“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

A rose in December,
when it snows in July,
as far as we know
the expected will die.

Common sense has infirmities
deformities, affinities
to pie in the sky;
as we try to get by.

Nothing happens too late
that isn’t taboo
a floating moon slips
above stone-built walls,
a story of end...

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Some decisions:
seemingly reasonable, rational,
seek to wipe out
sentimentality, romance
as if we lived by rules
more fools we if we do.

Time
leads me back to a field
in high summer
in Cheshire -
a piece of the rich south
here in the north - 
the roads are far enough away
today
to lead us to a silence:
provisional, yes
passing, of course,
but still silence
we shared a ...

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Splattered on a canvas

Or, scrawled on a wall,

Art

Is just

A husk of form

Without the artless agony

Of daily life:

The strangled scream

And the carving knife.

https://youtu.be/IzPQ_jA00bk?si=7BIHf1FtgOGt03JY

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https://www.baselessfabric.co.uk/is-it-hot-in-here-jason-hall-visits-a-crematorium/

1,2,3 I'm just waiting here, full of fear,
of what will be, will be.
I can't get around anymore 
the coffin's at the front, near the door.
Flames behind curtains,
at the end of the craic,
God knows I loved him
so that is that.
He was the one who spoke
reason, to me
we walked by the river
he yearne...

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Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought Percy Bysshe Shelley

Low slung August sun shadows stonework into
deeper shadow lands —
phantoms adrift on the wide Sargasso sea —
and so unruffled, these lawns,
and all this frumpery.

So much then has time
and its opposite
done for me.

It was along these lines that we walked, it was
beneath these swaying poplars we kisse...

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Now, only the vestiges remain:
Conduct a forensic examination,
Then scatter the remains:
See the fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail
We are condemned at the root.

A roof for his daughter,
Over a precipice-by-the-way,
His peculiar ways of thinking
Are alive today.

Some Russians worship icons,
In China there is smog,
Tom-Al...

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Say to the soul, sigh
so kind & honest he seems
to be when he greets others
courteously.
This abrogator of responsbility
this pretended fakir;
I cannot trust with my eyes’ intelligence
& I was stung in my heart, grievously.
He, dressed in pretended humility she
hoping she’ll prevaricate her way
into heaven.
She does not understand that if she
fails to expel the sycophants’
doctine...

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“Taliesin, don’t be sad if you’re alone
on Ynys Môn you have battled mightily,
despair will bring us no advantage
no woman sees what supports her.
Courage is invisible. Study The Mabinogion
God will not violate his promises.
We must suffer in Gwyddno’s weir
where our stand against the Saesneg invaders
will end in defeat! We must learn how to fail
better, being sad will not a...

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Lurking around corners — on groggy-doggy, laudanum-lit
gas lit nights, whispering death came to this age of the machine,
he has much drink taken, he’ll be dead soon.
Never mind.

See the tender white crosses-row-on-row
so-many windswept nights of swirling snow.
creaking branches catch the whiff of Lady Fortune’s
croaking of a pleasing freezing breeze,
and pleased, I am, immeasurably,
...

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  A persistent geography draws near a bloody tear
in the momentary blindness of a sunshine daydream;
of all that life could’ve been.
Instead we have the normal crucifixions
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains.
In my beginning is my end, my friend,
the starting point for music and poetry and art.
The gulags and the camps, the massacres, the genocide
stretch fro...

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-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes the savage-silent-dread
of memories-lost, storm-tossed
dust-motes float,
gossamer webs
glitter in the rain;
words thought, but never said,
misrule-misled,
in the very eye of the storm
memories replete
old-ghosts fled,
chapped, red-raw hands
from working this mid-winter land.

https://youtu.be/I3x01BYDmDY?si=hMSMBYtf9p6bHWAh

 

...

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When I were a boy, a nipper, a kid
wildflowers on a concrete waste
were always blindingly yellow, for me.
Flowers rooted in the cracks along the road
for me, the yellow-bloomed, only for me
whether I was hungry
or stuffed to the hilt, which was rarely,
a slash of yellow beneath the sun
was reason enough to have fun.

Later, we prisoners saw our lady Sunne
and we gazed in awe,
seein...

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