THE END
a tale foretold. ‘The crowd’s on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now.’
Touch, a so missing after trauma, so they tell us, and so I must consider you know don’t you too my mind latched on to but was it ever anything else. and indeed There is something to be said that our contemporary lives invest too much into being ‘happy,, by showering ourselves with happy smiles and emojis that become addictive self smugness of, of well of loony-bin Reality Shows for a start, making us believe that is all there is to life. and STOP us imagining alternatives. and well is writing and engaging with it – literary fiction that is – does this. So, am I here writing this to resolve and maybe dissolve lies I have told myself.? Can I then ‘face up.’, create my and your better life. Give us integrity, enabling skills, perhaps like literary devices, eh Joe?
So, – dad, mum, Peter, us in a plush caramel caravan on the Gower Peninsula. We’re astride a butter cornfield, on a lump of cylindrical height. I think it was above Horton Bay’s rectangular blues, dribbling 99 -cone vanilla ice-cream and flaky milk-chocolate from Joe’s gotten in Oystermouth..
Rain or shine, he’s got it, rabbit- caught- in- the- headlights. He’s bolt upright in a below calf, belted and buckled, gun- metal grey gabardine. We know there should be a flat cap In my mind it is a beret. How? I think it is from a trace memory. When generations from the ferry brought Spanish onion sellers, who’d spread outward to the council estates where I grew up. The face is a Scotts Porridge Oats gruel podge. Oft-times he’s my granddad docker please. The only photo of him used to be in the frame on Nan’s piano where mam learnt to play. It All sepia and not spoken of – neither was the dank morning wait for work unloading colliery coal from railway trucks – a coal trimmer. A man of principles trying tried raise his community’s life in the here and now.
Cloned Saturday afternoons yes but these days compete with saffron- robed Hari Krishnas, Anonymous- masked anti animal testing protesters, Extinction Rebellion shapes, sizes, colours – do single-issues change enough – wink knowingly inside me like my bedroom-wall P.J.Harvey poster amiss the rival socialist newspaper vendors. All semi- circle seekers for signatures on a petition against …. fill in here as is your wont.
‘Short back and sides, barber.’ THE END IS NIGH. ‘Zero hours, no contract, no toilet-breaks Britain 202 ‘ in a conversation on an adjacent table.’
‘Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’
The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley,
and I haven’t got a single problem now that I am with you.
