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I have fathered, at last reckoning,

fourteen children. My second eldest

Is a heroin addict and in his thirty-odd

years has contributed nothing to his society.

Truth be told, I see much of myself

in the boy. It was only yesterday that

he came, cap in hand, asking for yet

another handout. When I suggested he

might consider working for a living he

became furious, shouting and cursing,

‘’I am an addict’’ he stormed, ‘’I have an

Illness. And you don’t care. You’ve never cared.’’

And on and on whining like a kicked puppy

until I showed him the door. He slammed it

behind him so violently that a nearly full

glass of wine shivered,

and fell from its shelf

above the fireplace.

‘’And close the door behind you,’’ I shouted

to his retreating figure, my voice sounding

a touch pathetic and swallowed up by the

overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

I grew pensive, mourning the loss of a fine

Reisling. I uncorked a Burgandy and nursed

a glass, along with my grudges.

To soothe myself I perused my bookshelves

until I found a calfbound First Edition Browning;

I stroked the cover absorbing the quality

and workmanship, letting it carry me into a finer,

a more noble century. I glowered.

I could, if I chose, show the pampered whelp

a thing or two. I could throw open door after door

on rooms of towering, toppling bookcases,

floorboards bowed and buckling under the weight

of compulsion. ‘’This’’ I would declaim,

‘’is a spirit bound and shackled hand and foot

to the wheel of obsession.’’

For the truth, is I have an ocean;

fickle in its sudden storms,

unpredictable in its tides, owing no tithe

to the cool coin of the night.

He has never seen me, barely conscious,

washed up on its shores. Nor seen me flick

trailing green fronds of kelp from my clothing,

nor has he witnessed me emptying my pockets

of shells, my eyes raw and weeping from salt.

No, I will not burden him with my despair.

He would only juggle the crucible that contains it

from hand to hand, like a hot coal and eventually

drop it, where it would roll out of sight and be forgotten.

My mind, stimulated by wine, throws up familiar

Images. I see myself clutching at my chest,

my fingers scrabbling uselessly at a shelf of paperbacks,

the light dimming to a green twilight, my tongue

reciting the sacred, the divine syllables:

New times roman, sans serif, Caslon. The last thing I see

Churchill’s ‘’A History of the English Speaking Peoples.’’

I inhale deeply -aaaaahhh the intoxicating perfume of

paper, ink. As I fall to the floor my spirit shuffles away to loiter

amongst the world’s literature.

And what is it I hear

over the roaring

of my blood?

The dry chuckle of paper

-shifting- against paper.

His eyes were stormcloudy with forgetting

and my words were ropes thrown from the shore

that always fell short. His hands, when I held them

between my own, were dry and hard with the texture

of rough brick.

The hospital was a busy, confusing place with the constant

movement of many people.

It smelled of disinfectant

and loneliness, of despair and hope.

“You’re in hospital John,”

I told him, reassuring him again and again.

His eyes followed a nurse as she passed his bed

in her white uniform and he called out to her:

“Where am I, where am I?”

I reached for his hand and his fingers

quivered in my palm like baby birds.

I sat with him until he grew quiet again,

and then slept; his hands

gently releasing…. and

I was surfing music websites

when I read that Jimmy Lafave had died.

I watched his last performance on youtube.

I watched as he moved

his once solid frame

carefully about the stage, as though

it was something borrowed that

he intended to return

with as few knocks and bumps as possible.

His voice though, unchanged,

rich with light and shadow,

thick with the texture of weathered oak.

Sometime later, under the flyover,

I raised a glass

to the man and his music.

The earth was packed hard and littered

with empty bottles, crumpled

cigarette packets.

An old mattress ripped and torn,

spilt its stuffing onto the ground.

I watched the sun sink behind

the steel and glass office blocks.

The shadows deepened

and bled across the earth like

pools of spreading ink,

gusts of wind blew old newspapers and the traffic

thundered overhead.

Jimmy sang about this, the lost and discarded,

the stuff that cities

have no further use for,

the sadness and madness of it all.

I saw him perform just the once in

the early seventies.

He came on stage and, without preamble,

launched straight into

Dylan’s ‘’Just Like A Woman.’’

That broken voice that held desert sunsets

and dark bars; loss and loneliness

that ran soul deep.Guitar riffs that left

your heart scorched and your throat

gritty with Texas sand.

I remember how, the following day,

I could hardly bring myself to speak.

There didn’t seem to be

anything left to say,

nor, the language left,

with which to say it.

These are mysteries and this the search:

The magic cast

by the light of the full moon,

Music that is torn from the bones of the earth.

Courage

and its raised fist of struggle,

of resistance.

The holy path taken through this city

of pitted and crumbling stone,

and those that walk it.

The keepers of myth.

Truth that is held sacred by both

warrior and priest.

The ache of tears, spilled here,

where air and the perfect curve of cheek

are one, are everything she is,

are everything I am.

The single stroke of

the artist’s brush,

the secret held in stone,

the crafted, final word of the poet.

The inch of pale skin, exposed and vulnerable