Holidaying with Dad during
his Divorce
His car is a nervous
breakdown, scattering chrome
upon the motorway. In the
rain, he gasps through
panic attacks in medieval
towers. The falconry display
goes on regardless, and
eejits in velour, have a crack
at each other with plywood
lances. I’m in a fugue state,
headphones glued, as mum
calls to accuse him of kidnapping.
Come for a drink, he says. Retreat to the Travelodge,
dry my one pair of flares
in the mysterious trouser press.
He presses into my hands
some Günter Grass, and Sylvia Plath-
time-capsule messages in a
language we don’t share.
He’s stopped crying now
thank God. The evening heaves
with the bellows of cows
taken from their calves.
Typewriters
Black Olivetti typewriters drum to a deadline,
sounding like rain,
Bakelite phones set to ring, welcoming
the bloodthirsty day.
At his father’s house, the interview simmered
like a boiling sea.
having said goodbye to the real life, Jesus,
and the Word made flesh.
He substituted Pitman’s Shorthand, to shore-up
the fruitless language,
flying out in a sports car, down country lanes
to news-in-the-making,
films to review in darkened cinemas. A brew
of ravishment and shame.
A lover’s song
The house was silent, except
for her breathing. He ached
to be her lover. Money caked
on his hands, like bread dough.
The unruffled lake settled
where sky and waters meet.
Midges dancing in mid-air,
a beatitude to their delirium.
He read the news for omens,
hung a sign over his door:
Do not disturb. A
third sex
yearning for a lover’s song,
modern metaphors of sexology?
He looked at the stillness
of his wife breathing in and out,
he put the yearning inside himself.
Cigarette smoke drifted across
the room. He squinted through
the fog, to patterns of rain bathing
the pane, insignias of their marriage.
Uncle Jim
My father was Vladimer, Uncle Jim was Estragon,
a pair of autodidacts. Estragon’s horse, foraging
in the Hawthorn, tilting the wagon across the path.
His gait was unsteady, as if he was on board a ship,
handing disgusting sherbets, drawn from the soiled
gusset of his trousers, like a skirt around his loins.
Vladimir worked on his contraptions, a biscuit tin,
bits of string and glue to make mandolins. A dying
fall of Lets do it Again, lilting around the
garden
Estragon was a rag and bone man. He wears a white
silk scarf and carried me to school. A prince of tin
baths,
the echo of mandolins, while he clucked the horse.
John Whitehouse is a retired academic, living in London. He suffers from aphasia after a major stroke, which affects him with comprehension. His work has been in: Interpreters’ House, Acumen, Frogmore Papers, Stand, French Literary Review, Cannons Mouth, London Grip, and various Poetry anthologies, including Coal, commemorating the Miner’s Strike. His poetry was commended twice in the Bridport Prize, and short listed for the Templar Prize. John received an Arts Council Grant which led to a first collection of Poetry, A Distant Englishness published by Clayhanger Press in 2024. The second collection After a Short Illness is to be published by Broken Sleep in 2026.
