
As change drops
Into life’s meter
The sun shines on
A friendly mottled road
Of dappled green and spotted grey
Rules the streets
To the rise of a new day
We turn left
Or is it
Right

Into the Living Room

Door
Opens into a cozy room
Clean and small
Chestnut sideboard
Flat to the wall
Is the fold down dining room
Table
Next to granddads easy armchair
Asleep
In front of the cozy coal fire
But
Out of range
From his reach
A wooden radiogram
Is saddled close to his leather backed arm chair

Like a maverick

The console stands in the far corner
Alone
With its arms cocked
On the groove of a Berliner
Stacking
A 10 inch 78. 26 R.P.M.
Coated in shellac
Spinning
On a wax disc
Of diamond dreams
Revolving
On a silver line plane
That leads to nowhere
But
Always
Somewhere
Someplace
Someday
Someway
Somehow
The nowhere man
Will lasso the wandering star
That he was born under

Close to his side
A huge white mug
Towers on the mantle piece
Cold titanic tea
Enough to sink a White Star ship
But not enough
To fill his bladder

From his point of view

The backyard window
Shines its harmonic light onto his console of song
A mahogany music box
That barks out light
BBC
Or pop up
With Radio Luxembourg
From across the sea
We would listen to our family favorites
With our Sunday cup of tea
Eccless and Moriarty
Would drop in
Much to your dad’s gooney glee
Because you know what
We had no T.V.
Then
Late at night
Hurry off to bed with an Ovaltine tea
Before the omniscient Shadow
Called on the dead
Quick run
Because its time for bed

On the walls

Wallpaper
Stripped the past
While it pastes the present
Into the future
With its floral motifs
It became an ever-changing season
Which patterned the changes of our times
Somber
Did not wallpaper our living room
It was bright
With light
From our backyard window

Sunlight
Shone onto the soft sofa
Shawled in lace
It warmed our cozy living room space
With its leathery embrace
Its wrinkled arms stretched out towards the fireplace
Embraded with embroidery
Of charm and grace
It became the bed
Of the nights embrace

On top of the sideboard
A barrow of fruit
Mounds its surface
In a salver of silver
It colors the room
In still life
It frames the flowers
That bloom

On the wall

A side board
Backs the wall
Into the corner
Granddad
Like an ageing Jack Horner
Still asleep
In a slumber
Snores can be heard
Like a distant thunder
Do not disturb
Because it will be your blunder
If he wakes up
Our lives will be asunder

Ignited

With rage
Fires flare up
From the fireside
Flames
Flagellate into a furies of fiery
Flames
Flinch and flag
Flames
Flint and fade
Into the dappling flickering of the sombering night
Dyeing
Petals of lingering light
Mottled onto the mantel of a mantled moonlight
Shadows sinking
Slowly
As the wooden mantel clock surfaces
To the chimes and crescendos of the night

Above

A lucid pond of luminous glass
Hung onto a wallpaper
An attractive centerpiece
That reflects
Its timeless greeting
Light
Reflecting life
Unlike the timepiece
It does not stop for time
Nor can it be wined up
It imitates
And illuminates
Unless
Darkness overshadows

The light

At times

Distorts
Deception
Hides behind illusion
Don’t be blinded by its brilliance
Beware of iridescent change
And don’t be taken in with prismatic
Smiles
May shatter
As vision
Needs enlightenment
When you reflect
Look ahead
Beyond the ripples
You left behind
Hold
Onto the moment
As the ripples
Of time
Will sink
Into a sea of antiquity
Were you will be

Awakened

To its touch
The fire leaps up