When the moment comes, it comes with the Tams [written for the ArtWrite MOMENTS project ]

To hear this and other moments being read , go to https://www.artwrite.net/momen…

This is the day I need a moment, but what if there is no moment? 

And what if there is a moment, but I miss it?  

A poet once told me you need to be in a state of negative capability to be open to moments, 

but I think I prefer the idea of the Muse visiting…

When the moment does come, I’m driving down the M54. 

Maybe you can motor into negative capability, 

or maybe my own Muse straddles roads, 

unfazed by stained mattresses and bin liners oozing mortal waste…  

Opening riff of a song on the radio
Unheard for so long, but I know it’s the Tams
the words they’ll sing
how they’ll sing them 
and I fall through time and space
into Birmingham 1972
into a youth club disco
into a new smock of daisied yellow cotton       
into the hope of a boy with long brown hair
into a walk with him to the bus stop
into his bending to kiss me…
 
Song over, I feel an aching sadness, 

not because I know that fourteen year old me 

walked to the bus stop alone and un-kissed, 

but because I’ll never again feel the hope I felt 

as I pulled that yellow daisy smock over my head.

And in the rear view mirror I see mud-splattered folds of un-dyed linen being hitched above the knees of two sturdy legs that step to a pewter sky…