Paul Tristram- Three Poems

The Wrong List

If you keep feeling that you are on the
‘Wrong List’ in Life?
It is only because you are trying
to sit down with the ‘Wrong People’

© Paul Tristram 2015

The Pavement Is A Difficult, Cold Lover

Stubbornly obstinate and unyielding,
unemotional to a fault
and ever ready to catch your fall
with sledgehammer arms
of concussion and bewilderment.
Yet, you never forget its kiss,
that icy treasure
seeps its way into your marrow
and nests there, Winter-like
and achingly, forever after.
The tiny half sphere bumps
-almost brail like-upon its surface
are merely there to help
the Friday and Saturday night blood
reach the gutters easier and quicker.
“Don’t sit down on it for too long,
you’ll end up getting piles!”
my Grandmother used to preach.
“I just stepped out a bit too quickly
from The Travellers Well
and the pavement jumped up to greet me!”
explained my Father numerous times.
I once watched a woman in her late fifties
in the backstreets of Neath Town Centre
by the St Ives Public House,
jumping like a schoolgirl to avoid the cracks
and a wall fell on her, true story,
newspapers next day said she died instantly.

© Paul Tristram 2015

The Day I Actually Pulled An Earwig Out Of My Ear

Sometimes life just takes the piss, completely!
I mean it’s not even remotely funny,
I always thought that it was just an urban myth.
I remember kids talking about it in the schoolyard
back in infant school ‘They are called earwigs
because they crawl into your ears when you are sleeping,
right into your head and they use those pinchers
on the arse end to muck up your brains, if you’ve got any?’
I’ve been so drunk (For decades!) that I’ve slept
upon pavements, park benches, in hedgerows,
the gutter, derelict buildings, old air-raid shelters,
disused railway carriages, fields, meadows, forests
and canal banks and never had a problem at all.
I’m from Wales for Christ Sake! I spent most of my youth
kipping on woodland ground (No tents or sleeping bags
…that’s for fucking tourists…we have Red Dragon’s
blood to keep us warm!) but anyway, I digress…
I was staying in a flat in Dyfatty Tower Blocks, Swansea,
racing this insane woman-I’d been seeing for the last
couple of months-to the bottom of the downward spiral.
We’d been drinking and fighting and fucking and…repeat,
twice every half hour or so, all night into oblivion.
When I was rudely awoken by a pinching sensation
in my right lughole, I half awoke and put a sleepy finger
in my ear and pulled out the front half of an earwig.
I stared at it for a minute or two trying to focus
my battered brain until it registered what it actually was,
I started yelling and punching at the side of my own head.
My lover awoke from her ‘Sleeping Beauty’ like repose
and started screaming in her most fetching dulcet tones
“Is it a fucking raid, we can only afford drugs
on fucking Giro Day and it ain’t fucking Giro Day, is it?”
whilst waving an unsheathed machete around clumsily.
By now, the half an earwig carcass had fucked off
from the end of my finger and when I tried to explain
she merely looked at me disappointed and hissed
“It’s the fucking D.T’s mun, you Muppet!”
and fell-like a suicide from a cliff-back into a coma.
I removed the other (Real!) half of the aforementioned
insect from my ear with a ‘Swan Vestas’ matchstick
five minutes later and then exited the building
with the ‘Creeping Horrors’ upon me, never to return.
For a few weeks after people would come up to me
in the upstairs bar of The Bush Hotel on the High Street
and say ‘what a shame you actually suited each other’.
My reply would always be “Most men wake up
after one drunken night in Dyfatty flats with ‘The Clap’
‘Crabs’ or some other respectable sexually transmitted
disease like that, I spend two months there and can only
manage fucking earwigs, she had to go so go she did!”

© Paul Tristram 2015


Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.
 
Buy his book ‘Poetry From The Nearest Barstool’ at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326241036
And also read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/