Bigg Market 1969 Poem by peter rodenby

Frost on cobbles
Fresh from college
GSE English literature
Never finished that picture
On the way to the Monkey Bar
With Bill
Met his friend
Whose name I can't remember
Fresh from Jesmond
Looking like death warmed up
Drugs in his hand
From another dead friend.
White as a ghost and sorrowful
But he had emptied the flat
Before the fuzz came
"So that was ok wasn't it? "
But not so nice moving the body around
After finding him dead on the floor
On such a frosty unfortunate night.
Bigg Market cold and bleak in harsh light.
Me
Breathless from a break up with a girl not a mate
I should have let her go
But That was not my fate
Frowns of fortune on my face
Bill Johnson where are you now in space?
When you said
"You don't need the drugs mate,
You're far out any way"
I took it as a compliment almost a farewell sally
And he had seen Death Valley.

A friendship gone too soon.
Bob Dixon long dead from booze
What a waste of life and talent.
And tragic David and Bruno killed in a car crash
That tore the front wheels of a bus
And it could have been me no fuss
But I chose to hitch hike instead
It was almost like the newspapers had been read
The boys in Aviemore beside the river
Who shared my tent?
And took me with them to Edinburgh
They were people to remember
And suddenly I see them clearly.
They were all part of my life
But my parents did not know of them or disapproved
Of the ones they knew.
They did not know me.

Times I see them clearly now
All these years later
Who really knows anyone?
Those we speak with those we come into contact with sometimes ever so briefly
Shadows on a dark curtain of life
That flaps and quivers when a draft blows it around
There is no depth to the thin screen
And who knows what survives behind.
Its so simple to sit quietly waiting and dream of nothing.