Amaranthine

Amaranthine

Never meet your heroes -

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

and I’ve a shrewd suspicion

they died years ago

but keep on living.

 

Once, you’d see them capped,

braced and booted,

with a hard slap for a smile,

and what do you know, child?

 

They 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 their potatoes, flies in the soup,

kidney in their steak, liver in their mince

and that shampoo, set and rinse

in yellow matter custard.

 

Hanging round to this day,

too, replaced the drips and dregs

with those grim plastic pegs

to cop an earful of awful –

arms outstretched they rise from drains,

chanting: brains, brains, brains.

 

Some of them farmers, too,

harvesting their glass onions

from cast iron shores

to peer into and sneer.

Still, throw enough shit

at us and do we 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 we will sing this song alone.

 

And even in a sour milk sea A minor,

you 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.

 

That guitar, still weeping,

about a world still sleeping, never wakes,

or coming to a party too 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 forever,

drifts its fingers through the heather

that dances softly in the breeze

colours all that’s 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

it’s so much more than just a blend

in dark of red and blue.