The Searchers

I don't want a Young American taking me on a Disneyland tour, said Old Geordie. I want an authentic tour of an English football club. 

But it IS Disneyland, said Young Gabriel. 

The Old still search for authenticity. Something free of the Hollywood glamour. Something recognizably permanent in time and space. Something growing straight and true. Unseen by the priests who tend the Money God's garden.

They never find it, of course. They grumble and they die. It's gone. They are gone. Remember We are the Inheritors. You are the Last Man, Winston.

Perhaps my autism-inflected Ken Dodd marathons are right on the money. I'm a Modern City man afterall.

He smiled. He loved the Money God.

I'm no fucking Steppenwolf

I'm no fucking Steppenwolf. Or perhaps that's exactly who I am. Though I yearned for home, the clean and orderly modern city could never provide the warmth and shade necessary to nurture my multitudinous growth. Instead, it's been violently hacking me to pieces for forty years. 

See the killers lean backwards gleefully kicking thin, black, pointed legs, as they press skinny buttocks and white hands heavily down on his polished coffin lid. As he lies subdued, breathless and broken beneath.

Grimly satisfied, the leering falseteeth Gormanghastly monsters see him finally planted in Potter's Field. They lean grinning on their shovels. Licking thin lips. Savouring sweet victory over the broke-backed inarticulate boy. Who for sure was nothing, afterall.

"School teaching has been impossible for a long time. Sixth form college teaching was still possible. Now sixth form college teaching is impossible", said his hangdogtired union comrade one lunchtime.

And now university teaching is impossible.

It's over. There's nowhere to run. 

Added to which. He learnt today he has no concept of permanence. Can't be sure he can do again what he did yesterday. Or you're the same one he was with. Each day he must summon the energy to fashion first love anew in a time and space of his own making. 

With a child's heart, there's only and always the now. Everlasting. Burning. Pater's cold, hard gemlike flame. 

Only ever as good as his last performance, he steps out one last time to make his proud, death-defying high-wire walk far above the cartoon craning necks and open mouths.

Enough. He's had enough.

Please release me. Let me go. 

For I don't love you anymore. 

Goddamn, you're looking old. So old he remembers the poor man's Tom Jones.

The boy who is nothing is tempted to take his finger out and flood the whole miserable world. Let the fuckers drown, he snaps, and stomps off.

Why should not old men be happy?

A tiny tap at the staffroom door. Opening the door, at first it seems there's no-one there. But, looking down. There's Ruth. Shock of white blonde hair, almost obscuring her little pink face. Big, blue uplifted eyes peep out. She's come to tell me Roland her brother is poorly and won’t be in school today. In small, confidential tones, she goes on to give me the daily update. The life and times of Ruth and Roland’s mouse.

There's a chill wind blowing in from the hills, and we all stand shivering by the main entrance high above the town. As Harry expertly unties the basket, and releases his star pigeon. With a second’s stall, she's off. Describing a wondrous arc across a clear blue sky.

He’s been gone a long time. He only went out for a wee. Perched on the edge of the teacher’s table. Book in hand, wandering the moors with Cathy, Heathcliff, and some sleepy teenagers. For what seems like twenty years. I glance at my watch, and at the empty chair before me. Which had been shunted noisily backwards as he got up to leave. Suddenly the door bursts open. All heads swing round, and Dave is in the room. Knees bent, arms spread, 'ta – da' triumphant in full Superman costume.

"You called the cops?"

Dead of night. Guns out, New York cops clatter into a noisy backstreet garage. Cars jacked up, hunched arc-lit underneath, men in greasy overalls point metal tools. 

Lead cop shouts:

"You called the cops?"

Preoccupied oil-streaked whitefaces look round.

"No. You're called the cops. We're called the mechanics."

Alternative Dialogue:

"Someone here called the cops?"

"Yeah. You're called the cops."

Peadar in a glass

At the ice rink. Wendy steps carefully, as if from the deep green sea. Onto solid ground. A few uncertain mermaid steps. And she sits lightly on the wooden bench to unlace her skates. She stands and looks around. He stands mute beside her.

Clutching an enormous purse in a tiny hand, she turns her big green eyes towards him. So delicate, so fragile. So much smaller without the huge cork platform soles, her tiny sea-girl feet are nearly lost beneath the flapping seaweed tail of dark green five-button flairs. And her voice. It's so small. Despite leaning in, he doesn't know what she wants. 

Newly arrived on dry land, she seems unsteady without skates, without shoes. He reaches a protective hand down to her, but he can't make contact. He can't reach her. 

Of course, she's in no danger. She doesn't need a Gentleman's steadying hand. Only the whereabouts of the Ladies.

Maybe she sees him - if she sees him at all - very, very small and far away. Through the big end of the telescope. Peadar in a glass.

Glimpsed through rainwater pearls loosely scattered across the train window, a slender rain-soaked waif slips away on a northern hillside.

Or down deep, down deep, a whoozy ghostly face looks up from the dark green waters of a wishing well.

He so wanted to hold Wendy's hand at the ice rink.

Through Tangled Roots

Through tangled roots of upturned licorice trees,
Flattened whitegoldsunyolk floods the sky,
And the bashful dyad bows to how it is:
Her downcast eyes kow-tow to Mother Earth.
The mirror says, "Poor lamb, you're lookin' old",
Wires exposed, and, like her, thinly drawn.
Lost in second series Fawlty Towers,

Locked in repeats, pale ghosts of seventy five.
Kneeling broken on your Ben Gunn beard,
You scrape between the fortress prison blocks,
Wait and hope, recall the teenage dream.

What say we promenade through the park, Leo?
Can't repeat the past? Of course you can.
It's the real, the here and now we cannot bear.