Answers On A Postcard

It was near the end of the world,
as I remember,
her sunset flecks written
over speedboat trails
before it was dragged across
the vacant, slurried beach.
She sent me here,
some journey back,
that pastel artist,
straggling up Porth Dinllaen's
rising slipway
under-arm sketches
in turquoise, mauve and black,
kindling mad and moody.
Unknown ships,
we jammed into chat,
on some delirious
boy's canvas.
No Inns, but a suggested out,
I should have caught.
The North-West jaunt, now
had soft beer for spirit,
and a Leica for eyes,
with the end closer than before,
as Aberdaron seawall, mosaiced
to a tomb stone collage
tilting the graveyard for
their nearing slide
splash-less
into the sea-deep.

Jerry Pike

Let's Get Lost....For Chet Baker, Jazz Man

Again the ceiling thumped, through black
and whitened flickers of the old,
as step by step, each muted track,
hummed from his lips, to heavens gold

A coil of brass let loose and long.
He played this funny Valentine.
steeped up in drugs, too higher song
that felled so many from their climb.

Those books of substance wrote his dues,
and planes touched down, but barely him
three countries banned him from their news,
but Paris heroed, pretty slim.

Deep down inside Le Chat Qui Pêche
the devils heat cooked up a gas
He never knew which chord to wish,
but hell he’d hypnotised the mass,

The beat set, and its women drooled,
he built them stairways out of smoke
and walking down, each woman fooled,
on green, green grass of home (and coke).

Alfa Romeo, made his day,
unlike in broken sixty-eight,
when caught they knocked his teeth away.
#six months before he proper ate.

Khaki fatigues, pyjama stripes,
accounts from prison, laid no sin.
Outside his own career he swipes
at any way to get back in.

Then loads of Secanol delayed,
he crossed the age of fifty-eight,
and balconies just watched him fade,
out of that Paris jazz debate.

I’m deep in dream for you he’d say,
come let’s get lost, inside my head,
and slicked brown hair, brushed all away
now Dizzy, Miles and Bird are dead.

but when Chet blew, his notes curled up
in smokey blue where moonbeams hide.
And when he sang, all hearts stood still,
the ceiling thumped,
and angels cried.

Jerry Pike

For jazz trumpeter and singer, Chet Baker.

Blue

The sky is blue today,
an ocean of it stretching
above my head,
fathoms high
and inscrutable.

It has collected
all the yellows and reds,
holding their light tight
so I can’t see it

like your face
when you hide your heart.


© Jane Upchurch

In Your Shoes

In your shoes i'd have wondered what i'm like,
as woman now, and how I was at school.
did you not ever ask yourself, awake
at night perhaps, if i was beautiful
or clever, happy,mother now to boys
who looked like you, as handsome,tall and blond,
or if, for want of funds and fathering, all joys
had come to nothing, not survived beyond
the day you left us, broke? Life was deprived,
of course, but you gave me a legacy
I prize. you l3eft me hypersensitised
to cruelty and worth - rare gift. I see
right through facades. Not spared a second thought,
i'm fine - though i'm the dasughter you forgot.

Dorothy Pope

In Praise Of Slow

Daydreamers know they only seem
to spin the world who rush and steam-
roller the money making scheme
with workaholic self esteem.

In hammock hung from apple bough
ideas come, it's not known how.
Inventors, poets all avow
the idling minds the one endowed.

with thought. The Newton's, Wordsworth's know
the fruitfulness of going slow,
of gazing, musing, strolling so
let's pause awhile and wiser go.

Dorothy Pope

Of Sentimental Value

Just a knife
she said
seeing only
the vulgar plastic of its blue handle
its slim serrated blade.

Not seeing
our first sunlit
together day
under your Italian sky
with bread and cheese
autumnal peaches
warm red wine
wine and peaches glowing
with the salty sweetness
of ur new love,
shopping in Standa
for a knife
to fashion our future.

Just a knife;
but now a symbol
of when out lives
were intertwined
and your smoke swirled
around our youth
fragrant with coffee
icing sugar sweet
like paastries from Motta,
our certainty
lapped with
olive oil and sun.

Now I slice onions
with our knife
under chillier skies.

Sylvia Goodman

Grub Up

Getting up at three,
I put my shoes on the bed
left a hot tap running
and toothpaste top off,
didn't flush the loo
or replace toilet paper.
Walking downstairs
I floored some rubbish
left the fridge door wide open,
food wrappers everywhere,
and milk on table.
Old dirty plates whispered their pattern
through dried tomato sauce.
I balanced some waste
on an open, overflowing bin,
then wandered out to sit
amongst the two foot grass stems
in the rotting deckchair,
surrounded by wilderness roses,
and multi-coloured pegs
discarded from the line.
I chucked my filthy clothes near
the washing machine
borrowed some money I'd never return
and later, got a lift a few miles
at midnight…
then suddenly
like a whirlwind of remembrance
I looked in the grubby mirror
and realised I was no longer
a teenager.

Jerry Pike

Minerve

The ghosts of heretics
have gathered tonight
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.
Among them, the Perfect
relive the siege
and how the crusaders
destroyed their one well
then burned them alive
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.
They see once again
Simon de Montefort
that black-hearted monster
deploying one-eyed religion
to get what he thought he deserved
by killing the Perfect of Minerve.

Now visitors wander about
curious to find the site of the pyres,
then go into the caves
and build stone cairns
to remember the victims of the fires.
It is there the truly devout may pray
that the bishops and barons
are safely contained in their own hells
for what they once did
to the perfectly good
who preferred to be left
perfectly dead,
but true to their word,
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.


140 Parfaits (priests of the Albigensian or Cathar religion) were burned alive by Catholic forces after the siege of Minerve in south west France in 1210, part of an internal crusade against supposed heretics.

Peter Keeble