“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Hemingway.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881). Courtesy of the Phillips Collection, DC.

When I look into the mirror
I do not see my face
I see those ghosts behind me,
Trailing blood and lace.

Please excuse my misapprehension,
I do apologise for my fault,
...

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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, Finnegan's Wake

catching my death
it's an English thing
a melody
from tepid heat 
to damp cold
trans-(t)his, sans-(t)hat
means nothing to me
no meno'pause
required
freeze, moan, groan, alone
...

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Over four years now since the slaughter
On the 22nd May 2017 at the Ariana concert
22 murdered, 116 with injuries they'll carry~
all their lives. The target, the young and carefree.

Before, I loved the rainy mornings of my life
And I never thought friendly mountain passes
Would ferry me away
But  now happy times are seldom
And the Manchester rain runs away with me.

From holiday beach ...

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The smell of newly mown grass
deserts us in the winter,
stark-naked trees
occasionally glimmer
in the moonlight;
now the solstice is passed
we move slowly back to November
the dimming of the day.
Starved of sunlight
we stagger into
a year we know nothing of,
a real unknown unknown,
like three blind mice
we scurry away
hoping, just hoping,
that the strangled scream
and the ...

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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.

My nose smells the cold which craw...

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Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

The extraordinary ordinariness of the everyday
Day-in-day-out: work, eat, sleep then go away.
Like places at the table becoming vacant one-by-one.
This is what happens to families. They wither, die,
Then sprout anew. But not the same family, and not
The same you. No m...

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A raggedy thin cotton dress
On a little girl playing out
On this freezing December day.
She’s thrown out by her mama
Left out by her friends
Deserted by her dad
Neglected by the world
In the end little Ellie is just sad.
Her school calls the doctor,
The doctor calls the nurse,
Torn this and that way,
Little Ellie's just hurt.

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Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash

Away with the moon
with her shadows and all
those sturdy penumbras
you saw in the ball.
Forget you, forget you
we fall out of bed
and all we 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 bis...

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We are the Êzîdî
We have lived in Mesopotamia for 6000 years
Our souls burn with the fire of Zoroaster
We suffered 72 attempted genocides under the Ottomans
These attacks failed to extinguish our flame of belief
Faith always came back again; always the same
Until now; since August 2014. Now we are
Scattered far from Sinjar.
5000 men murdered
5000 women and girls stolen into sexua...

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I hold her ninety year old hand,
Bruised from the cannulas;
I can see my mum’s thin skin
No longer hides the blood within.
I stroke her hair and think of her
Comforting me when I was the boy
Who ran into her lap spouting blood,
A brush attached to my skull,
With a large rusty nail. 
From then on, I wanted my hair
Cut short enough to reveal the scar. 
And now as we sit together,...

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What church-bells toll to mourn their loss?

What calls to prayer by the muezzin in their memory?

For these young men who kill themselves?

— Only the monstrous silence of the media

    Only the national blood-loss of young lives.

What 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...

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Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. Charlie Dickens, BLEAK HOUSE, CHAPTER XLVII, ‘JO’S WILL'.

In defence of the sentimental
Dickens gave readings of 'A Christmas Carol'-
That universally known 'dream of a book' ...

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The sand across the beach, engulfed by an hallucinatory gleam,
Or so it seemed. The scale was vast, the proportions dizzying.
We laughed that we lacked the ‘Celtic spirit’, risen from the phoenix,
“ But sells poems,” she side-mouthed, with a knowing wink.
“To all those who know a little and understand less?” he asked.
“Aye, them.” She quietly replied and we walked on: skimming stones,
Paddli...

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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,
or 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 betwe...

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Man and mist and fog and dog;
my winter-of-the-heart hideaway,
I stop, wake and sleep again.
Clouds disguise this fall
into the past,
as surely as the grave obeys
the rule of days. 

Everyday, this sheer cliff path
crumbles, just  a little more.
Listen! as these screeched warnings of the gulls,
echo through this thin air.
Seeing you there shimmering,
glistening, as all light fades...

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The sky a pure-pink chiaroscuro that evening

Blotches of an adamantine brittleness

Spread slowly all over the Cheshire plain,

All over the acres and acres of rich pickings.

The quarter moon is waxing to the right

Behind my back and out of sight,

A grove of black, spidery trees

skeletal and strange

Put me in mind of a MR James story

Of  an unrequited remonstrance 

Of l...

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I walk beside you: tall, stooped,
a quintessentially English presence. 
Listen to those flat Fenland vowels
swirl into melodies,
meld with the staccato RP of Cambridge.

So many minor key explorations of sadness;
pull at the scabs of loneliness and regret.
Your songs made plangent
by the melancholic timbre of your voice.

Your abiding mood was irresolution,
the secret cross yo...

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Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

These empty spaces
Quiver, pulse, inside of me
Composed of God-knows-what:
Memory, hope, desire?
Lacking in originality
these empty rooms,
these lingering spaces,
In empty railways stations
Smell the  smoky-smell of coal and steam
Now long gone in this anonymous dream..
I'm caught up in an evening’s desultoriness.
I've seen my 5 children leave ...

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“When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life…We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here pe...

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Christian female fighters take on Daesh in Syria | Mena — Gulf News

Sackcloth on our backs
Ashes in our mouths
Wailing loudly and bitterly
We mourn our dead. 

The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic
Awakens me to the truth
We need more fighters, more youth.

The promises from West 
Turn out to be a blasphemy:
The rich mired 
In such maggoty apathy

Over the mountains,
Black c...

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Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh 

Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake


Thank you for being who you are.
A gift from the multitude of stars
Blessed with both heart and soul:
You shall not grow old.

Who truly knows all the dark crevices of a person?
Not I.
Love is too often hoarded, accumulated, squirreled away:
Like money, jewels, power, pre...

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There’s an end to everything::
Birds in the trees, lovers, music,
Plangent and deep,
Tempests and the flaring in the mind of man
Foreshadowing that terrible realisation
That you too have followed this same cliff path
Of unadorned humanity
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness
Of the day. When mother, father, child, friend
Have swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or despair. Or ...

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Moments of the past do not last,
kicked into the long grass,:
a warm early-summer’s day
in the twentieth century
gold petals of Sylvi's verse.

Days of stormy-autumn
come with flurries of snow
melted by my rich body heat.
In the frozen snow
a frozen child
poor with thin clothes.
She will not grow old.. 

Tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
just un...

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His garden was slightly uneven, slightly tiered,
From early February’s putting on of scattered beauty –
Snowdrops, daffs and crocuses –
A cascade of shade and colour.

His garden bloomed throughout the growing year.
So-many forget-me-nots:
Wild primrose and aubrietia
Then larkspur, delphinium and the beautiful bluebells
Carnations, cornflower and iris

Tier after tier cultivate...

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

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

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You both died, my son, my brother,
And I was broken for many, many years.
I can no longer hide this from myself,
Behind this screen of anonymity:
I have stood in empty spaces,
Walked along the winter beach
Stripped of everything except wind and sand and sea.
And me, I have looked into the summer sky for your blue-blue eye;
And all, all I see, repeatedly, are grey-clouds a-skimming blank lo...

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We can no longer gather
the brightest of England's strands together
Too many were lost in wars
We cannot compensate these young men,
Dead before their time,
Their genes lost
Their bravery and stoicism  no longer passed down
To further generations.
We, descendants of the cowards and the conchies and the lucky, 
Slink again into ordinary life
Stripped of all the dead might have of...

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  George Santayana 

No. I don't believe that entitlement.-
when somebody liberal and polite,
pinches the good school place
from your child. You must curse them.

Right?

When somebody, with more money,
Acquires the house you'd love.
Give them a shove in the back
Spit in their eye, then let them creep by.

But kee...

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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

An...

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No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne

A brother and a son on the edge of a cliff
Walking and talking, they look out to sea
Me? I shout and I shout, but they don’t hear me.
They’re fading, they’re falling, off the cliff side
The sky is as huge, and the sea is as wide
As the moving of moon, as the rising of tide.
This Calvary moment,...

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Hiraeth is a Welsh word with no precise English synonym or  equivalent. I take it to mean a form of spiritual desolation formed by a nostalgia for a home we never had. How life was before the fall from grace and into the realm of mortality. A pre-lapsarian sense of the beauty of the garden of Eden: a time out of time, and a place out of place. 

Hedd Wyn the shepherd poet who wrote in Welsh...

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“The question shouldn't be "Why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?' The real question is "Why aren't all the Christians here?”
― Joel C. Rosenberg, 'The Auschwitz Escape'.

The aim of the blues,
the only aim of the blues,
is not to pass you by~
but rather to aid you to scrape by,
to occasionally get high,
and always to know
On the road from...

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Morning maniac music
shakes me awake 
you, regular guys,
who once brought hope
now mired in hate.

Over the mountain,
clouds scud 
blood on the floor
fades away.

Iron in the soul,
blood over water
all those refugees 
avoiding slaughter,
as we oughter.

Waiting for sanctuary
no sanctuary offered
patriots will take care
of the country’s coffers.

Christendom fallen,
collapsed...

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It was the model spitfire in your front room window
That separated you from that tribe,
We call ‘the old’.

I saw you sometimes at the shops, your movements slow, deliberate,
Arthritic.
You carried a basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind.
And you were always looking behind you. I thought it was the traffic
You feared, but now I know it was the Messerschmidt ME 262 that still had y...

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It is the year's midnight, the old gods have gone to ground,
Their acolytes burnt, stretched upon the rack, hung, drowned...
For century after century the druid - the knowing of the oak -
Was driven out of place, trapped and yoked into subservience
Come! walk with me in the freezing mist of a November night -
Don't be squeamish, don't take fright -
See this land under the moon's mil...

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Stare at the red candle, remember the smell of patchouli oil
With Red Leb from all those years ago. Remember~
On Saturday 4th July,1846 the  London Daily News
Extolled the virtues of this peculiar Indian oil in preventing moths.
Nothing to do with hippies except famished sloths.
India, Afghanistan olfactory-based imagined communities from the past 
Have a grip that wont last. Ad age...

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“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

AS I approach death
I become more careless
Of myself. Instead of looking
Within I look out and see
The unalloyed beauty
Of all the natural world
& of the human world around me.
I admire the majesty of all the ex-cons
Beggars, thieves, all those who just
About get by and spit in the eye
Of the dark-hearted...

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burning a hole in my head
flame into words not said
glancie all around
frown at aa faint dismal distant sound
like a muffled bell
on the road to hell
the past lasts
in accents unused
in dead languages
of the dead sea
in the broken books
and the broken heads
in all the things we left unsaid
fleeing from ourselves
escaping goblins, fairies, elves
landing in the land
of unkno...

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Poetry’s a sanctuary
A refuge of the mind
Words flow so easily
Sorted into line.

The flotsam and the jetsam
Of all these live-long days
Do not hold a candle to
Dear old purple haze.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoDaYjdfSg

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The Scientific Enlightenment spead in the west at no small cost
Imprisionment, blasphemy, censorship, internment, death
Yet the magnificent Secular, Spiritual Sceptical, Scientific Spirit Survived
and slowly tamed...

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No foot marks in the sand

To mark my passage.

No disturbance in the air.

I cry and grieve and cherish

My face immobile, as I stare

Out at stormy autumn.

O! living through November

Demands a certain flair. 

Foggy bafflements afflict me, everywhere,

Pea-soupers some might say,

As I gaze beyond the moon

I swoon into another dismal November day.

https://youtu.b...

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In every mouthful of food
In every look of love
In every chiding and every making up:
This sometimes bay of tranquillity,
This harbour to which we hope to return,
This shelter from the storms and squalls of life,
This goddess of the trailing moon,
Sails with us
as we traverse the wild seas of experience.

The ultimate nature of the fully enlightened mind
is a union of pure love and empt...

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“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

[The Autumnal]”
― John Donne,

The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees have no leaves
outside 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 sisters 
on a skipping rope.

It is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morn...

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An old olive oil press rusting 
at the bottom of a sandy garden
in his occupied territory.
A man lying prostrate,
face down, on the sandy soil.

Not dead but murmuring
about a weight, a burden, something.
I could not hear clearly,
what with all the muffled explosions
and such.

This man, this man, he screamed out
 ‘NOT AS I WILL, BUT AS YOU WILL, FATHER!’.
But there was no other man ...

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Beneath this beach of sand and shells
Such new-found-land frames and hides
Such wide horizons; I walk along the cliff:
Sheer drop upon the windward side,
Embedded trilobites, beneath my feet
Quartz and Muscovite from the granite
Weathered by the winds and waves
Sea-forms outcrops, hidden rocks, caves.
Time carves the face of all mankind
Time shears the skin, sculpts the lines around
The ...

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I glimpse washing
Dripping into daylight
As the moon fades
Wind and rain shower
Trees sway
On this formless
Holy-day.

Light tucks away dream
I see
Children - washed, tired, pale, poor - 
They know it's All Hallows Eve
I know it too.

Tired ghosts forget to rise
Again witches tumble into day
As all magik drains away.
Clogged motors roar
As mist lifts.
Curtains dragged a...

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All those fecking white teeth
On the screen, obscene, even
Before you listen to the words
So absurd they make me laugh
And then there's the sin-cerity
Of the rich in the twenty-first century
Their appropriateness gets me right
Here, in the teeth, tho mine
Are full of fillings and crowns.
Go fuck the appropriate-ness
Of a woke pretence at a sixth
Sense. The extraordinary
Ordina...

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Those rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
Rich funereal language, baptism, burial and birth,
Blossom and harvest, the wise ones, Witan’s children.
The lips of children sing
This life is not enough.

Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
The Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
Are now slave markets for Daesh barbarians.
Children hide amongst the ruins o...

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Home only lasts a few short years,

houses pass on to more

human families. After a time,

we have nowhere to haunt, 

nowhere to return to after a long

day in office or factory. Only the

graveyard for our mortal remains.

Our souls, released from blood and bone,

trip lightly over hills, glide over lakes and seas.

But no return home to the kids and the dog and the tele.

Ho...

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Crocuses, snowdrops push up their merry heads
The cairn on the woodland path marks the unburied dead
In the air,  fleeting wisps of winter, white detrius, skeletal trees
A very occasional dew drop spends time hanging with the weeds.
This man he is an old man, his language Gaelic and rare,
Who in winter stares into the fire, in his isolated lair.

An bóthar ag taisteal na sióga….

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Lorca’s blood wedding
Bodies bleeding
Into lemon-tree-soil

Reminds me of nothing more than the toil, toil, toil
Of life in Al-Andalus.
Priests chanting the rosary
Like it was El Maleh Rachamim
Or the Mourner's Kaddish
(which it probably was, if the priest
Was a Converso, who  changed his religion
To save his life or, more likely, the lives of his children).

The Moriscos, Muslim ...

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Dukkha-taṇhā
Suffering and desire
Twist these unbidden tears
Out of me
Pumping hearts, his parting breath
Human life conducted in the dark
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years.
Craving for permanence
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
But let’s walk 
To the tomb of Maimonides:
Oh! Why do the wicked prosper?
Why oh! why do the righteou...

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

We occupy space
Vicariously
Some days hanging
On by our finger tips
Scared to look down 
Or up
We hover on a magic carpet
Of hope 

That things will finally get better
That Rita will be offered a council flat
But the man says Afghan asylum seekers
Come first, you'll get your turn
But don't ho...

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St Sophia's a Christian cathedral for over 1000 years, now a mosque by order of sultan Erdogan

None of us will survive,
we must strive again,
to seed some fallow earth
with the holy mysteries
of the Byzantines.

Their intelligence mirrored in mirth,
amidst the agonies of birth, and death,
comes the accidental revelation,
a voice that will always sing
of the majesty that was Const...

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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

we fall out of bed

and all we 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 g...

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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 thrills…...

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Gracehoper jigs ajog,
hoppity skippity croaks Mr Frog.
Shhhhh! Finnegan's Awake!

Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
Whine like a man who's out of time.
Casuistry and sophistry cling together perfectly,
Poetry’s more about the wine than the whine:

A true poet makes the difficult easy
Turns water into wine in a half-truncated line,
Caesuras soar, in a breeze  of words 

P...

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A sliver of a moon highlights
the stone house on the hill
full of young people, rushing
hither and thither, a cascade
of sound, a weekend of laughter,
a blaze of eyes. No disguise
so many discriminations:
of face, of education, of class.
We knew it couldn’t last.

I retreated for forty years or more
but I always knew I’d come back
to settle this musical score
moonbeams on youth
a...

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“Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.” Primo Levi, Shoah

The Unwritten predominates, 
The times of wonder gone,
We hold on - the wise women drugged,
Whipped, into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten haunted faces;
Which, much like Munch's lurid, silent scream...

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The wheels of tribulation
Turn full circle,
Seek solace seen by starlight
In a blanket of earth;
A reincarnation
Of simple truth.

On this sacrosanct morning,
With the trees shedding;
Their petals, veined,  
Crispy brown, wind-blown.
I fall into quiet.

I pursue a solitary silence,
A vigil of sorts,
Among a brotherhood
Of loss.
Holding close the solace
Of a vicious wounding
...

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

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In this autumnal mess of illness
and death i am bereft - stretched
upon the rack of reality i confess
that once upon a boyhood day
i saw those pearly blue robins'
eggs, i knew how much i did not
know and i knew for the first time
my family was poor i loved them 
so; more than words can say.
Now I watch my mother cry
after 70 years of marriage
to the orphan boy who knew
the rou...

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This rose for all the world
For you,
These tears for all the dead,
Those empty words of morning tide
This ever-present dread.

Those cloying smells of perfume,
On the dresses of the rich,
This workman stumbling
homeward:
His body in a ditch.

September's moon still shining,
On this old planet's doom,
Her wind and tide conspiring:
A chill invades the room.

https://www.youtube.com/...

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The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold November;
For the patterns in the grass can not last.
And so we take the winding stair 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 who, on the...

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

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

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

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

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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/I3x01BYDmDY

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Too late for us, my love,
icy winds blew our dreams away
before you could even say ‘I love you so’
these empty streets scattered
snow into the icy air of home.

I took you into my dreams even before
you existed, all the twists of life bounded
up with you. But who can see the end of life
in this storm of wind and cold and being young?

Do not tell me that the stars still shine
God’s jok...

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Photo by Cajeo Zhang on Unsplash

This silk road through the mountains,
These sundry stops, and stinks,
This rising into fury,
This slinking into think.

This edge of trees and wildings,
This glazing of the sun,
O! the spreading stench of wolverine,
O! Missy dead by the hand of her son.

This stink of flesh uneaten,
This sighing of the dove,
A game of death and stillnes...

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Sometimes, when we open our eyes,
Like Byron, on the bridge of sighs,
And see what is really always there,
Unresting death,
Moulded in white limestone,
Hidden behind bars;
Then we take a scare
That sends us scurrying
Anywhere
That's not the bridge of sighs.

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Children playing in Manchester 1971 — Flashbak

It was the hot summer of 1959. I was eight years old with a brutalist hair cut and wearing dirty grey shorts. It was 7.30 pm and still bright. I was sitting on the kerb of my road (there were not many cars then, everyone had a bike). Three of us,  playing with sticks and talking, always talking. To my immediate right, was Neil, always scru...

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I am paralysed, silent, stuck
in a shadow behind this mountain
I scurry into a  winter-valley:
Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten:
Rock- hidden fossils, time set in stone.

Evolutions of Medusa'd scare the shit out of me
Even if I wasn't afflicted by a peculiar petrified decay.
she gazed all the way into me
rubbed away something, eternally lost.

Stains dry and calcify
deep in these ...

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The wonder of the just ordinary, mundane
Nothing, under heaven, remains the same.
The glint, the glance, the gaze, the smile,
The unconscious optimism of the one more 
pilgrim mile. 'It’ll be OK’, ‘Live to fight another day.’
Looking down at the myriad of wild flowers
Born to make a carpet on this valley floor.
I look up at the swirling clouds of grey-blue
Each one a reflection of an unass...

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The children were attending, or not attending, interested or bored, on the terrible day of the slip. They may have been thinking about Halloween, but unlikely  given the date 21 October 1966.

Americana was still at a distance from these south Wales valleys.

More likely the boys would be planning to collect firewood for Bonfire night.

The unforgettable  truth was that 144 people would...

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In mid-winter
I picture the rose garden,
the secret garden of my soul,
where all that is good and all that is fine
is written in a tender-script divine
and where persian berries tantalise me
and the dates from al’andalus tempt us all.

The figs are tasty and the wine just fine
chinese herbs help me see
the tibetan plateau in all its majestic beauty
all around me sublimity.

H...

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Waiting for the barbarians is finally over:
Shades of pale shine through the pretty traces of lace,
Revealing in opal-luminosity the essence of  these late Romans,
Their indigo-dream now red with gore on this bloody May Day
Ottoman savagery cancels forever their impossible absorption into the timeless
creation of Constantinople’s holy drift and swell.

Elysium’s perfumed garden of lucidit...

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So hard to please, gentle reader,
so unlike me, loose, thoughts astray
Hot, tonight,  as it was for the poet,
Ovid, exiled from Rome to the Black Sea.
So many exiled nights ago,
Go slow, I whisper, go slow.

Forebodings bring unstoppable shakings 
Like i have poisoned blood,
I think I have stolen your heart.
I never lie,...

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He nailed his voice
to the heart of a mast.
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 
He never felt Oh! Rest assured.
In a convicted, a convinced
a sentimental in-pouring of grief way
he leant to swallow pain and anger.
Just one more inheritance
From t...

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Your skin alabaster cold now

Calluses of decades of heavy work

Lumped togetther with the bruised blood pooling

Around my father's dead eyes.

Oh! I love this orphan of the 1930s

More than words can say. His tortured

Childhood marked out in the myriad

Of white scars that pepper his back.

His life as an able seaman, sailing to Burma

When he was still a teen, sunk three...

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Moments of Vvsion 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

You’ll be reading the stars

After reading the runes…..

Green shades, dappled sunlight

The landscapes of the eye

A life passes by

Music, the primal scream

Modulated, nuanced,

Life is more than it seems.

...

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As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die." Frederico Garcia Lorca

All that remains of the purpled garden

 are the tattered garments of aniquity

resurrected in all honesty

by your hands around your lover’s waist,

eyes shining with tears

as you taste the brandy of eternity

swilling around your mouth

and look at the azure ocean,

so far from Barcelona and the ...

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“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath

When sadnesses besiege you:
at the dying of the light
and starlight illuminates
the end of night.
you will tingle in the frosted air of sight.

Starlight mirrored in the water and the eyes
when h...

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She cried as if she was three again

This competent, clever, caring woman:

Her practice all-emergency work now: depression, deserted children, suicide  dead souls,

Spice, Meth, Horse, Charlie, Booze, Weed, E.

Foul defilement, rape, violence, tears.

People living in fear

Do you hear?

People too scared to fall asleep!! You who live in the comfort zone,

Of pensions, savings, in...

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End of life care,

Look on the label,

you'll find the promise, there

square on the bottle

where big pharma's little helper:

postpones death just a little longer

extends the half- life

but you're still no younger:

sans teeth, sans mind,

sans dignity,

the benefits of big pharma?

Infinity?

https://youtu.be/F4MTHivAcyo

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The wonder of the mundane 
nothing remains the same
 glint, glance, gaze, smile, 
the optimism of that green mile
a myriad of wild flowers sway in the breeze 
look up at the swirling clouds of grey-blue           a reflection of  the unassumed eternity of you.              a side long glance that seeks to cause you hurt 
with the untold gentilities of flirt                                 pa...

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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 there.

A mingling of the finest bouquet
With the deepest regret in a minor chord
The tug at your heart and a tear at your chest
Just flower after flower, n...

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Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
William Butler Yeats, 

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

Some blind folk see the faeries clear,
For faeries are always close or near,
Oh, b...

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So scared tonight, he made me feel as helpless
As I am. He’s looking at me as I write, 
Cataracts on his eyes, panting. No disguise.
The fear he feels at the strangeness of the universe,
The inexplicability of life: the thunder.
But he knows I love him and he takes heart
As I tempt him into a cave under my desk
And Yes! He has finally settled down –
At least a bit – panting still but now n...

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Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
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.
She shows all her shades and shadows 
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme.
Moonlight flows so that boy is now an old man
sleeping in a hammock made of shades and tears.
I...

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I live a November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
through the tunnels,
over wind-swept bridges,
through the sedentary, childless
villages of the old from where I am now
in the land of mine enemies
where hostile witnesses abound,
skilled at shaking fists, digging up dirt,
being respectably contemptible.

Such terrible beauty in these lands of the rich:
wizened faces stu...

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I struggle every day to remain well,
It's an obstacle course, of sorts,
Yesterday, I was ko'd, knocked out,
But before the count of 10 I was
Up again, fighting to recover balance, poise, on my toes.
Today I fast
Hoping I will recover, in time
To watch a film, have a meal,
Get up from my bed. Be well.
It's been like this since cancer struck.
Illness has liberated me from any vestiges of a...

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We have eaten rats during this seige
The Spanish want us to 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 us light, like lamps do 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 new or...

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But in my opinion it was not an honourable
injury that I sustained when I fell in love
With this slip of a girl. Lightning cannot fathom
Her and neither can I.
Monsieur, if you are armed do not show your weapon
I find love completely unarmed.
Feeling opened the way for my eyes to reach to the core of her
her tears usher in a passage of events that elude me now, and forever.
It was...

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Oh! the lack of light, the all-day twilight!
How can a body live through this visual misery?
Even the trees have no leaves.
And the clinging cold!

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, drift, flux and flicker
in this breeze of time,

Penumb...

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Silence the whispers,

Open your heart,

To the whispers of sisters,

To the silence of art.

To the dog's dogged silence,

As he gobbles his food, 

To the deep black of violence

That's humanity's mood.

We leap into action, with a wing and a prayer,

But fade as we realise the power of the snare.

Trapped, woe-begotten, at coming a cropper,

I gather my senses, t...

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there’s only so much reading you can do

so much listening to storms rumble in

from far horizons

we think this earth is solid under us

but talk to a seismologist

then you’ll quake

we carry this dream of solidity

with us always: in hospital, at the grave-side, while boozing at the wake

everywhere our dream allows us to live

hoping, just hoping

that we’re travelling towa...

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Light is a wave and a particle
Too?
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 matter,
Waving to a particl...

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When you came to me, through an open window

All the cracked envelopes of my life came into your hands,

There was nothing in them — just invisible love that you can throw away if you choose to.

You chose to throw it straight back at me, I caught it, we had begun.

You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes

For being alive

I, too,  thought you were desiring reciprocati...

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"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." Bill Shankley.

The morning rain soaks my clothes, my hair, my skin,

I do not care. For I am  not here: nor there, nor anywhere

I look at the mortar between the crumbling bricks in this old

Wall built by the calloused h...

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Words you don’t remember,

wind rising in the sky,

you, bereft of fortitude,

sparks will fly..

……

Coals flare into flames; a pettiness

Of heat. Suddenly replete: golden sands,

Crystal brooks, silken lines, silver hooks.

Glimpsing what’s already there,

I begin to mount the stairs.

Who cares?

……..

A friend you trust implicitly,

a lover you just like,

a r...

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Sky bruised and virulently rumbling                                Oddly composed stresses in the air                              Books remain still as I sweat in my mind exists a wonderful panorama, my senses stray for a long time, we have no more than the bare necessities:
life, intelligence, poetry.

Over the Hills the rumbles are my most ardent pursuers in the intensity of day my hear...

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In England’s fields, few poppies grow,
Chemical fertilisers have seen to that
The land is still owned by those same fey aristocrats
Who’ve plundered and marauded for untold centuries.

On the slivers of common land that remain
The common sparrow still bravely sings,
Scarce heard amid the empty political posturings.
No-one listens to the Glorious Dead. Lip service, instead.

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

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

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

He lost his...

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..."teaching poor white kids about “white privilege” might be at best inappropriate, and at worst stoke resentment." https://www.ft.com/content/f266e992-d5c3-4d76-b709-90467259a428

A raggedy thin cotton dress
On this little girl playing alone
On this freezing December day
In the year of our Lord, 2017.
Trapped in a major British city.
She’s scorned by her mama,
Left out by her friends.
D...

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

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

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

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

Christendom has fallen
collapsed from within,
dee...

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

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

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She's the shadow of a shadow,

She's the smile upon a 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

Her remnants of a dream.

I track her down the by-ways

Of yearning and despair

But at the sound of foot-fall

She'll vanish in thin air.

But in the wa...

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We're perfectly adept at the odd sneering look,
The smutty double-entendre. the undoing-it-by-the-book.
We're top of the class at holier-than-thou
O! how we truly detest continental highbrow. 

We manage to forget that we reap what we sow,
With a smidgen of lying, we can easily disavow
False imputations that we don't do as we preach
We can clean it all up, with a bucket of bleach.
...

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The abiding Jan Hus

with all those Hussites burnt at the stake,

for believing, 

differently.

Fireworks, like blood red poppies,

explode like a nebula of stars;

a tang of smoke clings to our clothes

as the veneer of history swirls into 

mists ….. hordes of Turks, Mongols

Russians and now these bloody Prussians.

Braziers, chestnuts, mufflers, gloved velve...

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Photo by Uniq Trek on Unsplash

Goodbye, dear Ivette, 
you cannot expect
anything from a poet;
who, you know, must trust
to snow and winter’s howl,
to a wolfish life of hellish strife,
which prepares us for nothing more
than the resurrection of the dead:
tired, wild, flowers, dread mountains.
I said survival’s the trick of the day,
words that come in the dark
don’t drift aw...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Gt46aX9Z4

Time kills the taste for life
Time flings us all off the roller coaster of youth
Dumps us in adult strife, saves our life.
Unburied, six feet down and 5-miles high.
We pass over the mountains of the rising sun
in quantum leaps the sun rises from the sea
sky burns, rain falls, days pass.
In the distance the sun fades
into a ball above the ...

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Photo by ryan skjervem on Unsplash

Pulsing pale waves of spray
kiss & bless you alway, 
we patrol these walkways, night and day,
rain seeps in through the hole-in-the-fabric
the silent contusion that keeps us apart.

So scared are we,
see, shivering, ceaselessly.
Streetlights shine,
shadows scurry into mind,
on these concrete estates
of the heart.

Screeching seag...

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 OTTO’S LAMENT

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

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

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A reminiscence concerning a walk on a beach near Kings Lynn in north Norfolk, England on New Year’s Day. It was the middle of the AIDS crisis in the 80s. We’d driven there from London. It just felt that way.

Hanging on, scraping by,
Head above water
I’ll never learn to fly
In this monochrome world
Of winter trees stripped
Like skeletons against the snow-laden
Sky moving in s...

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

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Reading between the line's
a habit of mind
so look again,
out of the side of your eye,
to spy what I perceive,
and half-create,
Aye! The lonely maiden by the five-bar gate. 

Buried in her looks,
as she studies her books,
a rumble of thunder
reverberates in this clinging air
Aye! she's not there, No! she's not there.

This yew-strewn churchyard,
leaves by the side of her grave,
the...

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Keep the light we’re given
when our store of words is fled
empty as a music box
a box to house the dead;

The bridge between give and take
has crumpled into mouse.
a wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie.
a dream we daren't let out.

Our days are a struggle: to walk
 to dream, to think; when the gates of the new
Jerusalem appear we're blinking on the brink.

Will you follow my hear...

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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us... and we drown. TS Eliot

Flat sandy beaches of the Viking coast
this, is, our day of atonement.                                             
I laugh at her intense feel for hot air
fat bodies of the non-working class.                                             
A tremor o...

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Upon this beach of stones, sand and shells
Come with me! See the image of the rolling sea.
This new found land grounded by the tides,
These wide expanses framed by cliffs of sky
On the windward side the mere placidity of day.
Trilobites embedded, beneath my feet
Quartz and Muscovite glitter in the granite
The wind and the waves have had their time
To form sea views, sculpt’d rocks...

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Salvador Dali ‘Little Ashes’

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

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

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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

Gold petals
gleam
for God’s sake!

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

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

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

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

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 Dreams of a black country infect my sleep
 Ragamuffin babes we cannot keep,
 Everything is black, rotted, gone.
 Everyday I dig down to the bone, 
 To the marrow-black foam on a dead man’s lips 
 black thoughts of the black cancers of the soul.

 No home for me beneath these skeletal trees 
 God isa  black star, in a black mood, afar
 The animals mourn the black earth,
 Conemarra, i...

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I know a woman happily demented
She scatters petals as she sleeps,
Sings the songs of the 1940s,
Thinks she is Bo-Peep.

War came to her cake shop
Put her to the test.
Now she casts her mind back there
And lets it rest.

Passes the test of time.
In a concocted rhyme.
Dresses her hair in a yellow head scarf
Says apropos of nothing but the truth:
“The hyacinth will soon be out. I love
...

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Photo by Rainer Gelhot on Unsplash

The quiet spring rain pours down for all of the merry month of May
No quiet spring rains enter my dream as thunder roars across the sky 
I fly high, springing across the night sky, to be with you on this day-of-days. 
I whisper your name to the roof, to the spire, to the hills, as I climb higher 
Such quietly silent places can keep a secret or two 
Fo...

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Photo by David Herron on Unsplash

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 tell him unashamedly how
this friendship across species was Buddhist and Beautiful — 
So, rock me like a good old boy, befriend me like the wind,
You’ll be with me when the gates fly open, when angels drift on in.

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

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

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

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

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

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

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http://www.lateralmag.com

Eight billion humans tear this planet apart
Hating each other
Hating other species
Selfishly destroying
All the secret gardens
Of this world
Man came out of Africa
Killing as they went
Killing for food
Killing for ‘fun’.

In Africa now only
Twenty thousand lions with nowhere to hide
Just trying to take care of their pride
They defend each ot...

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

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

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

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

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“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

The shelling is from the land, sea, air
Gaza's children take the brunt,
the clocks stop on so many young lives
the twelve circles of hell await their tormentors 
those well-scrubbed, expensively educated girls
with their American accents who trot out ...

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

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

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

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Near is very far
Space, time,
Dark star.

Black hole
Wandering soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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