In my place

Wow! OMG WOW! What an inspiration the prompt delivered this morning. I woke to find Diane Wakoski sat at my breakfast table where she had poured strong, fresh Colombian coffee for two!

She pushed an empty bowl across the dried pine surface and said, “here, fill that”, and then sat back, smiled through her beatnik woollenry, and waited for me to write a poem about something I’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tire – that gave me a similar kind of satisfaction to what she describes in her poem, Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons.

I hope I did her proud.

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There’s very little American admiration in my make-up,
Except, perhaps for coffee, as in proper coffee, I don’t know,
I guess it’s Hollywood viewed through a black and white TV screen in the 60’s,
Which is odd,
Given that Kaldi watched his Ethiopian goats get their caffeine kick
Way before the Boston Tea Party kicked off.
But hey ho,
The world very seldom looks like it is,
And people rarely appreciate what is possible to know.
Certainly, the folks at my local karaoke did not know, they had no idea,
None at all.

How could they know, indeed, why would they even think to know?
When the voluble and vociferous one stood up to sing, did they think,
“O, wow, we are in for a treat now, this will be special!”
Or did they fall back and feast on their salty blue cheese tropes,
With their hackneyed, soul destroying, character consuming ways,
That devoured hope?
Course they did.

Promise rarely featured in the monochrome world of our youth.
Aspiration was a cul-de-sac our father’s drove us in to,
Then bricked up the entrance with cheap grey breeze blocks stolen from the building site.
There, they parked our dreams.
In the garage of cobwebbed asbestos with no windows.
In the warehouse of no expectation overgrown with rusty barbed wire.
The only exit being by pneumoconiosis and gallons of best bitter.
You needed to find scarce steps to escape that cloying cold clay fate.
I found steps.

Steps that led me to the Salvation Army citadel.
Not to find God or Jesus there, I’d tried that in Sunday School,
Where I learnt to remember names and places and miracles,
In exchange for Sherbet Lemons and Chocolate Limes.
I received my confirmation by confectionary.
My sweet Lord!

Years later, my leather-soled shoes echoed their tip taps on empty wet streets,
Where the weak electric streetlamps reflected fag packets in the gutters,
And piles of yesterday’s digested dogs’ dinners,
With my cold hands, I turned the twisted, cast-iron ring on the great arched door,
And went in.

The presence of divinity is marked in England by long, straight wooden benches.
Worn smooth by a thousand devout derrieres,
Waxed to a gloss sheen by wiggling buttocks of all shapes and sizes,
By Sunday best floral dresses, smart Marks and Spencer pressed trousers, and, here tonight,
By the sixty-strong Mansfield Male Voice Choir.
I sat down.

I took my place in the line of the balding, the bulging and bloody beautiful men.
Working men, retired men, old men, young men – happy men.
Perched like choral crows on a wire, we awaited our call to order,                          to sing.
And it came.

She expected nothing but total respect, and it was duly delivered – always.
When this this pencil-thin, perpendicular powerhouse raised a hand –
The world fell silent, filled its lungs, and waited.
Her forefinger baton had beat time for these men on world-class stages.
And here I sat, among them, equal amongst them, equal amidst great men.
Among the baritones and tenors and the basses,
Amongst the voices that emanated from joyous faces, here,
In my place.

I couldn’t tell a crotchet from a crutch or minim from a Moomin,
But I could hold a note.
A deep and harmonious note that garnered gracious appreciation from my peers.
Mr Spencer tried and failed to teach me music at school,
I like to think he would have approved; maybe.

Musical elevation led me to elation on those wet Thursday evenings.
For two hours a week, I was something, I was part of something,
Part of something much, much, so much bigger than tiny pointless me.
I was a baritone Atlas with a scoresheet in Welsh to guide me across the universe.
I became the sum of all the parts the Cul-de-sac swallowed,
I became me, all of me and all me wanted to be.

And the folks at my local karaoke did not know,
They had no idea,
None at all.

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