Tag: childhood

On Brighton Pier

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Spun sat – a gamble of co-ordinates
[wrist-rolls a cruelty]/ We steer silent
journeys – then instant guffaws as if
this pier screams – Roll-up & ride! A

bob – Ogle our fat fubsy lady! Once I
saw a mermaid [her lustrous breasts
were lifted by a sea lion] & I paid for
a closer look – via a penny telescope

A lifeboat landed an inert man – we
were spat at – Turn away from it all –
he was oily [slumped] with whiskers
& stared eyes [I paid him 2 pennies]

I walked from our empty family car –
from silence – a sat-nav directed us
here – don’t look – it will show more
rides to turn me on to bewilderment

[one last time – I wish] as Ivor reads
my tarot cards in his caravan up on
Brighton Pier – I see a mermaid & a
drowning – hindsight equals a quid

these days – we shove our modern
florins – no Britannias rub in purses
before being placed in an arcade’s
agape slot – drop a ten pence coin

then nine more to find less fortune
under a hundred cheap songs – our
greed sees gold in lit-orange rows
of one-armed bandits – we’ll go on

& climb aboard their doubtful ghost
train – a slam & shunt of mechanics
on a loop of terror – fondles & feels
were taken here by mods & rockers

until such pleasures waned/ I turn a
pound telescope back on to us – we
are now ghosts as we point phones
at rides [we long forgot how to feel]

Composure

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

His composure? Rare – indeed!

Above me – a treasure in a tin
on a narrow shelf/ It was then
a cold world [nuclear war lists
or raging unions] – my father’s
fear of Commies was nurtured
by old hums of hated pacifism

Electrical wiring was pinned to
walls – our carpets were worn –
small ornaments wore less dust

[& equal rules were imposed by
my parents to avoid that trail of
mud-dipped kids indoors]/ My
tin’s lid was hinged and opened
with a squeeze and a thumbing

[once it was a mausoleum for a
butterfly – at other times a cash
reserve of found coins – coppers
retrieved from backs-of-chairs –
but always my private box of air]

Story of O

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Your soul so toils – your own/
You dragon – you Ouroboros
[loud swallows of lost motifs
took your crown] – old Osiris
joined your roundings to ‘O’/
How your omphalos tore off

[you shouted oxygen’s howl]
Born so cold to our mother’s
spoken tongues [of shouting
of scoldings – of sour notes –
of louder bonds [to control]/
Pour out – more complaints –

to poison others [no women]
Our cool childhood took you
off to crowds for other love –
smothered you – for too long
below someone to love [who
blows you off to destruction

to reprove – to misdirection]
Who sows hope out of love?
You roll your O icon – to loop
to open – to swallow – whole
dragon stories – for Gnostics/
Uncoil your yonic metaphors?

E.1. MUMMY OF HORNEDJITEF

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Papier-mâché connected us kids to old Egyptian
burial processes [nowt else for a state-educated
minion – maybe Tutankhamun’s spectacular tour
in 1972 cast a curse on a few school-trip slaves]

Layered newspapers were our papyrus strips – in
spore-ish glue our fingers dipped to fish at strips
of Fifty Killed & One Million Unemployed rippings/
Ms Green also shredded two pages of obituaries

& handed them out in our mask-making art class/
An ancient lesson – we would not decode her torn
articles – kids sitting detached from too-big words
was a given [death an unknown] Our labours went

unpaid – all innocent in our hour of old arts of layer
placing/ Under Hornedjitef’s swaddles they placed
his body parts [bagged] to travel with him/ We set
our glue-dripped masks to dry as Ms Green smiled

& our precise lunchtime bell rang – she piled up her
stock of ‘papers [freely donated by male teachers]
praising us all we departed/ Sally whispered loudly
to Anne that Ms Green had bagged Mr Burn’s heart

VE Day 1975

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

No family clues to Gran’s
husband’s death – his life
was not a part of us/ Dad
took his ever-old mother-
in-law off to Runnymede/
We were dragged without
any explanation – a rub of
three boys [as she looked
for her husband’s rank &
recall on marble]/ A slight
woman – with her Geordie
beat – flagged by Player’s
fags sucked on scant lips –
not tall enough to read all
those dead – Dad helped –
his rozzer-height one lofty
ambition for his sons [our
desires were to be as high
as him – to descry in ease]
I now aid old-aged people
[in need of my set height]
I reach for tins in Waitrose
reading out those names –
Heinz Beans [low in sugar]
sat far up like her wor lad
who met her last on stone
below a war memorial flag

 

Mole Traps

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

You almost trip on another
tipped mound of grey sand

Turned soil reverts to fulvid
shades as our strides drop

us down to a black expanse
of foul-water ditches – thick

as if cooled off tarmacadam
& stinking [once kicked up]

A retreat to my childhood &
set aside meadows [framed

by dead streams – ore-stain
& pollutant slicks – no fish]

as July sun seared a stench
without equal – we could be

smelt at 100 yards [told off
we stood peeling outdoors

to shake off boots & scabs
into pleshes of dirt & blood]

There would follow bickers
of hungry voices – boys at it

with daytime treaties forgot
when hauled from outdoors

[our at-the-end-of-my-tether
mother cannot stomach us

Why four boys – Jonathan –
not a girl – me #3 a mishap]

Best left buried – eh – Mike?
Stay keen – about molehills

 

Carshalton

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Travel to a 1970’s grey suburb –
to my dad’s father’s door – here
be greeted by my dad’s father’s
second wife – Dorothy [a demur
woman in spectacles – quiet as
a mouse [a dormouse] A docile
creature in my recall of frosted
history] We were pulled by Ford
& Austin engines / We surged &
occupied – four loud boys upon
relatives’ homes [orders – not to
touch anything – all breakages to
be paid for – in too many ways]/
We were a quick swarm of flies
[characterised by Golding’s law
of maleness] / We were tucked
in & deposited – our parents set
straight by pre-war handbooks/
I remember my tiny hope [such
as those that offspring nurture]
that my parents were beautiful –
under their obvious ugly masks

Also on Medium

Lunches in Netzer Sereni

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Opposite me – at this table –
an elderly couple bend over
their equal servings to mine

[chicken & assorted salads]
We wear similar work shirts
Steel dishes chime cutlery’s

made scrapes & complaints
& return me – by breath – to
school time & a lunch hour –

cooled on a tray /  There are
no records of my [misspent]
fretted lessons served there

[my certificates were defiled]
It is easy for me to retreat to
my childhood – to wait inline

Sat in this kibbutz dining hall
[playing too easily in history]
I diminish my grades – lo tov

 

E270120

Two Treehouses

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

On my circular dog walk
there is a tidy treehouse
with no way to climb up

It is likely to be reached
by a foot-propped ladder
lent by someone’s parent

It has been made to last
by some eye-aligned tools
It is not my younger prop

of wood hefts – sly thefts
off a builder’s dry bonfire
by our ever-hapless gang

to make our cobbled den
of swiped timbers – to lift 
us – half a century earlier

above wired private land
in our splintered cockpit
of near-balanced planks

But this one has fat bolts
to hold – and a guarantee
of an adult’s supervision

On my circular dog walk
there is a tidy treehouse
with no way to climb up

Once More

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

There is such scant chance
of any long term escape
from your rusting suffixes
now all time is in a half-light

since your last offered dance
to your half-known songs
of romance –
you unstitched their looped lyrics
in your head

Love is not found in white lines
or knocked on hotel doors
or where an hour is charged
at exorbitant fuck-me rates

as underwear is slipped down
and another breath is felt hot
through a nipple-bitten-minute
of house rule-settings

before a stiff affirmation
of your being so beautiful –
that feckless gauge of worth
which has been set

by years of dressing downs
within your three-way coven –
they fucked you up
and left you to look – still looking –
for more than them

Grandpa? Not Yet

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Look! Waking white etens are tailwind-struck by onshore gusts. That tall flock of unfixed turbines. Into Kemptown they will march by France’s orders beyond La Manche ..

A readied Grandpa story – not yet –

not now – not pinned – not aligned
above high tides by unseen wordy fixings –
by birthdays – yet again – by cakes with candles

blown out – Once more – and finally out
Those one-legged giants were plummeted
into cedings – by borings into seabeds

through lost layers of petrified trees
into our once-forests washed off-shore
Let me tell giant stories to your children –

about hundreds of acres before this began
Our grandchildren do need to learn
that history is scribed beyond this land

Fruits and Suites

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

We washed in an avocado-coloured bath –
we had never tasted that foreign fruit
back in nineteen-seventy-two – or three –
we were lucky to get to peel tangerines

It was a plastic suite – uneasily creaking
with our scales of weights of our pre-teen
occasional visits – each darkly recorded
by layered rings of both dirt and soap –

but warm with the water – no cold steel
or enamel suck – a discomfort favoured
by our TV-fashioned homemakers –
but – one hears – green baths are back

Competitors

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Our house complains
of his heavy feet overhead –

quick as excited heartbeats
but then still-stopped

to my gone voice in our play
of Grandmother’s Footsteps

once commanding my son
to fix and freeze under

my quick look – that thrill
in his lost childhood – testing

his parents by such stealth
was an unplanned rehearsal

for these sometimes-days
of eggshell steps around us

We players of an adult game
without a joyous winner

First Year, 1970

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Aged five to school – an unplanned addition –
M. Bell – born into a monochrome 1964 –
just after real sex was bargained by Larkin –

Miss Green – my teacher – wore the latest
fashions – miniskirts and roll-neck tops
with cropped hair and big jewellery –

all co-ordinated above calf-fixed trends
of highly-shined high heel boots
and her daily sprayed halo scent –

Aged fifteen – my recall of Miss Green
was fixed again – seeing her once more –
she was still wearing 1970 well

when we passed in my dentist’s alleyway –
that red brick shortcut to the High Street –
but she did not recognise me – now fifteen –

A decade earlier she was my cool mother
on school days – she had set me to new words
and easy metrication – before my release

to longer grass and longed-for summerings –
She is now – by my calculations – locked
into her last few years – and still wearing
nineteen seventy

In Earshot

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

I stopped – I heard the playful howls –
the breaktime hollers from a school –
but my ear-to-the-past
was then frittered by the wind’s shift

which rudely imposed on my
awareness the speeding hum
of rubber treads on the sunken bypass
and flat warnings of vehicle reversing –
further dulling the innocent revels –

I lent on a wall – A much-needed breather
I would explain to anyone asking of
my unsteady condition –
To lift the cramps from my legs –

and still – the shouts were blocked –
now by a car’s revs over rumbling humps –
but – as quick – the wind dropped
and I turned my head to the past –
once more -with closed eyes –

the blind man’s map – which had shaken
itself as if it were a sail unhitched
from eyelets –
was now doldrum-flat for me
and my sensed route
returned – I do not need to see the road

to know the course for me to rove –
in reverse – over five decades
without this shortened gait of illness – of mine –
I was never – then – one of those sick kids –

The schoolyard was set silent by the whistle –
then to giggled-at-desks – it was penny plain
as I took to learning and then to believe
that our futures were guaranteed to be huge –

I looked up at the vast blackboard and was lost
to calculations and big new words –
that succour has been ignored for too long –
my concocted life has left me without
a belief in learning –

And if my first school was heaven – my chance
gone – then I know now – just by listening
that I can find the gates
and find my desk – again –
with my name etched by a held compass
till kingdom come

The Orbital Road

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

The bastard Surrey countryside
was our dawn-to-dusk playground
of rust-stained ditches – of new paths
set down through welly-trod crops

out to where the horizon was lost
to woodlands – and to buildings
that had not been let to trespass –
not since the fitting of the green belt

to this part of the arse of England –
but all that was dug up by navvies
sat in high cabs – forcing wide roads
across our churned playing fields

with their lurched one ton buckets –
set to feed on the tide-laid gravels
under the stripped-back veil of top soil –
We took to the clay and sand – until

in the channelled land – lunar places –
we found it to be a foolish choice
when they had to bring a donkey in
to pull a fool from the suck-quick sand

Insect Hunting

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

There was that microcosm
fixing my dawdled childhood
in which I centred myself
in a kneeled-to wondering

as unidentified insects
routed in and out – between
bent blades of variegated grass –
and in that airtight stillness

nervy sparrows let me forage
alongside their skits and hops –
until we were all fed enough
by the microscopic wonders

and then I unhinged
my tight focus – pulled back –
unhooking from nature
as Concorde halved the sky –

that white flechette – fustian –
slapping pigeons from the trees –
it was another sudden brutality
in my sub-sonic childhood

The Christmas Call

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

‘ ..We know nothing of man .. far too little..’ CG Jung

It is over two decades since we last spoke –
you offered no responses – not when I ‘phoned
or when I cheerily arrived at the family home

with – or without – a disquieted companion –
then I’d try to engage you in light conversation –
but that was your silent-met cue to exit the room

And our mother never gave me a full explanation –
except that – He goes upstairs and paints ..
pictures .. from his imagination .. It’s his escape ..

He doesn’t get out much .. nearly an old man – You –
a temporary loss in her thinning line of sons –
each boy sets her wondering – What went wrong?

I watched her fight her eldest – a patio-battering –
from behind the Crittall windows of my bedroom –
I saw her ill-faste fists set upon her eldest child

That is what she made – Us in her ugly likeness
of turned cheeks and of emotional tightness –
that son she striked – he died too early for her liking

And now – on the ‘phone – She is too ill to talk to you –
your first line in this garrulous time of your remove –
then a snapped order – not to try again – It upsets her!

You don’t speak to me for years then bark commands –
Do they count – along with your hardened demands
against my ragged ripostes at your loss of voice?

No – do not speak to me –
Please leave it twenty more

The Blinded

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

The olfactory hit kicks in –
smelling at a filed return
of youthful tree climbing –
of guns-made-from-sticks
and of our lumpen crashing
among swallowing bracken

I am now drawing so deeply
on this propel of perfumes –
of the under-tree rotten scents –
and also taking the shaded chill –
which seems to feed the smell –
which was the first suggestion

My childhood – found in the kernels
of peeled sweet chestnuts –
was so open-ended that nothing
was going to set a conclusion –
Then on to the unexpected
cinder path – where it ends – again

In Line

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Weird kids never came out –
not back then –
that’s why they were not in
our rushed pack
of loosely herded imaginations
running under the command of
Up to the ruins!

Us from identical houses
yet each uneasily unique –
being found guilty
of English differences –
set by the age of cars on drives –
which kept us in our place –
forever fixing our sub-classifications

The weird kids only went outside
to be the last-in-lines –
to retreat to bedroom isolation
which was still a viable option –
back then

Old Devices

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

We’d race to get the telephone –
stating our number as rote taught –
our mother in her poshest voice
but rough for sister talk

Relative news transmissions –
but not intended to be heard –
I knew nothing of kindred facts
’til I stole truth from her words

We were ignorant between acts –
maybe flattening an irksome book –
we’d stare through the yellowed nets
whilst half-tuned to loosened talk

We tugged at the reluctant drawers
where our history was lost and found –
there tucked between old table mats –
sepia smiles were loosely bound

News bulletins marked the hours
or were shoved through the letterbox –
that narrow window on the world –
ink fears of the Eastern bloc

Ignorance was a short-lived bliss
in those disconnected times –
no algorithms on our wrists
to redress the truths and lies

Into the Trees

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Under the trees we find the path –
that one we missed last time –
and climb above the flood plain
on which – five miles downstream –
fools build fifty-four homes

We are now in nature’s green skin
where branches and hand-propped boughs
form unfinished rough shelters –
these experiments and adventures
decay to an undesigned usefulness

Further on the slunked gully runs –
here kids built mud and stick dams
until a wire fence was erected
and that sucking and silting stream
was blocked from the apprentices

The track is beaten and heat-cracked
which encourages youngsters on bikes
to take the risks we also under took –
but we hadn’t the engineered machines
on which they hurtle as fearless riders

The trees reverberate with monkey calls
and the shrill complaint of a lost child –
it is as if the internet doesn’t exist
as the off stage scramble of children
escalates – not quite Lord of the Flies.

From the Gift Shop

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

In the dream there were scatterings
of things you had bought and then kept

Small gifts from a trip which were never given –
a sprinkle of purchased intentions

I bent with ease to pick each one up
and being of sleep they adjusted
to become other things and other thoughts

On waking I re-assembled the slim moments
from yesterday that my slept mind had touched

– I had briefly looked at a snapped picture of you
from that shortness of unschooled innocence
that age when we inhabit a world so small

– I sat in the sun on a hard garden bench
with my awareness shrunk to that of children
into only considering that which I could see –
down to that hemisphere of no more than a step

– Momentarily I had thought about a family trip
That was a rarity then and more so now

– An ugly fly landed on my emptied plate
but there was a jewel’s quality to the intricacies
of the fly’s translucent wings and rolled eyes –
an emerald’s glint as it fed on microcosms

We no longer stride the globe of our forbears –
that inheritance which childhood soon sheds

Our interests and eyes wander too wide
and so we stop seeing into the eyes of flies

The Old Boy

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

Grandfather was of a slipped generation
with his Bakelite-twirled-to radio stations –
tuned to his low-hums with orchestras
and his wound-up clock – that western sutra –
its regular pendulum his hands-free baton
conducting his lonely tea-mornings taken –
until he rolled his guard-rattling Raleigh
out of the garage – always wordlessly –

for his brief progress to priest-led prayers
down to the hymns and those-who-care –
His trouser leg rolled – clipped – chain-safe –
he pedalled away to kneel at God’s place –
I re-delivered his Guardian newspaper
to his emptied room – our in-house neighbour –
In such regular times I’d take a sneak –
a look inside The Old Boy’s suite –

His life with us was lived behind two doors –
the only bedroom with parquet-floors –
in that other place – not fully his own –
in his free chapel – there prayers alone –
beside his shelves of impossible books –
Schweitzer tallest amongst the hardbacks –
Some with his dead wife’s dated name –
but no further indications of her ever being –

That forensic examination of his living space –
with my untrained eye – I made mistakes –
I never read well his folds or light marks
which re-leafed books do often impart –
I now decipher those responses I get –
I am near his last age – and he gains my respect

041118

Projection Booth

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

fullsizerender

In the airless cupboard
of our sixties new-build,
in that three storey house,
up on the second floor,
we gathered, brothers,
to delight in the wonders
of the boxed projections,
a Chad Valley picture show
of Thunderbirds Are Go;
with fat batteries loaded,
like dad’s shotgun cartridges,
in the spring-tight blue barrel,
and then, a twist of focus,
our slide show began,
on the whitewashed wall:
Us on a shelf, in the warm.

A Son

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

A son: Thomas Howard,
Fourteen years old,
Was lain, hardly checked,
To enter the cold:
“My son, my son,”
Rust-kissed and crushed,
Left pitch-side, to die,
By a force we trust.
Sleep well young man,
With a beautiful dream,
A lad, a child,
Just supporting his team.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/features/uk-england-36103823/36103823

Updated reporting on the inquest here – http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/all-about/hillsborough-inquests