The Last Clap

Clapping is competitive
Rewind, relive being sat with contemporaries
In assembly when I was six
We would sit in
rows
and
rows
of
single-file
rows,
Cramped and crammed in cross-legged
Elbows sunk like achilles heel stilettos into laps
As one hand hides slacken jaws
And one hand holds heavy heads.
Heads heavy with lofty ambitions
Of playing up-front for Arsenal
And of one day getting a good look up Sarah Marshall's skirt.
Early doors dreamy detour and general torpor
SONIC-BOOMED into oblivion
I'm back in the room.

Mrs Thornton annouces the introduction to the stage of the Year 5 Wind Band!
What came next? Recorders!
My bleeding ears go through the mill to
Play host to music that soundtracks
A Chaucer-age cuckold getting hen-pecked by his aggressively amorous wife.
If this is what passed for pop music in Tudor times then
No wonder Henry VIII killed all his wives.

Being a hipster even aged 6
And able to grasp the concept
I clapped ironically, enthusastically
avowedly, unashamedly, ironically.
The clapping receded
But still smatterings
Around the gym hall.
I clock Tommy McCall and he's clocked me.
He's doing the same thing!
No-one could be as sardonic as me!
I hate Year 5 Wind Band more than anyone else in the world and I'm determined to show my unappreciation by getting the last clap.
Mrs Thornton carries on her daily sermon
Of shepherds and flocks
Of outbreaks of pox
And of how we're not allowed to play bulldog at lunchtime anymore because Danny Wilson's mum rang up the school because all Danny's shirt buttons got ripped off.
I clap sporadically
Tommy McCall claps sporadically
I clap steathily
Tommy McCall claps stealthily.
Problem: Mrs Thornton has clocked the game and says
'don't think I haven't noticed and the next person to clap is getting detention'.
Assembly is competely still.
I haven't the gumption
Tommy McCall has the gumption
The detention and most importantly,
The glory.
Hands sore, I walked out of assembly with my freedom
But left behind my dignity.
I lost the Last Clap.

Swordfight!

Butter the pen and flick the Stan
But on religious grounds, allow the kirpan,
Gentlemen and gentlemen
Boys and boys
Fuck the knife and resurrect your swords!
Take this not as the phallic dribblings of a priapic prick
I AM DEADLY SERIOUS
I'm no coward
I am waaaay past the oral fixation stage.
Back-stabbing is so passé
If we're gonna fuck each other
Let's do it like missionaries
Not like mercenaries
Look each other in the eyes and fuck
Face to face.
A shank is like a wank -
It's very impersonal and it's over too quick.
A swordfight! A fucking swordfight!
With it's
clink
clink
swish
slash
clink
clink
swipe
jump
left
right
bob
weave
clink
swish
clink
swish
clink
swish
clink
clink
clink
clink
clink
clink
clink
clink
clink...
Well, that's just poetry in motion.

Cross

It’s twilight, the special sort of twilight where the low slung Sun sits impotently in the sky like a paper tiger, it’s stellar rays still magnificent yet it lurks behind cityscapes sans the anger that earlier forced you to ‘low a jacket.

Down below, on street level are the most successful animals on the planet all about to go home after a hard day’s winning. Some have been shopping, some have been at work, some are on the way to drink in a pub to unwind before they go home, others to a show, to a funfair, to a private gallery exhibition premiere, to meditation, to speed-dating, to the gym, to self-defence class. Each of the animals busybody about until they have to negotiate a pelican crossing.

One man gets to the crossing first and presses the button. He likes the fresh click of the first press, the press that activates the red man on the interface above where his finger had pressed. Slowly but surely, the crossing fills up with people desperately wanting and capriciously needing to get to where they’ve got to get to. The animals hustle and bustle, bump and grind, elbow and winch themselves into perfect position ready to attack the gaps as their counterparts copy them across the way.

Traffic is sporadic. Sporadic enough that there are windows of opportunity for an illegal cross but busy enough to deter anyone attempting one. One animal does make a break for it, the other animals watching, collective breath completely still, watching him just make it to the other side. A car toots as he whizzes past.
The countdown starts and the panic, though still heightened, is muted for a few moments before they begin again.

Three.

Two.

One and the warring herds rush toward each other with a ferocity and intensity that could power cities. The two tribes hit each other and the lines melt, the demarcations between the two are gone, the frenzy commences. But ho! Wait! On closer inspection, the two tribes are not killing each other. It appears they’re making out in the street.

I Wrote A Poem About The Stars, So Fucking What?

The crackle of leather as I crick my neck to
See the stars for the very first time.
Before I would look, now I can see.
Stars do twinkle
They do illuminate the sky
And while I watch with wonder the luminescence
These stellar fairylights bestow below
I know that tonight
I'm an audience of one.
But the simple fact alone that these stars shine
Means I'm not a trailblazer
And I'm alright with that.

Epiphany

You should never run for the bus. Care not about how long it might take for the next one to come along. Never overestimate your proximity to the fleeting tail end of the bus, the exhaust fumes getting sucked up by the gasping sacs of air you call your lungs. (And for the love of God) Don't let the rain tempt you. The rain is your enemy. Why do you think it rains anyway? Yes, I know, they're God's tears and everything, but also mainly because rain knows how hysterically vain peoplekind is when water hits its collective assortment of curtains, crops, cornrolls, comb-overs, fauxhawks, mohawks, mullets and moptops and buzz cuts, bowl cuts, bouffants and blowouts. Running for the bus can only end in ignominious fashion, the bus(tard) having acknowledged the effort you made to meet him driving off into the rainset leaving you with nothing but an audience who dutifully provide the muffled sniggers as you once more faceplant into smog as the bus(tard) exhausts the last farts from its cantankerous pipes.

So the other day, I ran for the bus. I was on the phone (to my friend Simon who is telling me the Arsenal score from earlier that day, a 1-1 draw at home to Leeds, a team we should be comfortably smashing) so I kinda styled it out by continuing my run down the road so I looked less like 'man-who-has-missed-the-bus-ignominiously-even-though-he-himself-knows-that-you-never-run-for-the-bus' and more like I was just 'man-who-had-received-some-really-good-news-maybe-like-his-girlfriend-is-pregnant-or-something-and-he's-just-running-down-the-road-because-that's-what-you-do-when-you-get-really-good-news'. I'm still winning because the bus got stopped by the lights about ten seconds later. I went up to the door where there was a super-swell gal sat in the driving seat. I gave her The Eyes and not The Eye, but The Eyes. These were the pleading eyes of a spasmodic Italian midfield general insisting to the referee through hand gesticulations that he 'got the ball'. The super-swell bus lady lets me on, hence the super-swell nickname. As I went to get off the bus, I went back up to the window to once again express gratitude at her super-swell kindness (and let's face it, common sense) for having allowed me to board the bus at an illegal boarding point, walked round the front to cross the road when I was halfway across before a Vespa tickled my toes as it whistled past my face, tooting as it went. I had just had a brush with death. I was ashamed I had been complacent merely one and a half days since my great Epiphany.

One and a half days ago, I had a great Epiphany. I'm 25 years old. I'm in my mid-twenties now. I'm no longer my father's son. I'm my own man now. I live in my own flat, where I eat my own food, smoke my own weed and masturbate naked in my own front room. I'm not a child anymore. I've got to stop planning my future and instead try to live my present. Most people my age worry about what they'd have acheived by the time they're 30. I'm a rock star, though. Morbid thoughts of my own immortality infiltrate my skyline and I think to myself, what if I got merked off the planet, dead, done, gone aged 27? That'd be pretty cool to go at 27, join the 27 Club and sit alongside such alumni as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson, Kurt Cobain, Jean Michel-Basquiat et al, but hold your horses, what if I did die at 27 and haven't acheived like these badmans have? I couldn't possibly be a proud member of the 27 Club and sit alongside such alumni. In order to reverse the status quo, I need to get my house in order. That gives me a year and a half to get my shit together.

Sure, this is a trite epiphany, the sort of epiphany that one comes to when someone close to them dies in a motorcycle accident. After a period of understandable grief, they then run about town declaring how the tragic death of the aforementioned dead one has made them realize that life is too short, a sentiment accompanied by a head tilted at two o'clock, hands clasped together and a furrowed brow. Of course it's a trite epiphany. However, to suggest that something is trite or cliched is a pejorative term to suggest that it is overused and therefore lacking its original impact. This can be easily explained as something that is good would tend to be overused and the issue of the lack of impact through repeated airplay can be explained simply through the law of diminishing returns. Most importantly, why would you overuse something shit?

Well, actually, loads of people overuse shit things. There is nothing wrong with the 'life is too short' bit; it's the 'and from now on in, I will live as if each day is my last'. That's the shit bit, because I reckon I can declare with a certain amount of certainty that no-one has ever lived each day as if it were their last. If you lived each day like it were your last, you'd be doing something much more important than reading this. And you certainly wouldn't get anything done. If it was your last day on earth, you'd do something silly, like withdraw all the monies out of your account and spend it on stuff you had always wanted to do and then you wake up tomorrow and you've got no house and no job and no girlfriend because you went on a monster coke bender and ended up in bed with a bevvy of bisexual lovelies. No, rather than live each day like it was your last, live your life as if all the minor decisions you make during a regular, ordinary day might be the last time you ever make that particular decision. Walk the road less travelled. Go off the beaten track. Get Ribena instead of Robinson's. No-one's going to make these decisions for you because no-one cares more about you than you. You came here alone, you leave here alone. I can't guarantee success. I can't guarantee happiness. But what I can guarantee is that if that Vespa mows me down two years from now and I'm in the departure lounge being interviewed by Davina McCall and it gets to the end of the interview and she shows me my Best Bits, I can rest knowing that I died trying. Being a rock star isn't just about shredding your Gibson SG til you got blisters on your fingers. It's about doing the stuff that everyone else is afraid to do. It's about doing the stuff you're afraid to do. It's about the endeavour for endeavour.

Cryogenics

In the least morbid possible way, let's assume You went missing. On the flipside, in the most optimistic cloud-silver-lining kind of way, let's assume Your disappearance is nationally newsworthy. If You were newsworthy, the newspeople would have a picture of You so they had a face to the name. Also, people watching the news would know who they were looking for when they went looking for You, in Tesco Metro where You were seen buying spinach and ricotta ravioli, or at Natwest where You were seen withdrawing an undisclosed amount of money, all stuffed into one of their DL-sized envelopes or at the local outdoor swimming pool where You were seen doing backstroke for what seemed like an eternity.

Have You ever thought what picture they'd use of You? It's an important picture. That picture will be sat like a pride-of-place painting, at two o'clock to George Alagiah's head every six o'clock until something more terrible than Your disappearance happens somewhere else in the world. Your face in that picture will etch itself into the minds of millions, reinforced when they go online to read the newspapers, where Your Face will once again crop up.

How important is that picture?

In the most morbid way possible, let's assume You're never found. That picture is what You will look like forever. Sure, if You're really newsworthy, The Sun will do a computer-generated mock-up of how You might look today. And You might think your close friends and family will retain a proper likeness of you in their minds. Your lover will remember the concentration in Your face when You cooked a Hangover Cure Full English the afternoon after the night before for the pair of you; friends will remember your air-guitar face on nights out whenever The Chain by Fleetwood Mac would come on; the parentals will remember when you ran in the house after passing your driving test at the first attempt, which was remarkable given that You'd only had ten lessons.

I asked you how important that picture was.

The answer is, that picture has a bouncebackability that even Your Mother can't fight and she too will eventually be brainwashed by this immortal image of You - your age, your self-image, your emotions on the day that picture was taken, all frozen in time.

The question is then, how do you want to be remembered?

Adventuring

Where have you been my little friend?

Have you been hiding in a cupboard?
Maybe you were truffling in the shrubbery?
Possibly it could be that you been sniffing dogs bums?
...Or perhaps you have been to the bermuda triangle and back?
Can you have been taken hostige by pipe smoking parrots (of the kakapo variety)?
Or were you swimming with cephalopods?
Somehow you may have been dancing with Babushka dolls?
Or hunting the rare Mr L. David?
Have you been fighting with albino wasps?
Or maybe travelled to the Vatican to frolick with the pope?
Playing sudoku against your leg?

Off the radar is where you are.

(Written by J.J.Hartley)