“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time” British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

Old Royal Enfield bicycles
& rifles propped against a wall,
a gaggle of men,
in this humid heat
their necks are sticky
their collars starched and neat
& look! in the far distance,
a gable end
and look! a house.

Windows left wide open
in this high summer heat.
And, have we forgotten,
if we knew at all,
this art devoid
of rhetoric or name?

No, nothing ever can be the same
there is a turbulence of a dalliance
as snippets of conversation
echo in the brain,
so few will remain.

Wind rises around the window panes,
bounces off the surfaces of trees and leaves:
blows a northerly,
a rain-splattered man, with a sorry tale,
squats in the mud beside me, half-way to hell.

His life is a tale told by an idiot
packed with deceptions ripe and drear,
his eyes overflow with fear
to curry favour he gambles away time 
just to have what he already owns
his immortal soul

We tell tales to stroke our egos
we are the centre of a romance
devoid of the imaginative empathy
required to dance
a la recherche du temps perdu.

For those of us who live on tenterhooks
for those of us who write imaginary books
about war, my tale, contrary-wise, grows more alive:
each movement over paper,
each note added to the score,
delineates an hysterical panache,
that clumsily, childishly, clashes
with a dislocated, muddled, absurd
dalliance with the word
that takes our exploding dreams away,
back from the front, to infantilise
just one more live-long day.

 

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