Amaranthine

Amaranthine

Never meet your heroes -

you say that, don't you - whoever you are

and I’ve a shrewd suspicion

you died years ago

but kept on living.

 

Once, I’d see you capped -

braced and booted,

with a hard slap for a smile,

and what do you know, child?

 

You had suspect opinions,

scars for eyes, iron rations, hard tack

and if this sack don’t break your back

then the next one will.

 

Everything was always grey -

grit in your potatoes, flies in your soup,

steak for kidney, liver for mince

and a permanent shampoo, set and rinse

with driers that singed

beneath a yellow matter custard fringe.

 

You've hung around to this day,

too, replacing drips and dregs

with those grim plastic pegs

to cop an earful of awful –

trilby hats became baseball caps,

arms outstretched you rise from drains,

chanting: brains, brains, brains.

 

Some of you were farmers, too,

harvesting glass onions

from cast iron shores

to peer into and sneer -

still, throw enough horse shit

at me and do I not bloom?

 

You'll carry that weight a long time,

so let me carry the tunes,

place a raisin in a glass of champagne,

it will rise and fall forever

and I will sing this song alone.

 

Even in a sour milk sea A minor,

you'll take the plastic over the china -

I swear upon nothing finer

than a band I’ve known for all these years

with no sign of love behind the tears;

because in your eyes I see nothing.

 

His guitar, still weeping,

about a world still sleeping, never wakes,

or coming to spoil a party, late

on arrival, filling plates with the synthetic, the fake,

curl a lip at the half-breed

but everyone of us is all we need.

 

Something aching beneath the breast plate

that lives on forever,

drifts its fingers through the heather

and dances softly in the breeze

colours all your grey in melodies.

 

Pricks my eyelids, smarts my lashes,

haunts evergreen groves of elms and ashes,

And – for all of you,

here’s yet another clue

something so much more than just a blend

in dark of red and blue.