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1971

Wilf had a nineteen fifty nine Ford Galaxie. It was red with a crème roof. I remember that whenever we went for a drive people would admire the car because it was different. He used to refer to it as ‘my automobile’ in a phoney American drawl. Sometimes when he was staying at home Wilf would pick me up from school or from my friend’s house in the Ford Galaxie. These places were within walking distance from the house, so he just did it as a treat.
 In nineteen seventy one Wilf had to come back home to live. It was strange having him around, seeing him eating his breakfast, having him at home in the evenings. My mother was a great deal calmer when Wilf was around; when he was away she had been very highly strung. I had heard her saying this exact phrase to my auntie: Jeannie, I feel highly strung. In time I began to realise that other than this extraordinary car there was nothing remarkable about Wilf. From time to time he would get drunk and then he and my mother would argue about money.
 Finally things got so bad that Wilf sold the Galaxie to a man called Howard. When Howard came to collect the car he could not disguise his glee. He was leering and rubbing his hands together. My mother said that she hoped that Howard took good care of it. Wilf was very sullen. I had this idea in my head that now that Wilf had got rid of the Galaxie he would never go away again, as if it was the only car that had been capable of taking him away, and that now he was stranded here at home.
 Within a week Howard had crashed the Galaxie. Wilf told us over the supper table that it was a write off and that Howard had been lucky to survive the crash. My mother cried.
Wilf took me to see the Galaxie at Gwyn Cable’s scrapyard. It was sandwiched in the scrapheap between two nondescript cars, crumpled and faded. My throat felt tight. Apparently Wilf went there regularly, standing by the railings of Cable’s yard, as though he was visiting a grave.

Walker (2007)
© Walker & Jones 2011

Homeostasis

'...not untypical of modern South Wales where discipline and belief in anything is at a discount'.

Rugby Football Annual, 1927-28.

JOHN RUSSELL, R.A

John Russell, R.A, who lived from seventeen

Forty four to eighteen hundred and six

Produced vividly detailed drawings of

The moon’s topography having made his

Observations through a small telescope.

Walker (2011)

© Walker & Jones 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_J_Wolman

Charles Horace Jones (1906-1998)

Here was a man who took his poetry out onto the streets and didn't give a fuck about the consequences.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-horace-charles-jones-1198810.html
http://babylonwales.blogspot.com/2006/04/charles-jones-epitaph-for-poet.html
http://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Charles_Jones
Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics by William Donaldson

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

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

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.

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

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