I live on Question Street, though I'm a wanderer on Question Island.
   I pick up a pebble and feel the power of the sea and it always calls me.
   But here, in this season, I'm aware of leavings even as the cuckoo calls hope from the distance, unseen.
   Even as I see ring-doves on the rooftops, nuthatches returned to our garden oak seeking grubs.
   This street's a crook, a hook to hang a hill on.
   Sometimes a police helicopter hovers in the night sky with lamp-eye trained on the moors.
   Who is on the run? 
   Will the fox get back to its den?
   Sometimes you look out the window to find everything changed : a flashing light and open midnight door which has remained closed far too long.
   Yet this season has its own music of readiness, of openings as bees are timely in their comings and goings from a gap in the paneling they've made their own.
   Tulips closing with the dark, sleeping through a panic of lights, of a fall, of finality.
   Cats know no boundaries.
   In dreams I wander like one over lines, walls, by streams and nobody shouts at me.
   No leash, but there can be a chase : running against a wind, legs in muddy sand or arms underwater, straining.
   I live on Question Street, but who is asking?
   I pick up that stone and clutch it , so it takes me to another dimension.
   Question Street becomes Question Island again, yet I still don't know where it begins and ends.
   Out into the darkness , carried away by a wave even though the sea is a memory. 

                                QUESTION  STREET

I have lived here long enough
to know this street's the shape
of a question mark.

One by one the lights go out
as houses are vacated.
Soon they'll all be gone.

One night the ambulance arrives,
its doors left open,
couch and tubes waiting.

I look out for familiar lights,
for the insomniac windows,
the moving silhouettes.

See too much darkness,
too many hedges overgrown,
grass weedy and long.

Where do they disappear to?
Moon and stars won't answer,
no notices in the paper.

The street has no full-stop,
it's curved like a hook :
fishing for doubts again. 

  ' I'd be fine leaving the whole thing alone ; the trouble is it won't leave me alone. Last week Harry & Meghan showed up in my kids' book bags - they'd been invited by their schools to celebrate the wedding by wearing red, white and blue or buying cupcakes or both.
   This is propaganda through tasty pastry.' - Gary Younge, Guardian

  I was recently insulted online by a staunch Corbynite identifying me as  a 'Guardian reader'. I am not ashamed to say that I enjoy columnists like Younge (quoted above), Monbiot, Owen Jones ( also a Corbynite, of course) and Aditya Chakrabortty to name just a few.
   Younge's reluctant republican article was in last Saturday's paper and showed how he could be angered by fanatical propaganda in Britain akin to N. Korean levels of brain-washing.
   The Hewitt Bash dominated the media despite massacres in Gaza and the USA and there was a ludicrous presumption that all 'the nation' were enthralled by it.
   There were virtually no alternative viewpoints proffered, and the only dissent I saw came from singer Pauline Black of the band The Selecter, who voiced her antipathy in no uncertain terms.
   Not even Graham Smith of Republic was wheeled out as he usually is, to suggest it's all down to a one-man show!
   To me, the assumption this has anything to do with the history of my nation, Cymru, is an insult.
   The only relevance is to expose divisions in society, as I walked through Cardiff then Newport that day  and saw many people ( mostly quite young) whose only homes were doorways of closed-down shops not mansions or palaces, cast off by a callous system.
   In Newport one doorway consisted entirely of a blue tent and dog's bowl and many sheets of cardboard marked patches ; so many begged for small change.
   It was pertinent that one of the few republican events organised on the day of Hewitt's betrothal should be at Le Pub, a well-known Newport music venue and vegan/ veggie pub.
   This was organised by Patrick Jones, long-time Red Poet, to raise money for local food-banks alongside musicians against homelessness.
   Patrick had been there when Carlo ( Charles Windsor) opened Redhouse in Merthyr, once so important to that great republican Keir Hardie ( our then Labour Council had no sense of the irony!).
   We greeted Carlo with megaphone poems after the police told us ' No swearing, or we'll arrest you!'
   I got away with it by doing 'The Fracking Crown Estate!', but as soon as he saw Carlo, Patrick yelled out 'You fuckin cunt!' He got away with it.
   Day of the wedding I suffered dreadful food poisoning ( maybe a dodgy wrap in the Diff) and a speeding bus almost ran me down.......are there no lengths that Special Branch go to?
   It's revealing to quote Younge again, who explains that a recent poll said 46 % were 'indifferent' to the whole thing, while 29% were 'happy'; suggesting a great deal of the hype was media concocted.
   Patrick's 'Royal Bedding' event was a welcome alternative at a great venue.
   He opened the evening with his band the Quarks, comprising son Ethan on guitar and Dean Meyrick drums : heavy and aggressive music perfectly complementing Jones's forceful, rebellious verse.  
   His next cd should be excellent judging by this set.
   I followed next and nobody danced to my political and dialect poems, though I did a blast on the trusty mouth-harp and someone called out 'Pretty Vacant'.
   ( I couldn't help reflecting on the fact that the Pistols had won Young Businessmen of the Year awards, even as 'God Save the Queen' was so popular). 
   Most of all, I enjoyed reading a poem called 'Ballad of Mahmoud Sarsak' as I'd earlier attended a rally in Cardiff to demonstrate solidarity with  Palestine. The poem shows how an apartheid exists in Israel and I compare the footballer Mahmoud with Bobby Sands, both struggling for political status, both of whom went on hunger strike.
  Next up was singer-songwriter Selena In The Chapel, whose fine voice wove patterns over and around us and served a contrast to Rick Parfitt, once of 60 Foot Dolls and still a legend in the Port.
   Rick wowed the audience just as the Dolls had done in the 1990s.
   Final act was the amazing Rufus Mufasa, based in Ponty but originally from Ammanford, with a rapper buddy.
   What I liked about her music was it's refusal to be classified.....dub-rap-soul- r n b and more......and her voice , so full of emotion.
   These were songs / poems straight from the same streets I'd walked through that day.
   Younge dubbed that wedding ' a cross between Red Nose Day and the Eurovision Song Contest' .
   Patrick's republican alternative raised a fair amount for food-banks and the homeless of Newport, and was an event packed with the power of poetry and song.
   I was delighted to be part of it, even though I nearly had my skull smashed to smithereens afterwards on the pavement.
   As we left I stood next to a bouncer and we heard a resounding crash, frighteningly close! A large pot lay broken, its base like a thick, jagged missile.
   We both looked up at the stories above Le Pub. Darkness and no open windows or sign of life......pretty vacant, in fact.
   It had been a day of dichotomies : of Palestinian flags waving outside Nye Bevan's statue against Union Jack bunting on a few shops and pubs ; of sad and desperate homeless against the opulence and insistent Brutishness of Windsor ; of vacuous pomp against passionate poetry.
   

   ( This is a poem I wrote especially for that event........Diolch i Patrick a phawb eraill!) 


    
Markle’s  Wedding  Dress
 
In amongst the sparkle
And thousands
The diamonds and gloss
Of Meghan Markle’s wedding dress
Are hanging
The plastic shrouds
Of burnt cladding –
Each hole screaming out
For a person lost –
No matter how many layers
She wears to cover it up
Its black mourning
Glowers through –
It weighs her down
As she walks the aisle
A burden she cannot dismiss –
Not all the gold and silver
Can suffocate and smother
Those shapes, lettering
Of terror and distress.  

   

   Every day walking downhill to town I'm accosted by bewildered SatNav followers who can actually see the new mock-castle beyond a fence, but can't find a way in.
   'How do I get to the new Trago Mills?' 
   I'm tempted to misdirect every one of them, with 'Left, left , left and left again.....till you end up where you began!'
   In other words , keep heading leftwards till you're in welshsocialistrepublicananarchosyndicalist territory....the only way to react to a UKIP-owned megastore dominating Merthyr, just as Crawshay's Cyfarthfa did in the heyday of iron and exploitation.
   It's been over a decade coming and is probably the final knockout blow in terms of the survival of the town centre which - apart from market day - is devoid of life.
   The Redhouse cafe is regularly shut, so you can't get to stare at those Tin Tin cartoons of Labour politicians nobody's heard of.
   Only recently Burton's clothes shop closed down on the corner of John Street, which contains the last Bracchi, Viazzani's ; a shop which is part of Merthyr legend.
   'Burton's Corner' was the supposed meeting-place if you wanted a prostitute and, when I was teaching, a few cheeky pupils would say - 'Sir, I seen yew on Burton's Corner las night!'
   I never did see dubious women there, but it was the regular patch of one 'Billy Sticks', an emaciated seller of the South Wales Echo, with grubby mac and limbs like......well, 'sticks'.
   Grahame Davies - a fine writer who unfortunately works as a lackey for Carlo - tells of rescuing Sticks once from assailants and getting set upon himself for doing so.
   Sticks was there of an evening selling the Echo from a doorway and the Pink on Saturday , which I always bought after a Cardiff game.
   'Echo! Echo!' he'd echo. Or sometimes just 'Co!'
   Eventually his career ended when he went to court accused of masturbating in public, looking at himself in Burton's window as chapel-goers were passing.
   He got a 'conditional discharge'! You couldn't make it up!
   Actually, I might have more in common  with him than I thought, as Peter Finch referred to my 'political flash' in a recent review in 'Planet' of Prof Tony Curtis' Selected.
   Now I imagine myself as a political flasher complete with dirty mac revealing a red flag instead of a plonker!
   The characters, like the shops, have disappeared.
   On the bus home the old folks bemoan a centre they recall as bustling not so long ago.
   It all seems hopeless, yet the Portuguese manage to sustain two cafes, a shop and a pub along the stretch of High Street : custard tarts and espressos to get you buzzing.
   On the plus side, the caffi at Canolfan Soar will soon be reopening under the stewardship of the inimitable Jamie Bevan, returning from his Sully sojourn.
  I look forward to the 'coffi go iawn' and 'pice ar y maen' straight from the bake-stone. Everything will be totally Welsh, with coffee beans from the tropics of Bedlinog.
   I once wrote a haiku for the Canolfan and, amazingly, it's still hanging as you enter -
                  Nawr, mae'r Canolfan
                  yn tyfu fel y dderwen :
                  pobl yw'r mesen.
   It's good to see somewhere flourishing.
   As to the town centre, what can be done?
   I do have a wish-list, but know it's pure fantasy -
       * small bookshop focusing on local writers with a cafe for events
       * proper bakery where you can get fresh bread and scones etc ( think of those in small towns in Ireland)
     *  vegan/ veggie deli like the one in Pontardawe ( smaller town than Merthyr) with lots of tasty pies and pasties
       *   pop-up craft/art shop featuring local photographers , artists and craftspeople
       * craft and real ale shop with all the best Welsh beers and ciders....not to mention whisky
       * a tidy restaurant , not too fancy, but concentrating on tasty, nutritious fare : soups, salads and the like
       * tourist advice centre ( there used to be one), directing people to the many wonders of the area and selling the local walking and mini-bus tours which our imaginative Council will no doubt create.
       If all this sounds very Pontcanna, just remember that Canton has many of these features and I believe there are enough people in the borough who would support them and also we could attract far more tourists if there were thematic tours relating to our vital contributions such as boxing, literature, historians and the FWA parading with wooden guns.
   Festivals and one-off events aren't enough and the town will be duly ignored by all the Trago-seekers who snarl up the traffic every weekend.
   Kipper Towers looks like a travesty on the skyline, designed by a 5 year-old playing with his new Lego set.
   I really hope our town centre fights back. ' Bara a chaws!' proclaimed the protesters of 1831.......not just the basics, but so much more. 


Ewge shop
 
They built this ewge shop outside town,
it looks like a cardboard castle
made by a kid in an afternoon.
 
My mate tol me the owner’s racist
an they always support-a Kippers –
but if they offered me a chance….
 
We ewsed t make things yer,                     
people ave soon forgot –
clothes, toys, bulbs an washin-machines.
 
My dad worked down Oover’s,
woz totelee gutted when it closed down –
ee lost it, lost all purpose.
 
I get sent all over f jobs,
anythin t cover up the statistics -  
slave labour even in-a charitee shops.
 
My mam keeps askin agen an agen
‘Wha yew doin now, son?’
Maybe I’ll be gatekeeper in tha fortress,
 
stridin them turrets with keys in and,
watchin out f’r-a bard boyz –
or maybe I’ll join em.