ICKY ACKBAR

ROCK AND ROLL In AUVERGNE

SUNRISE, AUVERGNE: MID NOVEMBER

SIZE OF A (NANTES) ELEPHANT!

ON TOUR, BACK SOON

GROSS BACKSTAGE MAGIC

WHAT A SOUND CHECK

MUSH ROOM

Another year relaxes in its embers

We gather for our farewell

Through the months cuckoos have called

You have not heard, I wouldn’t know

Leaves fell off branches, regardless

In the evening sun on a Bandon hill

Still at this familiar hole

I try to think of your face

Taste the earth in the air

Your intake of breath is what I remember

That preoccupied, sucking - yeah!

Peculiar to this parish as you were

We can’t confuse you with mother

You are absent-bodied no more

We came here together apart thirty years

We carried each other once a piece

Me a slapped kid, you in the urn

We shared similar meals in between

Those blood red beef stews we loved

Stock full of juice and mushrooms

This is all we had though, moments at dinner

Dirt chewed today is spat tomorrow

My thoughts slip away leaving you

Under mouldering heaps

I head towards laundry and tea

As the moon balls out above the church

We have both gone home

To a colder ground 

PASSERTIME

The bird visited in my thirty-eighth year

I heard from this window tunes of freedom

Abandoned to the world as she was

In the dawn and the dusk she would always appear

On the same branch perched and unfussed

Singing lustily, thrusting out song to my ear

For two years she came to a sick cell’s outlook

And I’m sure others shared in the pleasure I took

For she didn’t care who heard her, not neighbour

Nor jailer, she was fearless

And then one full starred night she appeared silent

Her throat dry or her talent spent or her needs unrequited

I sat in my room holding the moon

Between finger and thumb for only a moment