Rifling through a sheaf of e-papers bearing lines almost already forgotten, I came across these I wrote a few years ago. They were published on Concelebratory Shoehorn Review Journal in June 2007. Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US

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IF THESE WERE WRITTEN IN TIMES PAST

They would smell of rum, maybe wine
Of a pristine dance on brown keys that tapped,
Rasped in echoes across father’s dusty lounge.

They would reek of innocence, shy lines
Of the toddler whose eyes lay only in the silence,
laden trivia of books, and old record sleeves.

They might show relics of a hopeful child lie
Within a bulwark of rage in the silence of night,
Quiet when adults slept with ears apart, dead to the world.

They would try to hide the author’s disgust
for past bustles, home noise and day jobs,
Useless rants that mainly deter than fuel a budding muse.

But it wasn’t written then, and so the past remains
Bilked in bits of old rum in even older flasks, and pains.

MACEDONIA

Lagos again, December

Speak you must, muse, in taps, raps –
Drum, tat-a, rolls of a furious key.
The tongue to rile a fog of blabbing naps.

As with a lost wing, flap on white winds –
Serrated dots of letters, dice dials of thought
Move the night with mares of omen rinds.

Why do you forget yourself so? Soul-
Journer of a sea of words and flaming fate?
It is I who call. Grant the bearing role.

Speak you must, muse, in raps, taps –
Drum, tat-a, rolls on a furious key.
From this fringe of meagre dream of wraps.

(c) 2007. All rights reserved