The Bottle Factory

 

Looking back, I’ll say I liked it,

That year I spent among the glass

A model dark satanic mill as ever was.

The ragtime  note of steel on glass;

The hot breath of the friendly furnace;

The march of bottles from the lehr –

All have, remembered, special charm.

Bottles green and brown and blue,

Hot to touch and sometimes broken –

Even now I bear the scar.

The men were men, the bosses bastards,

But bosses of your hands, not souls.

A simple deal, a neat equation:

Pay for sweat, your mind your own.

I liked best to start the night shift

Full of beer, a drunken star,

And after just an hour of working

I’d sweated sober, unconcerned.

Then at seven in the morning

The hooter sang out our release.

So off we marched to seek our freedom,

And as for me, I’m searching still.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A Prayer

 

 

O Lord of our Days,

save us from the standard-setters;

the hush-voiced counsellors;

the inspectors; the auditors;

the therapists and the charterers;

the petition-makers;

the ethical advisers.

Please keep us from the clutches

of all doctors, lawyers and accountants.

Spare us the priests and law-makers:

(anyone in a long black gown).

Close our ears to the lying politicians.

Let us creep softly into fat-arsed middle age

without the child within withering away.

And when our minds become fuddled with years,

or drink, or straitened thoughts,

keep a few crystals of truth

alive in some bright corner.

Let not madness, nor yet cold sanity

overtake us.

And when the time comes

to switch off the light,

Do it quickly.

But not just yet.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

London Welsh

 

1: London

‘Caewch y drws!’

‘Mae hi’n bwrw glaw.’

‘Bara caws a cwrw.’

I thought that these were things that English people said:

didn’t understand why they laughed in school,

nor when I said ‘thruppence’.

The place that my mother called ‘down home’

only awoke paint-box images

of steep streets and hills at the end of a cloud:

slate-grey, misty green, and always wet.

Where did my father learn this foreign speech

that he sometimes spoke swiftly with his brothers?

Not often: even the dog tipped its head

when he slipped his tongue so easily

around the strange consonants.

Later, I didn’t mind.

I was different, I was Welsh.

2: Wales

And now I live inWales.

I’ve been here for thirty years.

I’ve visited the bleak uplands

where my people scratched their living.

I’ve seen worn headstones:

‘Ffarwel blant a ffarwel briod,

Ffarwel bopeth yn y byd.’

I know the names of Llywelyn,

Glyndôr, and even Mary Jones.

‘Ah, but you’re not really Welsh, are you?’

says some Smith or Brown from Treorchy,

whose grandfather followed the coal in nineteen-ten.

But I don’t really mind.

I’m different: I’m a Cockney.

(London Welsh/Cymry Llundain is a bilingual English-Welsh poem)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Mr Jaksó, Instant Brit

 

Of course I said, ‘yes, you can sit there’.

It was only the canteen, not worth a fuss.

And he said he wanted to talk, to hear from another.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

He asked if I’d heard of Russian tanks inBudapest;

he told me how he’d fled from his city in fear,

but now wanted to be just like us.

Though he was called ‘Mr Jaksó,’ wouldn’t that matter?

Would ‘Jackson’ sound more like a British success?

And, to a shame that still burns across all these years

of course I said, ‘Yes’.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

A bio

I am never quite sure whether to send a short biography out when contacting a magazine for the first time.

Some editors seem to want them, others – rightly I think – say that it should be your writing that counts, and that such notes are superfluous. Anyway, here’s the one that I send out – sometimes.

Writer of fiction, essays, articles, reviews and poetry.

BornLondon, of Welsh family. Lived inWalessince 1972. Formerly a local government officer.

Numerous magazine publications inUK,USA,Eire,Romania,Argentina,Canada,South AfricaandAustralia.

Examples: poetry in Orbis ,Other Poetry, Outposts, Poetry Salzburg Review, Gaelach Lan, Staple; short fiction in Westwords, Odyssey, Panurge; non-fiction including a series of twenty essays on literary biography published in Writers’ Monthly; essays in the Southern African Review of Books; regular columns in over 50 consecutive issues of Cambrensis magazine; reviewer for Stride and Roundyhouse; contributor to Pembrokeshire Life, The H.G. Wells Newsletter, Country Quest and Cambria.

Web publications can be found on Expose’d; the web site of The Poetry Library, Stride, and elsewhere.

Numerous “commercial” articles, sometimes using the noms-de-plume Joseph Edmunds or Hannah Rae Evans. Many works re-published inRomania,UKcorrespondent for Antares (Romania) and Wales Correspondent for La Carta de Oliver (Argentina), and translations from the Romanian placed inUKandUSA.

Full-length publications:

Family Walks AroundSwansea(Scarthin, 1993)

The Time Traveller [Prose, edited with Dr. Petru Iamandi] (Porto Franco, 1997)

Nietzsche’s Children [Poetry] (Geneze, 1998)

Living Words [Essays on literary biography] (Porto Franco, 1998)

Passing Moments [Short stories, with others] (KT Publications, 2001)

TheLake, [Eighteen short stories] (KT Publications, 2006)

Checkpoint, [A collection of speculative fiction] (The European Institute)