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PP Issue 27 Flyer
The
Legend of Liz and Joe
The Fall
of the Pound
Heigh-ho-on-Wye
Dockers & Detectives Relaunched
FOUR POEMS by R.L.
HUGHES
FLY AWAY PETER
HIGHGATE - RICK BROWN
OLD BILL - MARTIN DOMLEO
RUTH MURRAY - ATOM SMASHER
Ruth Murray - Katamari 180cm x 120cm oil on
canvas
Alan Dent will write an essay on Ruth Murray in a
forthcoming issue of The Penniless Press
THE
PENNILESS
PRESS
ISSUE 27
Do we need a
poet laureate ? What does Nancy Frost make of
Mariella Frostrup’s voice ? How did Mrs Twinklekeys
get threads of blue carpet on her back? Is it
anything to do with David Craig charting the loss of
idealism? Why is Tom Kilcourse rebuilding a minor ?
Andras Mezei speaks for the survivors of the death
camps. Why does Serge’s Dr Kurlova have only eight
minutes per patient ? Tom Kelly finds the shipyard
and the steelworks closed. Peter Day sees Neruda
among the goons who rule. Richard George finds feral
youth in Whitehaven. Who caused the car crash ?
Michael Curran knows. What didn’t the bosses tell
Fred Voss in the job advert ? Who’s doing nasty
things with chips and sausage while Tanner waits for
a bus ? What’s driving everyone mad in Martin
Hayes’s control room ? What do pancakes mean to Ken
Champion ? Why is Terry Quinn singing songs from
South Pacific ? Martin Domleo gets to the heart of
Mary Magdalene. How does John Feakins connect a day
at the seaside and the bombing of Dresden ? And why
are the City suits in control in Jonathan Lewsey’s
Waterloo Station ? Plus reviews of Andy Croft
getting sticky, William Wantling taking the sun,
Kevin Cadwallender being seriously funny, Mike
Wilson spiking the New Brutalism, F.D.Reeve
following the blue cat on his prowls, Ken Champion
taking black and white snaps, Taha Muhammad Ali
watching a cow swallow a rope.
************
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Coming Up in Issue 28
Poems by Lalla Romano (translated from the Italian
by Ian Seed)
S. Kadison's story : Malcolm
Lowry and the Beautiful Boy
Breaking News! BritArt Superstar
Flees Greedy Govt!
Tent: "Everyone who's ever fucked me"
Haiku by Stefan Jaruzelski
Trashy Emin leaves.
Over-taxed
well-fucked art ho
Adds “G. Brown” to
tent
More on the Eminent tax exile soon
Dystopian fantasy
is a comic feast
Reviewed
by William Palmer
The Independent
- Wednesday, 29 July 2009
The Legend of Liz
and Joe
While it is always a pleasure to read a new John
Murray novel, it is not so easy to review one. The
usual dutiful compression of plot ("Joanna is a
middle-aged novelist whose marriage has run out of
steam") and description of style ("The flatness of
her prose is a deliberate attempt to...") goes out
of the window. A Murray novel is more like a comic
opera, full of splendid arias, farcical encounters
between characters who can be fairly described as
"larger than life", and the very serious business of
human love.
The bare bones of The Legend of Liz
and Joe are as follows. Joe Gladstone, aged 73, has
inherited money and opened a guesthouse whose main
features are superb vegetarian cooking and an
original policy for guests. They are refused entry
if insufficiently interesting and have to present an
essay setting out their qualities. Not surprisingly,
he is running out of money, and enters a competition
offering a £50,000 prize for a story told in the
Cumbrian dialect.
Joe enters a dystopian fable set in
2018, in an England whose nanny-state laws have
reached lunatic proportions. Cumbria has been
singled out for an especially mad project involving
men's trousers. Instalments are given at intervals
throughout the novel, which has many ingeniously
rendered glosses in dialect. Throw in Joe's detailed
recipes for Indian, South American and Greek
banquets, disquisitions on linguistic oddities,
arguments with his son Desmond about the arts, the
special virtues of beloved dogs, gloomy ruminations
about his wife's first adulterous affair (at the age
of 70), a virtuosic rant against dementia and its
treatment and a bunch of resurrected Vikings. Stir
vigorously, and the result is an extremely funny and
wickedly clever book.
It is a paradox that those novelists
who are reckoned to give a fantastic view of human
life present a truer picture than self-styled
realists. To Murray, "the truly comic is all about
deep breath, expansiveness, hugeness, a straining...
towards that which is limitless". Take a deep breath
and begin reading..........
John Murray now has a website
John Murray reads extracts and is interviewed at
http://www.listenupnorth.typepad.com:80/
To buy The Legend of Liz and Joe
REVIEW
THE LEGEND OF
LIZ AND JOE
By John Murray
Flambard Press ISBN 978-1-906601-07-2 £8.99
It’s a heartening paradox that
the most individual minds have the greatest social
sense, just as it’s a depressing fact that the most
miserably conformist boldly proclaim their
independence. John Murray’s is a highly individual
and unusual mind and his awareness of the shaping
power of social forms acute. In this, his seventh
comic novel (he began with two beautiful, non-comic
Bildungsromane) he buries his bitter social satire
beneath a welter of diversion, distraction, natter,
chatter, outrageous invention and linguistic
legerdemain. Such a book isn’t an easy read. It
requires a subtle frame of reference. The reliance
on dull narrative drive which powers so much
best-selling fiction is entirely absent. The novel
weaves its significance unobtrusively, even though
the lunatic invention is as obtrusive as you like.
Perhaps such books have always been the preserve of
the few, but maybe too our culture of flattery and
slick commercialism has trimmed the prospective
audience. This is a book which doesn’t let the
reader off the hook for a second. It does what
literature is supposed to do: constantly challenges
lazy-mindedness, self-indulgence, pomposity,
propaganda, ignorance, meanness, self-serving
ambition, received wisdom, glibness; it rouses the
mind from its early 21st century torpor
and makes it attend to the eternities.
Its narrator is Joe Gladstone,
cookery writer, ( the choice of the name of one of
the architects of the modern liberal mentality is
pertinent) who, late in life, has inherited from his
benign if intermittently potty uncle Harrison a tidy
fortune. He opens a guest house in north Cumbria and
in a reversal of the ideological driving of
consumerism into every inappropriate nook and
cranny, insists on admitting only interesting
guests, requiring an essay as proof. Naturally, he’s
bleeding money. His wife Liz has begun an affair at
the start of her eighth decade and connectedly has
begun to experience visions. Joe is obsessive about
binary compounds (linguistic not chemical). He also
loves to transcribe speech into the authentic
Norse-derived Cumbrian dialect and is entering a
competition, established by a food industry
capitalist whose brave new factory is sited in his
county, for a tale in local twang: his offering
includes, in a recapitulation a decade later, of the
choice of Cumbria as the primary locale of
digitalised tv, government-ordained, compulsory
wearing of braces in an attempt to curtail the
free-thinking tendencies and anarchistic
inclinations of belt-wearers which disturb the
orthodoxy of the slippery PM, Thomas Purley. Then
there’s Joe’s son Desmond who is making his way in
arts administration by promoting tribute bands and
clairvoyants. And much more, not least some
intriguing exotic recipes and Greek topography.
Murray writes like Joe cooks: with minute attention
to every ingredient and a desire to evoke each
nuance of flavour in the reader. And just as a good
recipe is a mixture of delicacies none of which
dominates, so the book provides delicious sustenance
through expert combination.
To be crude, it could be said the
book is a political satire. Murray’s first comic
novel mocked the Cumbrian nuclear industry, or more
precisely the mendacity which goes along with the
protection of big interests, but as in all his work
he knows art must triumph over ideology. The task of
treating political questions artistically is
inordinately hard. Murray makes it work in two ways:
unbounded expansiveness (Joe is a great fan of
Dickens), and obliqueness. Like Emily Dickinson he
knows all the truth must be told, but slant. The
level of narration is very high. The low-key,
downbeat style typical of contemporary fiction, the
short sentence upon short sentence ( not in the
manner of a Hemingway or a Maupassant, but more as a
way of concealing a lack of skill) is remote. To
take an example at random:
Baggrow then made a gesture of
whispering into his companion’s ear. And it was not
just any old public-house ear of course. It was
peculiarly uncomfortable because of the braces loop
wrapped tight about it which meant it was inclined
at a strained torque of about thirty degrees, a bit
like a paper animal’s ear as fashioned by origami.
Nor was Tunstall’s put-upon left lug particularly
enjoying the astringent aftermath of twelve pints of
light ale mingled with melted chocolate and
chemically manufactured Worcester sauce.
Even such a short extract gives a
sense of the intensity of the narration. It has
nothing about it of post-modern cool. Not only does
it contain a reference to the mad braces legislation
and the extremes it drives to, thereby lifting the
narrative into Rabelaisian fantasy, it also contains
some typical Murray goads: a strained torque of
about thirty degrees, put-upon left lug, astringent
aftermath, chemically manufactured Worcester sauce.
If you think through the implications of these,
you’re doing a lot of thinking. In short, Murray
forces his readers to use their intelligence, to
be intelligent. What about those who aren’t,
those who in the passing parlance would be
intellectually challenged ? One of Murray’s
favourite writers is Jose Saramago who recently set
his face against the drive to turn everyone into a
serious reader. In Saramago’s view, serious
literature has always been read by a minority. There
is no need for anxiety about this. Least of all is
there any need to tailor literature for a mass
audience. Proust and Cervantes are never going to be
read fervently by millions any more than millions
will bother with the Theory of Relativity or The
Origin of Species. There is a false notion that
whatever is not instantly accessible to the majority
is anti-democratic. This is to confuse realms.
Democracy is a political concept and practice.
Artistic and intellectual creation are a different
matter. It isn’t possible to dumb down quantum
mechanics. This isn’t to dismiss the majority as
hopelessly ignorant or worthy only of junk culture,
but it is to recognize that the idea of a turning
everyone into an intellectual is no better than a
eugenic fantasy. So if Saramago’s novels are too
challenging for the majority, what are they to read
? It doesn’t resolve so simply. The majority can
read Saramago or Murray. They should. A dumbed-down
culture is not the answer. The point is not to
compromise. Artists and intellectuals bear a social
responsibility. They must set the standards and the
tone. The worst outcome is the one we have: high
culture for the few, McDonalds culture for the many.
The answer is to refuse compromise and leave it
people to choose what to read. Of course, this is
looking at the matter from a cultural viewpoint.
From a commercial perspective, the impulse is to
sell as much trash as possible.
Murray refuses to compromise and
his insistence on forcing the reader to exert
intelligence and imagination is allied to his
unwillingness to simplify or sugar. At the centre of
this book is a broadside against the manipulations
of the powerful and an anger at the damage done to
us morally, emotionally, socially, intellectually by
the glib purveyors of political packages. Yet there
is no self-righteousness. Liz Gladstone betrays her
marriage and though mortified Joe forgives her. She
errs in a forgivable way. The powerful are
different. They twist and lie and scheme and
self-serve unforgivably. Very aware of the
destructive power of anger, even against the worst
injustice, Murray keeps it on a tight leash. He
gives free rein only to bountiful generosity and to
what, near the end of the book he typifies as
“mature wisdom”: the comic spirit as exemplified by
the hilarious fun-loving of a child. As he puts it
“pure inconsequential fun”.
This book is fun but it certainly
isn’t inconsequential. It wears its significance
lightly but Murray is one of the best comic writers
in English since Sterne and like that serious joker
he has important things to tell us. His first comic
novel, Radio Activity, was turned down by
dozens of publishers but was voted their favourite
Cumbrian work by the wise folk of his native county.
You would think the commercial instincts of the big
houses might impel them to take on this
extraordinarily gifted and original writer; but then
again, when the lists show Katie Price topping the
sales, you can understand why he’s still in the
hands of a small press and selling small numbers.
But writing as good as Murray’s doesn’t date.
Posterity will judge him well and that is his
present reward.
Alan Dent
THE FALL OF THE POUND
after La Baisse du Franc
and La Stabilisation du Franc – Benjamin Péret
From: Je Ne Mange Pas De Ce Pain-la (1936)
(i)
Pound little pound what have you done with your bones
What would you do without poker dice
to hurl these words onto paper
Once paunchy cleric you officiated in the corridors of brothels
distributing the wafer to skinny whores
whose eyes reflected your fat counterfeit
Once your vast piggy cheeks
were a reproach to the skeletal billy-goats
who spreading around their patriotic and Presbyterian stink
followed you like the shadow of a sun
Sun let's say foglamp
because you'll never light more than a road closed
where the cobbles have been replaced by broken bottle bits
But today just an earthworm sectioned by multiple shovels
you struggle in vain to escape the fish
You'd like to be a general of the bankers again
but the bankers died like rats
and out of ther stomachs ooze flabby pounds
and their financial rot fills all the coffers
where the last survivors implore Mammon
to let the pound become a Euro
Alas Christ poor used up pound
cast among the turds of the speculators
Here lies the quid beetroot without sugar
(ii)
If the ears of the cows shiver
it's because people are singing God save the Queen
Let's go children of the toilets
let's drip snot in the ears of Blair and Brown
The fishbones trapped in their teeth
have hardly spoken
It's me the Strong Pound
Down with the old fart who had me boiled
Like a fairground caricature
an eye looking out of a pisspot
Gordon Brown repeats himself
I fully deserved the Order of the Shithouse
Long live the union of dunces
Long live national cow pie
Translated by
John Hartley Williams
December 2008
Now writers like pop stars sell themselves and pose
slick models in the market-place of fame,
and pigeon-minded tv hosts spew inspissated prose
and literature’s a petty, catwalk game,
the not-so-great-and-good assemble every year
among the hills and books of little Hay,
to talk of Akhmatova, Charlotte Bronte and Top Gear
and who might Mariella get to lay;
a fine event for business, for the cameras, for the rich
who eat posh nosh and swill expensive reds,
but those who understand the truth’s persistent, nagging itch
stay desk-bound or sit sharpening their leads;
a president or two, a glib-tongued, car-mad nerd
today can the take the place of Proust or Crabbe,
for who would read, alone, when all the passing herd
assemble here to own what they can grab?
Fran Virgo
Dockers & Detectives - The Relaunch Review
It’s probably fifty years since Ken
Worpole attended a launch in Liverpool. Back then it’d
be a nuclear sub from the dock he was helping to build
at Cammel Laird’s. Last night (March 6th
2008) he was launching his own craft - the re-write of
his classic analysis of prole lit – Dockers and
Detectives which first appeared in 1983. Next to him, on
the top table at the News from Nowhere Bookshop at 96
Bold Street, was screenwriter Jimmy McGovern.
Ken’s thesis is that London and Liverpool
are special sites – port cities with a vital working class
culture energised by immigrants and the strong story telling
tradition of sea-faring men. He remarked how, as a teenager on
his first stay at a men’s hostel near the docks, he was
constantly pestered by yarn spinning sailors. Jimmy grinned.
The great, but now submerged, scribes of
that earlier period were James Hanley, George Garrett and Jim
Phelan. Not realist writers but expressionists (has this got
something to do with their eclipse?). We were reminded by a
member of the audience that Malcolm Lowry was a scouser who
joined the Merchant Navy and whose first book Ultramarine was
influenced by sailors like Melville, Conrad, and Jack London.
The Merch in those days was a quick, cheap way of seeing the
world and an escape route for desperate fathers of illegitimate
kids. Ken mentioned unwanted pregnancy as an important motif in
the novels of the 50s (eg Sillitoe, Barstow et al).
Perhaps west coast ports like Glasgow,
Cardiff and Liverpool had the edge on others being on main
routes to America. We don’t hear much of the school of
Felixstowe or Harwich. New York was a magnet. Ken wistfully
admitted to still treasuring his old Verve jazz records. Rock an
Roll, the Beat poets and Kerouac (another sailor) were
liberating influences from the dominant US popular culture - and
- “the tough guy vernacular style of writing was often adopted
by many British working class male writers as the appropriate
register for writing about their experiences” (D&D p71)
Another strand Ken explored is the
re-writing, and even erasing, of working class history. The
period of World War II was replayed in the aftermath as a
triumph of elite heroes like Guy Gibson, Douglas Bader and
Barnes Wallis rather than the tenacious resilience of docklands
workers. It seems we were fighting to preserve the
quintessentially English rural idyll – a thatched roofed pub in
the Cotswolds – rather than a working class community and its
values.
His most off-the-wall notion is that the
built environment acts as an anchor and definer of
consciousness. That people of different ethnicities or creeds
can feel a common bond in their attachment to place; and that
our destruction of even industrial installations weakens this
social glue. He “reads” these environments as he would a book.
Declining to give a conventional book-launch type recital he did
chose to quote at length one paragraph from Robert Colls Identity of England which he uses on page 10 of D&D.
When the
staple northern industries began to splutter from the 1970s,
very deep meanings choked with them. Buildings that for years
had given habitude to landscape were brought down without a
second glance. Elegant mill chimneys, dramatic colliery
headgear, sun-bright shipyard cranes, all hit the ground in
clouds of masonry, and with them fell a whole visual culture.
Where ships' hulls had once swerved across the skyline, there
was now only sky. Lodges and institutes, formerly places of
association and learning, became derelict. The bands ceased to
march. Banners were furled. Methodist chapels, emotional
heartlands of the Industrial Revolution, became carpet stores.
Pine pews were ripped out and sold as antiques. A landscape was
humiliated, piecemeal.
The event hostess wondered what we’d do
with all these disused mine shaft installations. Wouldn’t the
place start to look like a museum? Ken thought, gnomically, a
proper integration would be “difficult”.
The idea of “reading” environments arose
when he was questioned about the influence of the internet and
the possible decline of book reading. In the future, the
questioner reasoned, we’d be absorbing most of our info from TV
and DVDs via the activities of people like Jimmy. JM looked
puzzled, as well he might, being a writer who still sits at a
keyboard most of the time. But maybe it is possible to produce a
show by simply exhorting actors to say something interesting.
Big Brother eg. Ken guiltily admitted to being a keen reader
still, but thought the academic obsession of 1980s radicals who
believed writing more fat books on theory would usher in the
revolution was now exposed as a dead end. You can come in now
Karl; sorry the position is filled.
As for the internet, personally I prefer Chou
en Lai’s answer when asked if he thought the French revolution
had been a good thing – it’s too soon to tell. Ken is no luddite
on the web and said generous things about this site and the one
on Voices. I sense he sees important synergies in prospect – and
perhaps even the building of an electronic community on the
ruins of the physical wilderness. One thing the web does do is
give everyone, working class included, an ease of access to
literature and art works which would have astonished even Louis
XIV. Ken’s final section, on East End literature mentioned a
writer unknown to me – Dan Billany. Twenty years ago I might
have searched bookshops in vain for this rarity. Now I log on
and immediately find a first edition of The Trap for three quid
in Belfast.
Ken’s encouragement of working class
writers like Jimmy back in the 70s was generously acknowledged.
JM has said elsewhere “it was always a boost to get a story in
Voices”. His connection with his roots has remained strong. Why
do some proletarian writers fade away? They get rich, move out
and wither. Jimmy recommended the Liver Vaults in his home
suburb of Kensington as a top boozer and all purpose prole hub
(no not that Kensington). But even the playing fields in
Kensington have been built over so that the sportsmen of the
Liver Vaults have no pitch. Thanks to the City of Culture cash,
however, one will be created on a reservoir. Christ! These
scousers are so blest they don’t just walk on water the play
footie on it!
Jimmy had some sound advice to the writers
of historical reconstructions. Leave out apostrophes. Your
modern man says “You’re an idiot” but Elizabethan man says “You
are an idiot” I searched frantically for a pen. He might
even say “Verily Sir, thou art an idiot” The possibilities for
an overworked scriptwriter are vast. Jimmy’s TV series could be
played again in doublet, hose and codpieces. They just need
translating. Look out for Ye Street coming soon on channel 97.
Ken, unfortunately, wasn’t booked into the
Liver Vaults but the less salubrious Adelphi (it has improved a
bit recently). At least there he shouldn’t be too bothered by
yarn spinning sailors.
Ken Clay
FOUR POEMS
SPECTATOR
There he stands,
old man with a dry mouth
waiting for his soul to sing,
anything;
conscious that he cannot always
choose the song
and never call the tune.
Spectator
who sees most of the game
but, tongue-tied by despair,
cannot give
a coherent commentary
or find words
of comfort for the losers.
WALKING IN WINTER
Frost has put white flesh
On the bare bones of trees,
Thickened and stiffened the leaves
Of grass and herb that crisp
And crackle underfoot
Mist encloses the mountain.
It's cold enough for snow,
Which will not be slow
To spread from the far peaks
To these wooded slopes below
And sheathe white flesh in
Even whiter skin.
JANUARY FIRES
Smoke is rising from the bay:
men are building bonfires on the beach,
raising pyramids of brush and driftwood:
root and branch and twisted trunk of trees
wrenched up, dismembered, drowned,
picked clean by sea and surf and left
to moulder bone bare on the stony shore;
wrack of the last of last year's storms
cast away by wind and wave and strewn
haphazardly across the beach,
now gathered up and stacked on pyres,
slyly probed by fingers of fire
that flare in sudden breaths of air
and fan out into flaming palms,
sparks flying wildly to expire
in the sunlit January sky,
then die away to smouldering ruins,
where charred remains disintegrate
and ash and embers disappear
among the shingle, shells and shards.
TWO PHOTOS
One black and white, slightly
out of focus, faded
with age; the other
in colour and clearly defined.
In each a fair-haired child in
a white dress turns her head
towards the camera, looks
at me out of the photo.
Each child is two years old.
Thirty six years lie between them.
Looking at the colour print
I found I was afraid,
waiting for the child
to pass the other's age,
never having imagined
that another might come
even this close. (She too would
ask for me in my absence.)
What surprises me is that
it does not seem like betrayal;
rather, something to celebrate.
R.L. Hughes
FLY AWAY PETER
A sticky wicket needs a bat as straight
as C.K.’s whiskey;
a steady nerve, a hunter’s eye, an instinct for what’s
risky;
and Peter was our hero once when he put paid to bowling
by racists from apartheid’s land whose sweet death knell was
tolling;
he rose above corruption’s stench, he stood for all that’s
classy
we watched him on our black and whites and loved him more
than Lassie.
He gave us hope that principle might kick the arse of
grafting
and politicians find more joy in justice than in shafting;
but Peter shinned the greasy pole like any shabby creep
and found that McCord’s tricky case just sent him fast
asleep.
He knew that power must be bought, he preened in front of
mirrors
he thought himself a lofty sir and all the people sirrahs.
Now Peter fights to save his skin and we all find it funny
how young ideals get sucked into the septic tank of money.
HIGHGATE
I might’ve known; in any case,
Katrina’s
nothing but a breath,
a few puddles in the
universe’s playground,
and my daughter ending
her destiny
a less than pettiness
to all but us.
I’d suck the ink back in my pen
sell my
labour as a railway clerk,
touch my cap to
the boss,
to turn that round.
It’s tight in here.
My coffin’s like
yours except
I didn’t build it.
That
tightrope you’re on
as the rock melts
and
frail as houses everything solid’s
nothing
more than kettle vapour,
I walked it in my
head
in a café in the
cinquieme.
I was twenty-nine.
She
was forty-three.
At three she could recite To
be or not to be.
Sigh no more ladies, sigh no
more.
What choice do you have ?
Gravity’s
a law you can’t evade.
Your choices are
inevitable
and your inevitabilities as chosen
as hers.
Rick Brown
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE 25
Martin Domleo
OLD BILL
The Burton Years
They knew Old Bill at the Red Rose Social
As the bloke who arrived at seven of a night
In his perennial flat cap,
Tall, with a hand on the door’s upright,
Black-suited wispiness stooping slightly,
Two bony fingers supporting a quiet fag.
Years ago, his cigarettes glowed brightly,
Earning him the name of Terminator
But he rarely inhales these days (and the
Tinder that once turned so quickly to red
On his knuckles had long since gone to earth).
At eighty-and-a-half, Bill’s thin right arm
Was the steadiest part of him, as steady
As a Newcomen beam. That practised lever
Was for cocking pints. A sage on racing tips
Picked from the Sun and Mirror, Bill more than
Held his own with four furrowed and whiskered
Ex-brewers twenty years his junior.
Around nine of a night he would slip away
Two quarts heavier, and walk steadily
And mindfully across the road to his crumbling
End-of-terrace more shack than house,
And relieve himself as best he could
In his cold privy – a half-mortared windsock
Some part-time jobber had tacked to the kitchen
Between bouts of drinking and flatulent sleep.
At least this abutment was more accessible
Than the defunct Victorian dumping heap
At the end of his garden strip, sinking
Into piles of bottles, cans, planks, old bricks.
Bill left for good, just as quietly, without fuss
In his chair in front of his portable
As the lottery balls lifted and danced.
The set was still flickering a ghostly light
When they found him, the smell of his last fag
Mingling with burnt carpet, hot plastic, stale beer.
Although he bragged a little, he never won much.
Once he made twenty quid, gave forty away.
Always he bought the first clutch of the night
Before settling into side shadow, shunning
Centre stage, biding time as a good sage ought.
The crematorium was crowded out.
_____________________________
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