Biscuit Boy

I've been thinking a lot about biscuits lately!
This is about a boy I used to see walking to school every morning. He was known by the kids and I as...

BISCUIT BOY

The languid stride runs loose and fallow
His banana skin hangs sick and sallow
then from his pocket - it's time to risk it.
Custard Creams - a packet of biscuits.

He stuffs them in one after t'other
and offers one to his brother.
A Peak Frean Teen - he likes a McVities
investing in Type 2 Diabetes.

He pours the crumbs from the packet
stuffing the debris in his jacket
Wipes his mouth, licks his lips
Now he's off to buy some chips.

The Tin Sack - I'm glad I'm not an onion

I’m glad I’m not an Onion

 

I’m glad I’m not an Onion

Wearing an onion sack

Like an orange string vest

In a multi-buy pack

With a label saying Paraguay

Or somewhere like that.

 

I’m glad I’m not an onion

Making people cry

Spitting out caustic acid

And getting in your eye.

Cut me, cook me, peel me,

Steam, sautée or fry.

 

More rattlings from The Tin Sack - A life less complete

A life less complete

Solitary souls
weaving their single lives
like cats cradles
on the fingers of a child.
Dipping and dancing
with simple minds
into worlds they share
with nobody.
Lines on a platform;
faces on a train
numbing the incessant pain
with medicine made
from the same
homogenised,
pasteurised grain.
Paths crossing,
but never collide,
heads turning,
mentally deride
the castaways
stood outside
the narrow social parameters
of our blind alley times.
So many sad faces,
bearing the lines
of stresses and strains,
worried about nothing
in the grand scheme of things.
And the fragile
bubble burst
of our petty,
pointless lives;
becoming a mist of a memory
when the eyes have dried.
The friends that miss us
will rot as compost and peat
leaving nothing but
a name on a family tree.
A photograph;
some words,
a story misheard,
wisps of a memory
for a life less complete.

Kid again

I want to scuff my knees

And climb up trees.

I want to eat cherry lips

And sherbet pips

From a white paper bag

Tied on a piece of string

From the end of thing

That has the black jacks

Fruit salads

and flying saucers in.

I want to watch TV

When there was only three

Channels.

I want to spend hours

Watching silverfish scuttle

On the hearth.

I want to be Chief Brody

Chasing Jaws in the bath.

I want to read Scoop

And struggle to tie the loop

And the knot in my laces.

I want Christmas

To be a wait forever

And when it comes

It goes

 like it never happened.

I want to not have the words

When I’m trying to describe

The thing that I’ve never felt

Or seen or heard.

I want to be innocent

I want to be ever so naughty

I want to be a kid

I don’t really want to be forty.

From Tooting to Tulse Hill

From Tooting to Tulse Hill

She hung a DIY forget-me-not
around her turkey gobble neck,
scrap ends of string tied together
in a knot of careless abandon.
Stained years of sallow pain
were etched into her Marlboro face;
tracing paper thin skin,
pock-marked and aching
whilst she remembered him.
She still travelled to Tulse Hill
every Friday in sun, snow and rain
to sit on the park bench
where he never returned again.
Wallowing in her lonely life
with tears welling in her eyes.
Before that day,
she used to say
she could see verdant green leaves
waving from the trees
and the glass blue sky
with scarred jet smears
carrying far flung lives.

Now she only sees grey.

Broken-hearted surgery

 

Broken-hearted surgery

Caught in confusion,

sinuous contusions,

this was never going to be

a fusion

made in heaven.

Broken-hearted surgery

brings reminiscent misery.

An elasto-plaster

on an open wound;

a drifting love

remains marooned.

A shattered heart

in crystalline shards

and a shrivelled soul

down a dank, dark hole.

Broken-hearted surgery

cannot mend

it simply tends to

ooze and seep

bleeding your memories

to an agonised sleep.

The Shadows of Skegby Hall

The Shadows of Skegby Hall

Retracing steps from the past. Things change but everything fundamentally stays the same. Skegby Hall stands grand with it's black history. Now things of memory and infamous legend. Most of the sprawling grounds had been invaded by a faceless, but nevertheless, affluent housing estate. Even the grand old house of the Approve School Headmaster - Mr Lincoln had been razed to the ground and replaced by another substantial dwelling presumably free from the acidic, acerbic and nefarious ghosts of ill meant evils. The matchbox semi that cocooned my mother's depression had thankfully fallen to land development. The grounds that witnessed fights, football, cricket and things no one ever mentioned again were transformed into a woodland nature trail suitably peaceful for the souls that still lay there.
I walked part of my old paper round that was done singing Dexys; freewheeling my bike. Somehow I remembered how to find my junior school at the back of an old mining estate. Danewood School. I only went there for a matter of weeks. How small and insubstantial it seemed. I swear it had shrunk. I walked away, fearful of being branded a paedophile, singing 'Baggy Trousers' by Madness. That being my overriding memory of the place and being allowed to watch the McEnroe/Connors Wimbledon Semi-Final. We assumed the teachers were being nice. I wondered whether the small grey horse in the field next to the school was the same one that used to be there. I think it was grey. I'd forgotten that the field had existed, but the sight of it made me realise what we all take for granted.
I really wanted to find the coal shed of the terraced house I used to deliver the People's Friend and Daily Express to every day. The shed that was home to an owl that used to dive bomb me every morning at 6.30am, surely trying to dissuade me from delivering such right wing trash.
The clad houses on Stanton Hill still stuck out like office workers knocking off at Silverdale Colliery. The road was, always has been and always will be a dull, flat-lining grey of an image in my mind.  It still was on that wet, misty mid-winter day. The remnants of snow spluttering the pavements infused with a carbon monoxide hue. It was quite satisfying to know.
That desultory High School had not changed either, not one iota save from a new astro-turf and flashy school sign. The lego block classrooms still housed stickle brick brained teenagers with an eye on their lashes and MILFs on their minds. The smoker's safe zone was still sacrosanct and a fledging fumble were sharing a fag as I wandered past.

Off to the chip shop that served my school dinners for 3 years.