Guest Poet 10 - Antony Owen - A burial of ghosts

(Our Latest guest poet is a poet I have known for some time and has proved inspiration throughout this blog, Antony Owen).

We are all here curled in colour,

barely held together by hair bobbles

which Mum only wore on chip pan Fridays

before the must have perm of nineteen eighty.

We are here in this moth ping light

that money shot of a shit beach in Malta

us five in a red ear sun going down behind us,

where whelks clung on to rocks to never leave them.

All of us were there eating wristband dinners.

We brothers with our bagsy first dives as Dad watched

gleaming gold on hired plastic by our burnt Mum

reading nivea bottles and dousing us thrice hourly in cream.

We are all here fading away in an A-Z loft

that Dad organised when his Mum wasn’t here.

He came up to this place to say goodbye to nineteen fifty nine

when he holidayed in Rhyl and dreamed of Marilyn Monroe.

These sad exhumations of lives that were here

of unrehearsed smiles in rehearsed routines, happy

to be in our roles before life changed us to give life

yet some of us are still there in the old one.

(Antony Owen was born in Coventry and is the author of three poetry collections since 2009; My Father's Eyes Were Blue (Heaventree) The Dreaded Boy (Pighog) & The year I loved England (Pighog) which is out July 2014. Apart from many magazines Owens work has been exhibited at The Hiroshima Peace Museum and he is a past finalist of The Wilfred Owen Story and The Shine Journal.)