Omnibus

Confessions of a boyish prank

Palfreyman’s the Pawnbrokers
(“Taunting the poor with their own possessions since 1827”)

With morning dawning
An oily assistant would take an ugly hour
To bring out cherished items to be hung
Out of reach
On nails
With the aid of a long stick.

Summer hot with mischief,
A town’s sullen anger baking on the stone flags,
Drink and work and temperance their only opiates,
Minds closed like ovens.

With evening cooling
Boyish Peter Bunney took
His dad’s hammer and his mum’s steps
And calmly
Drove home
Every single nail.

First published in Coffee Pot

Rushbearing

We’ll have a wake like the old wakes,
As the townships close in.
Search the moorlands for rushes
While the probing wind pulls at the flax,
And tussocks of reeds are like stepping stones
For the children who dance through the wet marshes,
Watching the wakes dance through time
Bacup’s cocoanutters to Nick o’Thungs,
Rochdale’s “ceremonial gang warfare,”
A pulsebeat pumping
With the life of generations.
Defeating the bosses by simply running off,
Returning home in liquor at 6 am on Tuesday morning,
Holidays carved by custom
Not the masters’ liberality.

Come then, children.
We’ll gather in the pubs of Underhill,
Step briefly in the church
Its floors flagged over
By the cold stones of modernism
Dig on our knees in the loam
As if looking for something
Someone
We will seek the wet peat beneath
Sifting through the bones
Of our long gone Tollund children.

Scatter the rushes once more
My friends.
They still play, I hear them,
The children of the moors.
Dancing wutheringly amidst the rushes and reeds.
Jayne MacDonald
Keith Bennett
Stefan Kisco, yes
Hear the rushes hush, the soothing swoosh.
Sleep now.
Sleep now.
Hush.

Rushbearing
http://www.rushbearing.co.uk/History/index.htm
Jayne
http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/victim1
Keith
http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/62/62367_one_last_hope_to_find_keith.html
Stefan
http://innocent.org.uk/cases/stefankiszko/1.htm
Rochdale Rushcart
http://www.rochdale.gov.uk/living/libraries.asp?url=DPrushbearing

Cliché

A new school Head in Newcastle
Is excluding three students a day,
For fighting, smoking, chatting back,
Getting in his way.
The style is controversial,
And the radio audience bickers.
The Head says of
His new approach:
“It’s a marathon,
not a Snickers.”

.

.

Assassination babe

Mine host:
Assassination babe,
cherubim clear.
Commends the consequence of
the deed deep done.

Desiring to double drown every eye,
Following the failing of the first faculties.

Heaven’s here:
Horrid-horsed host.
a kinsman knife,
life like
like lips.

I might murder myself.

Naked, new-born in
my own pity, a
plague of pleading against the
poison’d prick, who
should shut sides against the sightless shoal of subjects that are so, so, so….

So
The Big M-
Striding Strong –

Surcease;
Success.

Teach tears that
that the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the…..

Vaulting virtues with my taking off-
Whose trumpet-tongued trust
Will wither with the wind.

Minnie,
Warm as caraway biscuits-
Heart attack: dead.

Leonard,
“Put wood in th’ ‘ole!”
Plastic bag over his head.

Standing in the Saturday Morning Lotto Queue

Don’t.
Live a little!

April 2003

Lots of stuff fleeing from my brain tonight:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan's Thomas's villanelle for one.

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

Frost's superb exercise in metre for two.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

From: Another Time (1940)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Auden for three

That'll do for now, boy.

1960

2005

Bus in the header is MTJ 435C, pictured when in service with Rawtenstall Corporation.
Bus below is MTJ 434C, pictured when in my brother's yard in Ewood Bridge.
These are some of my writings; some connections.
This is not about omnibuses. This is the omnibus edition.