Rites of Biography
I was born to an industry of losers
(tho the select few have stood on Hells High mountain)
in a land where the hills sing of indigo horizons
where the cool blue skies revise a gleaming kingdom
where the monarchic duty turns the vales to phrase
where the mid-winter mist is a divine joyful sigh
I was born to the nation that keep to themselves
and have asked nothing in return for the favour
born to the modernity of blind advance
a true shadow of a town that has the eternal
creepings of many an outpost, the creepings
the wheezed breathe of flagstones under feet
the paunchy roadside red brick walls
all waiting tired and overused neath orange haze
perhaps to us all the center of the world
was concrete with cologne of ale n semen
the rats scurrying in empty trashcans purifying mans combustible sight.
And you! Mind of a muttered claptrap
scribbles denting the excellence of paper
from day never be gone
a football song
of exploding merriment
I fell in love aged nine
with a curly haired student teacher
I urinated yards from my house
between the gravestones of Mary n Donald
I conducted Holst before my teens
over the breakfast trolley, an audience
a sip of sonatogen and a shot of stout
at lunch with my grandfather
his long white hair reminding my father
of that famous sketch of Beethoven
laying in the stuttering heat that only Welsh
summer dusks can compose
I dreamt of reptiles on a riverbank
and of the moon grinning in speech
camping I shot a friend in the temple
with a long air rifle from 75 yards
we rolled in laughter as he cried
and childhoods will move on innocent
in days when I feel pathetic n am overcome
by the sadness of the universe
I sit back in sad grey memory burning
with the boldness of a child’s emblem
I break my velveteen spine twisting
and reaching for bygone haze
I celebrated crossing the border into teens
by taking in a sparrow with a broken wing
I buried him at the foot of the garden
(land of the faeries then) days later
with ice lolly sticks forming a crude
crucifix to mark the spot
I fell in love soon on with a gangster’s
moll who was little more than a welcomed
curse, but provided me with my first wet dream
so many days spent trudging thru
reaching grass foils dense n soft
like a Rapunzel over view
St Woolos was a courtyard of everything
beaming out to the world anew
soon the world would know of me
and the triads would pack up n shiver in damp slime rock corners
and I discovered Jack n Allen n Larry n Greg
n they became my distant friends holly pen-pals
screaming the destiny no screaming the future
for destiny is a cowards future
n from now on I could fear no word for I new I had friends
who owned them and tossed them off
like dirty no good whores a purpose
for the end of the reason, no temple
no deity in the print hardly a crossed torso
sits at the rat tat tat typerism cursing the lack
of the cheery words
I bet they never cursed a moment
for the words were their footsteps
and St Woolos was New York City
bought and paid for
but the words never scored me a goal
the words never got me laid
I lost my boyhood aged sixteen
in a dank bare room on a skylite broken queen
sized bed after ale n sweet talk
to a girl I truly loved for a month or so
n I begged forgiveness on more than one occasion
but now I know that few have not
the river passed on by the foot of the hill
and I became a preposterous beacon
for the movement of our youth
the hip swagger pelvic mumble
we ruled the eternity and there seems to be more to come
now that the earth has opened up
and allowed me to remain
atop the gravel n the lucky charms
n the shit n the blood of the tears
of the captors and the captives
I was given an effigy written in semen
telling me that I would live to a grand
old age encompassing some of man’s
greatest days and some of woman’s
also, and in truth, from that day on,
I have tried less to prove that constraint
wrong. Where did I start this ramble?
Oh, yes. It was on the cusp of the wave
of ink, the ink that drips from a cut in my side.