Through the mist and fog
of early morning
I see car headlights crawl 
into view
Everything looks so sad today
the whole world’s a cemetery 
The sun sheds a sad stream
of light
intermittently
I’m out with my friend, a dog,
name of Woody,
we no longer hear church bells
in England, it is verboten.
Nothing is familiar anymore:
no wilderness, no heart ache,
no winter fires stripped o...

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dedicated to the memory of my friend Chris and, equally, to the memory of his friend, Meg

Photo by Chris Anderson on Unsplash

A flick of her tail
showed more uncluttered love
than a lifetime’s worth of empty ‘Hellos’.
As Aeschylus implied so-long ago
there is no type or condition
of suffering or pain
which is not made worse
by re-calling the glory days:
times languorous, 
meande...

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(This poem is dedicated to the beautifully lyrical music of rapture and redemption which this young Californian produced prior to her tragic death by heroin in 1979.)

 

She’s the shadow of a shadow,
She’s the smile upon her face,
She’s tantalising, like music,
Released from time and space.

Her image is a mirror,
Of glance and glimpse and gleam
On St Agnes Eve pursuing
The remnan...

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There is a diffuse rainbow in my mind
I wish that I could read it line by line
Ineluctable images go flying by
Consoling dreams splattered across
the sky: I will not die today,
I'd rather watch migrating birds
Fly high, higher, in the night sky
Such natural images shepherd me
Into sleep where dreams can multiply
I listen to my sigh as diffuse rainbow
Words come to comfort me, I recal...

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This man pushes this other man in a wheelchair
down a dreary inner-city road, they’re talking,
always talking, talking of nothing, talking of everything,
what it takes and never gives back. The load.

With wheels of fire and halos running all amuck
these two desperados meander along past
the pound shops and the bookies and the booze 24/7ers
they know all these places well. Too well.

...

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Tabula Rasa: blank slate
will take the breath clean out of you,
when you think the implications through..
Tabula Rasa,: blank slate.

No memory, no desire,
Nothing to bend you in any direction,
No-one to sling you lower or higher
No future, no fire
No prescience required
No past, no regret
Nothing for sale and nowhere to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-need to speak and no-one to li...

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Riding a memory wave deep into the past
knowing so little,wishing that people would last;
unsubscribed from all doctrines of peculiar self,
I fight the mood swings, welcome the dark daze
of these November days.
I freeze at the mention of a murder in the park.
Loving the addicts who plague us without hope,
forgetting our beginnings, that this life’s on a slope
that takes us to nowh...

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The times of wonder have gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten faces
Which, like Munch's silent scream,
Degenerate into nightmaredream.
Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,
Falls into disuse,
And all is as it was before:
A flat, grey concrete floor
Krema I at Auschwitz
Eminently productive
340 corpses could be bu...

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“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” Pablo Neruda.

Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

One fine evening when I was sixteen
stuck in some rowdy pub with dazzling chandeliers,
we walked out, carelessly, promenaded by the river.
we move  under beech trees, a passing shower,
everything smells so good, so fragrant,
when you are young, the air is so sweet.
you close your eyelids and...

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the blue is missing from the sky today
the trees have no leaves
outside it is very cold
the wind is cruel.

there is a person
in front of me
i don't know who it is.

i remember playing out
with my sisters
with a skipping rope.

it is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morning,
that is why I stretch and yawn.

that lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
'Wh...

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This poem was witten by my best friend, Chris Proudfoot, who I had the pleasure of knowing from 1962 (when we began grammar school together) until Chris's suicide in 2022. 

a hot, still July afternoon,
silence unbroken

through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass, 

heavy with anticipation of something not quite def...

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He owns nothing but he gives us gifts
He cannot speak but he says it all
He doesn’t live long but he loves life
He doesn’t think but he knows it all.

 

https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q?si=53q61GSMTOyJeTfm

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a sliver of a moon highlighting
a stone house by a river
full of young people, rushing
hither and thither, a cascade
of sound, untramelled energy,
a highlight of laughter, a blaze of eyes,
no disguise
in so many intelligent discriminations:
of face, of education, of class, of race
we knew it couldn’t last:
some retreated for forty years or more
but I always knew I’d return
in ...

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The priestly fathers love to laugh at Quasimodo
A dirty-broken gypsy boy, who climbed like a monkey.
Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, our joys & desires.*
Priests, bejewelled with gold crucifix, lusted after young Esmeralda
Her wild gypsy eyes flashed and she kicked and she tore and she screamed.
To save Esmeralda, magically, Quasimodo lift...

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Missing the wildness of my younger self
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, for the muse to catch up with me,
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode
So that I catch myself thinking this
Is all an act to compensate for the time
Brian climbed that tree before disappearing
To Japan, for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true.
A cherry blossom flash of inspiration
To can...

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Liberal elites don’t have a clue about the white working class.” The Washington Post

White privilige
what a joke
we occupy space
vicariously
some days we hang on
by our finger tips

Scared to look down 
or up or to the side
we hide from ourselves

Some days we hover
on a magic carpet
of hope 
that things will finally get better.

That our Rita will be offered a council flat
...

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Lurking in the shadows — on a groggy
gas lit night. He, who followed so many
to their deaths, in this age of the machine,
sits alone, bereft of sight.

In his mind's eye he sees the tender white crosses, -row-on-row,
glow deathly white on a whirlwind night of swirling snow,
he hears the creaking branches, catches a whiff from below,
of lying Lady Fortune a-floating on the breeze,
...

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Ye gods! circumstances compel me speak
Ye gods! using children as target practice;
From the first of the world
Down to our own time
Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the innocent dead.
For soldiers silenced, banned,
expelled, made as if dead.
Life continues for some but the crops in Galilee
Are no longer joyous.
goats and sheep forgot, humans will not
Some...

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The ease and simple grace
Of this man who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied.
His echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still sings in my heart
We’re never alone,
Never apart.
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
These speakers of a hidden art,
sing and recreate
moments that survive
when we were all alive.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And it’s...

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The land was sodden; even during the short breaks in the rain, drips cascaded from the trees, driven down by the briefest of breezes. The sky was bruised black and blue. On this deep set All Hallows Eve in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-seven Miss Abigail Prince hurried through the woods, lifting her skirts to avoid the worst of the mud, she’d finished her work in the big hou...

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moon sad, as only the moon can be,
cast silver shadows, a spectral plea,
a part of my tapestry of daily grind,
dreams weave deep in mind:
gather close, come, intertwine,

caught in glimpses, unaligned.
eyes fix firm on a stranger’s gaze,
a silent dance in an intricate maze;
lips take shape, sound mute, spirit sings,
heart takes root.
in glowing fires in daring eyes,
her hair cascad...

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Calculus creepy croaks a loaf,
gamble with diligence, excuse with repose
sunday afternoon-summer in jeans, bobby dylan, the kinks

and my pal bought-sold this three-wheeler,
b...

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A river runs through me -
the river of life -
with its twists and its turns,
its banks out of sight.
(early morning mist
scatters dregs of the night -
O! the unbidden tears!)

Flotsam and jetsam
of years pass me by
i swirl in a whirlpool
float in the sky.
(the azure blue heat-haze sky
of childhood all gone by)

Down in the depths,
murky and drear,
i listen to my heartbeats
ta...

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First light: a new beginning
rising at the crack of dawn
feel the air against my skin
walk, with the aid of a stick,
listen to the dawn chorus.

Thrillingly,  it’s already late September
over a year since the funerals started
on St Patrick’s Day,
when madness brushed with death.

Now, I’m thinking that when I return
home with Charlie I’ll read
words I can never forget:
“The world i...

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You are my moment, as you read 
your eyes are full of tact, unembarrassed, laughing,
my dream is just of continuing.

We cannot add up or divide words, as we can numbers,
yet, words are equally intractable
friends & family die in the blinking of an eye
you cannot eat your words.

Nor can we précis longing, hiraeth,
homesickness tinged with grief and sadness,
but we certainly can str...

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In whispers soft, shadows creep,
Dolorous days, the depths of sleep,
Mythic tales of derring-do
Seize the day, no foreboding thrall,
For here am I, standing tall.

Carpe Diem is all we know
In fading light or flurried snow
If I can  just hold on, hold on tight,
Will life's journey lend me light?

I dance where sunbeams gleam,
Sparkle like dust motes in my dream,
Bounce off the twi...

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The sadness of sundays
persists
even amidst
the various
reds, yellows, browns and golds
of stormy autumn
and as I walk
I have in mind
the fragility of a veined
porcelain
hand.

So, who am I to resist
this child's
every imperative?

https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q?si=crbOmLQHYdHZjsY1

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The devils' in the detail,
these flashes in my head,
i'm always feelin' poorly
said the livin' to the dead;
the skull beneath the skin,
my friend, has fled.
His never-ending searching,
his suicide at dawn.
Who  wins the faded glory
of the decency we mourn?
Who hears the call of morning,
jazz rhythms in the night,.
Berlin before the storm
troopers roll backwards
into this ver...

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a blank piece of paper,
blows in the wind,
skids over people
ducks under bridges
this heavenly graffiti;
passes a litmus test
of meaninglessness, yet:
illuminates manuscripts,
tracks lovers' letters
random epistolary acts,
despatches from the front
in black-lined envelopes,
disquisitions on semiotics
written enticingly
in small handwriting
fabulous confabulations
stutterin...

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“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”
[The Autumnal]
― John Donne,

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Moments of the past
do not last:
kicking leaves
in stormy-autumn
tumbling heaps, red, gold and brown
deep-set colours all around
echoing the silent dread
of the silent tread
of the day of the dead.

A memory-lost, a memory-fo...

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I want to smell the tender roses,
Before their petals droop and fall,
In that one garden, in St Petersburg,
The most beautiful city in holy Russia,
In the whole world this city stands out.
...

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“He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.” James Joyce, ‘Dubliners.’

I make the sign of the cross, today,
the last Saturday in August 1999,
for Jack who d...

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Slow breath in
hold   then breath out
pause for a wee while 
then in that brevity
I kick sand
on Sandymount Strand.

Now, I am out and about
waiting while Daedalus fashions a cow,
so she could mate with the bull,
pregnant, she bore the Minotaur
fruitlessly.

Heavy clouds sweep in
off the Irish sea
to blow these dreams away.

It's 1943
and Ireland is neutral,
the Nazi am...

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DELPHINIUM BLUES

Blue like the sea
Like the sky
Like your eyes
Like me. 
Muddy waters
Lead belly
Blues
Getcha every time
12 bar blues
 That 'ol gone fishin'
 line.

https://youtu.be/3VEpQo2w2tw?si=YKvp_4_OVZfyUB9S

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I do not drink   

But I am living under this mountain

That might crush the life out of me

Any time, any day

So, I drink anyway.

 
 Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stuttered out

"'Non Serviam! I will not serve!'”

And that is enough, and more than enough, for me

To condemn all the big words spluttered by politicians. 

 
I will not serve that in which I no longer bel...

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At the concert in the Apple Market,
When you were still David Jones,
Your south London twang,
Accompanied the many undulations
Of time.

Your wild androgyny
Mirrored the mirror
Of myself

David Bowie, name bought off the shelf,
Skimmed the water
Of childhood,
Like a dog shakes off rain,
You accelerated — changeling

You lit up, spot-lighted,
An iridescence of sound
Ziggy!
Yo...

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We take giant steps
When we let ourselves go:
Step into love
Step into eternity.
Nano steps will hardly do
Outside where full blown life
Blows me away from restrictions,
Predictions. Derelictions. Do not smile at those trapped
By circumstance, by failed romance.
Instead take a walk while spring flowers hibernate.
Too many of us stay inside, hide ourselves away,
We do not live the lo...

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Generation 27
Lorca’s blood wedding
or so the whisper is,
packed full of vaginas bleeding
into lemon-tree- soil,
a foil for the mere conjugations
of eternity. 

The toil, toil, toil
tilling the soil, soil, soil
of life in wgat was Islamic     Andalus.

Priests chant the rosary
like it was El Maleh Rachamim,
or the Mourner’s Kaddish
(which it probably was, if the priest
was a Co...

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He nailed his voice
to the heart of a mast. Sailed the seven seas.
Learnt to speak up for himself.
Spent time in jail in South Africa
For defending his black friends
From the beatings of the Boer.
The winds took him hither and thither 
In wartime, he never felt complacent.  Rest assured.
Never self-indulgent. A convinced
and sentimental socialist he shared an in-pouring of grief at childr...

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 — I’m not from around here — 

In my imaginary cottage in the hills
I am immune to the world’s ills,
Or so I like to think.
On evenings of freezing fog,
I throw another log on the fire
Watch closely as the flames reach higher and higher,
Take another sip of whiskey,
Pat the back of my young dog,
Who can feel the spirits in the breeze,
Pick my book up from the stone floor,
Read Mil...

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Tràighean: the Scots Gaelic word for ‘beaches’ 

The reputation of the beach
is gaelic
it has many tongues to tell
from the time of the women
now it is a hostage to steel and silicon
the flotsam and jetsam
of this barbaric age

we cannot throw our souls away
we will be no richer
if we make a stand
at this end of the world
listening to the broad Atlantic’s
slow, withdrawing roar

...

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" Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning

I hear the mountains spring back to the moors.
strangers look up and down the brown-blue mountains
seeking summits, I guess
and it is always the weaver of water who welcomes us
into the new H2O, the fish screech to taste sharpness,
& swim in order of merit as we water tears at our home comin...

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That time has arrived, when, in England
To thrive n stay alive, 
We must learn how not to offend
The pointless book ends of the woke,
Those who can not take a joke
Without choking on the very cheek of it.
Rhetoric will be banned, 
As will the rising intonation in conversation
Suggesting a statement
May well be a question? 
No originality of thought allowed.
No challenging of the convent...

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The wind blows ever sharper,
as the temperature drops,
– I am recalled
to a dialogue with the dead.
My grandfather, Jack Prince, 
could no longer gather
the brightest of life’s strands together
he'd lost too much in war.
Nothing can compensate these young men,
millions dead before their time,
their bravery and their genes lost
to all further generations.
We slink again into ordinar...

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If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
I’d roll them up into the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes
I’d pat him and stroke him and tell him unashamedly how
This friendship across species was the best that man could get.
He’d tell me I was some kind of Buddhist — he’s cantankerous and pithy 
that way. So rock me like a good old boy, befriend me like the wind,...

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Seeds — for Connie

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Seeds we plant, unknowingly,
in the flat lands of the past,
bloom in least expected places:
in shadow, rain and clay; unintended,
they disperse, gather to a greatness,
perambulate on windy days, follow
custom, mulch. Humans harvest,
load, deliver, sell, eat. Cows chew the cud,
create protein, stare, moo amicably, 
in blesse...

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