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On a road out of London, pulled up at a pub
i  heard him say the words I remember, today.
the drinking man suffers: glug, glug, glug
the drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug

taste of whiskey, craic,  all that convivial shite
he remembers, truly remembers – he’s a creature of the night
searching for the resurrection of a moment of lost content
he ...

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These empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
certainly lacking in originality.

Empty waiting rooms
in empty railways stations
no more smoky-smell of coal and steam.

Caught up upon an evening’s desultoriness
a girl’s slight d...

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Also I hear the mountains spring on their way back.
they kick up brown-blue mudslides
the weaver of water expands
as fish screech to taste
an order of merit
water is in our tears.
wars over water will be profound
like Israel’s grab for the rivers of Jordan.

Listen to the laplap lapping of the weedy river
the river is no longer firstly or lastly. It just is.
Chris & I used to s...

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I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. Sylvia Plath

The past is present in all our genes
and when you begin to recognize ancestors
running through your blood
you begin the blessed process of forgetting
the here and now, as a free-standing reality,
and so begin the unknowing of yourself.
Di...

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BY THOMAS HARDY

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

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For the Edwards & the Adas, and the Agathas & Alfs,
For the host and crowd of ‘old ‘uns’ ‘going south’.
For the stoics and the silent, for the quietly afraid;
For those who’ve always known the outcome’s
Grave.

Thank God!
For those who disapprove, of everything I say
But who’ll defend my right to say it night and day.
When priest or rabbi or imam degenerates into hate
“Écrasez l’infâme!”...

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Amidst this waste of time
I live under this mountain
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day
But, I drink anyway.

 Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stutters out
" Non serviam! 'I will not serve!'”
And that is enough, and more than enough, 
 to condemn all those big words like ‘humanity’.
and 'insanity.'
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe
Whether it ca...

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“There were soldiers there, also officers, but not a single one helped us defend ourselves,” Al-Azza continued. “I am a Palestinian citizen. I don’t have a voice, I don’t have a weapon, I don’t have security or soldiers who will defend me.".https://www.972mag.com/hebron-mass-settler-attack/

this space in which i squat 

to type does not contain me

in future years i will be gone,

al...

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A raggedy thin cotton dress
On this little girl playing
On this freezing December day.
She’s scorned by her mama,
Left out by her friends,
Deserted by her dad
She's just lonely in the end.
Neglected by the world around her
Little Ellie is plain sad.
The priest says ‘she’s going-on bad’.
So her school calls the doctor,
The doctor calls the nurse,
Torn this and that way,
Little Ellie is...

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Your words cast a shadow,
linking the living & the dead,
I will jump across the years,
to reflect your innermost fears,
drag my breathing away from tears.

A passing air at sunset,
a glance across your page,
the heavy thump of midnight,
the dreaming of your grave.

Childhood memories beset you,
drawn from lost time's distant drum,
visions of a time of careless ease,
when you were hav...

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He likes this apple, chews,
He was a boxer, a goalkeeper.
His name was Arthur,
Uncle Arthur has a screw loose
The kids chanted
As he traipsed his way  home from work.
His filthy tie hung over his chest.
Worn on all occasions
He lived at the behest of his sister
In the smallest room of the house
Now, instead of screaming, he wimpered
When he heard the gatling gun's rapid rattle
...

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Like a chess board on ice
Ska
Black  and white all around me
To support the striking saris in Willesden
The men of the north, the underground coal men,
Came down to London Town
Stopped to hear the sound of
Ska
Spreading far and wide, away from Harlesden,
And Brixton, and into our souls
Ska
Spread so far.
Even into the graveyard by Rostherne church
Where Chris & I chat and eat our butt...

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I walk my dog, Woody, on a freezing day
He pulls on the lead, he needs to be free, away
Soon, he's outrunning Ned the whippet,
I glance along the forest edge
Up at the skeletal trees
Even the pines decline to leaf for me.
I count my losses - deaths natural
And suicidal. How can I reconcile
Myself to such losses? I do not know.
My beautiful children extend their hands
To me but they are b...

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Bone marrow transplant au Paris,
brutalized eyes in a skull,
a husk of image
in an empty skin,
thin, thin.

Skin as tight as light
as shadows flicker on a man
with eyes like vipers
solemn...slow...the tusk begins to grow.

Limousines shudder, yams decompose,
draining the body fluid
into the sewer beneath.

Tke,Tke....the analysand
above castle stone
in Normandy or Picardy,
th...

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Tobacco spills into her tea-stained lap
as she squirms tightly on the chair
in the church hall this cold December evening.

Where to pick up the pieces from?
What to do with them?
She hears the serenity prayer
but cannot remember the story from the chair.

It gets better, they say,
day-by-day-by-day.
Outside, 
nobody shakes & fears like she.

Inside, a kind of mad jollity
grips & ...

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On this day of flowers, the animals follow

The usual path of the sun

Ripples coagulate like water,

All manner of things mirror our big brother sun

On this shining  Ἀρκαδία of August 1941.

.

Sweet airs fill the breezes

Forgotten summer scents,

O! The billowing of  intent

Reed and oak and beech

This beautiful canopy of the living green,

Shimmering in this too bright ...

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On this freezing December Thursday.
She sits silently hunched
Over her one-bar electric fire.
Dismal north Manchester light
Seeps through her tightly drawn curtains.
Her entire world was broken
When the burglar came
And will never be the same.
She sips her sweet tea shakily.

She gazes up at the mantllepiece
A young man's face
Looks out of the cracked glass
His face smiles at...

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Pulsing pale waves of mist
Kiss & bless you
I patrol these walkways
Rain seeps through the holes
In my heart, so scared am I
Alone.
Streetlights shine,
Rats scurry into mind.
These are the concrete estates
Of the heart.
Screeching seagulls see
The black holes in the fabric
Torn apart, broken-backed,
We are the twins in the mirror
Looking at each other,
Side-by-side,
With nothing to...

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Waiting for the barbarians is over:
As whiter shades of pale, pretty traces of lace,
Reveal in opal-luminosity 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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A whole life spent out of kilter
Every day is out of whack
So when the storm hit
And the lights went kerflooey
I was ill-prepared.
There is no going back.
And if a little dreaming is dangerous,
Is the cure to dream more?
Well, I wish you were here: that’s for sure.
On a sad, december day
When all the words that ever were
Just drain away
Leaving me aghast,
Alone, marooned
On ...

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The red glow of our one-bar electric fire

Reflected on our hardly bearded faces

The multi-coloured music of curved air

Synaesthesia rampant, the sweet smell

Of burning Lebanese hashish everywhere.

That thick and smoky sweet sweet air.

Nick Drake still alive amongst

The flat-lands of Cambridgeshire.

Five leaves left a common currency rolled up

And me the lad from the Nort...

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___an omen___

Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light
It’s not a rose; it’s a beautiful buttercup, like the
Yellow marvels we used to use to decide if we
Liked butter or not. Did the yellow reflect upon our
Chin? Those flowers resemble those of the wild rose.
And it’s poisonous to humans. Its scientific name is
Helleborus niger macranthus — enough to ...

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I can hardly speak but I will try
On this cold December evening:
my brain falls silent, still
it is the dying of the light
when a ferment of tenses
leads me up many cold-cut cul de sacs.

I linger on a moonlight-figure
palely mirroring the sparkling frost,
she’s gone but never lost.

Suspicious of the silences within
outside is wild, the colour of blood
sin soaks into the sky...

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“He who kisses joy as it flies by will live in eternity’s sunrise.”
― William Blake

It is easy to walk away from faith
Harder to climb back on board
The ship of faith as it navigates these stormy seas.
The scientific sage of this secular age
Associates blind faith with barbaric ignorance
Murder and marauding and in the name of God.

True faith links us to childhood innocence
To Wor...

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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, named after Jean Jacque’s eponymous hero.

Married at the weekend, it has spread,
He fears he’ll soon be dead.

His Caribbean lilt
Still
Ech...

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And all the torn envelopes of me came into your hands,
Nothing in them — just love that you could throw away –
You threw it straight back to me, I caught it, we were away.
You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes
For being alive
I thought you are desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t
You were just a girl, I was just a boy
I felt your difference: of mood, of shape and tone
I wa...

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Fluid the medium by which we desire,
Heavy the limits to which we aspire
To lift ourselves free on the wings of a dove
To practise perfection by drinking his blood.
The illusion of earth is splintering fast
As we grab at the air, as we fall at the last:
Witchery, Witan, Wicca and Wizard
Pursuing the furies is why we are feared.
Opening space and stretching out time
In a flurry of word...

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Του μέλλοντος η μέρες στέκοντ' εμπροστά μας
σα μια σειρά κεράκια αναμένα —
χρυσά, ζεστά, και ζωηρά κεράκια.

Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης

What a catastrophe; we are made
for ease, & nice times
when change stays away
& unjust fate just passes us by
encouraging me not to succeed
denying me the hindrances
of trivial habits, like breathing,
and small-mindedness, and indifference
on a col...

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Paul Léon was murdered in 1942,
For the crime of being born a Jew
In Auschwitz concentration camp,
Oświęcim, Poland.

Paul Léon was James Aloysius Joyce’s friend,
Yes, the Joyce of Dublin & Galway,
Of Trieste, Zurich & Paris,
And, off course, Anna L’Liffey,
She who riverrun on & on,
Even till the Finnegans’ wake.

Joyce had lived in Paris for twenty years
He was so poor but everyt...

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Antonio Salieri, a man of less than monkish virtue, and of very little talent,
Falsely promised the deliverance of Jerusalem from infidel hands,
This was a lie. All his music and words were packed full of lies and thefts.
At the age of 35 Amadeus Mozart fell ill. Mozart was prodigious producing:
Opera buffa such as Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte
Opera seria such as Idomeneo and Die ...

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Zoroaster whispered in mine inner-ear:
Look! Listen! Synaesthesia is near!
Fill your eyes with music
Fill your mind with taste
Judge from the plunging depths
To the necklines of lace.
Feel this rise to the screaming heights,
Smell out these plangent declensions.
The silence from the Queen of Night
Or a cacophony of exclamations?
He's soaring, always soaring, he's winging out of ...

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a fluorescence of luminescence
gathers to a phosphorescence
of thought control
the music 
spreads an arpeggio
of discordance
that enters the soul
like the Via Appia or
any old Roman Road

mixes of music,
cascades of sound,
control 
the pulse of the shape 
this plastic fantastic
version of summer

the light show
left me cold
I know i’m old
but this fake

‘creation of meani...

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open your heart to the misery
of those who live without hope
learn to walk in another’s steps
do not avert your gaze.

give all that you have to give
see with the eyes of a child
learn to not count money,
my friend,
value comes and goes
stay on your toes 

count your hours & count your days
minutes, seconds, breaths, ways.
to please is all that you can do
for kindness is the currenc...

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All across the Nineveh plain the lights have gone out
Crosses driven into the hearts of the last of Mesopotamia’s
Christians. These Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language
Of Christ, have been loyal throughout the long centuries
Of subjection to the burning wind that came out of Arabia.
Now in Christian villages there are no girls left. All taken.
For the earth and the heavens hav...

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I took ol’ snail upon a trip
Upon the live-long sea
Ol’ snail she is so silent,
More silent, still, than me.

We wander forward on the tides,
And wander back in time,
But all upon a Tuesday-drear
Ol’snail she speaks in rhyme.

With metaphors a-plenty,
Right on the cusp of time,
Ol’ snail becomes ye old March Hare
And leaves us all behind.

https://youtu.be/f-o5Y2byIMg

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hear the mountains spring back into shape
their brown-blue sides winter lingers in crevices
the weaver of water a tinkle of god 
fish screech to water.
nobody’s salty tears fear wars over water 
listen to the lap-lap-lapping of the weedy Bure
sadly my song’s whiskey my sadness.
overwhelming my heart slows.
arrhythmia getting worse day-by-day
water peeled of impurity
forms patterns the dr...

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Do not ask what words mean
Let’s just assume they mean….something.
There’s a putative purpose in words.
You don’t like the implication of this?
Go, go to the palace of protection
They have not the sense nor the innocence
To know what they do when
they restrict free speech or write
a complaint about bad language 
Sexist, racist, classic, heterophobic
Such a wokish need to classif...

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Enter my world,
your very presence,
changes everything.
Potentials and propensities
merge, mould, into: 
she is not a fixture,
she is a fitting
in my world,
She flutters, flings, flummoxes,
acquires the shape of the word.
eyes sparkle — 
as I burn the last volume
of poems.
Eternal signs sigh over the ashes.
Letters tell of nightmares,
stone slabs become monster-statues
created by a...

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The trees are still today
Denuded of leaves 
Seemingly apprehensive.
Squirrels gather nuts - 
Against the coming storm
The big freeze will fill
The hospitals.
People seek warmth
Seal windows
Door frames
Kicking against disease
Poverty: defences disintegrate
The cold seeps in.
Dogs neglected
Left to fend for themselves.
We begin not to recognize
Any common humanity 
Just competitor...

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“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
Or leave it if you dare.”

 Songwriters: Philip Lesh / Robert C. Hunter

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As I force myself toward pleasure, 
and I love this November life,
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
through the tunnels,
over the wind-swept bridges,
through the sedentary, school-less,
villages of the retired rich
into the heart of my enemies
where hostile witnesses abound
skilled at shaking fists, digging up dirt
spitting out venom and being richly contemptible.
Wi...

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This is Gorffwysfa, a place of rest,
This is where her recovery began
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was an old Welsh witch,
When sky was black as gold,
She was dragged across a sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold

Lost in the stinking slave ship’s hold.

From the slave ships and from the factories,
From...

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The moon was sad as only the moon can be
Men in tears sought to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with the fingers we can pluck

The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth;
While sobs slide into tears
Remembering the smile of a mother,

On the fortunate day of a first kiss.
The past becomes a magnet,
Drunk with the all the hea...

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Suttee, Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”), a Hindu custom of a wife immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.

............

Moths fly high
on this cold delight
of a summer’s night........
their wings sing
but my mind’s not right.......

See the showers spark high
in the flaming air,.........
sizzling on the water
blowing in her hair......

And...

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Let the starving Irish eat their babies.
This modest proposal of Dr Jonathan Swift,
published anonymously in 1729,
displayed considerable prescience
predicting the Great Hunger
the famine, an Drochshaol.
"Black '47" was the worst year
over a million starved to death.
In the south and west - the Gaeltacht - 
where the deaths were at their worse.
this attack was  also on the Irish lang...

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On this flaming day in June, with such beautiful pagan mountains rising all around, I felt your uncertain presence in this bastion of the Jesuits.
I listened, and you, doubtless, overheard, disquisitions concerning the nuts and bolts of your poetry
As your real presence crept slowly into my heart, I knew your journey of renunciation saw you washed up on many steep and rocky promontories,
Where ...

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The old gods of the greensward and forests have gone to ground.
Their acolytes burnt, stretched upon the rack, hung, drowned
For century after century until now the druid –in  the knowing of the oak –
Is found only in histories, myths and, tales until you walk in the freezing mist
Of a late November night – don’t get squeamish, don’t take fright –
See the land under the moon’s milky light: th...

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In ancient, Roman Byzantium
The King of the moon came looking for me
With blood dripping from his mouth
& a wide toothy smile, as wide as the Bosphorous.

Aristomenos the daughter of Ancient Man.
Will do everything she can to remain Byzantine
But the Ottomans raped  and laughed and smoked hashish.
She asked herself what the Greeks said about murder
And refrained. Uttering such-and-suc...

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We was paid of a Saturday night,
Tide us over Sunday morning,
Sunday’s dinner still to be bought
this Saturday evening in November.
Scarves pulled tight against the air
Damp pea-soupers everywhere. 
The market was bright, alight
With candles, gas jets, grease lamps,
The fires of the chestnut roasters
Amongst the cacaphony of cries
Traders calling out their wares:
“ Bootiful sea...

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Ghosts are everywhere
pulses of her heart stopped
in a knot
wraiths chattering
mixing and melding
In this invisible air
oddest number is the one
moments linger in the empty chair
talking to a lady no longer there,
odd that even two is only ever odd 1 + 1
associations carry on until the wood
rots and there are no trees and no ice
and no air and nobody there..

Only the hallow...

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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,
Nothing to send you lower or higher
No future envisaged
No prescience required
No past to regret
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-need to speak and no-one to l...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of Time,
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into the past:
Generations of suffering: eyes lifted to a cross,
a c...

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Photo by Dmitry Ermakov on Unsplash

Fresh water suits my watery nature.
I squint at the ripples of redemption,
Watch the ducks glide beside me
Keeping me on the straight and narrow.

The call of strangers splatters across
The sky and I choke on what I do not  know ,
And so cannot even whisper or sigh.

Mountains and sky reflected in water.
The extraordinary ordinary
Among the gol...

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Upon this beach of ground sand and shells
Come! See the image of the rolling sea.
This n...

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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 afflicts me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that. He connected me to the
Pack, little knowin...

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We met on the usual terms

Of affectionate endearment

Bred over more than half a century.

Our talk flared into a satisfying silent numbness

Chris talked of what was to be done

Generally nothing, I thought, but I do remember

Chris praising Farage's intervention

On behalf of the persecuted Yezedis of northern Iraq.

You live and learn. Only in this case we didn't. One of us. 

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To switch climates is not to switch allegiances.                    We drove them out of the temples, the money lenders
The souls of the murdered did not die at all.
The land around the Mediterranean bloomed
With blood remembered by the poets sporadically
The simmering of the sea this November morning
Supposes war in the east will lack the vigor to stain
The hot sea red as the ghosts of ungh...

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Arabic spoken in Al-andalus
after 400 years of the inquisition.
Muslim houses in Bosnian villages
with crosses on display 

despite the threat of apostacy.

"And slay them wherever ye find them."

morning fresh as one –
the Buddha knew –
the flowers of the valley
the grasses of the plain
shine with the unbidden light of heaven
and nothing shall remain.

This is still the truth
no ...

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I cut the sky, and heaven cries,
I gallop yet can never escape.
Killers drove me off my land
Despatched me onto a death march
One thousand miles of desert.
Pillagers followed our route
Stealing our goats, our women
Our children.
Abused bodies thrown into ditches.
The Turkish infantry...

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Wind cuts through this January night
Slices like a knife through my meagre clothes.
Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog
The cry of the wind is all in vain
Nothing is the same.
I kiss you across this black hole in time.
In the old be-jewelled spider-webbed
Way we kissed tender to kiss long,
Frost-filled graveyard-remains
For the happily insane, a song.
Yew trees shadow against the moo...

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No foot marks in the sand
To mark my passage.
No disturbance in the air.
I cry and grieve and cherish
My face immobile, as I stare
Out at stormy autumn.
O! living through November
Demands a certain flair. 
Foggy bafflements afflict me everywhere,
Pea-soupers some might say,
And as I gaze beyond the moon
I swoon into another dismal November  day.

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These long, black evenings fill me with premonitions,

The falling of the leaves remind us of our losses.

Captain Wilfred Owen killed in action

During the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal

One week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice.

Such terrifying bloomings of a malignant fate,

A godless irony, force us back into our centrally heated caves.

We dream...

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Baffling how I came to be a pauper, I thought,
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not real home. Everything changed.
Belfast, The Falklands, Belize, Operation Desert Storm
See a doctor some said,
“I’ll be reet” I say, “after a bit.”
Even here: No-go, No-Irish, No-squaddies 
The Falls, Free Derry, Shankhill, South Armagh, New...

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Snow... lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The Dead, Dubliners, James Joyce

Paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of empath...

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In England’s fields no poppies grow,
Chemical fertilisers have seen to that,
The land is still owned by the feudal rich
And the larks, still, sometimes, bravely, sing
Scarce heard amid empty political posturings..

No-one listens to the 'glorious" dead. Lip service instead.
When the ‘great and good’ pretend to remember
They dont recall the ordinary Tommy Atkins like my granddad, Jack Princ...

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soft and steady rhythm of a baby

breathing

her gaze  tells us all we need to know

her footsteps tender in the snow;

the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window

considering all we do not know

or understand, we stand hand-in-hand

under this beautiful harvest moon

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Damp air, sticky, misty horizon,
stiff mud under foot, scarves
pulled tight, gloved
in the greenwood
stripped with leaves
of snow. 

All I remember
are the neutral tones
of a beery afternoon,
long ago. Chris knew
all the names, Latin &
vernacular, of the plants
& birds of the Cheshire 
plain. Nobody came &
nobody went as we 
marched into the 1970s
with such thoughtless tr...

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Early on in Dostoevsky’s great work Crime and Punishment.

Published in 1866 when Dostoevsky was 44 years old,

Raskolnikov, an ex-student in St Petersburg, sees himself as a young boy,

Walking through a provincial town with his father.

Outside a pub, a drunken rabble surrounds a weary old horse,

Hitched to a weighty cartload that it cannot possibly pull.

To the delight of...

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In the apple market
your south London twang
accompanied the many undulations
of time.

Your wild androgyny
mirrored the mirror
of yourself
skimming off the water
of childhood,
like a shaking dog.

You lit up, spot-lighted,
an iridescence of sound
Ziggy!

Your songs were the water
I needed;
Your terse verse
spread underground
watering imaginations
breeding rainbows
ov...

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Somewhere between these avenues of dereliction  straddling the moon and new york city, avoiding the fairground detritus of half-remembered dreams. I awoke, sleeping with her together in her dad's caravan, at the bottom of the garden, amidst the rhubarb where I fell in love.

Smoking joints with red leb scored from placid dealers, drinking orange juice in pubs, astounding the upstanding patrons w...

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We grab our words from thin air
Drag words up from the wriggling earth
Such unearthly digressions infect even 
The connotations of our words, like ripples dripping from a stone,
We veer further from home than we ever thought
Possible. We grow to loathe ourself and 
Our empty suggestibility. Something must last.
We stumble back to denotation, to shared
Meanings we so blithely deny: the eart...

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Low hung ample apples of the sun

On the tree of knowledge. Right next to me.

Enough for you, enough for me. 

Extends my irresolution.

I need to hear the crashing of the sea

to believe in me

to mercilessly set me free from these unghosted unknown

unknowns that hover on this edge

of consciousness, always out of reach,

the sublime sublimity,

of that extra sensory pe...

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Bewildered, by all the things he left unsaid

Serendipity, chances cut dead:

I am wise enough to play the fool.

This vicious wind of a deep set night

Put out the light and then put out the light

Memory cuts through this taut, damp cold

Slices through me like a knife

Signs hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:

A life lived in vain....nothing the same

Across a bla...

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i.m. of Guido Fawkes, (born 1570, York, England—died January 31, 1606, London - Hanged, drawn and quartered.

Red-hot fire engines fly by like hot whirlwinds,
Squawking burning red machines
The brilliance of a sheen made not to burn,
Hot dragon breath in the fog
A red fire has engulfed the country
Gunpowder, treason & plot
Take care of my money! Take care of my family!
Red horses once set...

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 “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. . That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Harper Lee, 'To kill a mocking bird.'

How jealousy and envy
Remain a deadly threat
Generation after generation
Beget after beget.

He had the  ease and simple grace
Of a man who's never out of place
I loved this man who’s died
That cannot be lied about
That cannot be d...

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Flavours of sweetness
spices of life,
another place, another time
innocent tastes of love-on-the-vine
tangle on my palate,
mingle in the air,
no longer alone, no longer there
abiding in the cynic’s lair? No, she’s not there
cross seas, forks, knives, stay alive,
thrive with your three eyes,
a pasty present for the future
we done us best when we wus let,
thinking sent me all to...

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It is a time of wind and rain.
And in the green wood
The voices of the dead
Coagulate and skim
This edge of consciousness.
It is a time of heavy-hearted dread.
It is the day of the dead.
And what have we done
Since the last, lingering death?
Nothing, nada, no.
The wicked still prosper,
And the rich come and go
And the world spins the same
As ever it did before
And the poor are as the...

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Your vernacular usage is privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity.
Democracy. That’s fair enough I suppose. S’far as it goes.
Gather to a greatness: the ooze, ooze of oil. Toil. Toil.
Endless gold and land form the sinews of war you say
Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law you say
No one is...

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O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Gerard Manley-Hopkins, 'The Terrible Sonnets'

Out of the depths it came
I didn't just lose my friend once
I lose him many times still:
at every waking
at every pause in the day
every time I look at the sky - 
with you no longer beneath it - 
Or, I look do...

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The day has eyes. The night has ears;
the monster within, unbidden tears.
Think you’re escaping,
run into yourself, bang;
longest way round, shortest way home.

T’was the night before All Souls
dark and cold and dreary.
Full, dark, black, night.
For lettered and for unlettered alike.

Fear the roaring of the skies,
tremble at the dying of the light;
fear seeps from  miasmic g...

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                                                      (For Tom)

But please, remember me fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then they went on to say that the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti. Sam Beam

In every mouthful of food
In every look of love
In every chiding and every making up:
This sometimes bay of tranquillity,
This harbour to which we return,
Thi...

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The majesty of dogs impresses us –

Their solitary solidarity –

Yet above their grey horizons

There is always the promise, lingering…

Of continuing.

These days an ending is assumed

That glorifies the story of our lives:

Making children, seeing things,

Listening to the waves wash the pebbles,

Overhearing our hearts’ desires.

Yesterday the sky darkened at noon

Seas sp...

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 Evening dark, damp, cold
 Retreat into electric caves
 Try not to think about you
 In your grave. Your soul 
 Meandering. Suicides in GB
 Buried in unconsecrated 
 Ground, until a MP topped
 Himself and was buried
 In Westminster Abbey 1822:
 Viscount Castlereagh. I think.
 Easier to digress than to confess
 How flummoxed am I 
 With the whole unholy business
 Of not saying goodb...

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First light: every day a new beginning

Rising at the crack of dawn

To feel the air against my skin

To walk, with the aid of a stick,

To listen to the dawn chorus.

Thrillingly,  it’s already late September

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 rea...

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

On 29 May 1453 the Greek Christian city of Constantinople finally fell to Muslim armies. At least 4 million Christian Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, who had resisted conversion to Islam for 500 years, survivors of the Byzantines, were slaughtered by the Turks, many in the early C20. Now there are 2000 Christians in Constantinople and 15 million Muslims.

I...

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The pungent smell of tar sends me back
To summer days spent wending my time away
Spraying tar on the M62.
As dandelions parodied the gaudy sun
And the pebbles in my pants
Were reserved for having fun by skimming water.

In the dark church heavy incense
Melds with the body odour of the priest
Sweating for his immortal soul
While mixing an amorous alcoholic liquid on the altar.

Di...

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Now, only the vestiges remain:
Conduct a forensic examination,
Scatter the remains
Are they the same?
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 precipic...

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Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent. RD Laing 

In the bloody water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through her skull, a technique called trephination.

She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy, and their suspicions. 

Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to...

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We on this northern isle
Are not given to violent
Demonstrations of grief
more a steady drizzle of sadness.
Buttoned up we may be,
But in straightened
Circumstances, we are not.
We are amply provided
With history. We recollect
Emotion in tranquillity.
We know in our bones
That nothing remains
The same. We press on
Into an uncertain future.
We are rarely divided
Against ourselves...

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Following up 
the flippancy of flowers
I recall why metaphors are rare
In our neck of the woods.
There are no smilies - implied or crucified - 
for death
Nothing like or as, except perhaps
An emptiness that remains
Empty of content, direction, frivolity.
In the turning of the leaves
We have a half-metaphor for a half-life
Spent well or spent badly but mainly
Just spent. It is ...

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It's not as if I wanted any thing
I didn't ask for a thing
I just liked my life
My mam and dad
And never feeling sad.

I remembered 'Clapton is God'
Sprayed all over the wall ~
Of a Conservative town hall
but nothing changed
Money had its way
And everything had to have a purpose.

My friends;
Some stayed the course
Others committed suicide
Before they were hardly alive 
M...

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Words cannot echo mood,

It is impossible to convey

The tingling numbnesses

Of grief.

She died today - not yesterday - 

A young woman: ordinary, happy, ill.

The semi-detached daze

Of an icy clinging depression;

The tight closing-in upon oneself

That foreshadows pent up tears.

And years of fighting to be well

Despite the fear that accompanies

Nearly everythin...

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Dukkha-Torah
The unbidden tears
The trembling in the heart
Human life conducted in the dark
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years
A craving for permanence
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
But walk instead with me
To the tomb of Maimonides:
Why do the wicked prosper?
Why do the righteous die?
Answer came there none
Except in the Song...

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I weep in the midst of the lack of thee
On stranger days than this or foul.
I am no shepherd, no modern Maccabee,
No Mayflower set to sail the broad Atlantic
Nor a hermit glued to the sacred mountain.
Just a man who trembles in fear.
The brave do not evade fear,
Do not live a half-life, but confront
& overcome time's mischief.
I will not find you in mountains or valleys
You no longer...

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