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

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

Photo by Chris Anderson on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a hot, still July afternoon,
silence unbroken

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

heavy with anticipation of something not quite def...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DELPHINIUM BLUES

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

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

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I do not drink   

But I am living under this mountain

That might crush the life out of me

Any time, any day

So, I drink anyway.

 
 Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stuttered out

"'Non Serviam! I will not serve!'”

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

To condemn all the big words spluttered by politicians. 

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

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

Your wild androgyny
Mirrored the mirror
Of myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

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

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rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
blossom and harvest, wise ones and  children.
from the lips of children we must learn 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 alleys that the J...

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Words cannot echo mood.
It’s impossible to convey
the trudging numbnesses
of everyday.

The semi-detached gaze,
the tight closing-in upon oneself,
foreshadow pent up tears
and the tingling that stalk us.

The dim lingering terror in
almost everything I do
enables me to live day-to-day;
fear meanders like an ox-bow lake,
and can take years to settle to that flood-tide
that knocks...

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From trembling thin arms to thunderous cries,
A childhood stained with hunger's cruel guise,
Clinging to mother, seeking her solace tight,
In a world where shadows cast a daunting fright.
Constant threats and abuse, such a heavy weight,
Youth stolen away, no chance to abate, too late,
Billy the eldest boy, burdened beyond his years,
In grey short pants,seeking  resilience through tears.
...

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To live a life in a day
the difference is plain
there’s no doing it again.
A flight within the 4th-dimension
no squirming weasel words for you
just a graceful flutter and decline
on a wing and a prayer.
No absence of synesthesia here.
just a mingling of the finest bouquet
with the deepest regret in a minor chord display.
The tug at your heart and the tear at your chest
just flo...

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An unholy roar began to build
that cherry blossom day
thunder in the air,
a miraculous quiet,
a low rumble, 
a terrible tremor,
a move towards total devastation
in the air, on that very day
when the earth begins
to tremble and shake
uncontrollably.

Look! 
all the skies scorched with fire
and the air explodes
fusing flesh with flesh
into a whiteness
from which the dark shadow ...

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Photo by Milind Ruparel on Unsplash

Acrid November brought to mind in late July:
That lack of light, that all day twilight!
How can anybody live through such visual misery
without declining into snake, or toad?
Even the trees have no leaves,
cold will rise to infect our eyes!

We are, unfortunately, not Italian, nor Etruscan,
just woolly-backed mammoth barba...

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Photo by Kirill Pershin on Unsplash

icelight in my eyes
iceflowers on the wind
a storm black night
stings me awake
my dreams scatter
light dissipates
night fritters away day
sky black with cloud
disperses time into verses,
made of earth, in grave colours;
no black mass here
no candles in the wind
no witches zoom to the moon,
no lifting of the spirits
just gloom
as men fall in...

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It is not the cruelty of children that angers me
But that my hesitation to commit the word to air
And, aye, maybe, to the ear, the heart, was treated as an affliction
By those with the polished shoes and starched aprons;
Sometimes I was not even there when they mocked me but I knew
What they did and ‘never-a-bother-it-was-to-me’.
But it was. I was brought up to be brave but inside I was ...

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(a continuing genocide)

The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Dari: بت بامیان‎; د باميانو بتان) were two 6th-century monumental statues of Gautam Buddha blown up in March 2001 by the Afghan Taliban.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

Nuristan, in eastern Afghanistan, was formerly known as Kafiristan (کافرستان, “land of the infidels”) until the inhabitants were forcibly c...

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Mist and fog and waterspray blind
this winter-of-the-heart hideaway
i stop and wake and sleep again
clouds disguise the fall
I fail to face
as surely as the grave decays

everyday this sheer cliff path
crumbles just  a little more
Listen now!  
to these screeched warnings of the gulls,
echoing through this thin air
seeing you there
glistening as the light fades away
I slip t...

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Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

Nostalgia has barbed-wire teeth,
establishes its grip and never lets go,
Nostalgia skews, twists and shapes 
how we experience the world and its doings
Nostalgia consummates our lives with lies
composed of dreariness and disappointment.

Looking back with rose-tinted spectacles
turns us into reactionary, pale conservative
clones who love t...

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FOR SALE:

BABY SHOES  

NEVER WORN

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Awed by the dance of continuous change,
a symphony out of transformation's range,
where one thing turns to another, anew,
so the sum always outweighs the parts on view.

Metamorphosis of hearts will slowly unfold,
as we witness the unfolding of a tale untold,
where differential calculus charts the way,
adjusts the rates at which all things decay.

Yet the total always remains the sam...

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The ideas of the beautiful  Cathars of Languedoc spread across western Europe 700 years ago
Cathar comes from the Greek: καθαροί, katharoi, "the pure [ones]"
They built on the dualistic theology of Manichaeism
Which they blended with the eastern Christianity of Byzantium
They were ascetic: believing the material world was the evil realm of Satan

Whilst the world of the spirit was the b...

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Photo by Sora Sagano on Unsplash

On this beautiful spring day in February
With delphinium-blue skies and cheeky
Crocuses splash purple, while dazzling
Daffs nod in agreement, in this mild April
Zephyr of a breeze –we arrive in flaming June
And then do folk longen to go on pilgrimage.
Modern pilgrimages tend to interiority
We seek relics of our past that cannot last.
I imagine that i...

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The man who fell to earth
turned to stone, all alone,
this script never changes
barbarism, xenophobia
think it over.

Strangers come & go,
stranglers too, y’know,
open training allowed
sorry dear Mr Fantasy.

Strangers in the night...

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I remember falling as a child
And being lifted by a faerie-wild
She kissed my cheek and mussed my hair
And then she wasn’t there.

Some blind folk see the faeiries 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 rem...

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Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash

Blue-flame tabernacle rises from the ground
A concrete mist in the air, flames all around, 
Now this purpled phoenix screams at the sight
Of fast approaching, relentless, coal-black, night.

In this descent into infanticide, false consciousness abounds,
A child’s pleading eyes, alone, on a rising tide of the sound
Bombs tear up the ground: destro...

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More than five rugby teams’ worth, of men,
every week, dead by their own hands,
Young men mostly, three times as many men as women,
Nearly 6000 a year, 60,000 over a decade and rising. ….

Using traditional routes to oblivion —
 hanging from a tree, opening arteries, being free with the pills
Or, a closed garages' exhaust fumes:
jumping off high-rise flats, bridges, vehicles, pain, iso...

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All those years of hope
Fitted, now, into a wooden six foot box.
From girlhood’s putting on
Of burdensome beauty
Into the chiffon-sixties of London town
Then Devon, and the farm
Australia, divorce, and worse
The utter confusion, the end of hope,
You were sliding down that slippery slope
Where, at last, the dreadful daylight starts
Of unkept promises, and broken hearts.
And, back, finall...

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Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

The times of wonder have gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten faces
Which, much 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
Emin...

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On this beautiful spring day in February
With delphinium-blue skies and cheeky
Crocuses splashing purple and dazzling
Daffs nodding agreement in this mild April
Zephyr of a breeze –we arrive in flaming June
And then do folk long to go on pilgrimage..
Modern  pilgrimages tend to interiority
We seek relics of a past that cannot last.
I imagine that if a poet who I have in mind
Were...

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 A fluttery piece of parchment,
in the bowels of a tree:
a space-time horizon
over which i cannot see

Composed of gravity and fear -
this dead weight inside of me,
often tries to kill me
and won’t go away.

I send this freight’s immensity
to the centre of a black hole;
retracing the wandering journey
of a wandering long-lost soul.

Mine is a grave-singularity,
that contains a terr...

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♡

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

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Linked arms, looking into the future,
my daughters, in jim-jams,
bought from Sunday markets,
off the Thame Road,
their beautiful young faces
picture a world
imbued with all the scattered sadnesses of time,
so rhymes this over-flowing mind of mine.

Looking, seeing,
you, as you never can be again,
with all the holy blemishes of youth
leaves me here bereft,
floundering between  sky and ...

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We walk a steep and slippery way,
Mixing senses is synesthesia’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, times gone by,
I walk along a steep and slippery way.

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

Dark hold...

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“What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.” Charles Bukowski.

What’s this area got?
Not a lot of jobs, or prospects, or money
There’s no des-res for burnt out
City execs round here
Nothing for the well-heeled retirees. .
But there is plenty of poverty, and plenty of fear.
Look around, you’ll see:
No antique shoppes, just second hand ta...

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Iron grey her hair
this woman who bore me
laboured for her family.
Cleaning for the rich
she bought us clothes and sweets;
dad's shift work strained her
debt and death lined her face.

I retain her uncertainties
closely. proudly.
her generosity never failed;
separated by death
we share the moon
on cloudless nights
above our northern city.

https://youtu.be/Lxc3O4mQV74?si=e...

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To weave the blessed singularities of a woman
you must read her book of shadows,
when her sadnesses besiege you,
in the dying of the light,
when you are just plain terrified,
late, late at night
look deep into the blackness,
at the heart of second sight,
see yourself mirrored
in the declining of the light
in your sleeping child’s eyes
so abandon all disguise.

Rise into ...

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The sky and sea merge
Into strange flecks of grey.
Neither fish nor fowl
Predominate.
There is a lot of empty space.
And that dull, withdrawing roar
Of yesteryear.
Last year, on this very  day, 
Of shock and awe,
was your funeral:
wildflowers on your coffin
an emptiness inside
I read your poem 'Lemon Light'
Then there were 'Eden Rock and 'Adelstrop'
You knew all the hedgerow flowers ...

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all these hatreds
back in action again
like iced-familiars

cold objects
gripped
by god-knows-what
certainties
thawed
by the heat of bodies,
smashed in the eyes of children

icons
waving in the glare of air
sultry and mild
atrophied
by the dust of centuries

sunlight stipples
the pock-marked churches
turned-mosques-turned-churches
turned mosques
as blitz-hardened wom...

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The buzzing bees circulate around the flowers
waspishly congregating around the litter bins.
There is a dull hush of subdued conversation
After all this is England. A gaggle of
Liberated women push buggies and hold tiny
Hands, Two old men shuffle over to a bench.
The slave-built stone mansion squats ugily
As they talk retrospectively, of how generations
Disappear whilst slave-buil...

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With his close-cropped hair and his tatoos here and there
With his thin pale face and his commitment to the race
Christian James was well known for going it alone
He drove the multi-storey and he died in a blaze of glory.

The owner of the Golf GT
A businessman from Daventry
Got a new one from the factory.
Christian James, youngest of seven,
Lived & Died and went to Heaven.

At scho...

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In Calvados you have your cross
And though you won, you most surely lost.
Your sacrifice, at twenty-four, to modern 'wit'
Is nothing more than a crying bore.

Who now has read Alamein to Zem Zem
Your story of the war in the western desert?
For though you certainly knew how to kill
You knew the cost, for you had no draperies over your eyes
Or heart. No deception, no disguise.

And wh...

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Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

Black sun on the run
born a mute
not too cute
on my back, sans coat,
sans hat,
on my back
no fringes of lace
around my face
I’m intact at last
I fling curses
at the stars
bury my wishes
in old jam-jars.
turn mere shadows into shades
hold my breath
for an age
i kiss a lion
In a cage
condemned
at the root
& in a rage
I evade
an early grav...

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I can hardly speak but I will try,
my brain falls silent, still;
it is the dying of the light
when a ferment of tenses
lead up many blind cul de sacs.
Lingering, a moonlight-figure,
mirrors the sparkling frost - 
she’s gone but never lost - 
suspicious silence offers a respite
outside, all is wild, sky, the colour of blood,
soaks up our dreams and fancies:
a barge meanders down a ri...

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Echoing the songs sung by the famine children
the tones of the big bell settle in the dust
of this small market town in County Meath
and on the stained glass window, still,
I see the sun-marked resonance of bell — 

Circles of uninscribed sound
uncaged
through all the cerebral centuries
chimes and chants for C...

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Away w'th th'moon 
with her shadows and all
those sturdy penumbras
you saw in the ball.

Forget you, forget you
you fall out of bed
and all you beget
is quite suddenly dead..

She’s tousled & sleepy,
this edge of the moon
where Angus, dear Angus,
just walked out the room.

His pool-side of shadows
is living alone,
with ginger-nut biscuits
and large gulps of tea,
my shad...

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We take this boat of life
to God-knows-where
leaving not a trace behind,
forgetting takes forever,
in rain or storm or sunny weather,
even our oldest, our best-loved dreams, 
disappear like clouds
on a sunny May day; 
memories of what we did not do,
or what did, and wish we hadn’t, 
pass amongst us like a virus
nobody is immune to regret
like the refrain from an old song 
we ...

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Yes. We spend too much of our short lives
chasing the mot juste, that phrase, that image,
re-working narratives of fact into (un)heroic
self-justifications. Nobody can reconcile
the contradictions of experience;
we fail all round to bring another’s pain to mind,
we seek to ease the pain and to make amends
but there is no end to the ways of art.

We must learn to wonder as we...

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Little boy blue
how our family loved you,
we lived for you,
baby blue.
You thrived
before the meningitis virus
entered your brain
before nothing was the same
again.

I sang to you
as the doctors
began their prodding
& their piercing.
You turned your head,
just the once,
heard my voice
and met my gaze.
I will carry that
to my grave.

Everyday
for thirty-five years,
I...

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In the middle of the greenwood,
In the centre of what is,
The wise women gather,
They’re lifting the lid
On the meagre remnants
Of the magik that once was:

Wicca, witch and wizard
In the whispering wood.
Found in times of turbulence,
Of movements in the blood.

The devotees of the vacuous,
The frightened and appalled,
Consumers, losers-all
Watch silently as children’s blood
Se...

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Wild is the minute, clear is the sky,
A world of colour and sight rushes by.
Portals of discovery abound around
This newfoundland: sheer cliffs,
Flower with vivid Mesembryanthemums,
This Cape of Good Hope contrasts
With the all-round invisibility of you.
Your absence distracts me from the flesh and blood 
Epiphanies of cloud and sky and sun,
Hal...

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Never-ever
again,
in all the mutations
of this passing world
of things,
of noise and empty rancour,
will my son
turn
his baby face
towards my voice;
as he did,
during those terrible hours
before
he died
and I
carried his infant body to the mortuary.

O! his blue-blue eyes,
look again at me,
look through all the workings of eternity,
in that long ago
land
of lost cont...

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I cut the sky, the heavens cry,
I gallop away yet can never escape.
Turkic 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. Passing Deir-az-Zur
Abused bodies thrown...

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Endurance is a flower
A bulb in winter’s depth
A rare-repeated wonder:
A sin we must forget.

In this-world-of-my-creation
In this world-of-make-believe:
Cancer, the death of children,
Are falling autumn leaves.

I see a road before me,
A road I walk in vain,
A road through Trawden, Lancashire
A road that has no name.

All roads lead to heaven
And all roads lead to yo...

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Love smells like early spring
the spirit struggling free from
wintry defamations. A cheerful
time laid up in store. A wordy
declamation of an intent heaven
sent to begin again, again.
The ticking of the clock
replaced by the shady shadows
of the trees saying: “It is time
for the trees to be adorned in fresh, green
leaves.” We are here such a short time.
Seasons come and go but love ...

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(for my father and all his warrior-comrades)

In a field full of spring flowers
I hear a pause in the silent roar
of time as it rhymes its way
to the full stop that ends all
our lives. A hidden reverence
leaps across a rainbow into
my clouded sight, inverse night
falls away, sun appears in patches,
all is as it was before, crema four
in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Above, in the skies, Spitf...

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Tortured by how life could have been
the silent scream lifts her off her feet:
ill-luck, tough-times, bad-choices
some had the benefit of clergy
others that stability wrought by money.
She'd been brought up 'in care'
nobody cared for her like they did
their own kids;
flung from pillar to post
she had runaway - straight into the arms of evil-doers.
Many of the boys and girls  she...

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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
echoes in...

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