Mike Jenkins is a poet, short story writer, editor and literary activist with Wales' republican Red Poets Society. Although born in Aberystwyth, Jenkins has made the dialect of his current home, Merthyr Tydfil, very much his own. His books include Invisible Times, This House, My Ghetto and Graffiti Narratives. Split We ad it all sorted, even-a name NEW AGE RIOT. We ad exerise books full o' lyrics, good stuff an all with loadsa language. I woz-a bassist though I adn learnt yet, Ash woz on lead an ee could play a bit. We had a drummer, but no drum kit. We ad all-a best influences from Nirvana t' the Manics. Ash ud even designed ower first album cover, with the devil umpin a sheep. We wuz gunna be so sick we'd make-a Sex Pistols seem like-a Bee Gees, we'd expose owerselfs on primetime TV. We woz so close the boyz called us 'bum chums' - I think tha got to im. An when ee tol me ee wuz seein Mandy Goth I larfed, thought ee wuz piss-takin. Ee slapped me real ard, broken nose, black eye, the lot. We split before we could start, least I did anyway, totelee mashed up my face like the Oo with theyr guitars. The end o' my rock career, though ee'd problee end up in Oasis. The Cale Variations Between Mynydd Du and y pwll glo, on the edge of limestone escarpments and waterfalls of consonants; between your father and mother and the tongues of underground rivers. A Sons And Lovers upbringing : leather belt meant to harden, though not the drunken targetting. Music your destination : the strict time of lessons and practising,the chapel organ where you found early fame. In your teens, another organ graced the chapel,deflowering the minister's virgin daughter, the blasphemy of spilt blood as Christ impassively looked on. Viola your chosen one : velvet-petalled flower, not winding pansy stems of the ubiquitous violin, nor the fiery geranium of the cello's range. You took her, Viola and made her your own. Took her flying over oceans, while the piano's chords and arpeggios were river, lake and shore always tugging you home. Away from mountain, pit and cave of chapel walls with their Biblical print, you learnt to unlearn, turned instruments inside out, taught the music of silence and revolution of scores which resembled hieroglyph. You had to go far to return : Cordoba, Casablanca and Amsterdam, the envoy with nobody listening, till back to Swansea eventually with the sea and Dylan looming, booming intonations. You dammed the river when you elbow-punched the piano keys, it was a burial of all those stuffed suits, trussed and ready for carving. Shock was the treatment you gave as Copland flirted, but you were a letter away from Cage with his joke on the blank surfaces of art. The Big Apple a windfall you picked up, ran away with, ate with gusto. Except it was drawn in plastic by Warhol, in a factory with open doors to courtesans of the night-street after beat. Blood-brother with Reed of knife-sharp needle-point, you rose with scrapers to fall down the shaft. It took years for you to cover the tracks, still engrained tributaries of coal on the hands. Years when you became a sailor of the grand lifting a lid to catch the wind; a poet of the riverbank close-watching debris tangle with bright, resilient plants; a follower of ghosts along galleries of history; a balladeer in village pub calling lost friends from dark; a lone accompanist to films shown in a derelict theatre ; a swimmer with a lamp in the streams which disappear. You have returned from exile without coming back. The chapel organ's an avalanche of collapsing roofs, the piano-strings echo as we search for you in those uncharted caverns. (With thanks and acknowledgment to John Cale's autobiography 'What's Welsh For Zen' and, above all else, his songs, poems and music from the Velvet Underground to today, some of whose titles I've referred to in this poem.)