Long Hair

Black leather

Ripped jeans

Sneakers

Three chords

Play dumb

Never grow

Old

One hungover morning

The doorbell rang

I answered it. There were two ladies

Dressed in black. One of them said

‘We’d like to talk to you about God.’

‘Yes,’ I said,

‘Where is he?

I’ve been up all night looking for him!’

‘Well the thing is,’ the other lady said

Not at all perturbed by my wild behaviour

‘He said to tell you that he’s been unavoidably detained

And that he may not be able to make it back

For at least another two thousand years.’

‘Two thousand years?’ I cried

‘But I haven’t got anywhere near that long

As well he knows, the cheating…’

‘Well, he says you’ll just have to manage,’

The lady on the right interrupted

‘He said that he left you a note with all the instructions.’

‘Instructions?’ I wailed

‘What instructions? I haven’t seen any instructions!

Nobody told me about any instructions!’

‘Also,’ the other began

‘He says that he gave you intelligence, free will,

Compassion and empathy,

And what do you think those are for?’

‘Well, yes,’ I admitted

‘We’ve got those. But…’

‘Well, you can figure it out for yourself, then,’

She answered, a trifle curtly

As though she had got a direct line

‘He says there’s plenty of food

And things to get on with

And he’s sure you can make your own entertainment

Until he gets back.’

‘Just try to play nicely,’ the other warned

‘And don’t hurt each other

Or go breaking anything

Or else there’ll be Hell to pay.’

‘Thanks,’ I said,

And closed the door.

I went and sat down.

I had some serious thinking to do.

We are privileged to return

To our everyday sadness

To our own small kinds of failure

To the incalculable blessings of boredom

We who have no ideals worth fighting for

Blind to the value of our tepid

Ineffectual

Existence

Truly must be the chosen children

Of a God we have the luxury of leaving

Well alone

The point of this life

Is that everything constantly changes

Nothing is fixed

Everything always in motion

Passing

Everything happens

Life is loss

And love is the knowledge of loss

But holding and treasuring all the same

And maybe there is another life

Where nothing changes

Nothing ever dies

Nothing is born

And nothing ends

And nothing new begins

And maybe that life is called Heaven

Or maybe that life is called Hell

Today I have porridge with real milk, full fat

Not soya or oat milk or goat’s milk, but that

Tastes just like the porridge I ate as a kid

Porridge that’s just like my dad used to make

Using the mug that he gave me, I thought of him

As I was mixing the oats and the water in

Using a good wooden spoon like he did

Adding salt for our old Scottish ancestors’ sake

And I made up a pot of loose tea like he would

On those wintry mornings, in his dressing gown

As I lay warm in bed till the 8 o’clock pips

The pipe smoke and steam rising as I came down

I sprinkle on sugar, let the honey drip

Then pour on a white lake, fridge-cold, to the tip

Of the bowl, till small islands of oats can be seen

Like Atlantis, half-glimpsed, just beneath the sweet sea

I don’t stir it up, but make channels and hollows

For the milk to run into, then scoop it and swallow

Milk warm from the porridge, and sweet from the stream

Of sugar and honey that swirls through it darkly

And I watch as the ocean recedes, falls away

And the land cools and hardens, and rises above

Just like in the days when the world was beginning

Through the steam and the smoke and the unspoken love

After, I shave with my dad’s shaving brush

And look in the mirror at the face that fell

From my father and mother to me, long ago

And I think of that story that they used to tell

Of a house in the woods that was found standing empty

With three bowls of porridge stood ready to eat

But nobody home. They’d all gone away

But the porridge was something, at least

The aging skinhead leaves the house

The shining bone untroubled now

By stubble, fluff, and other stuff

His wiry frame betrays no hint of bloat

As he rubs at a single smear of dirt

On his Harrington coat

Pulled on over his Fred Perry shirt

And Sta-Prest jeans

And sixteen hole Doc Martens

Gleaming like a pair

Of midnight suns

He walks into the world

Surveys the streets with jaundiced eye

This bastard world of bother always

On the brink of chaos into which

He’d once gleefully leap, with savage cry

Restoring order with pale tattooed fists

And his icy iron forehead’s

Blood-baptising, blessed kiss

A veteran of a thousand rucks

He tries to recall every broken nose

Each shattered smile

Each quaking, collapsed crotch

He put the boot into in act of holy war

The sound of screaming in his ears

Of foreign layabouts and queers

The battles he has fought to keep this country clean and pure

This England that he loves

Those days are dim and distant to him now

The aging skinhead walks erect

The children look at him with sneers, he’s sure

And when he’s passed they giggle in his narrow shadow

Where they once went white with fear and awe

He grits his teeth; what do they know

They don’t know anything

The kids today don’t know they’re born

They don’t have any discipline

Their problem is that they weren’t broken in

The cane, the strap, the steel rule

They never did him any harm

His life was clean and hard

Working in the factory

Making ball bearings

Forty years gone by

And now he has to put up with

The little bastards staring

Just because he never lived a lie

Or let things slide

Apart from Mary

He once thought

But she was just a slag

And anyway the women they just make you soft

He much prefers

The company of men

Down at the Lamb and Flag

Watching the match free from all doubt

Shouting at our lads to stuff the krauts

And downing pints of decent British lager

The aging skinhead almost feels calm

Discipline, he thinks, that’s what it’s all about

You stick to what is right and true

You keep it clean and follow what you started through

And you won’t miss things

If you get in there and stamp them out

Before they get to you

Well, it’s a life

You stay within

And there’s nothing to fear

But that one speck of dirt just won’t wipe clear

When we were very small my sister and I would be bathed together

Sitting face to face all pink and smiling smooth and soft among the foaming Matey bubbles

She sat hunched against the rounded empty end while my back would be pressed against the taps

The one still hot the other cold the rubber shower attachment hanging down

The plug beneath my tiny hairless balls as quite methodically I’d try

To get the chain neatly along the crevice of my arse

And casually we’d wonder at each others differences;

But as the years went on increasingly we took our baths alone

That jolly Jack Tar Matey in his naval sailor suit and blue bell bottoms

Made his magic foam for me alone

While for my sister there was new Miss Matey, blushing demure in pink and her bubbles

I thought effeminate and frivolous somehow, unlike my own

And still I always automatically sat at the tap end of the bath

Without thinking of it, it just seemed

The natural way, although I guess, yes

Now you mention it, the more uncomfortable

But still it was a habit I continued well into my twenties

Thinking without ever forming words to the effect

That the curved and unobstructed end of the bath tub was feminine of course and that

Among the hard and jutting taps from which the water flowed

Must be the only station for a boy or man;

But like the bubbles I had left behind in childhood

These certainties proliferated wildly and could fill my view

While still remaining insubstantial, artificial and

When I tried to grasp them be

No longer there

I could never fuck a man

Who looks like he reads books, she said

The only time that I can come

Is when his clumsy calloused fingers smear

Brickdust and bruises on my breasts

And I can taste the sweat and smoke and stale beer

He’s breathing hard into my face

And I am crushed beneath his gut

As his thick arms of tattooed muscle hold me down

I like a man who might have done some time

Who’s not afraid of anything

We’re all afraid of something, I’m afraid, I said

I can’t get off with boys my age, she said

Students skinnier than me

Who fumble and can’t hold their ale

I need a real man who’s been there

Propping up the bar all night

Who calls me darling, traps me with a wink

Who’s got one wife and family at home

And another chasing him for child support

A man who’s flash and spends his money recklessly

Who’ll put me in my place

And what about a man who wrote you poetry, I asked

What, texted me some stupid rhyme, she said

No, poetry, I said

Recited from the heart out loud

Blank verse perhaps

If any twat embarrassed me like that I’d kick

The fucker’s head in

Right, I said

Just wondering

Where have all the werewolves gone?

Long time passing, every one

Eating people might be wrong

But where have all the werewolves gone?

A sweet young maiden can but hope

To meet a full-grown lycanthrope

A man hirsute of hand and cheek

Misunderstood, if seldom meek

Those furry fiends, their savage howl

Can stir the sleeping secret soul

More deeply than the sweetest song

Oh where have all the werewolves gone?

They banned them by decree and oath

Put silver bullets through their throats

And chained them down in dungeons grim

Where the full moon’s light was dim

And I would lack both sense and tact

To question the most basic fact

Of safer streets directly linked

To werewolves being made extinct

But still, I miss the snarling beast

Who’d make of one small child a feast

So I lament, both loud and long

Oh where have all the werewolves gone?

Get back, you bastard!

I’m trying to build sandcastles

But all I have are hard stones