The Youth Inside
I used to be able to run,
Not the shambolic, nattering of feet
No longer responsive to commands;
But the hungry eating up of ground
That left others in my wake,
Set my lungs on fire.
The youth inside can sprint,
But the old man knows better.
The head’s off with the pistol,
Thorax hot in pursuit,
‘What the fuck’, say the legs.
I topple forward, overbalance,
Lie still, crumpled, stretched out
Like a flimsy, discarded rag.
Yet the youth inside can sprint.
Give me the baton on the final bend,
Pass me the ball on the wing;
The blood is up, the heart pumps
My tiring limbs to tape and line.
In such fleeting flashbacks
The body’s memories
Have left their scars.
Deep within these limp and wasting
Fibres sits a recurring dream
Of adolescence, of the glow of fitness,
Of speed and tracks and pitches.
Alone in Company
Solitude is not loneliness
And familiarity comes in many guises.
I nudge the café door and check
The table with the plug is free;
Quick, stake my claim!
I drape my bag on the chair,
Hook up the charger
And stay vigilant at the counter.
Strange how we apportion trust
Among anonymous inner-city strangers,
Let instinct trump reason.
Word is my laptop is my friend.
I relish the bustle around me,
Hear and don’t hear the chatter,
The guffaws, the squawks of chairs
Levering in and out.
A companionship of papers and jottings
To the right, cappuccino to the left.
I usually have a plan, maybe several:
It’s the book today, though there’s
A chapter whispering impatiently
In my ear and the omnipresent threat
Of seduction by blog.
The phone’s a prop, as once was my pipe
Before smoke was banished in public;
(In any case I was biting through stems
And they made my canines wobble.)
Check the news, cricket scores, Twitter,
Facebook: catch up with virtual friends.
There! I said solitude is not loneliness.
There’s nothing like ‘an independent’,
Wooden tables and benches and whatnot,
But in truth I can settle on chequered plastic:
Kitted out with exercise book and biro I drafted
My first textbook pieces over coffee and chips
In a Wimpy on Waterloo Station in 1980.
Four decades on and no space left for Luddites:
I can barely write or read my longhand now.
Before we were ambushed by COVID
I spent six hours most laptop Wednesdays
Writing my way through cafes
In Tottenham Court Road, Guildford, Dorking,
And I loved it.
Cafe society bestows the gift of absence
In presence; silence in a landscape
Of shifting bodies, clearing of tables,
Stacking of dishwashers and passing gossip;
And there’s just that smidgeon of sociability
To reach out for if and when,
But on my own terms
Then it Snowed
Even as it softens landscapes to whiteness
It transmutes adults into children;
In one Surrey village Alpine skis
Are retrieved, wiped down and swish
Past makeshift toboggans on Box Hill.
The snow crackles underfoot if you step
Around the footsteps of the early walkers;
A brother slithers his sister on a sledge.
Today we trek gingerly, pigeon-toed,
To the churchyard of St Michael’s.
But it was a brief sojourn and already
A pale sun lurks behind the grey clouds
And the droplets spattering from the Ewes
Anticipate a thawing of the white gloss
To a sullen mush and rippling mud.
A rough collie is lost near Norbury Park
As the screen of paint disassembles, rural
Browns and greens sneak back to reclaim
Territory only briefly ceded; and soon
All will be as it was, except the memory.
I was in Melbourne, and it was Night
Twenty-three hours, three films and a taxi
And there I was, in a hotel twinned with a casino.
It was late and dark, but time meant nothing:
I unpacked, gazed unseeing out of the window.
Laptop hidden in a carrier I wandered mindlessly
And chancing on a ground-floor tunnel winding
Black-sheathed to a sharp bend I followed it:
There, bathed in velvet-green was the casino.
It stretched out for what seemed a cluttered
Mile or two; a surfeit of tables of punters
Appeared relaxed, but then they say addicts
Drift beyond ‘win or lose’, just bet some more.
I was not seduced, instead selecting a table apart,
Collecting a coffee from the bar, powering
My laptop and beckoning slides for talks
On health, first in Melbourne, then Brisbane.
It was a prize landscape of choice, alone in a bustle
And hum of gambled tokens and fantasies;
But my contentment was suddenly fractured,
I was gently upbraided for laptop use in a casino.
What a compliment – to think I would be capable
Of hacking a fortune by a mere pressing of keys!
It was a generous, apologetic reproof, and I was led
To a side-room; but nothing was quite the same.
TLC in the TCR
It’s a Wednesday:
Turn left out of the tube –
He’s gone now, the man with the windy stall
Who used to sell me the ‘Evening Standard’ –
Look right, navigate Tottenham Court Road
And it’s there, sitting behind an abrupt awning.
They usually see me push at the doors
And instinctively check my table, the round
One with the double plug just past the stairs
Down to the loos; they’ve even been known
To exhort unwary interlopers to move.
No need to speak beyond a nod, the table
Is wiped and a glass of water appears, companion
To a large glass of house white:
‘Are you ok?’ ‘Yes, thank you.’
One plug for the phone, one for the laptop
Roughly sequenced papers and jottings cascade
Around me, an open book anchored beneath
The MacBook Air, humming quietly to itself.
Hours are spent like this, but they whistle by
As the author’s gaze tracks all movement
And sounds are filtered, edited and filed
Even as time is transcribed into paragraphs
And the next book trudges slowly ahead,
Or maybe an unplanned blog is urgently
Delivered, as if by c-section.
The Crocus
The ground is matted,
Gouache brown
With slivers of ice;
It’s just stopped raining
And it’s numbing cold.
As if in defiance
Of this season
Of crystal stillness,
At the earthenware base
Of the statue of a maiden,
Her thoughts far away,
There’s a thin etiolated
Thread of life,
The umbilical cord
Of a single blue crocus.
The petals are bathed
Droplets of rainwater
And it looks pale but pert.
For aeons the crocus
Has laid down its challenge:
Let’s think of Spring.