Charlie and I walked our post-cancer walks
Down this narrow stretch of green in the city
For a full decade. We aged together
But not like malt, we blended into each other,
Man and Dog. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
And his life was shorter than mine. That afflicted me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that.  He connected me to the
Pack, little knowing...

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The sting of the wind
On this cold black night
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work.
Down in the mine
On early shift.
This  connection, now, is
Deep in my blood
Deep in what I mean
When I say words
In tones that rhyme.

Words that would’ve
Carried meaning in those
Hungry days
When this same old
Mottled sky’d
Pleased the eye of
Thos...

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Wherever I go
In this god-forsaken  country,
I hear a call
To break the silence
To break free from the robbers
To break free from the liars
To bring an earthquake
To bring a transformation.
Again in the darkness
Of manipulation,
Main-stream-media
Spews us into lines
Penned by the liberal elite
A nation at its feet.
Light your torch
Lift the whole mountain
On the palm of yo...

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The devil’s in the detail,
Your cousin’s in the club,
She’s been boozing since yesterday - 
Aye, there’s the rub.

Look in the mirror
Inspect the back of your mind
Microscopically construct another time:
an armed robbery —
you dirty, rotten swine.
sip whiskey, look around, frown.

what could it be?
this city of the bee?
Let’s go have ourselves a look-see.

He lost his...

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Sackcloth on our backs,
ashes in our mouths,
wailing heard from north and south

Morning maniac music
shakes me awake
those who once brought hope
now mired in hate.

Over the mountains,
black clouds scud
a perverted vivacity
has entered the blood.

Refugees waiting,
knocking at your door,
seeking sanctuary
on a distant shore.

Christendom has fallen
collapsed from within,
dee...

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Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers. Ray Bradbury

 

Treasure a desert orchid
Do not classify the sky:
It is the time for bees.
Anybody can name a bee
But can we know it?
Fascists swim in rain or snow
To let us know they glorify the body. 
Pools are deep but silt can do its work.
Transforming a do ...

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 OTTO’S LAMENT

 

FBI files on Sylvia Plath’s father shed new light on poet | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian

 

O! daughter dear, on this mid-western afternoon,
When I can see all the way to Sacramento, I cry
For you, Ariel-blue, in all your golden-girlhood,
Too lovely for a life of pettiness and strife 
You caught a boat to England, never returned.
No Nazi goblin me, an e...

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“`He was courteous but very silent. He was good with children. His eyesight may have been impaired, but he had an ear open to the world.” This is how Alex Leon recalls James Joyce, who, between 1928 and 1939 was an almost daily visitor to his family’s flat on the rue Casimir-Perier in Paris. Joyce came to consult with Alex’s father, Paul Leon…” ‘The Irish Times’, Thu, Oct 29, 1998

 

...

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Salvador Dali ‘Little Ashes’

Turning statements into questions is annoying?
So, actually, murdering people is, like, wrong, yeah?
I think therefore she might be?
God can prevent evil but chooses not to?
God cannot prevent evil?
God is dead?
The repugnant are desirable?
There are two genders?                         The two gentlemen of Verona?
Beethoven silences YouTube?
Women adapt to...

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With delphinium-blue skies and cheeky
Crocuses splashing purple and dazzling
Daffs nodding agreement, in this mild April
Zephyr of a breeze – then folk do long to go on pilgrimage. 
Our pilgrimages tend to interiority:
We still seek relics of a past that cannot last.
I imagine that if a poet, who I have in mind,
Were given one more day on this  mortal sod
This would be the kind of...

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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Those rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
Rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
Blossom and harvest, wise ones, Witan’s children.
From the lips of children we learn that clinging
To life is not enough.

Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
The Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
Amongst the ruins...

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“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Moments of the past do not last
kicked into the long grass
of a warm, early-summer’s day.

Gold petals
gleam
for God’s sake!

Stormy-autumn prefigures
flurries of snow
eaten by body heat;
silky snow frosting
tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
that crisp-crackl...

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When sadnesses besiege you:
at the dying of the light,
starlight illuminates
the end of night.
Do you tingle in the frosted air of second sight?

Starlight mirrors the water in the eyes
humankind freed from its long disguise.
The spin and whirl of hemlock
help witch and Wicca sway
underneath the greensward, all day.

All that was dark
summoned by the light
the Sigil of Baphomet shine...

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Again, we set sail for Byzantium
Defaced by the Turks
Who have spent 500 years wiping out
Every trace of our 1500 year occupancy here
In Constantinople...
Our voyage will be a long one
Full of adventure, full of discovery.
Covering much time and space
Yeats set out but never arrived
His spirits flagged:
But St Sophia waits!
Surrounded as it is by minarets
This cathedral for all the Ort...

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The King of the moon came looking for us
With blood dripping from his mouth
And a wide toothy smile, as wide as the Bosphorus,
Extermination was on his mind.
Rome had become more lax, more fey, more gay
Romans escaped the hard work of fighting by night, by day.
Romans imported mercenaries, began to turn the other cheek..
In the Second Messenian War of Ancient Man 
The G...

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Nothing can stay with me,
Nothing I love or hate 
No dark shadow can make me afraid
No divine love saves me from the grave.

Through the roar of the waves tall grasses sink
Into evolution's dismal course,
Abducted by charm our younger selves
Notice the brilliance of water
On a nondescript day.
Now years look like moments
As I whistle my way into the field laughing. 

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"...her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage..." James Joyce, Ulysses 

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

Missy Moon came to an old Cheshire mere
in all her pretty finery.
Some days this boy cannot stop looking
and looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder surrounds us on this ...

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Stories of love, fairy tales
of the scuttered heart,
keep our hearts beating,
so er wont fall apart.

Heart broken
hanging by a thread
a different story if
you’re dead.

Rainfall day
thunder in the corner,
i ought to mourn her
visit me in sleep,
never let me go,
haunt me in hail, rain, snow.

Fangs of regret
pull at my neck
memories so sharp
break my heart
love sets us to dr...

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”At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.” Lorca

Lorca’s blood wedding
menstrual bleeding 
Into lemon-tree-soil
nothing more than the toil, toil, toil
of peasant life in Al-Andalus.

Priests chant their rosary
like it was El Maleh Rachamim
or the Mourner’s Kaddish
(which it probably was, if the priest
was a Jew, a Converso, who  changed his religion
to save his life ...

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Near is very far
Space, time,
Dark star.

Black hole
Wandering soul.

Still
there’s a vastness that appals
chemotherapy,
White walls.

Scurrying through
the corridors
of the Christie, this Monday morning
early,
meeting Emile,
yes, it has spread,
he fears he’ll soon be dead.
His Caribbean lilt
still
echoes in my head.

We smile and laugh and joke with the nurses
as they try ...

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We have no way of dealing with the sea,
Drinking water is fine by me.
but sea grasses do not fool me
Into visiting seabeds.  
Human hands stain the sea with detritus
There is now no water music in the secret garden
Of the sea,
Moisturize before the wastewater grips you.

Water is repetitive, water is the doyen of tides,
menstrual cycles, sister moon's loony tunes. 
When water drips off ...

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Rain's a risky business,
past priests issued receipts
for the dry mantlepiece.
I knew from the very beginning
that this was home: four walls, concrete
no mountain ranges
the rain just fell and fell.

Your story is teary,
liquid eyes deceive the rain.
Springs are sources of water,
rain on display, alluring
the sound of fast asleep
sprays a bondage of roses for you.
Time passes and not...

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“The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

 

The extenuation of time into rhyme
Devil’s in the detail, in time
A confusion of contusion, a microbial illusion,
Stretches out meaning so that
Ti...

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Between 1915-1922 more than 3.5 million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians were murdered by the Turks so that now 99.8% of the population of Turkey are Muslim. This marked the 'irrecoverable' death of the Byzantine heritage mentioned in the poem 

 

Her love didn’t come from nowhere.  
Her father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas
A Byzantine, by birth, like me. 
Her mother, an An...

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Photo by Charles Tyler on Unsplash

We walk a steep and slippery way, 
Mixing senses in synaesthesia’s way,
It seems as if I am a chorus in a play 
We feel by measures, hidden from the eye;

Time is borrowed, blue days wasted, time slips by,
I walk along a steep and scattered way. 
Winter seeps me into sleep, now my soul flies, 
To compose this gist of an art, as time goes by,
...

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Whether on Ynys Môn or in the Bollin valley
I am at home with my friend of sixty years..
There have been gaps, it's true, when you
And I fell out of orbit, But we always knew
We would reconnect. Now, as two old duffers,
Rapidly running out of puff, we take delight
In the sights and sounds we share or even
A companionable, silent staring into air.
We are not at all the same in taste or beli...

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Melancholy’s lack of zest
written all over his palimpsest:
to die at twenty-five to some
will hardly seem to have been alive.
but  for Johnny Keats and the footloose Cavaliers
poetry, music, art, tears were eternal.
They eschewed self-pity, untold fears.

They tried their best to stay alive
In a world without antibiotics.
no easy crossing of the river Lethe
no seeking out of empty-heade...

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A great deceit is practised by the liars who rule the world
Playing the fool they tell us we cannot be ourselves.
And we believe them, more fool we.
They tell us to be satisfied, to fall into line,
But amongst themselves they call us
Filthy, ignorant swine. 
They drink their wine slowly,
Savour every drop.
Laugh at the face outside the window
Dirty, ignorant sop. 
On April 19, 1903 in Vi...

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Squirming words,
squabbling, fighting, reeling words
sore with myself.
so sore with myself
a world of regret,
begets
sorrow.

This absence of you
it's all I can do to write to you.
O! I wish I could turn words into wishes.
O! I wish my days would fall into line
my eyes rise for you
without the slightest disguise
for you.

 

This evening is so heavy, the rain has been & gone,
th...

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In Victoria Park Salford we held a party
On the 2nd April for Charlotte who was 2
On April Fool’s Day. There were balloons
Footballs, Easter eggs and so much love.
It was cold but very sunny, she loved it.
Charlotte is not a people person per se
She likes space, walking and talking
To herself and Peppa Pig who came
To her party but did not impress her.
Just a big cartoon pig who disappear...

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I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception 

 

The days of stormy autumn come
Mother, child, brother, son,
Memories, like dust, infest my eyes, 
Swirling, like Turner’s skies;
Like water under wind,
Mixing greys and blacks, whites and blues,
A chiaroscuro, tussling monochromes
Int...

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I stumble into my usual discontented   
bout  of sleep -  
a fragment of the fourth dimension
traps my insides inside an echo of a dream –
time, like the river Lethe,washes over me,
I am left bereft, left to float upon the river of unmindfulness
towards the golden dome which glows with synesthetic force –           
a pulsating kaleidoscope of times –     present-future-past –
flashes fast...

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This mourning moon comes out too soon
This unrest rids me of the zest for living
My insides squirm towards a common grief
An inside loneliness that strips me apart.
My body is dying, sentenced to death.
I know: despite this cavalier attitude, that I owe you 
So much, the clouds are so vast and we are so small.
Yet I must prepare, for when I am not here. not there
Things do not go my way: s...

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As we move towards the Ides
of March, awake, as if from sleep,
Peep up at the snow moon sky.
If you want to read this sky
look up, be high, as clouds
scurry by, just as they did
in Roman times. Forget
context – be free to see
the full moon of late February
slide across  the Aurora sun. 

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Shadow behind the sun, the echo of her words,
Meanings stuck in transit, the music of the Byrds,
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache;
Years pass by like phantoms, passions of the heart
Stalk in silence the silence of her heart, faeries take their part.
Forget what you remember, give and never take.
Lift the veil off the mysteries, see the lady of the lake. Silky torn up la...

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Published in The Express Tribune, April 19th, 2011

 Abstracted in Afghanistan
 I pick cankers for a simple
 choose a rhapsody in blue
 love lapis lazuli
 and you.

 I paint the Virgin Mary
 with ultramarine pigment
 extracted from lapis lazuli
 where I am with the brave Kalash,
 in their snow-capped mountains,
 of the Hindu Kush,

 The blue-blue skies
 reflect their blue-green...

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I do not think
But I am living under this mountain,
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day,
So, I drink anyway.
Too much grandiosity
Dims the soul
Makes us old.

I hear the wise ones pleading, screaming when on fire,
So much screaming, as the flames they get higher:
Hebane, belladonna, mandrake, datura
All of these, like mescaline, can see right through yer.
A ...

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Freezing rain soaks my clothes, my hair,
I do not care.  I am not there.
I stare at the mortar
between the crumbling bricks in this old wall
built by the calloused hands of men who’d survived
the Somme. Who’d been called ‘dirty scabs’
in 1929 by striking dockers, miners. They’d hung their heads in shame
but they’d had mouths to feed. They’d taken any work they could obtain.
They’d carv...

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Photo by sanin sn on Unsplash

 

The best of us British fell on the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele,
Our luckier cousins had long ago set off across the broad Atlantic
Convicts moved to the antipodes, to the Swan River of Western Australia
Convict scum of the East End born to live again.
The ragged Scots, after Culloden
So many Irish everywhere in the Empire
The Raj with the spice and ...

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Sky and sea and land, these three amigos,
 like love and fate,
 lately delayed the day when the dreadful daylight starts
 of unkept promises and broken hearts.

God’s dying conspired to extinguish every ounce of youth and beauty
 to send us scurrying to the heaven-sent skies,
 or some dreamy city of the sultry south,
 where word of mouth only carries a smidgen of meaning,
 and that’s ...

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

A rose in December,
 snows in July,
 as far as we know
 the unexpected will die.

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

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

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Waiting for the barbarians is over:
A whiter shades of pale, pretty traces of lace,
Reveal in opal-sluminosity these late Romans,
Their indigo-dream, red with gore on this bloody May Day
Arabian savagery negates their absorption into the timeless
Creation of Constantinople’s drift and swell,
Elysium’s perfumed garden of lucidity broken by
Mehmed’s Turkic desecration, his sweltering road to ...

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The times of wonder gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
 First Peoples neglected
Their land abused.
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 ...

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Photo by Mario Rodriguez on Unsplash

 

 The extenuation of time into rhyme
 The devil’s in the detail 
 A confusion of contusions, a microbial illusion,
 A stretching out of meaning so that
 As soon as sad-so-sad covid rears its ugly head
 A crying game ensues, tears shed
 Mood into an Aztec-under-the-volcano
 Cacophony of rumblings of stars, bowels,
 Owls’ uncertain stutterings ...

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Goodbye my Sufi friends and lovers
Nothing exists to connect you to me
Tayyar is honourable, full of good intent
I will rise from the trap of the world
I will not ask you to be my servant in paradise
You are my dancer, I am your poet, we laugh
Together on days when we taste the rain.
When you sew, I  watch you and fall in love
Again I remember our first meeting
Amongst the sweet smell...

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In rings of bright water
The days of stormy autumn come
Mother, child, brother, son,
Memories, like dust, infest my eyes, 
Swirling, like Turner’s skies;
Like water under wind,
Mixing greys and blacks and whites and blues,
A chiaroscuro, tussling these monochromes
Into the piebald skies of heaven above.

Below, girls in mucky summer dresses,
Chase boys with unruly mothers,
Fathers...

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n.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Wednesday, September 28, that a proxy of Syrian fighters has been deployed from southern Turkey To Azerbaijan.

 The war has now begun
 And will end in the holy city
 Of Jerusalem.
 And many will burn their eyes
 Before she is done, or dies.

 The Turks refuse to accept the Armenian genocide of 1915. Now, in 2020
 Armenians are, again, bei...

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Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

 

 Ghost writing the sting of the wind
 Shivering spring day
 Reminds me of my
 Ancestors who rode
 This way
 Battling this same wind
 As they trudged to the pit
 On early shift.

This connection, now, is
 Deep, sunk into my blood,
 In all that I mean
 When I say these words
 In tones that rhyme.

Words that would’ve
 Carried meaning s...

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Moments of the past do not last
days kicked into the long grass
A warm early-summer’s day
gold petals bloom today.

stormy-autumn comes
later, flurries of snow melt in the air
into a body without  heat

Frozen snow above
tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
used to crisp-crackle underfoot
like old ghosts who lose their threads,

Druggies:  their fragile, skin
eyes like slit...

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Look at these lines – fishing for compliments –
Hooked, they drag us back.
Leave us squirming on the dry bank:
Palpitating, bruised from the fight.

Removing the pin from the mouth
It’s a painful business. But worthwhile.
Who’ll throw us back in to sink or swim?

Alone, we wriggle to the edge then flop
The shock of contact leaves us breathless.

It’s hostile here. But we feel. We ...

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