As so often, it has been ages since I put anything on this site. Today is Christmas Eve. This isn’t about Christmas but it begins on New Year’s Eve and ends on Christmas Eve…
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Nennius- Historia Brittonum 9th century- I have made a heap of all that I could find
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We saw the New Year in over the Atlantic
At some uncertain hour; yet to come
Was midnight in L.A. Catharctic
To arrive there in the dark, having made that jump
Of 5,000 miles, seen out the old year twice.
Awake in the redeye morning in the new time zone
I walked until I found a place
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To buy eggs, juice, milk and Cheerios.
Paid in dollars, so I couldn’t weigh the cost.
That didn’t matter; it was a great thing
To see blue skies and palms on January 1st.
A new world. Yes, I thought, I could live like this.
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The fat man cupped his ear.
“I can’t hear you!” he complained.
“How ya all doin’?” he had asked
And we had answered in our piddling English way.
Patiently he smiled: “Over here,
When asked, by me, or anyone in the USA,
‘How y’all doin’?’ the answer is”-
And he spread his hands, his smile,
And threw his shoulders back:
” FANTASTIC!
WONDERFUL!
AWESOME!”
I set the words to Handel in my head.
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Painful to meet my unarmed memory
In this unlit underpass, afraid I’d be attacked
And wind up beaten once again
For all my new-fangled weaponry-
Palm trees, the Pacific Ocean,
Sand so hot it burned your feet,
Neon! All new and none of it
Forbidden in the Pentateuch.
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Coming soon!– Assault of the Killer Bimbos.
Not in my right mind just then
When it came, I went; but under protest,
Ostentatiously poking from my pocket
Un saison en enfer of Rimbaud’s.
When a guy in the foyer asked ‘Are you a fan?
Personally I prefer Samuel Beckett”,
I told him the Killer Bs were the true artists.
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It’s a cult classic nowadays.
When you stood on the beach it burned your toes.
The salt water crowded
With bleached-haired surfers, descendants,
Perhaps, of folk who came here by wagon train
Across the Sierra Nevada
To find the spirit of the Mahabharata.
They’ve come a long way
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From throat-to-ankle dresses
To back-to-front baseball caps,
The strip of cloth that passes
For a bikini bottom.
(And I’m the one supposed eccentric!)
On Muscle Beach the women too are ripped;
They implore me to speak in my accented
English- so I hit ‘em
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With my memories of The Queen and of The Beatles.
They’ve come a long way
For EGGO, America’s favourite frozen waffle
(Five flavours- too good to leggo),
For the thrill of walking along Santa Monica pier
And out of the good old USA,
For the West Coast sound of The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean,
The sneakers with the L.A. Dodgers logo.
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These are great-grandchildren of founding fathers
Here at the San Diego Highland Games-
The massed bands, the Braemar stone
The truck jam-packed with goods from home-
Tetley tea bags, Crunchie bars, Heinz baked beans.
The catch in my throat as I swallowed honeycomb
To the sound of the pipes in that incongruous weather-
Sunshine, blue skies, rather than mizzle and rain.
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Is this about us? I always have you ask.
Yes and no. It’s about me setting off the smoke alarm
Making toast (I didn’t know we had a smoke alarm!)
An early example of my being cast
An innocent abroad, almost a laughing-stock
As when the 6.1 earthquake shook
The pictures and the mugs from their hooks
And you, I think in a state of shock,
Yelled at me to wake up and shelter
With you under the kitchen table
And I swore and put my head under the pillow.
You were only trying to be my helper
But from everything that followed
-the quake didn’t reduce the block to rubble!-
It turned out I was right and you were wrong.
I took you to Las Vegas for your trouble.
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Next stop Japan, we joked, as the boat
On which they threw our Christmas party
Left the dock. We sucked on green mojitos,
Smoked some weed, danced heart to heart.
You were dressed as Daisy Buchanan,
I was Wyatt Earp with a fake moustache.
We made the fat man walk the plank.
He made quite a splash,
And we cried out after him
“FANTASTIC!
WONDERFUL!
AWESOME!”
freeversefolkestone 