David Hadley's Blog, page 160

Thursday Poem: Departure

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Departure

I shall stand on top of the distant hill
and look down on these lands. I shall
walk away, letting these times go
like those warm fingers that rise up

to grasp out of a welcoming bed.
I go with weary reluctance
and I go slowly with regret.
I hope not to look back with longing.

Leaving is all we allow ourselves.
I have good enough reasons
and I see the stories that I can tell
about all I left behind and lost.

I shall stand on top of that hill
to see a new dawn’s sun rising
before I leave for a distant place
to learn the art of remembering.

50 Sheds of Grey

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‘It is the inalienable right of every free—born Englishman to have a shed of his own.’ Such were the closing words of Winston Churchill’s victory speech at the end of the Second World War, when to the horror of the male populace, including many still in uniform overseas, the full awfulness of the German blitz’s destruction of British garden sheds was finally admitted by the UK government.

Since that time though, the erotic lives of British men have improved immeasurably with it now common for nearly all home-owning adult males in the British Isles to have a shed of their own to use for their own personal erotic purposes.

Of course, it has long been understood that for the male the shed plays the role that the boudoir, Hollywood film stars, romantic and erotic writing, chocolate and the intimate personal massager play for a women; especially if the man has a set of tools in his shed that he can use, fondle or – even – display or demonstrate to other men upon whom he bestows the honour of allowing into his personal shed space.

Until the advent of the e-reader, however, this use of the shed for male erotic purposes had been a rather quiet, surreptitious and suburban pastime. However, since the release of E.B.G Henry’s 50 Sheds of Grey, first as an e-book now as a traditionally published book, all that has changed as Sheddism has now – at long last - become mainstream.

Capturing Her Youth

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There are times when the day crystallises around a moment, a moment when time becomes solid, a permanence in an otherwise fleeting world. It is as if time carves certain moments from the transient, giving them permanent form in the mind. Times I will always turn to when I remember… especially when I remember her.

She was long ago and it was spring, spring on the turn into summer. I was young, of course, but she was not. All I had was still unformed, verging on the possible. She was stumbling towards that time where life becomes a time of less looking forward and more about looking back.

She said, once, and only half-joking that she ‘wanted to recapture my youth,’ she smiled as she turned to me, running a finger down my chest. ’…and you are that youth I’ve captured.’ Then she kissed down the path her finger had traced, as I turned and lay back letting her hand, her tongue, her mouth capture all my youth.

She had a life, of course, husband and children, even though the children were mostly grown, and – at times – I felt myself replacing both husband and children in her otherwise slowly-emptying life. As she said, some other time, as we lay together down by the river: ‘My husband left me years ago. The trouble is he never actually got around to moving out. We live our lives like two trains on parallel tracks, sometimes passing each other on our routes to different places… occasional sometimes even meeting for a few moments in a station or train yard, but other than that….’ She turned away to lie on her back and watch the clouds, and that was the moment that crystallised, became an unforgettable memory, as I realised that we would both be one of those passing clouds in each other’s lives, there and then gone.

Monday Poem: Here is the Place

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Here is the Place

Here is the place we stood
to see the world begin.
Here is the time we took
to get to know the world.

Now all that is gone and lost
and the days begin without us.
We do not need the ceremonies
of morning. We know the sun

will rise without us. We do not
need to be there to witness
its rebirth from the distant horizon,
coming over the hillsides

and out of the morning mists
and shadows to meet us.
These days we do not need
a shadow to touch the earth

or to let hot sacrificial blood
seep deep into the ground,
even though too much blood
still gets wasted in the dust.

The Dark Forest Path

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The path led off into the trees, deep into the shadowed darkness of the dense wood. She knew, she had been told enough times, what happened to girls who walked off into the woods, but she was – she thought – no longer a girl. She was a woman, especially since that evening after the village barn dance when the woodman’s son had taken her by the hand and led her out, away from the dancing, and they had laughed and fallen together into the hay where he had stopped laughing and become urgent, hot, insistent.

No, she was no longer a girl.

Anyway, there was a path, and those old stories only ever told of the bad things happened to those girls who strayed from the path. So she set off with determination in her step, a determination that faltered somewhat as the darkness under the trees seemed to rob the air of some quality it had out in the open.

It seemed as though the trees were arching over her head to steal the light of the sun away, that the soft green darkness was a blanket the forest threw over her as she stepped further and further away from that dwindling area of bright sunlight and on into the woods.

She shivered, not knowing what to expect, telling herself that those old stories were… well, just old stories. She didn’t believe in stories anyway, stories were just for children and old women sitting around the fire in the dark.

No, stories were for the others, not for her.

Then, some new story rose suddenly out of the dark shadows. A dark and terrible story grabbed her, pulling her down into the undergrowth, taking her far, far away from the world she knew. Grasping her tight in its claws, the story took her into the deep and the dark; far into a dark, ancient, story she had never heard before and would never hear again.

Walking Alone

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It was never going to be an exciting life. I should have realised that from the start, or at least from the time I found myself making up quadratic equations in my head for my own entertainment. I should have known then that I would not be the action-hero type.

I was no wimp though, bigger and stronger than most of the people I knew, I was never bullied or picked on. It was more that I never could fit in with those around me. They seemed to exist almost on a different planet, I felt like a foreigner, newly arrived, who does not speak the language or know the customs. I felt like someone who has arrived in a small insular village where the locals regard outsiders with suspicion.

That was not unusual though, as far as I could see there were probably more teenage outsiders than insiders, or so it seemed from the books, TV and films I saw. Or maybe it was more that I was always drawn to outsiders, found something there that I could not find on the inside.

I still am a loner, though, even after all these years; a loner, but not lonely, not very social but not anti-social. I am not scared to be alone, or to do my own thing, regardless to who is with me or where I am. I do not feel the social pressure to conform, to keep up with the Joneses, to do the latest popular thing.

If anything, I found that trying to fit it, trying to conform was harder for me than being alone, on the outside, looking in. I was always happy walking my own path and find my own route to that place where I’d always wanted to be.

Caught in the Act

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Obviously, the wardrobe was out of the question. That would be the first place anyone would look; either that or under the bed. I wasn’t going out of the window either. I remember the last time that happened, out of a student hall of residence window; naked and into the snow. I wasn’t going to do that again… ever. No matter how big the boyfriend and his rugby team-mates… well, maybe…..

Now, though, she was running around the bedroom, half-dressed in various bits of clothing and gathering up all of mine in her hands, whilst a stream of some of the filthiest swearwords I’d ever heard – and I’ve worked in the building trade – poured from her mouth.

Meanwhile, her husband’s car was just sitting on the drive with the engine still running.

‘He’s probably just listening to the end of a song. He does that,’ Johanna inserted into her stream of conscious swearing marathon. ‘Bastard,’ she added just to keep the swearword count up near 100%.

I pulled my trousers free, from where she was clutching them against her one naked breast, whilst trying to pull her bra back on over the other. I felt rather wistful for a moment, contemplating those breasts I’d got so close to, but were now slipping further from my reach.

‘What sort of music does he listen to?’

‘What?’ Jo stopped her swearing tirade, her knickers at half-mast. ‘I dunno… the usual stuff…. Why?’

‘Well…,’ I said, trying to untangle the legs of my trousers. ‘If he likes progressive rock or something like that, those songs go on forever, but classic Motown… well, you’re looking at around three minutes per song.’

Jo glared. ‘What the fu…!’

I thought about pointing out she’d got her knickers on wrong: one leg down a leg hole and the other through the waist, which was why her current batch of swearwords was directed at the fact she was finding it impossible to get the knickers further than halfway up her thigh.

Those thighs….

‘Hurry!’ I yelled at myself.

Then I heard the car door slam.

Jo found a untapped reserve of swearwords I last heard when a chippie had sliced his thumb off on a building site I was working on.

At least I’ve got my trousers on, though, I thought to myself, as I wondered what would happen next….

Thursday Poem: Fragile world

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Fragile world

She walks alone in silence
out along the water’s edge.
The river is clear, calm, cold
and so inviting, calling to her.

The dawning light is bright
behind the darker heavy clouds,
so big, their weight is pressing down
forever on her delicate, fragile world.

A world that she holds so carefully
wrapped up tight in her hands, kept
safe from everything that could harm it.
She does not want her small world

swallowed up by this wider universe
to become something insignificant
easily mislaid or overlooked, forgotten
as the days go by, until one day

it is found, broken in a dusty heap
unclaimed and unloved, ignored
left behind on this empty riverbank
where she once walked alone.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any man carrying a mallard duck in an inverted dustbin lid doesn’t usually need to engage in conversation, especially any discourse about why he is so engaged with the aforesaid wildfowl.

So, if you don’t mind, I will be going about my – and, of course, the duck’s – business without anyone here attempting to distract me – or the duck – from what we are about to do.

After all, even in this day and age of social media and everyone tweeting, texting and Arsebooking themselves into everyone else’s life, there is still room for a certain amount of privacy for man… and duck.

Sometimes, there are things – and for those with that sort of mind, I don’t mean in that way – where a man, either with or without an accompanying mallard duck, and whatever mode of transport he is using to convey that duck (should there be one), should be free to continue to their mutual destination without having his progress blocked by someone attempting to engage him in conversation when it should be obvious that it is not suitable time for such a dalliance, and – furthermore – he would be much obliged if the aforesaid interlocutor would just piss off out of the way as mallard ducks are – surprisingly – much heavier than they look.

Memorable Games of Naked Hide and Seek

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It began – as these things often do – with the cheese. Sometimes, these things do start with the naked woman, of course. More often than not, though, they do start with the cheese. After all – and be honest here – how often do you open you fridge looking for a naked woman?

Yes, well… apart from that time, obviously.

Although, I do have to admit that was one of our more memorable games of Naked Hide and Seek.

Not quite as good as the one in Tesco, admittedly, but hiding out in a chest freezer of own-brand Pizza BOGOFs, did give her somewhat of a chill, and put her off concealing herself inside low-temperature hiding places for quite a while. I was rubbing for ages to get her circulation going again, even if some of the places she suggested I rub seemed not to need much in the way of re-invigoration… certainly not in that way, anyway.

Anyway, it began with the cheese, this time, without encountering any young ladies in a state of total undress, when I opened the fridge door. Which, now I come to think about it was much more disappointing than the rather past-its-best portion of Smoked Applewood I did eventually find underneath the partially-squashed iceberg lettuce with the naked footprint on it.