A Reading Of Youth Poem by Alistair Plint

It's quarter past
I've been waiting since six
hollow halls, echo absence
like empty picture frames
hung delicately
in wide-gallery-spaces

Filled walls are as blunt
in delivery, as two teenages
blurting "yo mamma" jokes
behind dressing rooms
at a school-sports-stadium

All that corrugated steel
reverberating in the wind of it
while war-cries, cheerleaders
and drum-majorettes hide
cries of silenced hearts
invocated under breaths
of pure loss;
regressing whiskey to water

There is a solace in the search of it
[a deathly silence, humanitarian science]
I'd imagine the world felt
that suffering shuddering of earth
in the past;
probably when Shakespeare died
or da Vinci left
our art-world
though I know
you haven't
departed

yet

A lonely tear
tries to drop
sniffs itself back, remembering
a statement
it should have owned
before thirteen
when the jokes were stupid
and young folk drove
the engineers out

The hands-of-time
having rolled through
the grandfather's face
twice
in the period these words
came to rest in reticence;
your voice
narrates my dreams
in the mid-moon
I resent it, intensely;
while searching your
hands, lips, flowing hair
in the darkness of the
slumbering-stars

Isolated understanding
in this primary juncture
that I am child
no, I shouldn't cavort there

but

it's a negative my child
relinquish the electricity-port
while opening your tool-box
teleporting your tools
-it will shock you
never rebooting
your worn
un-ticking-heart

I've waited since
Wednesday at six
the bread is stale, beer is warm
-cobwebs fill the library
The winter icicles are
pummeling my ears and nose
in their burn
[while the north sprouts summer
like a global seasoning]




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