The Flags of our Fathers

Card school code in the common room,

a dishonoured debt, hair pull and later found

to be an emo on Facebook, request denied,

walked past the gates on the way home once,

people live like this, behind gates,

and languish in the devil's disappointment

of a botched scholarship, 

or a missed promotion,

or a spell in prison for fraud or 

embezzlement of some kind.

The flavour text that appears decades

after the time to explain whose

parent was nothing but the flick of

the tail of a trench coat in the wind

or the smell of walnut and leather,

or for me, six grand borrowed for

a Golf L, disappointment, 

the faint recognition that mouths

often write cheques that the body

will never cash, that the body

actually can't cash and the

body can't cash in class crossing

because there are secret signals,

stand up during the Hallelujah Chorus,

morse code through the space echo

of fists crashing at the rugby club

of dads who suddenly appear

from beneath the eaves.

That is

they are here again to say I had dreams

once too, that I didn't want a voice

that wakened me husk,

that bellowed artificially low

over watery real ale,

I didn't want to think of empire

or industry or anything about my

role in all of that.

 

I simply wanted to step out

of the cockpit,

walk the wings of a Spitfire,

storm a machine gun nest,

manage a verse of 

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

at Twickenham without

weeping into my pint,

or worrying about where

the car is parked,

I wanted not to watch

my upper lip slowly

curl up in distaste

over several decades, 

like a fortune telling fish 

in the palm

of someone else's hand.