Just one more day until the front door slams
The car is packed
The road is open
We are off.
Off to take in the slower pace.
The stillness of the navigation.
Walking pace through life.
To take time to watch a minnow dart
See a kingfisher flit
Hear an echoey tunnel.
Rise with the sun, rest with the sun.
Use natures clock as our own.
As centuries before man woman and child
Lived and loved aboard,
All life is here,
in these wooden walls
This floating kingdom,
all I hold dear.
Just one more day.
Just one more day.
In the eyes of the law, he was black
As black as the ace of spades, not one of them
The dreams he carried to this land
Were stowed upon the sail ship here
Nigeria to Leeds with hope, new life
From hunger to plenty, to bias
The outcast judged by his skin
He faced the torment that broke him
When once he stepped out of line
To fight back, unleash his bridled fury
The coil released, he went too far
Now in the echoey white washed room confined
He’s choked by pills and electroshock
And when he goes, his soul is left behind
Crushed by the law, crushed by them all
At liberty to walk the streets, unfree
Now safe in the hands of police unjust
He’s paid with blows and ridicule
His beaten body prone and robbed of life
He’s found, claimed by the River Aire
A broken spirit gone, the dreams disbanded.
Nudnick
By Sy Roth
Self, I say
Self,
Wake up.
Your ganglions
Are asleep again.
Wakey, wakey…
Those around you, nudnick,
Are whirling dervishes
Those who come and go
In the Speakeasys of their lives
And I am a silent partner.
Wake up dammit
It’s slipping away
You’re letting it slip away
While the humped dowagers
Prepare their casseroles
For the hungry men who’ve passed.
See in their eyes
Your sadness, Nudnick,
Where’s the fun in your voyage
Careless self
Elf of the bygones,
Shelf where the platitudes lay
Dusty
Fusty hungry dinks waiting
For their revival
Wrapped in their silent home
Domicile of mordant cells
For the somnambulist to walk echoey corridors.
Awaken before it is too late
Or perhaps it is.
The monster is caught galumphing to Bedlam
And the nudnick sits on the side of the road
Waiting for him to pass
Like a hundred-car freight train crossing.
Wake, I hear it in my ear!
Wake the nudnik from its dream
The train is a never-ending circus cavalcade,
And he yawns as it passes by.
They all yawn as he passes by.
I yawn for myself
Yearning to avoid the parade
As my eyes close and sleep invades my reality.
A gentle, calm,serene lightly textured morning ocean
A still day without wind and barely a hint of a wave
Sand carved by a tractor leaves a steeper sand dune.
Smooth sea surface soft sounding sandy shores.
The tiniest of waves curl in a echoey glassy whisper
Laden with shells pebbles,red coral, rich with seaweed
A flat pale blue sea reaches out to a silhuette shadow
of a ship awaits in anticipation on the dark blue horizon
A grey warm windless sky greets the ocean hanging
sometimes darker sometimes lighter on the horizon.
Folklore says that souls of dead sailors are transformed
into pale -eyed, black wing tipped, red webbed seagulls.
I stand on the shore abundant with treasures of the sea
waiting looking out to sea hoping for my love to return.