JINGLE ON MY SON!

JINGLE ON MY SON!
A doughty champion of his local culture.(Poet Tom Hubbard)Your performance at the city hall was soooooooooo good! Christoph thought it was excellent! (Carolyn)

21.7.15

LIKE THE SPANISH CITY

































LIKE THE SPANISH CITY

The days have gone;
the laughter and shrieks
blown away.
We have all grown up,
left old Catalonian dreams 
and the blazing seaside bullfights.
We are dazed,
phased out.
Spaces where we courted
bulldozed
to make way
for the tack of tomorrow;
the hope in the sea breeze;
the distant echo of castanets
and voices scraping
in a dusty rotunda.
I remember where I kissed you,
where I lost you.
It was in Spain, wasn’t it?
Or was it down the Esplanade
on a wet Sunday in July?
Either way,
we are still
twinned with sunny Whitley Bay,
and flaming Barcelona too;
and our lives
will dance in fading photographs
from the pleasure dome,
whenever we leave home.



KEITH ARMSTRONG




























GARCIA LORCA IN WHITLEY BAY

I’ve come to devour your mouth
and dry you off by the hair
into the seashells of daybreak.’
(Federico Garcia Lorca)

In the rotunda,
your voice lashes out at war.
You 
sing 
on the crests of the girls,
streaming up the Esplanade.
You
scream under a parasol of gulls,
skimming through the fairground,
on a mission to strangle
flying fish.
Haunting poetry 
in the dead ghost train,
the palms of the fortune-tellers, 
dust.

Lorca in a broken-down ghost town,
scattering your petals:
Garcia up against the wall
of last night,
eyes shot;
blood from the evening sky,
dripping down an ice cream cone,
down a sweet lass’s blouse.

Saw you on the Metro, Federico,
saw you in Woolworth’s.
Saw you in the crematorium,
on Feather’s caravan site.
Saw you drown
in a sea of lyrical beauty.

Lorca,
like Community,
you are gone;
ideals
torn into coastal shreds.

Still shells 
glisten,
lips on the beach
ready
for kissing again
ready
for the re-launch
of childish dreams,                                                                 
sticky 
with candy floss                                                                                                                    
and cuckoo spit.
                                                                                                  



KEITH ARMSTRONG



The Spanish City, Whitley Bay.



                                                                                                                    


the jingling geordie

My photo
whitley bay, tyne and wear, United Kingdom
poet and raconteur