27.4.11

The Bad Nerves Gene

The Bad Nerves Gene
Slouched, my
Mother wore her worry
Like a heavy pendant
 Resting near her belly.
Anxious ladies have anxious babies
Cortisol and adrenaline shoots up yr umbilicus like amphetamine
And you never ever recover…
Fear me fear me squealed the garden gate
The daisies screamed
And the kitchen clock ticked
Like dripping blood.
Buried alive by the sky,
Dread pressed down on my axis bone,
  Nostrils stuffed with phobias.
I have tried, you know,
Tried hard
 But you never ever recover…

Walker (2011)
© Walker & Jones 2011

24.4.11

My Old Man’s Calculations.

My Old Man’s Calculations.
The South Wales Evening Post
Was a broadsheet in those days.
It gave you inky fingers
And smelled of damp pulp.
And the Old Man came home late
Smelling of the cold road
And oil.
He ate a warmed up supper
And did his calculations
In the borders with a biro
He kept in a cracked mug.

Cryptic figures,
Long divisions
Under the yellow kitchen bulb.
Concentration ploughed his huge head,
Curls greying on his smeared brow
His broad notched fingers ingrained
With the dirt of days.

He never looked pleased when he’d finished
Never satisfied
One more multiplication
As at last he sipped his tea.

Did he calculate arthritis,
Or the wear and tear on his will?
Did he ever find the number
Of the things his sums could not reveal?

Walker (2011)
© Walker & Jones 2011

23.4.11

Just do it, mun

As you can see by the variety of poems, rhymes and simple prose we've been posting, anything goes.
There are no stuffy rules holding you back, there is no intellectual snobbery to be afraid of, no limits, no boundaries.
Words, the arts, the world is ours, we need to grasp it, embrace it and smash down the walls that hold us back, that keep us in our place.
For far to long the intellectual elite have ruled the roost, happy to feed us crumbs, accept our lot whilst they sit at the top table, greedily slapping each other on the back, protecting their precious little empires.

We must create an environment where creativity flourishes, where it feels good to scream, safe to shout, free from criticism, where the work of each and every one of us is accepted, valued and loved.

The arts in this country of ours should belong to each and every one of us.
It doesn't, and that has to change, and change pretty damn soon.
Let's all join forces, get off our backsides and do something beautiful.

It's not about any one person, there are no stars, no celebrities.
To do this we must all be as one.

Before it's too late.

Turkish Delight


swirling girls,
twirling girls,
some girls with spikey hair.
happy girls,
and angry girls,
and girls who do not care.
orange girls,
and foreign girls,
girls with bums to die for,
some with tints
and some with squints,
and one you’d like to try for.
the older girls with bottled curls,
and one who looks
like Greta,
they drink and flirt
with the flowery shirts,
when they really
 should know better.
there’s girls with shots,
some with the hots,
and some who look
quite hammered,
yet big or small,
win lose or draw,
they’ll all go home deflowered.
but mock them not,
this cheerful lot,
these girls who make us shudder,
we’ll down our pints,
rip off their tights,
and soon we’ll call them Mother.
these girls who come
to this smalltown,
and drink and dance within it,
these are the girls
who rule our world,
as they like to tell us…….
…………………….
…………………
…………..
……..
….
..
INNIT.

Jones(2010)

© Walker & Jones 2011

Think About The Place You Live...

Or where you call 'Town'.
Are there buskers there?
Strumming guitars?
What are they singing? Wonderwall, Blowin' In The Wind, Redemption Song ?
Do you write songs, in your bedroom?
Get out there, stand in the street, play and sing.
If there are no buskers don't be discouraged.
Do it anyway.
Be the first.
Others will follow.
If you want to be in a band then form a band.
Talk to people.
Read poems.
Aloud.
In town.
You've got a voice.

22.4.11

Meinir Pugh's Unwell


Meinir Pugh’s unwell
Or so her neighbours say
She hasn’t lit the fire
Or been to the shops in days
Dil says she’s seen the doctor
Though she’s yet to find out why
She’s been peeping through the curtains
Just to keep a watchful eye
They’ve said a prayer in Chapel
The Vicar, Reverend Moffet
He said there’s be a whip round
To pay for the funeral buffet
They sang some hymns and arias
Gave praises for her life
Poor Mr Thomas got confused
And said his prayers twice
But now the sun is shining
And look, there’s Meinir Pugh
I’ve baked two dozen sausage rolls
What am I going to do?
Jones(2011)

© Walker & Jones 2011

19.4.11

GLANYMOR (for TJJ)


When I moved back to Glanymor I started going to the rugby. This was something that I had hardly ever done during my earlier years there.
I’d never seen the appeal of the oval ball. I couldn’t catch it. I couldn’t kick it. You couldn’t play with it on your own. At school rugby was the yardstick and I was no good. I hated the rough and tumble, the contact and the reliance on others to shape your fortunes.
Wilf, the man who acted as the father in the family that my mother had assembled, didn’t care for rugby either. We would sit silently in the tin roofed barbershop while the silver stubble necked old men discussed the ‘football’. My grandfather, Wilf told me, had shared his indifference, referring to the game as ‘pants and whistle’.
Wilf’s mate Ted, who used to work on the open cast with him, had ‘gone north’. Ted was a monumental bewhiskered humanoid who visited us in the summer, wearing a leather jacket on even the warmest of days, a brown cigarette permanently welded to his bolt like knuckles. Kids ran after his Triumph Stag as he drove along our street, but here, he pointed out, they just followed him without knowing who he was. I remember my mother watching him once on Floodlit Rugby League when Wilf was out, which I found quite strange. Ted was sent off, and she switched back to ITV.
‘Football’ was Ted’s job. He spoke about it in the same way that Wilf talked about the open cast; the practical jokes and who said what to whom and so on. He never talked about the game itself.
On Saturday afternoons I would hear the occasional bursts of noise and a shrill whistle followed by a cheer or jeer drifting from the Parc, but I stayed away. Once I went and was pinned to the ground behind the dead ball line and filled in by two fat denim clad boys from ‘away’. Bloody nosed I ran home past the crowd who were indifferent to my suffering.
Now back in Glanymor I was struck by how central the ‘Parc’ was to the town. The corrugated roof of the pathetic stand was now painted in black and amber stripes with Glanymor RFC in man sized white letters.
The men who mattered still leaned on the cast iron railings opposite the ‘stand’:
Pug faced Gary Lock who smashed up the Boat Club with a baseball bat when someone took the piss out of his son; Gwyn 18 Months who had half his ear chewed off one Bank Holiday in Porthcawl; Ted, mad, addled and arthritic, his curls now white, leaning on crutches , his kneecaps, apparently ‘the size of cabbages’.
There were, now, things I’d never thought I’d see in the Parc, modest advertising hoardings, a hot dog van, Tongans and loudspeaker announcements and music just like the Millstad.
Pre match warm ups and drills with tackle bags and isotonic drinks as the tannoy played The Stereophonics against the breeze. Old black and amber hoops distorted and obliterated by a patchwork of advertisements.

I still felt excluded by the banter of the ageing ‘boys’ and the seriousness of the more concerned onlookers. Parochial paranoia and grudge simmered.
Elwyn Rees, sixty, grey haired, bespectacled in a skin tight pink Ospreys shirt told me that when Shawn Morrison went straight from Glanymor to Warrington that they took sacks of sand from Glanymor beach up there for him to kick from.

Often the visiting team would carry the name of one of the giants, the founding fathers of Welsh Rugby, who we used to watch on telly playing the All Blacks, with seven Welsh internationals in the team and crowds of twenty thousand. These clubs had been laid low by the coming of the regions, playing in shitty little parks like Glanymor Parc with one old stand and about 100 people watching.
Week in week out I went, paid my fiver and learned the script, leaning on the iron rail with its 100 coats of black paint.
I watched the teams attempt to get rid of the ball, hoofing it for about an hour, punctuated by twenty minutes of re set scrums and outside halves with permatans and sixty quid haircuts.
There was always a lot of talk about some bloke called David who had signed for the Scarlets, but something had gone awry.
The last game of that season was played on a boiling Saturday in May, and the next day they found this David hanging from the crossbar of the goalposts in the Parc, at the end where Shawn Morrison had kicked the penalty that knocked Pontypool out of the cup in 1986. Or was it 1987…

Walker (2011)
© Walker & Jones 2011

Dydd Farchnad


She smiled as she kicked him.
An ugly, ragged, Tomcat like grin broke out across her mottled, blotchy face, exposing her toothless gums to the cold, damp, morning air.
She took aim once more and with the precision of a laser guided weapon her right foot made contact with the prostrate man’s face, whipping his head back and forth with a sickening jolt, his skull shuddering to a halt as it made contact with the wet, bullet grey pavement.
She stood above him, her limbs flailing, agitated, her face contorted into a grotesque mask, spittle dripping from her open mouth as she greedily gulped down as much air as her lungs would take.

He lay there like a rag-doll, his body limp and broken, the wound to his face exposed and angry, a fountain of deep, rich crimson blood gushing from his nose, quickly forming into a large pool where he lay.
He looked old.
Maybe 65.
He was probably a lot younger.
Perhaps 30.
Time had played tricks on some of the inhabitants of Smalltown, their inherited self-destruct button programmed long before they left their Mother’s breast.

The girl now ranted.
And raved, hurling obscenities at those who would listen, and to those who wouldn’t.
Or couldn’t.
She pointed at the broken man lying before her and screamed,
“touch my fuckin’ giro again and you’re fuckin’ dead”
Her friend took her by the arm, whispered something in her ear and led her away at speed, down the covered walkway to the bustling market.
I heard them laugh as they opened a can of lager.

Passing shoppers carefully avoided the rag-doll man, gingerly stepping around the messy heap they found blocking their way.
A man came out of the chip shop and asked if an ambulance had been called.
There was no response.
Thursday, was market day.

Jones(2010)

© Walker & Jones 2011

18.4.11

The Iron Lady


In your final earthly moment
Before you breathe no more
Will you cast your failing mind back
To all that went before?
Will you think of all the hardship
The lives you tore apart
Will you finally show compassion
Do you have that in your heart?
Will you ask for God’s forgiveness
For the horror and the pain
Will you seek your absolution
A last chance to explain?
Or will you stick your neck out
So oft as times gone by
Will you sneer at all your critics
Look on as innocents die?
And as darkness falls and spittle dries
In your cracked and acrid throat
When your tongue’s so badly swollen
that you begin to choke
Will you beam and leer and tell us all
That this lady’s not for turning
As the devil rides and lights the spark
To get his warmest fire’s a burning

Jones (2010)

© Walker & Jones 2011

15.4.11

Sad Island Line

Sad Island line
Heads dead west
The last windblown paper day
Of the fairground season
Lights dim in the
Pale grey
Plain grey
Daytime sky
Tiredly we grin
With cracked lips knowing
Knowing things will never
Be the same.

Walker (1987)
© Walker & Jones 2011

13.4.11

Copy and Paste This !

                                                    ©

7.4.11

Yes We Can!

We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities... We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.
Durruti.

1.4.11

Let Working Class People Ingest Art

This article is six years old but contains some very pertinent points regarding the relationship between 'the arts' and 'the working classes'.
http://www.jgfs.info/portal/Home/Articles/LetWorkingClassPeopleIngestArt/tabid/115/Default.aspx