Dull day. The Black Mountains in mist.
The houses crawl up the lower slopes like rising damp.
I wander the town devoid of purpose.
November’s fallen leaves siliconed to the wet Monmouth Road.
At five the streets eerily vacated as if there’s a curfew.
Everything already now so last year.
Weatherspoon’s beerhall empty but for one loud mouth who seeks a fight,
proud as punch he won’t pay for his pint,
as the young bargirl waits patiently at a watchful distance.
Later in the Hen & Chicks the old men gather in the upstairs room.
Warthogs shuffling to their waterhole.
Battle lines set for the team from Caerleon,
the chess boards placed out like dining tablemats.
This warm faced fatherly man in front of me
wears a cracked face bronze analogue watch,
the second-hand judders inside the glass and ping,
it’s like the one my dad wore; the glass
cracked when he chopped the logs.
Time ticks and the past pulls open its hidden curtain.
‘You go,’ he says, bringing me back,
with a wave of his palm, and it’s as though
I pick up playing a game I left off
with my dad, long-dead, all of thirty years ago.
