A kind of lif1

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A KIND OF LIFE POETRY

AUTHOR:

Stanley Wilkin


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A Kind of Life.

Crystallising thin white light Decked with ancient portraits, The air heavy with dust. Beneath the glittering floorboards Rodents scurried, smelling out crumbs. This was where The old man walked at the very end Of his very long life, grappling With pitiless unforgiving memories. In this garish, gargoyle haunted house Amidst the enduring pine trees he was born To a beautiful mother. Her death Scoured his child’s heart, leaving only barren thoughts In a featureless land. Above the antique fire His father’s portrait, a reckless fantastically bewhiskered hussar Astride a mighty horse, his epaulettes like fringed Dinner plates, his embroidered jacket gloriously Covered with silver tassels and golden buttons, Smiling bravely, sabre aloft as if flying into battle. Surviving Crimea his father died in the hot wastes Of muddy Kingston, ravaged by disease, Flies flitting through the overheated air, Attended by his creole mistress, whom he loved, his Mummified body transported back to the calmer climes Of his estate and stored away in a mausoleum, for eternity Transfixed by rotten relatives. It was, after all was said and done, A wonderfully unlikely fate.


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In meagre revolt, the old man when young ran a finance house Where he never once met a lovely creole girl, but Grew passionate over money. How slow and quiet moved his sullen years Entering and exiting each decade, grasping With evacuated passion. First a millionaire and then an MP, ruling His tiny world with his father’s distant Êlan. Loving a troupe of stately women, loaded down With jewels and raging with syphilis. At fifty, His obsessive purity weighed him down Like a metallic tear. He shared His lovers with the king. The king shared his cigars with him, And, his pockets stuffed with reciprocal loans, Occasionally, his burgundy.


4 No man or woman loved him In the greyness of his life He planted his emotions In white sand And buried his friends in shifting dunes Leaving no clear Marker in his dissembling memories. Age came like a disease in a cavalcade Of bruises, boils and mottled skin. Time became less a glorious panorama Than an un-scalable wall. Shuffling along his dusty Halls he’d stop by the windows and spend hours Fixed upon his father’s picture, staring Triumphantly at him from the past. At such moments, The sun dancing across his ruffled forehead, He’d feel jealous of the dead man’s youth Love of adventure, and his rousing life amongst Beautiful women in a hot passionate land. At inopportune moments, sick at heart, He’d rage against the dead man’s Unremitting thirst for his wifeHis mother’s groans at night His mother’s dark screams of pleasure Still made him howl.

A bit of geography: A terrible noise rising and falling


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Cutting through the wind. It was a Very bad day. Only before war or in war’s aftermath, In sunken days of wasted cities, Are there such days. In the valley, between tree stubs, were The bodies of long dead men. Now Ghosts waiting for their respective funerals With expanding stomachs and darkening Complexions.

Yellow roots spreading swiftly across The valley, protected by immense oaks. Sunshine Filling the sky like a reflection. Succulent unbothered Grass. The weeping Of undiscovered winds The call of the past.

In such a land centuries Have left their spittle


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Memories have faded Like empty laughter at a funeral. The broken, fragmented landscape Declares human violence And human domesticity. Each event the examination of the one before.

We walked up this road Among these ochre leaves, Among these expanding roots, Bustling flowers and swirling daffodils. We witnessed time evaporate in the chemical Obduracy of love. We arrived at the end, A dusty path that rarely went straight, And said ‘goodbye’. In such instances, time Ends with a caress.


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As: As they grew older they grew further away Withholding their love Remote, with apparently little to say No words, no tears, no kind of stuff Falling from their distant livesLiving with new thoughts, lovers, wives. A troupe of sons, gambling with time!

The great Alexander was a rotten son of a brilliant father Misled by a mother’s lies Into an oedipal outrage. Spurred to violence, rather Then be a man he became a legend, pursued by biting flies. Betrayal often leads to success, The betrayer a psychological mess.

The love of a child evaporates Evident in the lives of kings The urge for power saturates Ignores duty, gratitude; those kind of things. But hell! So what? We, objects of their beaming infant smiles, once received such a lot.

OK, Richard 1 left his father to die alone, John, his maudlin brother, ripped the money from the dead man’s purse, They then fought each other for the throne Making a family feud undeniably worse. Throughout history, the mothers taking new ambitious lovers Caused greater angst amongst whole generations of brothers.


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Families are rarely friends: brother fights brother Sister quarrels with sister, battling incessantly, Despising each carefully chosen lover Examining each other critically. The success of one initiates gloom, A show of brilliance, a thunderous rain-wrenched boom.

Compared to great and legendary figures Our problems are played out beneath a dimmer light We drown our thoughts with liquor Squabble like screeching bats in the night No grabbing of swords, fastening of armour, beribboned horses Our mundane arguments have tiny causes.


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Urban Sprawl: The city did not make a clean breast of it, Ending its expansion fifty years before, But dug into the countryside like a mole Burrowing unpredictably after worms and roots Indifferent to any harm it caused. Where once had been yellow fields Was now a regimented parade of three bedroomed Homes, supermarkets and tiny parks Representing nature in the raw. Yet, Even this had a beauty, the sandy bricks And grey tiled roofs positioned cleanly Amongst the human bric-a-brac of gleaming Cars, bikes, discarded T.Vs and lawnmowers, waiting Patiently like sentinels on the grass. In summer Flying insects descend re-colonising the land Savaging around the richly composed refuse In incalculable numbers. At night foxes Pick out choice chicken scraps and wander Around the ordered gardens searching for Cats to eat. A stream emerges from sinuous underground Tunnels beyond the estate, falling, flowing and quarrelling Through the rising hills and remaining Woods, rushing out in cascading flurries, Missing the sewer by inches. Nearby A building plot is measured out, The undomesticated, bramble and fern saturated, Land subject to concrete devastation, Ground down into an even prison of impenetrable walls: A new and different splendour born.


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