Fraughts napping

Fraughts napping 

Does my cat ponder why i speak?

Does she long to reply?

Or does she see how my words creak,

spittled on rusty hooks and hanging to dry?

And the tattoo of the old songs;

why do I find my eyes 

smarting under skylark skies;

full of tears as I run along.

How the sixties pulled away from

the spent bubblegum fifties,

beyond the remorse of war,

a zany decade, was permitted.

Pasties asked of the pub side door,

it’s light beaming onto the dark

village, with its slag-stoned streets, 

where the snow was settling on a

childhood, once and for all.

Hooks and worms, the fisher boy,

with his rod and reel might

catch himself a summer’s day,

to fry on a long and wintered night.

For every time I fall asleep,

these memories creep;

in a child’s shawl

I leave today and crawl

back home again;
O Mammy, Mammy please,

do kiss away this pain.