The Tiger

'Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse.' from 'The Blackboard Jungle.

Do you ever get that feeling that

You’re flying, or you’re dying, and

You’re watching, like it happened once before?

When your mind is rather hazy, or disturbed

And much too lazy to remember where

You saw that scene you saw?

 

I just get this one returning, like

A ghost that's finished haunting

Other folk, but who has settled now on me.

But I know that I remember that this

Ghost of mid-December was a Terry James

I knew when I was three.

 

He would start his Triumph Tiger while

Enraptured by the window I

Would watch him in his leathers and his jeans,

Then he’d stroke his tank and wave me, for he

Always called me Davey; 'little Davey'

He would say, for I was three.

 

And the smell of oily jerkins

Leather jackets, dirty denims would

Pervade him ‘til he smelt just like his bike,

Though that throaty Triumph Tiger was much

More than just a bike, it used to roar

When stroked by anyone it liked.

 

I can see the chrome and trimming, and

The flash of all the women who

Would cling with streaming hair behind my friend,

‘Til the day my mother mentioned to my

Father, (who was pensioned), that she

Always knew he’d meet a wicked end.

 

Then at dusk they brought the Tiger, smashed

And torn, without its rider

To the house that Terry James would see no more,

And the years that followed laid it, let it rust

And quite dismayed it, though I’d jump the fence

To ask it what it saw.

 

But it answered in its silence that

The end had been so violent in

The sudden shock that tore its metal heart,

That its roar was gone forever, and the

End of a believer made it feel like a

Deceiver from the start.

 

Now these visions fairly haunt me of

The lad who, not quite twenty, rode

His bike right off his last full-printed page,

For these nineteen years have left me with

His picture, nearing twenty and I

Can't believe he’s forty years of age.

 

When I’m bordering on sixty, then

I know that he’ll be with me but

He’ll still be dressed in leathers and in jeans;

Then he’ll stroke his tank and wave me, and

He’ll call me ‘Poor old Davey...’

Can’t you see - I must know what this vision means!

 

David Lewis Paget