6 January 2011

Watching Hockey On Television


It was just me and
The Hammer walking
By the river today.
It was like a scene
From McCarthy's "The Road."
We get lots of days
Like that during winter here.
Days so thickly overcast
You would think the
World had ended in
A cold wet bang.

Just about everybody else was
Watching hockey on television.
No birds, no beavers,
To observe.
Have they got tv sets too?
A bloated headless corpse
Passed us on the weepy current
As we looked out over the water
Like the drunk boom men
Of the apocalypse
Pissing in the river.

5 comments:

istvan said...

The boys have to piss somewere.Great poem Beer. I wonder how many of those boom men lived to 65. 5 seconds is about all the time you have before those Daytons take you down,as for being drunk subtract 2 seconds.As you are aware the river changes every day,week,month,year and still seems to flow.Relentlesly.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

The old boys certainly got in some scuffles. Not many of them did live to be retired for long but those that still survive have got some fine stories to tell. Buy a retired faller a beer next time you meet one.

ib said...

I liked this one too. Except for the "Pissing in the river" bit. No, I lied. I liked that bit too.

Spare. Wintry.

On the same level as "Stew and Dumplings", but not so lean. Actually, I've been meaning to assail you of late in connection with Blake. William, not Norman.

Have you read the Peter Ackroyd biography ?

Some really insightful shit regards the well documented truculence. I dont know. I'm guessing you might enjoy it.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

I'm not as familiar with Blake as I ought to be. Read some of his poetry in books loaned from the library long ago. I gather he and Godwin brushed past each other as Blake moved in when Godwin was forced by tragic economic circumstance to move house.

You're not the first person to steer me Blake's way. You are, however, the first person north of the Treaty of York border to do so. Did Blake drink much?

ib said...

Not as much as one might suppose. A daily draught of porter; once, I gather, a bottle of walnut oil sent him as an experimental ingredient in his engraving process.

Much of his language is a far too gothic for my taste. As is the Englishness, albeit of Albion. I keep coming back to him. In spite of the religious element. Or because it is the only book close at hand since everything is more or less still in boxes.

He moved house more often than Fred Goodwin. Never mind the Godwin. Each one smaller than the last, as reputation and standing eroded. He and his wife. There is something I definitely like about the man: perseverence; recklessness; an inate inability to coin it in.

I'm even prepared to forgive him that fucking awful hymn. Jerusalem. The music banged out by some idiot Royalist decades after Blake was cold in the ground. At best, a raving capitulator. Sir Hubert Fucking Parry. The name says it all.