Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women. the full story in…
My Back Pages
My Back Pages
A selection of published and self-published volumes 1992-2022…30 years! I will be reading poems from these various collections tonight at The Organ Grinder with Neil Fulwood. Here my CV 🙂 A NEW YEAR GREETING ****(poem here) Addenda: What I am not. Shaun Belcher is the author of one out of print slim volume that disappeared…
My Back Pages: Collateral
COLLATERAL (for D.D.) Windows shake, tyres screech Litter blows across the estate Gunshots ricochet as sound The Divis Flats, Brixton Market Beirut, Jerusalem, Sarajevo A baby cries, a baby cries The broadcast stops, the helicopter hovers There’s a smell of cordite, a cold wind A face you have seen before on the news Starting to…
Thunder Circling: Thames Valley Texas
THUNDER CIRCLING He needed to talk to someone.It happened to be us.His rolled tobacco slipped from his fingersas he went over events fifty years before.The harbour, Singapore, thunder circlingand lightning flashing across the sea.A merchant navy man,sitting on deck with his mates,watching a free show.‘lf they’s could only ‘arness that energy’. The same bar two…
Hawker Siddley Argosy: My Back Pages
HAWKER SIDDLEY ARGOSY Improbable squares, steel-framed frogshopping from aerodrome to aerodromethrough an emulsion sky, wool clouds.You could hear them from miles awaybefore they’d flash over the barnand into my wide open six-year old eyes. Other times they dissolved throughthe outhouse plastic corrugated roofinto distorted birds that rattledlike boxes as they headed southtravelling so low and…
Diving for Change: Thames Valley Texas
DIVING FOR CHANGE Below and to my right from this window a Volvo lorry crunches gearshredded leaf, dust and gravel trickles from bumper and wheel-arch. The digging of the new pool has been going on now for two weeks. Yellow digger-buckets mouth the park’s soil and turf into lorries that rumble off, indicators flashing, down…
Arteries: Thames Valley Texas
Arteries “Never knew what hit them , the impact must have been tremendousto have left that much blood on the road,looked like it had exploded”. My father talking about the accident.One side of the car had caved right inand there was a bloodstain twenty yards longacross both sides of the road. “What was left of…
The North Field: Thames Valley Texas
The North Field You lying exhausted in another room, me taping,trying to drag some of the past with me.Three stories up in West LondonI think of old friends, forgotten journeysand the cracked ceiling reminds me of iceand cars swish beyond the stained curtains. You say I never talk, never explain thingsclam-up, freeze-up, a tight-lipped Englishman.You…
My Back Pages: The Cloud Factory – A Selection
A selected volume – The Cloud Factory Poems 1996- 2011 can be read here.
England Swings: Thames Valley Texas
No not a reference to Sergeant Pepper that was 20 but out of curiosity here an unseen poem from 1991. Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now.. ENGLAND SWINGS Soho doorway, December ’66sleet melting on daisy-patternedplastic raincoat, seeping to salt linesup purple suede slip-onsHer front teeth bite her bottom lipas…