Unlock your heart with the grateful dead

The original code is nearly always 0000

Pull off the shackles to unlock your hands and other necessary appendages.

Rotate your heart 90 degrees counterclockwise 

Look out of any window

Squeeze your heart.at what you see

Set a new combination by turning the tide.  

Choose a magical number and never-ever hide, never-ever part

NEVER ret...

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especially in mid-winter

I picture the rose garden

the secret garden of my soul

where all that is good and all that is fine

are written in a tender-script divine

where persian berries tantalise us

and dates from al'andalus tempt us

and the figs are fine and the wine just fine

and chinese herbs help me see

the tibetan plateau  all around me

where all that is, is being ...

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The hill was steep upto the Ashton memorial

At 5 am  iI was wondering why I was walking up

The hill. I rarely stopped to think in those

Long-gone days, just did what came

'Natural'. I hought of my  friends as permanent

Features in my life. Time would tell me that was

Not right. Those with money and charisma would

Be successful. The rest of us would struggle. I'd

Rather stru...

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The 1997 collection from Manchester poet John Marks. He was a part-time tutor for the Open University specializing in 18th cent. European literature and 19th cent. British religious history.

ISBN 0 903610 20 5

SHELLEY

Low-slung August sun shadows stonework into the 
 deeper shadow lands — 
 phantoms adrift on the wide Sargasso sea — 
 and so unruffled, these lawns, 
 and all this ...

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WE let others kill the elephants

In our name we are letting this obscenity

Happen. Again and again until the elephants are gone.

It is easier than doing something

That might embarrass us or tire us

WE fear being accused of

Creating a scene by screaming out

Man's cruel derision to elephants

Who we already know mourn the deaths

Of those they love. Scientists are discoverin...

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The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. Luke 16:19-25

Take the earth’s resources from the poor.

Rob them. They can’t fight back.

They have wives and children to feed.

Yes boss. Sure will boss.

Let them do all the work, stretch

Them on the rack of survival. Grind them

And beat them and terrify and mist...

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finisterre is no longer there

the end of the earth has gone

from being occasionally poorly

with sprightly attempts

at good visibility;

she entered a decline

she was last seen

veering off across

the broad atlantic;

her funeral was at sea

her replacement

the comic Jacobite FitzRoy

has sought to claim lineage

with Admiral Robert FitzRoy

HMS Beagle's capain

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Hushed, stuttering, sotto voce conversation

Of women of a certain age squatting in a cafe

Like tigers in a rage. Red in tooth and claw, 

They defend their young with barbed remarks that

Carry such sage implications

That the ripples of misunderstanding extend far and wide.

Of their dark past little is known, except mothers

Perform many daily tasks whilst with joy and grief

W...

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Jim Morrison would throw a massive party at the cemetery in Paris

Where his mortal remains were buried one bleak summer day in 1971

He was the man who came back through the door

To attend his own wake and to read more extracts

From Joyce's work-in-progress Finnegan's Wake

Anybody who has passed through  the wall

Will be changed,

She may be wiser buthe  will be unsure of everyt...

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Before the Reformation

The Christian's duty was 

To carry out the instructions,

For the whole of the community, 

Laid down in Matthew chapter 25 – 

That all Christians shall:

·         Feed the hungry

·         Give drink to the thirsty

·         Welcome the stranger

·         Clothe the naked

·         Visit the sick

·         Visit the prisoner

.          Bury...

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Philosophy or poetry?

Plato preferred philosophy,

He would being a philosopher.

Poets, of course, are  liars by profession,

And endeavour to give an air of truth

To airy nothings.

Poets, like children, personify ideas

Through extended metaphor and simile

Imagine in more than one dimension

A golden age, an Arcadia, which poets have invented...

Is bewilder’d by these sp...

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Moments of Vision are fading away

But a magical moment is, here, today;

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

After reading the runes.....

Green shades, dappled sunlight

The landscapes of the eye

A life passing  by

Music lacks the primal scream

Modulated, nuanced, 

It is more than it seems...

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never-ever seen one

of these newmen

are they like newts only longer

or do they lack semen

anyway I've never seen 'em

newmen: what do they do

take their kids to see the oldmen at the zoo,

go to work when they don't want to

spend all their time and all their money with their children

I do

is a newman always young

never tired, knackered, crotchety

is a ne...

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The clock ticks so slowly, my mind spins so fast

Imaginings hover just out of reach, how long can a minute last?

01.32: A dialogue in my mind as I try, fruitlessly, to unwind. Imagine if I could send you a screen-shot. A screen-shot of my mind. I'd save all these words. No. It'd be absurd.  You'd need a screen-shot of time.

01.48: I'm going to oversleep, I'm going to be late.Tick-tock. Ti...

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Shifting shades afflict the ghost of David Rodinsky

As he returns to his room in Whitechapel, London

For one last look at the Aramaic and Hebrew texts

Which provided him with the hex of disappearance.

Where he came from nobody knows. Was he Jewish?

Yes and no. Was he British? Who knows? Not he.

Certainly he lived there once: ate, slept defecated

Until ...

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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

There statues will remember me when I was young

And I remember them all under the river Neva.

In the fragrant silence between the Tsars and Putin

I have changed form

No longer a young woman...

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As we, again, set sail for Byzantium

Be prepared.

The Turks

Have spent 500 years wiping out

Every trace of our 1500 year occupancy here

In Constantinople.

Our voyage will be a long one
Full of adventure, full of discovery.
Covering much time and space
Yeats set out but never arrived

His spirits flagged:
But St Sophia waits!

Surrounded as it is by minarets

This cathed...

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The old pub on the corner lost beneath a motorway junction; stands

in a similitude of snow now. Its windows are gone the way

Of the church spire from whence the müezzin calls a different faithful to prayer

The bronze statue of an eminent Victorian child abuser

Glowers over what was once his property, his factory, his people

There is wet snow in the air.

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Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC

An Anglo-Jewish volunteer - did his patriotic duty

Joined up on 4th August 1914

He was one of the First World War’s greatest poets; 

A fearless soldier who won the Military Cross for bravery,

The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.

He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire

Collectin...

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At the pomana - the death feast - I missed him most

But I am relieved to know that under the stars of this cold, pellucid night

The ghost of the gypsy soldier is not without a home

No Romany man can live alone, our women are not alone

We carry our home in our hearts, our women wear topaz and dance

No, we will never-ever part: the man I killed is part of my family

The Go...

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“I done me best when I was let out

Oh yes I did: whistle-blowin, liftin the lid

I think I always knowed it'd go wrong

Nuffin fer a laugh, nuffin fer a song

A hundred seas could separate you

From me, our sea of troubles,

Fear death by drownin

Or one in a thousand years of nights

Will parcel me up and remove me from sight

The cubby-hole under the stairs

Was for wettin t...

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An old, Welsh witch once said this:

"Taliesin, don't be sad if you're alone
On Ynys Môn you have battled mightily
Despair will bring us no advantage.
No man sees what supports him
Courage is invisible. Study The Mabinogion
God will not violate his promises.
We must suffer in Gwyddno's weir
Where our stand against the invaders
Will end in defeat! We must learn how to fail
Being sad will...

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Winter on Mount Sinjar in 2014,

By the Christian calendar.

That year lasted forever:

Such a long, long time,

Our mouths expelled a hidden heat

The soul of the Ezedi.

Never before has the sun

Filled us so full of tears

Though we have been persecuted

Since the killing-wind of Islam arrived

These particular torturers arrived in the night

Stole our daughters, killed ou...

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From last November's quiet recall to duty

This piece of graffiti on a dry-stone wall

His headstone verses are writ in water

Drawn by the eyes of his future daughter.

Lichen-lines-love-and-only-love-slaughters-this.

And all he knew was the deepest blue of Lapis lazuli

A  good man’s eyes are written in the blood

And mortal love will always end in death. Time

Weathers the...

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the soft and steady silence of a baby

breathing

the gaze which tells you all you need to know

her footsteps tender in the snow

the pitter-pattered blast of rain upon a window

considering all we do not know

or understand, we stand hand-in-hand

under the beautiful harvest moon

setting off too soon, determined not to be late

seeing her lost in thought by the five-barred gat...

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What church-bells or calls to prayer by the muezzin

For these young men who kill themselves?

      — Only the monstrous hypocrisy of the media

Can call attention to this national blood-loss of young lives

No mockeries now for them from politicians who do not care; 

      Only the voice of the mothers whose sons are no longer there —

Only black and white boys' photograph...

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With the golden eyes of a pharaoh –

My lioness extends her paw to me -
Her forebears brought down rhino –
Under the sweltering skies of the high veldt:
Lithe and supple, fleet of foot,
She covers this northern turf
With ceaseless leaps and bounds.
Her loyalty is unbounded by species,
Affiliation is to the death.
No treachery in her world of smell:
No subtleties of intent

No pretence...

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A river runs through us
the river of life
With its twists and its turns,
and its banks out of sight
...early morning
mist, fractured light,
scatters
these dregs of the day –
Away, away!
The flotsam and jetsam
of the years passing by
Swirl in the whirlpool
float in the sky.
the azure blue
heat-haze sky
childhood, all gone by
Down in the depths,
murky and drear,
Listen to the heart...

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In memory of Malcolm Lowry

No se puede vivir sin amar” ..

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
An...

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The roses of Picardy are blooming,

Red like the blood we will spill,

The sun shines onto the yellow wheat

Which drifts in the summer breezes

Sill, we face the Saxons, brothers-in-arms,

And this quiet landscape will soon explode,

With all the bloody gore of war.

We swore we would survive.

My tommy gun spat bullets for days

My hands bloody, burnt and raw.

Sweet Christ w...

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Tick-a-Tock-Tick

The sounds of the day

Are clownishly fooling

But it won’t go away -

A nightmare to follow

This minor delay -

It’s tick-a-tock-ticking

We’re all going away.

Such a story to swallow -

When the old witch is flying -

On the edge of the moon

And the war is beginning

And it’s zoom-slugger-boom

The starlight is raging -

It's all over so soon

N...

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He was but what he was, nobody cares

Or knows. We forgot easily what he might

Have been. And all thought falls into

The remains of this tear-filled parting forever.

Dreams I had, come and dreams I had go,

Leaving nothing but the faintest

Impress of my hair upon a pillow.

Shadows flit across this static air

And the sun-soaked dust rests here in mid-air.

My dreams rem...

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Poems that do not rhyme often

Do not help themselves - considering -

Poems that deal with obscure subjects

Such as by-gone times and dead people fail

To engage the attention of those who'd.

Choose to focus on supermarkets, special deals

Buying stuff online and being a very BIG part

Of a WhatsApp group that crosses generations

And sexual orientations. .

If you think you'r...

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The red-gold glow

of stormy autumn

leafy-mist lights this late

October dawn recalling him,

curiously,

to the design hidden in words,

which swirl like smoke

rising from a fire, from a pipe,

tended by an old man in a black suit

the front of which is bedecked with medals

time-ridden, he is missing, gone  missing in 1913;

this fleeting meeting with the present

...

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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 the traditional routes to oblivion - hanging from a tree, opening the arteries, being free with the pills

A closed garage and exhaust fumes, jumping off high-rise flats, bridges, cheap thr...

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A bride's beauty surpasses all

The love farmer can say

I said she was a human person

And that destiny is the fruit of love.

When the crowd gathered and saw her,
They cheered and sang songs.

When love is a glory and men

Shake hands

All bodes well.

There is no war.

We all have a country

And a heart beat of dreams

Music makes us cry out loud
And love is curtailed

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We have eaten rats during this seige

The Goths want us acquiesce to Christian suzerainty.

They never tell us why we should do so

We have our music, poetry, wine, gardens and our beautiful women.

And beauty gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.

Makes one wake up, notice a sparkling jewel
A pearl from the deeps of a distant ocean

A rarity of dreams:

A passi...

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Κύριε, ἡ ἐν πολλαῖς ἁμαρτίαις περιπεσοῦσα γυνή,
τὴν σὴν αἰσθομένη θεότητα,　
 

Oh Lord, my God,  I fell asleep

No longer in a state of grace

No longer a beautiful woman

Beloved by the Emperor,

But a harlot, like Mary Magdalene,
A sister of the Christ

Dazzled by the myrrh,
By an acre of sorcery, by a terrible moon
By a time of the month.

Nothing is too soon.
Give me your t...

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The snow and ice have melted long ago, already the grass returns to fields of

  gold.  So why am I still shivering? 

The seas and rivers change their courses, and  flow awry. So why am I turned to stone? 

Faeries and elves stir up their sisters into

  dance. So why cannot I move my legs today? 

Immortality seizes man's imagination. So can I  live another day? 

And why do I c...

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Curlews cry, an Aegean sky: a boat
lifts and falls.

The heat of noon, a lethargic
gloom, she's tracked with light this star-struck night.

Moon-shadows cast, it's cool at last, this sweep
and swell, this road to hell.

The ship's becalmed
with false alarms, this attic night of bone-white light:
no palimpsest, no Grecian zest.

A sapphic wind balloons the moon, fans the fog's
pe...

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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 good times

Times languorous,meandering puppy-walks,

Times of plunging in wild abandon

Into the freezing Irish sea.

Walter Scott suspected

That do...

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None of us will survive,

But we must try again,

To seed some fallow earth with the mysteries of the Byzantines

Even, with their mirth, amidst the agony of birth, and death,

The accidental revelations,

Of our passing on the wing,

A voice that will always sing

Of the fall of Constantinople:

Of the mysteries of birth and death,

And of all the unalloyed impermanence

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The New York Dolls with their wicked innovation

Gender on a bender, so no more hesitation.

Galileo, Newton, the republic of the mind,

Seeing is believing, so tumble into  line.

One dusky-dusty-time-consuming evening long ago

The empirical method was revealed by the melting of the snow:   
.

Time’s fatal munificence, the old ebb and flow

There's a long gestation

In ...

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Shading monochrome - grey then black, never white,

This light is outta sight,

 - the end of the beginning is near

Creep up – come,  listen here.

On the street the white boys are sleeping it off

In sub-zero, cough, cough, fucking cough.

We, new Russians gather– no gulag this

Just alcohol, heroin, crack, piss:

Kosovans, Nigerians, Kenyans,

At  the fence, pleading, ple...

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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, s...

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As the light fades ever faster,

And the temperature drops

– I am recalled

To this dialogue with the dead.

My grandfather, Jack, had his

Last pint of mild in this pub

I am sitting in before

Embarking for France in 1914...

And his first one back in September 1918:

2018 Jack - alive in my heart - always known, never seen -

Not a line of his writing have I , not a wisp of...

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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 magic that once was:

Wicca, witch and wizard

In the whispering wood.

Now, in times of turbulence,

Of movements in the blood,

The devotees of the vacuous,

The frightened and appalled,

Watch silently as their children’s blood

Se...

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Janissaries were the eldest sons of Christian families in the Ottoman Empire who were taken as infants from their families and brought up as strict Sunni Muslims who often became the cruellest soldiers in the Ottoman armies - but not always.

I'd love to wander far from this meagre time and place.

Back to the ashes and the dust of what I remember

A besmirched, a frightened, a human place: ...

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The simple vision of a child

Will make us see that time is really only borrowed

And that what we perceive is more than half intended

Wild obscurity blocks our view, until the curtain’s rent in two

And too many seconds become too few.

Persecution sets the heart on fire

Memories coagulate like blood,

Gather around the brain

Pass through the arteries of the heart

Where...

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The bell jar of innocence

Will, heaven forfend,

Create a world

Without end

Look! Look! Just around the bend.

Such faery stories he'd believed. 

Now in the cramped minds

Of these lean-faced men

With heavy stubble

Who shuffle down the road

Nothing happens.

No looks are exchanged.

Just mothers bending down to warn their children.

One old man falls down flat,

...

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The sting of the wind
On this cold black night
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work

Down the mine
On early shift.
This  connection, now, is
Deep in my blood
Deep in what I mean
When I say words
In tones that rhyme.

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

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Now we’re on the Border:

Tranquillisers are no good for what is to come,

Nor are religious beliefs of any sort.

Divert your mind, the manuals say,

Space and the collected tranquillity of bees,

Appeal to me

Speed is now slowed to a drone; a quill,

A quintessence of thrill

For these bastards

Are only minutes from take-off

They say

Nothing impresses like force,

And...

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Near is very far
space, time,
continuum,

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 Jacques’ eponymous hero,

married at the weekend, it has spread,
he fears he’ll soon be dead

his caribbean lilt
still
echoes in my head.

we smile and laugh a...

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Strange fruit hanging 

From the poplar trees

A shame on America

And a shame on me.

Sprung shadows surround me

As words fade like the harvest moon.

Today clouds cavort in the sky

Then sink into the flatness of an American horizon

A pallete of clattering silences

In the drift of Continental armies.

Mourning for the Union dead.

The drift towards liberty began before t...

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There are so few Jews in the world

The Unrighteous among the nations

See to that. Maybe 15 million.

Only 1000 in China. One in a million.

See who receives the nobel prizes.

Look at the contributions to scholarship

To learning. Jews employed by the Spanish

Crown during the Inquisition. Conversos.

But everyone knew not to call on Saturday.

Jews employed by the Ottomans to...

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Old river Thames

And the Essex marshes

Fugues in free-fall 

And the ending is starting

When two become one

On an ancient swansong

Sung in a minor key

Will it drag you along?

And all for your lover

And so-little for yourself.

Femininity in this bluesy mood

Leaves us on the shelf.

As the tide goes out

Forever

Like the dark stars in the sky

And the friendl...

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(dedicated to the all-women brigades of the Kurdish YPG ܚܕܝ̈ܘܬܐ ܕܣܘܬܪܐ ܕܥܡܐ)

Some say we can only play our part

(Most promise money, a very few art),

Nobody outlives the roles they play

Or so they say,

We must continue day-to-day.

Or so the complacent westerners say.

We? We choose another, older, harder way,

Cast our ashes along the crucified way,

Exposed ...

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Everything fades in time

Memories, birds in the trees,

Even these dreadful expulcations 

That old druid time plays the same deceptions

Plays havoc with the mind

As we reach out to touch each other's skin

And take that leap we hope 

Will find us somewhere human.

Sardonic wit, the sceptical glance,

The silent prayer

Converge into this plea

To wear your learning light...

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The days of stormy autumn come

Mother, child, brother, son,

Memories, like dust, infest my eyes, 

Swirling, like a Turner sky,

Like water under wind,

Mixing greys and blacks and whites and blues,

Chiaroscuro, tussling these monochromes

Into the piebald heavens above.

Below, girls in mucky summer dresses,

Boys with unruly mothers,

Fathers absent, except in dreams,

W...

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The clock is stuck at twelve o'clock,

Grandpa’s shade is fleeting...

The cat and dog are sleeping...

The moon shines on her silvery lake,

The phantom are unweeting.

Outside the rain is thin and cold,

A frightened child is weeping.

Gobeen-men with their tick-tock-tack,

Are slithering and creeping.

So, let your brain run riot,

And do not stop,

For all that is. Is not...

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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 the one –

the Buddha knew –

the flowers of the valley

the grasses of the plain

the body, a holy place again

eyes shine with the unbidden light...

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Ice in the wind this storm black night

Stings me awake

To walk the sodden way again.

Again this ex-communication

No black candles, no witches’ curses,

No lifting of the gloom

Just shivering in a room.

Imagining an iceflower

Shimmering in the heat

Of a living body

This genesis of the heart

Tells me

‘we are not who we think we are’

 A phoenix made in time ...

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With the golden eyes of a pharaoh –

Her forebears brought down lions –

Under the sweltering skies of the high veldt:

Lithe and supple, fleet of foot,

She covers this northern turf

With ceaseless leaps and bounds.

Her loyalty is unbounded by species,

Affiliation is to the death.

Recognition is fixed in her world of smell:

No subtleties of intent, no deceptions o...

Read and leave comments (0)

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, 

Atop on the topmost twig, — which the pluckers forgot, somehow, — 

Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. Sappho 'One Girl'

Linked arms, looking into the future, my daughters,

In your 'jamas, bought from Sunday markets,

Off the Thame Road, and your beautiful young faces.

This picture of ...

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When your eyes are full of tears

But you cannot cry

When you think you’ve conquered your fears

But can only sigh.

When you rise to the occasion,

And hold yourself together,

In rain or shine or stormy weather,

And your heart beats fast,

And faster still,

As if you’re running up the steepest hill.

Memories tumble out,

And stop you dead,

And you cry at last,

For...

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I used to carry three of the five up to bed

They’d say ‘Daddy, daddy, please stay’

But I would go away and work.

Suddenly we were semi-detached

They’d flown the nest, gone away,

And what I wouldn’t give

For one day with them

When they were little and I was young.

Telling them stories, singing songs,

Getting along.

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Alan Turing (1912-1954)

Truth is hard to find – the years ahead, the years behind,

Yet find it we do – in snatches – on days that go by:

On days when nothing is decided, on throw-away days such as these

Farmyard smells, christmas bells, and all the frumpery of lawns.

Children connect you to the truth: tooth faeries’

Dreams, goblin times, gobeen men,

Ca...

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moments of the past 

kicked into the long grass

a warm early-summer’s day

May: gold petals

For God’s sake, 

stormy-autumn

later, flurries of snow

melted by

body heat

frozen snow

tumbling-heaps

leaves  

red, gold, brown

crisp-crackle underfoot

old ghosts lose their threads

lose their heads, again

fragile, thin

thin-like skin

echoing the savage-f...

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All his music drove the silence in between the notes. At the age of 35 Amadeus Mozart fell ill.

His final illness was spent writing his Requiem: his meditation upon death.

He was nursed by his wife, Constanze. Was he poisoned by Salieri?

Who knows? Salieri was proud. The sin of pride is the sin of sins.

It was this sin which transformed Lucifer, an anointed cherub of God,

The very ...

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Only the freshest human tears

Gently boiled, released into shallow crystallisation tanks,

Then harvested by hand and finally rinsed in brine....

And so it begins: the separation

Event from consequence, hurt from tears

Tears come unbidden like the harvest moon

To ease away the heavy veils of hurt

Separating the  salt from its medium

Separating the screaming air of death

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POETRY FROM HELL

WARSAW GHETTO POEMS FROM THE RINGELBLUM ARCHIVES

Moishe Kaufman: My Last Request

My Last Request
by Moishe Kaufman

Peacefully, I want to die
on the breast of my beloved
when the red hued sky,
sadly mourns the dying day.
2
When the sun sinks in final flames
tired, weak from wrestling death,
then I’ll want to be with her
and sing for her with my last breath.
...

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So you think.you can tell

Heaven from Hell.

Two Hasidic men

With their ringlets and all

Playing Pink Floyd

Against a Jerusalem wall.

Wish you were here.

Washed over by waves of invaders

Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion.

In modernity men and women

With no flesh, no fat on their bones

Crowded onto boats in 1946

People fleeing the Shoah - the catastrophe -

Ca...

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All that we wished for

Left undone

Marriages fail

Families disperse

All that we have

Is stolen from the earth.

All epics and rhapsodies

Silenced so

The hour of our birth

Is

The hour of our death.

Icicles, stalagmites and stalactites,

Preserve

Us, the bog poets.

Everybody laughed

When the cars

Finally suffocated

The sprea...

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Morality matters

Muttered the manic ex-military

Whilst eating sliced bread, buttered,

In a sanatorium near Lymington-on-Sea

It is spring 1918, you see

Before the Big Push or the Battle of the Bulge

Recuperation they call it

Between the waxing of the moon,

And the rising of the sun

An armistice was agreed between Gregor and his demons

A sort of peace achieved by glari...

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In this well-furnished home

On a modern estate

A child

Like Tom-All-Alone

The crossing-sweeper

Is weeping herself to sleep

Night-after-night

There is nobody to notice.

And our stupid, cruel society

Thinks this is a family matter

And privacy rules the roost

And the little child is left

All-Alone until something terrible

Happens.

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Come tear me to pieces, come tear me apart:

Open my arteries, open my heart.

As we struggle with history and desire.

Light a fire upon

The darkest, most drearysome of nights.

With that visceral spark of intelligence

That struggles free of the bounds:

Of rule and convention

Flames flicker into light

Lift our faces to the sky

  Rescues our sepia souls from the need to d...

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It is the absence that appals

Locked windows

White walls

Chemotherapy exchange

Deep night invading day,

Has that bird called Hope flown away? 

I walk around muttering,

Now the background buzz

Of machines

Is hushed by nurses

My mind is a stone

Sinking

My heart a frozen block of ice

And nothing, no nothing, will suffice.

Time flees to young oncolo...

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Away with the 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 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 la...

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An August poem with moths

Buzzing around the oil lamps

On the maestro's writing desk

He flicks through his well thumbed

Collection of erotic 

Prints. His wife thinks he is writing.

He isnt. His mind has moved far away

To when he walked the streets of London

Town

And bought a fuck for half-a-crown

The clouds followed, massing like soldiers

And now his study & recrea...

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Mary Queen of Scots,

Alone in her room,

In Fotheringay

Awaiting execution

Yes, death comes too soon.

Still she prays for absolution

Using the old rite - 

Catholic she remains -

She who was Queen of France

Speaks to herself in her mother's tongue

French

Robbed of a throne by Elizabeth:

Mary Stuart 

Ponders the ironies of love

The emnity of nations

The we...

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The majesty of dogs impresses us –

Their solitary solidarity - the pack

Yet, above their grey horizons

There is a promise, lingering….

Often, these days, an ending

Is assumed, designed

To glorify the story of our lives:

Making children, seeing things, being here

Listening, to our hearts’ desires

We realise only yesterday

The sky darkened ...

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As I lie in this standard issue bed

That's too small for me

I hope that the traffic still slows

As it stutters down Eccles Old Road.

Three weeks fighting

This overwhelming infection

I'm lucky to be alive.

Nurses wash me out of hand

Truck no nonsense

Silence enrols the mind 

Dashes into line

Consider the future. 

Meander through

The ashes of the past...

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If you open your heart to the misery

Of those who live without hope

If you learn to walk in another’s steps

 And learn not to avert your gaze

If you give all that you have to give

And see with the eyes of a child

You will learn

Not to count on your money, my friend,

Its value comes and goes,

Instead, count your hours and count your days

Your minutes, seconds, breaths

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The sweet smell of marijuna in the air

Young guys of all sexes laughing at and with  and at each other

You have to learn to mock yourself

My pretensions, my silences, my backward glance

We have to leave the young to enjoy their youth for they shall inherit the world and all that is in it shall be theirs

So crazy to hold on to what we must pass on

Like pass the parcel or chinese w...

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Well I wove the rope and I picked the spot
Well I struck out my neck and I tightened the knot
O stranger, stranger, Im near out of time

Richard Thompson

This is no country for young men

Men who will not bend to every fashion and whim

Men who cannot abide the gig economy, zero hours contracts

All Thatcher's legacy, a poisoned chalice.

Men do not like being lectured to, hec...

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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 a meagre remnant of what was:

Wicca, witch, in whispering wood.

 Now, in times of turbulence

The devotees of the vacuous

Will turn and burn the witch.

For, in the lore of the wise,

There is no disguise

We see to the rotten heart of man.

Our ...

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Rivers of melted music

Fuse into sculpture

Around this old oak tree

The moving air vibrates. 

Sound, shape, sightless shade

Spill into my sinner's heart,

That place apart that comes

And flutters on the wind

And is no more.

And so I settle into the coolness of thought

Follow the stream, just as you follow

Your heart. Run and you'll never

Stop running,

Mired in...

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I still walk beside you:

Tall, stooped, a  quintessentially English presence.

Listen to how those flat Fenland vowels swirl into melodies

Melded with the staccato RP of Cambridge. 

So many minor key explorations of sadness;

Pulling at the scabs of loneliness and regret.

Your songs made plangent by the melancholic timbre of your voice.

Your abiding mood was irresolution, your s...

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Thoughts like an ox-bow lake

Begin in the shallows

The current pushing us along

Into the depths, cloudy with sedimentation,

Thoughts, feelings, speculations, hopes,

Where we can wallow if we like.

As the river creates land out of water

Taking us back back to wallow in the shallows

Once again to meander from the main

Stem of the river -  cut off,

Creating a free-stan...

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Working late on a Sunday drear

The sky is flat like German beer

Iron-grey, black Russian in patches

Blown away by Dostoyevsky's flashes, 

Desperate remedies appear in the mirror,

Look in the pool. Look in the heart of you.

What do I see? A foolish old man looking

At me. The clip and clop of horses 

Times ong gone and passed

Lost in the scramble for money. The chimera tha...

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...est in Arcadia ego...

This early morning air, pellucid, refreshing, soft

A time of hush, just before that cacaphony

Of hope that marks sweet May - the lifter

Of moods, the harbinger of hope, the visionary self. 

Filled with all the quiet majesty of an English breeze

Stirring the leafy canopy as the sun begins to 

Follow the shadows of dappled zephyrs

And now serenity her...

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The Scientific Enlightenment came at no small cost

Imprisionment, blasphemy, books burnt, the Inquisition, internment  death

The Secular, Spiritual  Sceptical, Scientific spirit survived and slowly tamed Christian fundamentalisn.

Now, a new constant vigilance is the price we pay as unreformed superstition seeks to re-establish a new dark place in the west - truly it is difficult to f...

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Lurking around corners - on the groggy

Gas'lit nights that followed so many

To their deaths in this, the age of the machine.

See the tender white crosses-row-on -row

Oh! so-many wind'swept nights of swirling

Leaves and creaking branches, I caught

The whiff of Lady Fortune on the breeze and pleased I was immeasurably.  More fool me  

I introduce myself to darkness - a...

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Tobacco spills into her stained lap

She squirms tightly on the plastic chair

In the church hall this dull November evening.

Where to pick up the pieces from? What to do with them?

The serenity prayer, she cannot remember the story from the chair.

It gets better they say, day-by-day-by-day.

Outside no-one shakes and fears like she

Inside a kind of mad jollity grips her

And g...

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“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

catching my death

of the cold is an English melody

meaning travelling from heat to freezing cold

culture, religion, sexual orintention, trans-sans

sans everything

this means nothing to ...

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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 so old that he cannot li...

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Turning statements into questions is annoying?

So, actually, murdering people is, like, wrong?

I think therefore I am?

God can prevent evil but chooses not to?

God cannot prevent evil?

God is dead?

The repugnant is desirable?

Beethoven silences YouTube?

There are two genders?

Women are more flexible and adaptable than men?

We must learn to acknowledge our own prejudic...

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Light is a wave and a particle
 At that?
 And it does not matter
 If a particle’s partiality
 Parts with the classical concept
 Of duality:
 A wave can be a particle
 And matter, or matter not.

The behaviour of the quantum
 Is unpredictable in the extreme
 So firing particles through a mountain
 Isn’t all that it may seem?

Like position and momentum,
 Or like photons and ...

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Words cannot echo mood,

It's impossible to convey

The tingling numbnesses

Of grief;

The semi-detached daze

Of depression;

The tight closing-in upon oneself

That foreshadows pent up tears.

The fear that accompanies

Nearly everything I do,

Meanders like a Mississippi ox-bow lake,

And can take years to return as a flood-tide

To knock me off my feet,

And gather t...

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Bone marrow transplant

Au Paris

Brutalised 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 tusks begin to grow

From blood and bone.

Limousines shudder

Yams decompose

Draining the body fluid

Into the sewer beneath.

Tke-tke.

The analysand

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Who'll cancel his undergraduation?

They'll sneak a plot of consecrated ground for you - 

All those muttering priests, your brothers - 

Chasing their blues away

On this, your burial day.

Across these empty fenlands Puritan melodies float

Echoing the empty whiteness of the sky.

All those unseen congregations,

Unrelenting in all their brittle affirmations.

Be...

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It is no time

Since we said goodbye

My son and I

His silent goodbye

Like the darkening sky,

His blue, blue eye,

As time passes by,

Is with me alway

As night follows day

Ashes that drift

And silt in my head

I know he is dead

He is dead

He is dead

It is no time

Since we said goodbye

My son and I

His silent goodbye

Like the darkenin...

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There's an end to everything:

Birds in the trees, music,

Voices plangent and deep, sweet

Tempests flaring in the mind of man

Foreshadow that terrible realisation

That we too follow this same cliff path

On nights of luminosity and in the utter desolation

Of the day, when mother, father, lover, friend

Have swooned towards the moon in triumph

Or despair. Or when those steps...

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          Pulsing pale waves of wet mist

Kiss & bless you & I

As we patrol these walkways

Highrises, in the sky

Rain seeps through the holes

In my heart,

I know, love will tear us apart.

Streetlights shine,

Police scurry along in screaming cars

Passing by these concrete estates

Of the heart.

Where screeching seagulls see

The black holes in the fabric

Time tor...

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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.

Too much grandiosity

Dims the soul

Makes us old.

I hear the wise ones pleading, pleading when on fire,

So much screaming, as the flames they get higher:

Hebane, belladonna, mandrake, datura

All of these, like mescaline, see right through yer...

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Low-slung August sun shadows stonework into the
deeper shadow lands —
phantoms adrift on the wide Sargasso sea —
so unruffled, these lawns,
and all this frumpery.

So much then has time
and its opposite
done for me.

It was along these lines that we walked, it was
beneath these swaying poplars we kissed;
and now memory passes strange lines of time over me.

All, all I can think of
...

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The truth, slippery as an eel,

The truth, so hard to find -

Grasp it and it's gone

We carry on:

The years ahead, the years behind -

Find it we do:

In snatches, on days that go by,

On throwaway days, such as these.

Or in thick-set night

When we fight

Not to put out the light.

Not to put out the light

On skin as white as snow

And smooth as monumental alaba...

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This the place of recovery
This where she began
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was a warrior,
An Amazon having fun.

When sky was black as gold,
She was dragged across the sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold

Lost in the stinking slave ship hold.

From the slave ships and from factories
Amids...

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At your wake i touched your alabaster skin

And remembered your warm, open heart.

Walking behind your coffin on this 

Freezing Dublin morning, I remembered

You as the warm fire we had gathered around

For decades. Broken-hearted your family

Displayed that quiet dignity, amidst the direst

Parting our all-too-human hearts can know.

In this stinging air, our tears reflected

A...

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