Moments of the past, do not last
memories kicked into the long grass:
a warm early-summer’s day
golden petals, white clover.
Stormy-autumn comes
with flurries of snow
the dead of winter
catches body heat
in frozen snow
tumbling into slushy heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
old ghosts lose their threads
pot-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes t...

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The sting of the wind
On this cold december day
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work
On early shift.

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

Words that would’ve
Carried meaning still
In those cold, hungry days
When this same old
Northern sky
Still pleased the eye ...

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Calling time on the cinema queue
instead, we let our dreams come true
in the pub
it was the evening of the day
fervourless
and blue....

I still had you
we gave up on our one chance
of silence, it is true
who knows where the time went to?

Time enhances you.
so, we wound up
like we always knew we’d do:
bruised black and bruised blue
carving out a place a-new.

https://youtu.b...

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Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash

The regiment of day
cannot drift away,
back to the cancer hospital
back to the chemo and the radio
and injections in vain,
nothing in my brain. 
It’s your loved
pnes take the strain
I recall Emile, yes,
named after Rousseau’s
eponymous hero. He hoped
it had not spread. 
Married at the weekend, his Caribbean
lilt still echoes in my ...

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So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain? Pink Floyd

In Gaza's ancient town, a tale unfolds,
A journey of love, as the prophecy foretold,
Yusuf, faithful and true, with Maryam by his side,
Embarked on a quest, filled with hope and pride.

To be registered they went, with hearts full of grace,
Maryam, carrying a child, love glowing on her face,
Amidst the...

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Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Redemption comes at such a cost
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost — loss pressing on loss — 
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly so carelessly,
And we know it costs them their whole life
To fly this way and sing and eat and build and build.
Yet still this merel...

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‘to a meadow only to a meadow’

Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash

I wish that I knew from the very start
Which mountain the sun came from
For your eyes can be deceiving in rain
Fountains are rain corralled and I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. A servitude of roses.
In which green bay the rolling sea spy on me
That’s deep, but it aint at all clear. Like seawater,
Lagoons on...

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On this day of flowers, the animals follow
The usual path of the sun
Ripples coagulate like blood,
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 light.

Thunder c...

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I lack the muse's command of cadences and tones,
Sometimes words tumble from my mouth like grain,
At other times words need to be pulled like teeth.

When I sit down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day,
I weep because of the curse I carry,
The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.

I cannot sing the songs of the Lor...

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The power of purpose, it weaves through the air,
With intention, its design is a snare,
The careful and tidy, their minds are so dull,
They forget to remember the graveyards are full.

Oh, just how does purpose weave its magic today? 
It strikes with intention, it wont fade away.
For even the most careless, wandering tinker,
Knows in his heart, life’s a real stinker.

The actor, care...

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The sky is clear today with streaks of blue
the supermoon with all its lunar perigee
swirls in the sky reflecting sombre horizons;

Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
over the hills, conspiring in their usual
ragged silence. In front of me are dreary
trees laid bare, a mist of water in the air.

Streets deserted, folk driven inside by covid
I’m not yet caught cough, cough, coughing — 
m...

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Moments of Vision fade away
But a magical moment is, here, today;
And all it will cost you,
Is all of your life.

Cast over the sea
And cast over the moon
She'll be reading the stars
While you're reading the runes.

Green shades, dappled sunlight,
The landscapes of the eye,
As moment follows moment,
A life passing  by.

The primal scream of silence
Modulated, nuanced, on t...

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Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Shine on the people of this world.
Let them recall the smells of spring
On cold and drear December days.
And let them hear the baby’s cry,
That all the hounds of hell defy,
And give them all the boons of love –
For love is really all we are –
The tiny gestures – the glance, the word –
That will in memory reoccur.
And deep amidst the fears of nigh...

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Crack thunder over head
flash crackle of lightning
nothing the gods said:

Stretch your words across the sky
illuminate the stark, skeletal
trees of a northern winter

Rumble roar-nothing-fled
echo, reverberate,
all around my desperate head,

Hidden clouds drop hail-rain
like frozen tears pelting down
on a world turning dead and lonely

With a clownish frown
on a world tumblin...

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Let’s away to the mountains
to the music of loss when elegy-tossed
the sun above us burns mists away
as we walk back to the valley of youth. 
Today, I walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just above the far-horizons of sight,
no closer after five days of tramping the fields;
I keep going and going whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just keep heading
for the rising sun or the waning...

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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 definable

it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay
and autumn, though still distant,
slips into consciousness in the earl...

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Is it better to feel pain
Than nothing at all?
My son has followed
Me now for thiry-four years
Up hill, down dale.
He’s been AWOL
From this world
For all except his mother
& his family
& I who still cry
For him. On one black
December night
I carried his medicine-
bruised body
through the ward —
dodging the sight lines
of terrified parents —
into the mortuary
where I kissed
h...

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— Like the morning sun you come
And like the wind you go —

I never tried too hard at scholarship:
it seemed a pursuit for those in suits:
pedants, careerists, autodidacts, of all sorts,
accumulators of facts, the stay-at-homers,
the dog-with-a-boners, worrying the hell
out of themselves and acquiring prestige.
i preferred to confront the vast unknown —
that which is so hard to ...

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In serried ranks they come to me:
Tom, Will, Harry, George, Bill, Alf
rows of squaddies heading south,
dust and dirt and gas and screams
hot metal designed to do its worst
tearing savagely at human flesh.
Lads from farms & factories
Lads from mills & mines
sacrificing their most precious time -
Jack Prince, a machine gunner
in the Cheshires, served right through,
from 28 Jul 19...

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Let’s away to the blue mountains,
To the elegaic music of loss,
the sun above us burns the mists away
as we walk to the valley of youth..  
Today, I will walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just a ragged wall above the far-horizons of sight,
they’re no closer after five days of tramping;
for five days I continued whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just  kept going and goin...

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Beneath this beach of sand, shells
I see the image of the rolling sea.
Such new-found-land frames and hides
These wider horizons; I walk along the cliff:
Sheer drop upon the windward side,
Embedded trilob...

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Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
In all her shadowy finery.
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form
Shows us all her shades and shadows and crevices
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme
Moonlight flows and the boy is now an old man
Sleeping ...

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passing clouds
you don’t remember,
wind rising in the sky,
you, bereft of fortitude,
me, just strolling by

trees flare into flames; my friend,
a pettiness of heat.
the past at last unchanging
no memories so replete: 
 

golden sands, and crystal brooks,
silken threads and silver hooks.
glimpsing what’s already there
blue shadows, orange flares
she's screaming on the stairs

...

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Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:

Pale-blue eyes
on a snow drop face
seen-through lace,
seen-through lace.

These empty waiting rooms of the heart,
set to tear us apart,
like ventricles of the brain, never seen again.

Birdsong flung
into fond recall
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.

The smoky-smell of coal and steam
an eve...

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War's no place to be
Yeah, I were a soldier me,
constantly, for years,
still am now I’m on me arse,
listening to all these gobshites
with their feckin poppies.
I see watermelon smiles
 — to the ears, not the eyes --

me on me knees
unexploded ieds — 
women-with tanned, muscular arms
walking for miles
for water
men with children on their backs …
jumping into the sea to esc...

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"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows."
Siegfried Sassoon

Circumstances compel speech,
Ye gods and little fishes, 
From the first day of the world
Down to the horror in our own time
Peace is forever out of reach.

Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the dead
A soldier-poet silenced, banned, expelled
Misery a...

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https://www.mecaforpeace.org/close-to-home-gaza-knows-suffering-too-well/

Suffering comes to our unguarded selves
Unbidden. Suicide slammed into my hidden
Self. The slaughter of the innocents all
Around us. Buddhism teaches some suffer
Too much, others too little. Suffering follows
Us through our lives, like a shadow. We must
Unburden our minds, seek compassion 
For all those sufferi...

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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 stays in my heart

We’re never alone, never apart
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
Speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.
.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And...

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The door behind my mind
Opens and I find
Every day a new beginning
I rise 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 late March,
A year since the sepsis,
When madness danced with the spectre of death,
I emerged stronger, cherishing every breath.
As I walk, I hear a symphony of sound,
The dawn chorus, nature...

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The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold October
For the patterns in the grass do not last.
And so we take the winding stairway
Into the high tower above this land of forgetfulness
Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries
Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight
Of one John Mulligan esq,  who, on the last day of August
1938, according to the L...

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In the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive words, songs & stories,
coiled and twisted words, selfish and cruel,
through their darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never complete.

Like curdled thoughts, they merge and entwine,
in restless minds, where shadows define 
this chaos, a light gleams,
October's moon, a friendly old lunatic, 
like me

stalks this poor man's sky,...

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These rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
Rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
Blossom and harvest, Wise women, Witan’s children.
From the lips of children we must 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 of Nineveh along the same back paths
And a...

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“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Israeli-Bombardm...

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County Lines spread evil
all of the time
a cross all the living and the dead
their lines sink into our time:
we need them gone.

A spring day in late May,
she can no longer stand 
she must fall:
tall, crumpled, bent, dead.

She has lost the lines that link
her to her family, friends.
lines now link only random things:
road, rail, red phone box,
needle, plunger, sink
sink into...

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Bewildered, by all the things left unsaid
Serendipity, chances lost, cut dead:
Are you wise enough to play the fool?
Or, does this vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light?

Memory cuts through: taut, damp cold
Slices through my meagre clothes like a knife
Signs previously hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
Is yours a life lived in vain......

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Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
warps,  wefts waste away
the body afflicted with decay
O!, I say, the hey-ho way of the live-long-day..

Whatever has lived will wither, languish, and decay.
time pines us all away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget..

No transubstantiation this,
no move into immortal bliss:
this work of resistance is an inception in art
of...

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As we draw closer to Remembrance Sunday in black November and all that false praising of the armed services by 'the great and the good'  I wrote this poem to show how we really treat those who risk their lives to protect us.

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Yes. Music to eat by
flavours of sweetness 
spices of yet another life, 
another place, another time
the innocent taste of rhyme
tangles me on the palette, 
mingles me in the air, 
no longer abiding in the cynic’s lair, 
for she’s not there.

Crossses, forks, knives, staying alive, 
we thrive with three eyes, 
a pasty present for the future 
we done us best when we wus let, 
...

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The majesty of dogs impresses us –
their solitary solidarity –
above their grey horizons
there is the promise, lingering…
of continuing.

These days an ending is assumed
that glorifies the story of our lives:
making children, seeing things,
listening to waves wash the pebbles.
overhearing our hearts’ desires.

Yesterday the sky darkened at noon
seas spewed forth strange shapes
cl...

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The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees still have leaves
outside it is 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 sister 
on a skipping rope.

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

The lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
‘What is a vi...

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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 good...

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The innocence of nature
Mocked by the depravity of humanity
You chose to spotlight the genocide
Of the Tarsier, a primate, DNA like ours,
With enormous seeing eyes.
You made the humble Tarsier
A metaphor for the innocence of nature
Exploited, ripped apart,  killed for meat
Mocked for fun. No empathy between 
Tarsier and Human. Man the killer
Species. You used bitter irony
To deny hu...

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‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ George Orwell

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In the red water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through the skull, a technique called trephination.She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy and the doctors'  suspicions. 
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.
This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep...

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

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My son, my brother and my dog
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all that is, not all that seems.

That hidden fountain of delight
That shines again, just out of sight,
That promised land, of sweet content,
That land where time is safely spent

Beneath the skies and stars of heaven,
Where every blemish is forgiven,
Where children play all night, a...

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It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night
Of solid rain, unremittingly wet. And cold.
When, suddenly, all the rivers of all the world stopped flowing
And all the summer colours leached away and never returned.
And the wind so cold and stings like hell
And sky descends into the well of unforgiving.
And you're not here.

And the blackness is deep, so deep, and remains so deep
When...

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Comes to remind us not to expect
consistency from Mother Nature.
Climate change keeps us on our toes
Expecting….? God knows what blows. 

https://youtu.be/yOKAQSGCm8Q?si=z9HpEgTDrsQW3a7_

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head shaved by eight o'clock
cold grips my skull - now brain freeze
stubble grows like wheat - neat!

https://youtu.be/bqtfl0gt5fM?si=2D4d9DfiNU6mC_Zd

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"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it." Sylvia Plath.

Amidst the depths of contemplation’s maze,
Words grotesque and selfish lie ablaze,
A fusion of curdled musings intertwine,
 In late October light, a restless mind resigns.

Like an old moon, friendly yet discreet,
Stalks the dawn sky, casting shadows sweet,
In this time of rhyme, where memories reside,
Sh...

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Anna Campbell was her name and Kurdistan
her nation — she died on March 15 2018, the Ides of March.
She was fighting as part of the all-female
Kurdish Women’s Protection Units, the YPJ.

She was 26 when she died 
a long way from Lewes in East Sussex where she was raised.
She was killed by a Turkish airstrike — the Islamist Turks NATO-empowered enemies of the Kurds.
Anna had dyed h...

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saw her in the street

polite, random, neat.

forget drunkenness

create the diabolical

divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate

too late.

one, kind, sweet woman,

polished floors with rage

arms red and fleshy –  

 dark memory of her soul 

 late, near the Spaniard’s Inn, 

 full moon shining,

with all the solemnity of a river in flood,

sleeping London dreaming o...

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We walk a steep and slippery way,
mixing senses in synaesthesia’s way,
it seem as if I am a chorus in a play.

We feel by measures hidden from the eye
time borrowed, days wasted, life goes by,
I  walk along a steep and scattered way.

Winter seeps me into sleep, as my soul flies
to the gist of an art unborrowed from the eye;
I learn by going, where I have to go, inside.

Dark ...

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Sadnesses besiege me,
at the dying of the light,
nothing can console me,
like a vein of ore run through solid rock,
through my life
the glittering flow of tears
has been like a tumbling spring
in hill country.

My love, stretched upon this rack of time, 
appears redundant, gone,
until her song is sung,
until her time is right
until the light in her eyes
greets me at night....

Memo...

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memory fades
slippery words
frankly absurd

at home the fulcrum fulminates
again children expect blows
nobody knows 

eldest boy
emotions frozen
for years and years
unbridled  tears

father, brother son, friend
world without end
pressure in my head
they're dead

thinking will no longer do
so what more can ye do?
walk a way with a dog 
Skip into music
Fade into art.
Be a part...

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https://aphelis.net/james-joyce-meets-nora-barnacle/

I stare at the ceiling, stare at the sky, time flies by. I scuttle along a dirt track, climb over a stile into a cornfield in the previous century I see no blood-red poppies, merely blue corn flowers and the witch Hazel. Now, I’m stuck in the backroom off of Clapham Green, where the black mould spreads insidiously  like a disease tha...

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The winter sharp brains of children 
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
They came running across raging seas, dancing on the waves.

A storm-blessed salty awakening.
Had nothing to regret. 
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the roo...

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When sadnesses besiege you,
at the dying of the light,
and starlight illuminates
the end of days
then star-crossed lovers
quietly drift away,
sigh silently out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes,
And you will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise..

We spin and whirl and shiver.
like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch, Wicca, Wizard
who sway beneath the moon,
all night, all da...

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Brittle beauty, that Nature made so frail,
Whereof the gift is small, and short the season;
Flowering to-day, to-morrow apt to fail;

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (born 1516/17, executed 19 January 1547)

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Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

On these dog days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
 after much deprivation and cruelty
ours is a molested nature,
that screams in agony in an iron trap
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death 
as humans point their cameras and smile.

Will these few remaining animals be abused
exterminated, tortured
like all four-legged creatures
...

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Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

A bond unbreakable —
Private soldier Jack Prince by name,
Not a pillar of strength, nor with a heart aflame,
You you didn’t live a life of wisdom and insight,
Your absence does not leave a void that feels so right.
Do you rest, in eternal slumber?
Spirits dance on, like a glowing ember — 
or so the poet says — 
Does your legacy live...

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The moon was sad, as only the moon can be.
Men in tears seek to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth.
White sobs slide into our eyes
Remembering the smile of another
A mother,

On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past was a magnet that draws
Into us the heady...

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Syd, do you remember that golden sun,
When youth burned bright, your journey just begun?
Shine on, you crazy diamond, hold your flame,
Illuminate this world, leave your mark, etch your name.

In your eyes, a depth, a universe, vast,
Black holes of wisdom, memories from the past.
Shine on, you crazy diamond, never lose your glow,
Your brilliance shines through deepest darkness, in a cel...

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Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
Whine like a man who knows he's out of time
Casuistry and sophistry
Work together
In perfect harmony.

Poetry's more about wine than whine
More about seeking to express the inexpressible
Than complaining about how difficult it is.
A true poet makes the difficult easy
Can turn water into wine in a half-truncated line

Caesuras can soar in ...

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John Clare knew and understood
the wonder of the mundane,
how nothing remains the same.

Glint, glance, gaze, smile,
the optimism of
that pastoral green mile.

You saw and smelt
a myriad of wild flowers 
sway in the breeze.

You looked up at the swirling clouds, 
a grey-blue reflection of your unassumed eternity
and then you wrote your poetry
unmindful of the side long glan...

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From trembling thin arms to thunderous cries,
A childhood stained with hunger's cruel guise,
Clutching to mother, seeking her solace tight,
In a world where shadows cast a daunting fright.

Constant threats and abuse, a heavy weight,
Youth stolen away, no chance to abate,
Eldest boy, burdened beyond his years,
In grey short pants, resilience through tears.

Socks pulled up, a symbol of s...

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An epiphany of history: 
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.

In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the gulags and the camps and massacres came later,
they s...

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Wild is the way, unclear is the day.
The seeping mottled sky passes me by
Opening before me the vista of a life:
A world of smell and sight and sound,
The portals of discovery all around,
I enter this world, this newfoundland:
The sheer vividness of colour abounds
Synaesthesia's all round visibility of sound,
Flesh and blood, heart and soul
All the half-created, half-perceived
Epipha...

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All those who scramble after death
And all its accompanying sensations
Gather around you now.  You looked
In so many different directions for the truth
And I don't know if you ever found it.
But you tried. God, you tried.

All those south Dublin Gaels dismissed you,
As they did the Aran sweaters they used to wear
During the Celtic Tiger with their Estonian nannies
And their Latvian garde...

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Oft and steady rhythm of a baby
breathing
her gaze tells you all you need to know,
her footsteps tender in the snow,
the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window,
considering all we do, and do not, know
we stand hand-in-hand
toe-to-toe
under this beautiful July moon.
 

And now she's our lady in red,
dancing at the party.
Big school beckons in September,
with all its inherited human...

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In this land of loughs and dry burials
The invisible lends itself into visibility
In the dialect of words – tattered,
Stained, inadequate – visceral words
Spew like blood from a gargoyle
Into this mist-ridden air where these
Pagan burrows hide the dead inside 
Blessed Earth: dogs still dig for bones
And the music fills the very air
Lacerated by the explosions of anger
We see upon the red...

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Minutes before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney texted to his wife in Latin: Noli timere or do not be afraid.

Seamus Heaney's sons carrying their father's coffin

Redemption comes at such a cost.                     
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost - loss pressing on loss - 
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly, so carelessly,
A...

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Her red-gold hair
on a stormy autumn day
along the borderland where
time fades away

Like the leafy-mist
which persists,
drifts along the hedge rows
on this late-summer morn

Emptily, curiously,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics,

hidden in the wood-smoke
burning  our throats on a lost
once-upon-a-time damp autumn eve

I am afflicted by
the time...

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I have a dead weight inside of me 

Which I carry around all day,

It often tries to kill me

And it will not go away.

I send this freight’s immensity

To the centre of a black hole;

Retracing the wandering journey

Of my wandering-wandering soul.

Mine is a grave singularity,

It contains a huge-huge mass,

In an infinitely small-small space:

A density — gravity...

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Charles Bukowski probably said (or wrote)
That we are here to laugh at the odds.
I’d say it all depends. Listening to a rich
New Englander (Martha’s Vineyard)
Pontificate upon the miniaturist artists
Of the Renaissance in the ever-so well
Known salons of Venice or Florence
(Such pale shadows of the British Imperialist
Tomb raiders of the nineteenth century).
These daughters of th...

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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 generations of suffering:
Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a ...

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When sadnesses besiege you
with the dying of the light,
and you find your solace in starlight,
time drifts away from mirrors,water, eyes
on this Aphrodite night of no disguise.

When night falls and cats crawl,
my heart is filled with sadness, I fear
starlight does not illuminate sky at all.

We know that all human love must die.
as silently we drift apart,
away from each othe...

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How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken? Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

On a road out of London pulled up at a pub
I heard him say the words I remember, today.
The working man suffers: glug, glug, glug
The drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug.
Taste the whiskey, feel t...

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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 up space and stretching out time
In a flurry of wor...

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From he multi-verse within
I stumble into my usual discontented
Bout of sleep –
A fragment of the fourth dimension,
Trapped inside, no disguise.

In an echo of a dream –
Time, like the river Lethe,
Washes over me
And left I am here, bereft,
To float upon the river of unmindfulness
Towards the golden dome

Which glows with Synesthetic force –
A pulsating kaleidoscope of times...

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Sometimes it’s best just to make up poems
In your head whilst drinking beer and gin
Then let them blow away on a windy day in July
Sitting outside in cold sunshine with Woody.
If I call you what the fuck I like
And you call me what the fuck you like
What are the chances it’d be the same fucking word?
Would you take a fence or would I take a fence
Or is it only certain horses that ...

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Some blind folk see the faeries clear,
For faeries are always close or near.
Oh, better far than what we see
Are fairy wings that brush our faces
Like spiders’ webs, or shimmering laces.

Such magical, lovely, lonely things.
A rustle in the wind reminds us
...

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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 canno...

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Today I listened to a loada shit
Concerning toxic masculinity
I was kinda bored. It was Radio 4.
It was an arrogant fucking lecture on
The vital importance of the pronoun
'They' and hey there were no jokes..
This is no way to speak to ordinary users
Of language. It's a shame that working
Class people are so excluded from
These delightful ways of speaking. Minority
Rules you say. No p...

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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

Yes, paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of e...

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In my dream I am paralysed, silent
There’s a shadow behind the moon
I scurry down into the winter-valley:
Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,
Rock- hidden fossils, set in stone,
Evolutions of Medusa. My bones
Afflicted by a petrified decay.

All, all she gazed upon
Can never be rubbed away.
Stains dry and calcify
Deep in these hidden bogs
Remnants of consciousness
A quagmire-swamp o...

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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 stings in my heart
We’re never alone,
We're never apart.

Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
These speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.

Oh! it’s a sin to kil...

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What church-bells or calls to prayer by the muezzin
For all these young men who kill themselves?
— Only the monstrous hypocrisy of the media
--- Only the slurp, slurp, slurp as we all become greedier.

Call ...

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“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
― Robert Lowell,Life Studies

Swirling around the failures of my life:
I laugh at the shyness that impeded me
Held me back until the children came.
it was good to give the future names.
My flights were just a fancy
To do with everyday expressions of what was really always there,  
Dim unknown, unexplored, uncertain, hardly realise...

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(For Clare)

It’ll 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,
Noithing to lift you higher..
No future envisaged
No presience required
No past to forget
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-one to speak to and ...

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At school I was never all that good at geometry:

Perhaps my pencil was too blunt or my eyesight too dicky,

Or perhaps I just couldn’t be arsed to get it right.

Other boys could, and did.

What I do remember is that the most minute inaccuracy

Made at the small source would lead,

Left uncorrected, to greater and greater error

Until the final calculation would be wildly wrong...

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.
sad december skies haunt my thoughts as I drive
skirting south of the stage set of my younger days:
my home town, seldom visited now. lemon light
can’t warm the chill around my heart,
the chill of life unlived, or lived awry, and in greater part
treasured only in hopeless hindsight.

the motorway speeds me away, in flight into deepest cheshire:
the light is cream soda in clouds,
the sc...

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