Seagulls screech overhead understating the depths below. Fleeting bubble meetings that burst and go.
Spirit buzz energising the soul. Sat with the salt of the earth by the sea on deckchairs with the old laughing their heads off at how time flew since get-together births.
If you feel like not bothering a cigarette will give you a chance to walk away. I’m off for a fag getaway but if you really care, no excuses will mean you’ll be able to stay.
Chaotic cars drive themselves in car parks. Everything is out of control and depends on the last lyric you listened to like ‘but you blew my mind.’ I can’t thank you enough for telling me something I never knew.
Speaking after the service to the Uffculme gravedigger filling in the grave, he came out with some choice Devon that would have pleased Dave. Like’em say; them with lots of friends die young! 200 or so I counted, and all there for one.
The bells rang out at St Mary’s at the end, after Dun Ringill by Tull. Bells that that mischievous buyy (pulling the other one) often would literally pull. Catching the bus back to Exeter with postmarked post I’d sent long ago, beloved Devonia, with its herds and hills, was on a roll.
28 year gone since it would begin with Bill and that Friday pint and pasty lunchtime break at The Bridge Inn. You, always a half cider at most, while me on that infamous occasion (bolloxed) having got to It’s not fair! back from The Double Locks.
Then there was your pride and joy Barclay which you worked on meticulously only for it to break down at the wrong moment unfailingly. Your old leather jacket and more reliable Moto Guzzi. Whether the engine was running or not, our vintage joke was I never knew your age exactly.
Musically, (apart from our mutual Who worship), we dueled with compilations designed to educate. Your greatest victories were Jethro and The Moody Blues. Mine Morrissey, though (for your begrudging acknowledgement) you made me wait! In recent years, you sent DVDs and gave me a proper job hard disk portable drive to use.
Last time, last December we met as usual at Waterstones, Cathedral Green. After a bit of dithering about going somewhere different, we went on to Topsham and The Passage Inn. You, holding up your cup, and with an impish smile, milking the fact I said it wasn’t the done thing in Italy to drink a cappuccino with your main meal!
Lots more to mention like my printing offset litho disaster when, with ink flying off onto the Vincent Thompson carpet (a stain that would never disappear!) you came to my rescue. Or the (not so many?!) times you covered for me arriving late for work, worse for wear. Or our laughing at Bill’s legendary assertion that before I met you all, I had no character.
So, yes, please all rise, and hats off to The Mighty Trist, as he takes a bow in all his fine family crest pageantry. Well, me old bugger, you’m gone and done it now. You b’aint be coming back, will he?
In memory of Dave (David Anthony Trist 1954-2015) This poem written 26/5/2015
This poem was written for a collection I did 2010/11 with poems written inspired by groups and singers I love as if they’d written the poem or lyrics. Remembered this poem because of Andy Rourke’s passing this weekend, fact he was only 59 like me, and the photo was taken in a cemetery in honour of one of my favourite Smith’s songs ‘Cemetery Gates.’
You’re a demanding little so-&-so and a real tug-of-war to-and-fro but don’t take it to heart; Never in a million milliseconds will we part.
I’m so middle class, one day it’s poverty the next day it’s wealth. I could just die for a spot of good health. You’re the one who knows me well and I’ve you to thank for this flaming hell.
Ohflaming hell! And bloody laura! Will I ever write again amidst flora and fauna? The good old days with straw and hay in our frilly frocks on a harvest day?
Though it can only ever end in a hospital bed and round the bend, go straight on, and second right and please, mr bendy copper, don’t stop me tonight!
Sat on a train, a young woman puts her arm round his shoulder. Sat close they are united on a station that heads for Nostalgia.
Others when they can give love look and feel like an animal in a zoo and when they finally realise they want to might not have the opportunity to.
In poetry, you can deceive but things get serious when nitty gritty. Can anyone reading this help? Backtrack what happened to that couple’s national rail history?
Tiny eyes watch with miniature retina. London seems huge, makes each face minute. Small humans breathe inconsiderable air. Dwarfed lungs. This slender window.
Most of this is new: a place of extremes. A life of a person too microscopic to be noticed. Deliberate buildings and spontaneous streets. Meticulous entrepreneurs disguising their witch-doctor faces.
Unfamiliar days made up of dilated hours. An iris of compressed wideness. Horatio Nelson grows shorter. More becomes relatively less.
Words in my head hardly stay. Droplets of memory break. Divisibility of the tiniest day. My immediate smallness of fate.
‘Outlaw Blues’ plays on the radio As I think to myself: when is the stage-coach to Paradise? Outside, the drifter is obviously alone. Others, too, have had desires denied. Hand me my whisky. Pour me my moonshine. The hotel lovers, half unclothed. The poker-game gambler down to a dime. Saddle my horse. The saloon has just closed.
With no sound but tiny bells tinkling on an empty platform in the middle of nowhere and a model train silently moving towards a station there, the only waiting passenger listens to tiny bells tinkling on an empty platform in the middle of nowhere and a model train silently moving towards a station there.
6.20 pm. With no sound but tiny bells tinkling on an empty platform in the middle of nowhere and quick spontaneous ghosts on a disused railway sprouting up on a stem, a gothic black dressed made-up comic character stops the tinkling bells by suddenly being there.
After dinner, two play violin as she dances on a pub table, just hours before her flight. While she steals an umbrella and gets caught out he takes off Elvis, Saturday night.
There’s one that quotes comedians verbatim as another cries her karaoke eyes out, having her lyrical say. As one of them eats spag.bol at 4 a.m. two water-pistol pedestrians twice, then make a get-away.
He walks on Dartmoor. She falls asleep tipsy in his pyjamas. While she mixes up REM with The Rolling Stones they act the goat in one of the town’s cattle bars.
As two shouting-match brothers pull a hired boat the few metres to shore she confidently quotes A woman must have everything taken from Joni. One gives him the nickname ‘Think Out Loud.’ while another says he’s talking baloney.
A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 