When you watch a gritty mother saying she’s told the kids their house has burned down. When you watch a Borg -McEnroe doc on their struggles, rivalry and friendship. When you see how much sacrifice a women’s England football player made to get to the top. When you see a friend struggling with bureaucracy diagnosed with cancer.
When you look back. When nostalgia brings a lump to your throat. When a song comes on that gets you going cos you suddenly got older. When there’s a moment you could have changed.
When you watch a soppy film about pets. When someone dies. When your team wins. When someone says something that isn’t even upsetting. When something triggers something, or teary little bullets in you.
When you get good news out the blue. Not often bad news cos you hold it back And not always when you should. It usually comes when least expected
But that’s when you get like the poem title says. Probably on your own, the best way. Sometimes with others. When you think to yourself something they won’t say.
When you surprise yourself ‘Well yeah, I can get emotional.’
John Di Girolamo was born during the swinging middle ages as the Battle of Hastings raged outside on a cold, miserable Saturday evening just outside 'The Juggler's Arms' in Oxford, Torquay and Exeter at the same time. Born to a family, he spent most of his early years learning how to open umbrellas for a rainy day, and the runnings of horses and sword swallowers and the costs they incurred. Having graduated in 'Circus Management', he took to spinning plates for a living and persuaded his father to buy a restaurant to fund what he believed would be a lucrative career move. However, in the the days leading to The Age of Post Punk', he quit and would embark upon what was to go down in history doodles as a notebook.
Few knew it then but he had already started copying poetry, and often written by other people. As the minutes passed by, and Sardinia loomed, the idea of collages and drawings suddenly hit him as a way of filling up what had become a kind of book with pages and all. One day while storming off in a huff because his mum told him to, he struck upon the idea of putting it all together over a long-playing record (later a CD) and during a commercial break in the digital age, decided a blog would end Cromwell's ill-fated republic.
Sent off by recorded post, it would be by chance that his poems would get to their ultimate destination as, meanwhile, his pigeon who had queued so loyally for so long, sadly died the day before it was sacked.
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A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 