A Beautiful Life – 16th July 2021

Modern life is no poetic dream
Fancy words for reality unseen
Grey buildings, dull cars in commute
Dead faces in an old fading suit
Stray dogs barking at stray cats
Dead in the gutter, eaten by rats
Rice fields planted on broken backs
A pleasant vista for tourist snaps
Instagram cafes and beauty filters
Made by dollar-a-day immigrant builders
Sunsets on mountains, time to sleep
Poetic minds now sunken deep
The toiling hordes have no time to play
With words about their tortured day
No romance in their existence
The beautiful life kept at distance

Your private matters need looking after, it’s way too late, though – 24th July 1994

The girl obviously had a strange upbringing. Dragged naked from the burning barn. Certain things left emotional scars and for a lifetime.

She ran, pinny wrapped around her undignified body, down through the field, tripping on tree stumps he had left there last summer. She ran as though searching for something, turning at strange angles, here and there, in her misguided direction.

The road below thronged with tourists, keen to see the local attractions. This certainly wasn’t one of them.

Soon she stood naked, unknowing of anything around her. Of course, they just drove past. The men in the cars smugly thought they understood. Drugs – huh! The women cringed away disguising their disgust with tourist talk – ‘Oh – look at that hill.’ He laughed, ‘Look at those hills.’

They drove past – into another universe.