THE WORD

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Microphone at the end of the road

It’s a long road we travel, sometimes bitumen, sometimes gravel. There is a song of the highway that gets us through, we say we can’t sing but we can always hum a tune.

Some of us walk a mile or two on our own and some of us walk in company on the road to home. The Kitchen, the Gallery, the Inn are welcome and warm, somewhere to shelter from the storm, somewhere to celebrate the day that we were born. Here’s to the way we travel, here’s to the road we are on, see you at the microphone humming a word or a song.

Well, there’s another month of Open Microphone action being served up just down the end of your road. So won’t you make it to a feast of food, poem and song at NgAna’s Gallery in Collingwood; to the sizzling Dangerous Microphone at the Dangerous Kitchen in Takaka and to the monthly gathering of live poets and musicians at the Mussel Inn in Onekaka. It’s a long road we travel, love to see you on it sometime.

Check out the ALONG THE ROAD…page for  Monday night sing-a-longs,  Mussel Inn programme and Pete Flynn Project at Molly B’s.

Peace
Mark Raffills
Golden Bay Live Poets Society

 

 

 

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ON THE ROAD

for Jack L. Kerouac

there were no stars winking this day
above the hot stone altar
hidden away in Lowell

for the afternoon sun was bright
and burned the grass brown,
just like it had withered time

and here time was crushed
and crumpled by the ideal,
hammered by the weight of expectation

the road was an outlaw,
a hundred miles of freedom
could not out run this friendship

some say he found redemption,
others that he stumbled into hell,
ruin, carved deep

but still, we left a note in the sun,
some words of thanks for the long road,
a tear, for what was not found there.

Mark Raffills
(on visiting the grave of Jack Kerauoc, Lowell, Massachusetts)

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