To All the Lost Things

To all the lost things,
And all the lost days,
To all the lost folks
Who meandered away.
To all the lost things,
And all the lost dreams,
To the family and friends,
Lost hopes and lost schemes.
To all the lost things,
And all the lost skills,
To all the lost health,
And the newfounded ills.
To all the lost things,

Which taught me too well, 

That to all those lost years,

I must bid a farewell.

bobby stevenson 2020

THING and the Big Blue Sea

It was inevitable that it would happen. Thing had started to grow up.

Sure he still sat at the cave mouth every night on the chance that that would be the very moment his mother and father returned. Yet something deep down told him that they weren’t coming back and that he was on his own, and he’d better do something about it.

He knew that life would have to change, that his dreams would also have to do the same. There had been that one perfect moment, probably one day when he packed his school books and got ready to walk down the hill when his mother had kissed him goodbye and his father had patted him on the head and said ‘make me proud’. The sorrowful thing was that there wasn’t a fanfare or a bell that tolled as you passed that perfect moment in your life.

Maybe there would be another perfect moment, perhaps if he met someone – but he wasn’t holding his breath. He knew that he had been born looking like his family but not like anyone else in the valley or at school. And he had suffered because of this, he had been called names, beaten on a couple of occasions, and most hurtful of all was being left out of parties and celebrations. It wasn’t the kids that didn’t want Thing there. It was their parents.

Thing had been taught in school that we were on a rock which travelled around the sun every year. If this had been a ship, we would have helped each other; we would have cared and nurtured each other. But this was a ship without a sea, and so folks and Things didn’t appreciate how fragile it all was. Perhaps if folks looked at the sky and treated the big blue yonder as a sort of sea, then maybe they would be kinder to one and other.

When Thing was small he had first seen his reflection in a mirror in school, and it had shocked him. He knew he looked like his parents, but he didn’t realise how different he looked from the other children. That night he had wondered if this distance between him and the others would last all his life.

He had made friends at school, and those friends had not seen any difference, but he had noticed, as he got older, that the children had started to carry prejudices and words built-to-hurt to school. They weren’t taught those words in school, so there must have been another type of schooling done at home, the school of hate.

He never really felt sorry for himself, but he did wonder what kind of God would have made him so different. Then as the years passed in school, he saw that others had their problems too; even if they all looked alike. Little Johnny had lost his brother in a war, Elsa had been made an orphan after a car crash, and little Craig had gotten a disease called cancer and had never returned to school.

Everyone was tested Thing realised. Everyone. So he decided that if he had learned anything, it was to be strong when folks bullied and attacked. That everything passes, and that there is more good in the world than bad and that some kids’ parents cripple their off-spring with lies and hate and that, thought Thing, was the worst kind of injury.

So that night, as the sun was setting, Thing looked at the sky and saw it for the first time as a sea, and he saw the clouds as the waves breaking. That was when he really appreciated that we were all on a big ship going around the sun and we couldn’t afford to let anyone or anything get lost along the way.

bobby stevenson 2019

Keep Going

You’ll make it, I know you will,
You’ve come too far and now is not the time.
If only you stopped and thought about it all
The walls you’ve climbed, all the troubles crossed
All the failures faced, all the little victories
Look into the eyes of those beside you
The woman at the table
The man in the street
It’s there, deep set perhaps - but there all the same,
The very same terror as you
A flicker of recognition in both your eyes and then you move on
So if they can live in temporary quiet desperation
Then so can you
And one day soon you’ll make it across
To where you can start again
I know you will
You’ve come too far, to stop.

bobby stevenson 2019

Easy

You see the lovers, sitting,

Holding hands outside the café,

Perfect you would think to yourself,

Just perfect,

Yet for a fleeting moment there is a look in one of the couple's eyes

Which screams, that the end has finally arrived.

The woman walks the long street, watching and smiling at

The babies in their prams, and the mothers and fathers,

all smile back wondering what the woman is wanting.

What the woman wants - is to know, that had her child lived

What she would have been doing today. Who she would have been loving.

The vicar sits by the window of the church, looking out on to the world

That he has tried to save for nearly forty years,

He slips down another whisky, and another but nothing

Can warm his soul the way that God did in the past,

That was, until he stopped believing.

The little boy stands outside the house where his father has moved,

This is the place where that woman lives, the one who destroyed the family

- According to his mother.

And all around the houses, and streets, and villages, and towns, and cities,

They are all singing the same hymn:

“No one gets it easy any more”.

bobby stevenson 2019

Friends

Don’t think you are never seen, dear friend,

You leave a trace wherever you wander -

A smile, a laugh, a hope.

Don’t think you are never heard, my pal

There is always someone listening -

A song, a word, a joke.

Don’t think you are ever forgotten, old friend,

For when we passed each other

In that briefest of time,

You left a piece of you with me

That I'll carry wherever I go.

bobby stevenson 2019

Twenty Twenty Vision

Next year some people will leave your life
And new ones will enter
Next year some dreams will vanish
And others, not thought of, will come out of the sun
Next year you’ll make mistakes
And you’ll survive them all
Next year you’ll win some things, and you'll lose some things
Next year some friends will fail to understand
And some will grow to love you
Next year you’ll learn a little more about yourself
Some of it you’ll like and some of it you won’t
Next year perhaps you'll cry alone
But you'll also laugh at things you won't explain to others
Next year some of your actions will be misunderstood
But you'll discover that others understand in amazing ways
Next year you'll misjudge hearts and situations
And yet find more caring than you ever thought possible
Next year you’ll learn to love yourself just that little bit better
And that will be all you’ll need.

bobby stevenson 2019

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

Strange things happen to nice people. 

There I’ve said it, but it don’t make it any less true, friends. I ain’t gonna argue here, and now about how you measure niceness and all, you’re just gonna have to take my hand-on-my-heart word on that point. You see, me and my pals, sure are the nicest people to walk this part of Bucks County – may be even further, but heck, if it just don’t stop things happening.

I guess the first kookiest thing to happen was when my grandmother lost that precious ring, the one that my grand pappy had given to her on the day she said yes to marrying him. Charlie (that’s my bestest friend) just turned to her and said, you’ll find it under that old leather chair your cat uses as a bed. And you know what? That was where it was. Well, I’ll be, I kept saying to myself that day, well if that ain’t the darndest thing.

My first thought was that Charlie had put it there himself, on account, he was always up to something or other. But then, as Charlie said himself, he’d never been up to that part of my grandmother’s house that held the cat’s chair. I don’t think he was lying, friends, I surely don’t. I guess Charlie had always been the weird one – well, weirder than the rest of us – which is a long way away from what folks call normal in these parts.

Charlie used to go by the name of Kenzo, The Magician when he was knee-high to a real magician. Used to put on shows for us kids, even convinced us that he could make birds appear out of the air. Then one day, Danny, Charlie’s young cousin from his pop’s family, bust a finger when a brick fell on it. That finger couldn’t make up its mind which way it was pointing. Then Charlie took his cousin’s hand and placed it between his own hands. Danny said he felt real warm and when Charlie took his hands away, the finger was pointing the way it was meant. I kid you not, friends. It was pointing as straight as the day is long.

Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I’m thinking the two of them had conjured this up between them (‘scuse my words), but that night, Charlie swore on my life that he didn’t do nothing sneaky. The look in my pal’s eyes made me know he wasn’t lying.

One day, not long after my birthday, I was playing in the yard with the hamster that my folks had given me. I can’t really remember what happened, but my mom called me for something, and I turned to ask her what she wanted when Geronimo (the hamster) kind of made an escape right into the middle of the street. It was just as Mister Feeling’s horseless carriage was put-put-putting along (with Mister Feeling singing a really loud song from Don Giovanni) that he ran over my hamster.

I think it was my screaming that brought Charlie running – I must have been loud to hear it over Mister Feeling.

“What’s happened little brother,” that’s what Charlie always called me, on account that I was shorter than him.

“He’s killed Geronimo,’ I screamed.

Charlie went over to the flattened hamster and picked him up.

“No he ain’t, lookie here little brother.”

Sure enough, Geronimo was running up and down Charlie’s arm and nibbling his ear like he was at the peak of his life.

“I musta been mistaken,” I said to my pal.

“No, you weren’t,” said Charlie, and he wandered off whistling to himself.

These strange things kept happening - but far enough apart that no one ever really joined the dots. I guess when folks would talk about Charlie behind his back, I would get real annoyed and punch anyone who said my bestest pal was weird. He ain’t weird I told them. My mom told me that folks like Charlie only come along once in a blue moon.

When we’d finished schooling for good, I went off to learn how to be an artist and Charlie joined the army as a doctor or something. Apart from a postcard here and there, we kind of lost touch.

Then one day, not long after my dad started talking strange like, talking about things and people who weren’t there, Charlie turned up at the door.  

“I’ve come to fix things,” he said and walked straight in the house without a hello or anything.

“Where’s Henry?” That was my dad’s name.

“He’s sick,” I said.

“I know he’s sick, I’ve come to help him.”

I told Charlie that my dad was in the back bedroom and that Charlie wasn’t to be alarmed. You see, my dad kind of liked to be by himself and be with the folks he said were in the room. I couldn’t see any of them.

“Just ‘cause he sees them, don’t mean they’re there. And just ‘cause you can’t, don’t mean they ain't,” then Charlie started his whistling again as if he knew something I didn’t. That wouldn’t have been difficult.

“We are such things as memories, that is all we are,” exclaimed Charlie. I asked him if it was Shakespeare who had said that, and he said it was him then continued whistling.

I remember my grandpappy had said that Charlie was an ‘enigma’, which I thought was a monster like a vampire or something. But when I looked it up in the book of words; it said that Charlie was the kind of friend that no one could work out. Those were the kind of friends that I liked.

When Charlie came back down from my dad’s room, he just said that everything was fixed, that he’d meet me tomorrow on Main Street at three.”Don’t be late.”

As Charlie closed the front door behind him, my father was standing 

at the kitchen door, scratching himself.

“I could eat a horse,” that was what he said, and he whistled the same tune that Charlie whistled, then my dad went in and cooked the biggest steak in the world. My dad never talked of people I couldn’t see, again.

Charlie never got real famous for anything, but folks eventually talked about him in friendly terms. Whenever someone had an illness, or a doctor gave them little time to live, people would call on Charlie and sometimes things would get better and sometimes they wouldn’t.

“I guess the universe ain’t taking ‘no’ for an answer this time,” he’d say.

On the day that Charlie died, the whole town showed up. I was picked to say a few things about my pal, the enigma, but first I got the whole congregation to whistle Charlie’s tune (he would have liked that), even the reverend had to smile. On his gravestone, I had them carve the words:

CHARLIE TURNER – ONCE, IN A BLUE MOON.

I reckon he would have liked that, too.

bobby stevenson 2019