Had I not been peering at a soft-core calendar  

A women's rowing club – posing butt naked - for charity 

With discreet oars obscuring zones of 'special interest'

Our golden wedding day would have passed unnoticed

 

Friday, October 20 2017 – an empty square

We married - 50 years ago this very day

Deep in the autumn of the ‘Summer of Love'

 

We might have become ‘grey panthers’

Prowling motorways

B roads and dusty tracks to deserted coves

In our Eldiss Xplore 304

Bought online from Autotrader

Parked up on a clifftop

Looking out over the wide flat ocean

Focussing binoculars on Polaris, unmoving

Proving the Earth is stationary

Marvelling at the mediaeval mindset of those who think

The Earth is a spinning ball

Or wintering in Albufeira

Where we honeymooned in 74

 

Despite his distaste at our drunkenness

The registrar declared us man and wife

You, a pregnant teen - five months gone 

No wedding rings

No smiling family throwing rice

Two clerks dragged in as witnesses

And just ten bob to see us through

"This one will never last”

He muttered as he blotting papered the register

 

But it lasted - through years of grinding poverty

The speed in Benzedrex inhalers keeping me awake on night shifts

Dodgy lodgings, dodgy landlords

Dope dealing mates? Dodgier still

Life brightened, for me, by the Henge and Glastonbury

 

I lived in a hallucinogenic haze

I was a 'test pilot' - taking anything to get a buzz

Mushrooms especially or LSD

I made the local headlines

"Flying hippie belly flops off the Market Street multi-storey"

Bollocks!

I was not trying to fly

I was suicidally inclined

I had dropped two tabs of ‘yellow sunshine’

And from nowhere a thought crossed my mind

'You must die and be born again if you want to get to heaven'

That sounded fine by me so

"Geronimo!"

But I survived

Mashed myself up pretty bad instead

Breaking my pelvis, my ribs, and cracking my head

 

My week in a coma was the best part

A kind of holiday

You came in when the kids were at school

And wiped my forehead

And squeezed my hand

And ran to the nurse to report my first blink

 

Old friends visited daily

Chatting and playing  "Stairway to Heaven" for me

I chuckled inside my tight-locked shutdown head

Bleedin' stairway to heaven – if you only knew

 

Each day a fresh revelation

I saw heaven

I saw hell

I met angels

I learned the secret of life

 

A voice said it was time to choose

Life or death?

It was up to me

Living meant pain and

A narrow lonely flinty path

Until I faced the Deity

 

Or simply dying - giving up there and then

A bathetic end to a pointless existence

A painless oblivion but not before

A tantalising glimpse of the splendrous eternity

That I had let slip from my grasp

 

Live or die?

Take the money or open the box?

Deal or no deal?

I opened the box. I struck a deal. 

I chose the narrow painful path 

I would walk it as long as you walked beside me

The angel's parting words

As you kissed my forehead and I awoke?

"Remember Lot's wife"

 

I looked the same when I got discharged

I looked the same but had changed inside

I had seen the light

There was a light 

And I had seen it

A light you had not seen

Could not see

And did not want to

 

We grew apart

Estranged by my zeal for Jesus and your disinterest

No more drink, no more drugs - I was not really fair on you

For the sake of the family I forsook the family

Kissed the children and limped to Galloway

Then the coast path

Right around to Scrabster and the ferry to Orkney

And obscurity

 

I'm quietly waiting now to die

A dignified patient passage from life to life

I wonder where you are now

Is god to blame for our marriage fraying beyond repair?

You would have liked it here

In my cottage beside the burn

I've a family kitchen - cosy

With a peat stove

But no one eats with me

 

And you would love the view of Egilsay

Across the bay

And watching otters, seals and gulls

I wish you were here

Fifty years of memories would be ours to share

 

I wonder where you are

I wonder where we ever were