Paul's page

Hijo Mio (Son of mine)

In my self-enforced exile

One of my troops comes to give succour.

Cursed or blessed I have agonised on his behalf

But the osmosis that takes place is undeniable.

Our animations and silences

Are in almost perfect synchronicity.

While our hearts unfold like the un-crumpling

Of red, discarded napkins.

This is not new, it has always been so,

For he is a hijo mio.

Each, in our own way, suppresses the ugliness in our lives,

With the weapons of the written word.

The inner scape of the moving image

And the magic of notes on a page transformed

Into an auditory balm.

Now we walk the old streets of this Mallorcan town

In another mutual quest for beauty.

Our talk is quiet, sometimes desultory, but always pointed.

We carry our hurts and wear our scars ever so lightly,

Never quite hardening into censure or reproach.

But what jaundice and cynicism I hold are like

Bows and arrows to his gatling gun of youth and sense of fairness.

I salute him and surrender,

knowing that he Is not only a hijo mio,

but also hijo de su madre.

Our love of the troubadour, the misfit and the outsider

Ironically, brings us together and succour has been found.

The two of us, to greater and lesser degrees, 
are solitary by nature.

Loving beauty when we find it, a wound and 
Its pain healed by the greyer life.

But when the wound opens, we bleed together, 
blood mingles and we are renewed and remade 
for he is a hijo mio

Written in Palma, Mallorca August 2018 (Seeing Damian Rice in concert)

My vista (for Karen)

I stumble from out each dawn and move

Slowly into my day, eyelids unsticking,

stretching  locked limbs, focusing eyes.

And when I look across to you, 

Your sleeping form and gentle presence 

In place and heart, raises not just 

my head from my siren pillows,

But my dampened soul too.

For each morning I am reassured

To see your face and form again,

As I lose you in the darkness of each night 

And gain you again in the light of my day.

We are not everything we want of each other,

We know that, it’s our private joke.

No eyes locked together across a crowded room,

No chance encounter on a deserted shore,

No one hundred impassioned letters over the lifetime of a week.

No, not everything we want but everything we need.

Our joy and coming together is borne out of  our cancelled soap operas.

And so in our new found  play we are re-cast, re-scripted 

And we play for private laughs knowing we will have the last ones.

And at the end of each of our new found days, 

My poor wounded heart beats a path to our door.

I become sheltered by your smile

And warmed by the fires of your eyes.

In this  house of love we bid farewell to lives lost, 

Letting history’s storms pass over.

We will climb our new mountain of life together 

And in awe I will turn to you

My  new world view stretching out before me, 

My landscape, my vista, my love.