Stories My Dad Tells Me

1

I like to tell my dad’s stories.
They’re much more amusing than mine,
given that he sailed in
the 1970s,
a Naval engineer.

He served with Prince Andrew.
Who was as thick as Corgi dung
to a point where you couldn’t
hold a conversation.
The instructor would threaten
to kick his head in
if he didn’t pay attention
and learn.

One night in the bar
a drunken sailor
walked up to the Prince and slurred:
‘ow you pull so many birds?!
An officer grabbed the man
and threw him out wholly,
like a wooden boy.

More ominously,
when in port, locals
would push their girls
up to the front of crowds,
hoping to catch the Prince’s eye
and hide it in a magpie nest.

Where they failed, of course,
a coy New York financier
succeeded more than once...
those Central Park magpies
more cunning than our own.

2

Then there’s the tale of
the sailor’s heart,
broken via radio
when his fiancée ended their
engagement, suddenly.
Stuck at sea,
he snapped and took an axe
to any radios he saw,
and had to be locked in the Mess.
Quite a nice chap
said my dad,
you just couldn’t let him
within sight of a radio.

Considering our stations then
were DJ’d by a league of men
who toyed with orphan girls in cars,
you can, I reckon, sympathise.

3

Dad saw the Middle East,
and met a Belgian sailor who
had lost his own fiancée in
much darker circumstance.
She disappeared from their hotel
and wasn’t seen again.
I sometimes think of her,
kept as one of several brides
to a wealthy sheikh,
drinking grape juice from goblets
as peacocks roam the yard,
and handsome guards fan her.

A naive fantasy, perhaps,
but sometimes fantasy
is all that offers us mercy.

4

Dad’s other Naval story tells
of nothing more complex
than his own equilibrium.
He found a sailor’s corpse,
not long after the man had been dared
to drink a pint of whiskey in one go.
Dad reported it simply
and tidied up as best he could.

5

Another Middle East romance
sees him in a hotel room
above a busy street.
It’s dense with Muslim anchorites
flogging themselves for their prophet.

I picture a parade of them
between stalls and awnings.
Their backs bloodied as they
traverse the narrow thoroughfare.
Their voices rote
in bellowed prayer.

6

Discussing with my dad today
his life before
he met my mum,
I’d like to think enlightenment
was possibly an outcome of
his manifold experience,
at sea.

Sadly, that isn’t so, and he
instead of wisdom rants
about White Genocide.
Congratulating storms of mosques
and calling murderers heroes.
He speaks as ignorantly as
a yokel whose entire life
has never crossed a county line.

When you’re 65
he says,
England’ll be Muslim.
The desert flower’s outbreeding
our whitened English rose,
he claims.
And then we’ll have a civil war
to fully drive ‘em out.

Muslims aren’t his only peeve.
He sneers at a couple on television
who’ve cared for their autistic son
from child and through adulthood.
Only ‘til they drop dead,
then he’s our burden.

The teaching trade attracts homos.
Pre-war Berlin was rife with gays
‘til Hitler came and cleaned it up.

7

My dad is not a wicked man.
He raised his kids and tried his best
within his own limits.
Like many of his age and sex
he doesn’t share emotions well.
Eminently practical,
he gives love by providing room and board.
Of all the stories my dad’s told
I’d like to end with none of them,
but rather one of mine, of him,
and how he once said quietly
that he struggled to care for himself, mentally,
and so he couldn’t give counsel.
We were talking on the stairs.
I remember his head being bent.

Perhaps the only lesson is
that finally we’re just ourselves,
regardless what we’ve seen, and know.