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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DELPHINIUM BLUES

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

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

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I do not drink   

But I am living under this mountain

That might crush the life out of me

Any time, any day

So, I drink anyway.

 
 Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stuttered out

"'Non Serviam! I will not serve!'”

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

To condemn all the big words spluttered by politicians. 

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

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

Your wild androgyny
Mirrored the mirror
Of myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

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

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rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
blossom and harvest, wise ones and  children.
from the lips of children we must learn clinging
to life is not enough.

smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
the Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
amongst the ruins of Nineveh along the same back paths
and alleys that the J...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Milind Ruparel on Unsplash

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

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

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Photo by Kirill Pershin on Unsplash

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

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

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(a continuing genocide)

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

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

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

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FOR SALE:

BABY SHOES  

NEVER WORN

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

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

Yet the total always remains the sam...

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

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

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Photo by Sora Sagano on Unsplash

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

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

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

Strangers in the night...

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

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

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

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Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

The times of wonder have gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten faces
Which, much like Munch’s silent scream,
Degenerate into nightmaredream.
Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,
Falls into disuse,
And all is as it was before:
A flat, grey concrete floor
Krema I at Auschwitz
Emin...

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

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

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

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

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

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♡

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

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

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

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We walk a steep and slippery way,
Mixing senses is synesthesia’s way,
It seem as if I am a chorus in a play.

We feel by measures hidden from the eye
Time borrowed, days wasted, times gone by,
I walk along a steep and slippery way.

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

Dark hold...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rise into ...

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

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all these hatreds
back in action again
like iced-familiars

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

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

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

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

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

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

At scho...

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

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

And wh...

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Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

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

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

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must learn to wonder as we...

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

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

Everyday
for thirty-five years,
I...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I cut the sky, the heavens cry,
I gallop away yet can never escape.
Turkic killers drove me off my land
Despatched me onto a death march
One thousand miles of desert.
Pillagers followed our route
Stealing our goats, our women,
Our children. Passing Deir-az-Zur
Abused bodies thrown...

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

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

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

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

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

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(for my father and all his warrior-comrades)

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

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

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Near is very far
space, time,
dark star
black hole
wandering soul.

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

Scurrying through
the corridors
of the Christie, this Monday morning
early,
meeting Emile,
yes, named after Jean Jacque’s eponymous hero.

Married at the weekend, it has spread,
he fears he’ll soon be dead.
his Caribbean lilt
still
echoes in...

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Headscarf on tight,
as if stuck down with araldite,
she shuffled into the church hall
on this raw, black evening
her lipsticked lips
smiling the compulsory smile
eyes wildly akimbo.
She nodded at neighbours, friends,
world without end.
she’d made the tea, Freda had the kids.
Fred hadn’t even asked her
how the appointment had gone
leukemia they’d said.
She wondered if she’d soon be...

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A slight mist, an autumnal sway,
 celtic, crossed and re-crossed, 
we’re on our way;
a watery calvary 
stares back at me.

Delving into this thick unblemished air
we dead coagulate at Golgotha,
in Palestine, where two thousand years
plant horrors in our minds

from which we cannot escape
despite the divine interventions
of the very best psychatrists — 
we dead capitulate -
thicken o...

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That cherry blossom day,
thunder in the air,
unmiraculously, everywhere:
a stutter in the Gaia,
a low rumble, a terrible tremor,
an unholy roar begins to build and build
and sucks out the very air
total devastation
on that final day
when this very earth was undone
the land began to shiver and shake
uncontrollably, delirium tremens
e...

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Brought up to stretch scarce resources:
food, love, time, hand-me-downs,
he only learnt he was poor after passing an exam
allowing him to attend a school 
which was dug deep in rich kids’ territory;
his mum wondered how she would manage the money,
his dad laughed at him.

The sleeves of his school blazer shot up to his elbows,
while the rich kids had their permanently pristine cu...

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I wish I'd  known from the very start
which mountain the sun came from,
eyes can be deceiving in rain,
fountains, rain-corralled, tempt me into sleeping on your neck to serve a servitude of roses.
in which green bay the rolling sea spies on me, seawater-deep, but  not at all clear,
lagoons on tropical Islands are lost on me.
kind of like fantasy.

I wish you and I knew from t...

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These bloody dead
That debt we owe,
Abide with me,
Never let me go.

That mocking voice,
These clever folk,
Display their wit
In the cutting joke.

That tree that grew
Those shady nooks
This dappled sunlight
These gilded brooks.

For men may come to worse than dust
When love of self is breach of trust:
A moment’s respite means more to me
Than reams and rea...

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pale waves of mist
as I kiss & bless you
we slip along these walkways in the sky
rain seeps through tears
in my heart, so scared am I,
here, alone with you;
streetlights shine,
lab rats scurry into mind,
straight into these concrete estates
of the heart
screeching seagulls shit freely
through black holes in the fabric
time torn, broken-backed,

from Dublin up to Sandy Row,
dead ...

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The hill was steep leading upto the memorial
at 5 am iI was a time of wonder, stepping up
the hill I floated. I rarely stopped to think in
those long-gone dog days of graduation
born between Belsen & Napalm
I rarely thought of others, had no perspective,
'naturally’ I thought of my friends as permanent,
nothing is, of course, and one day one of the best
would set me up for a theft...

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https://flashbak.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-biba-361329/

Shadows behind the sun echoes, echoes within words,
Meanings stuck in transit, Music of the Byrds.
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache.
Years pass, like phantoms, passions of the heart,
Silence breeds silence, the Pink Faeries played their part.
Forget what you remember, giv...

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flow, fly fluent speakers
of the air
your trills & songs
magnify
the every where;

gentle breezes
pass me by, listen,
something will remain
of you

on me, in me, the atoms
which compose everything;
don’t let the putrescent
become the putrid,
remain remotely

visceral; vary yourself
in gentle zephyrs
& in April showers
when you can spread your wings
& sing!

https:...

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A savant, a wise woman, in the greenwood, hidden,
Out of the way, of all those bastards of the church.
Her curses removed revenge from the material sphere
Laid out the alchemical elements to cancel wealth and fear.

We knew the wisdom of the witch, and so did those
Dressed in the finest of clothes. They tried to burn
Her, reckoning that the church knew more than
Our old religion o...

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

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

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Odd, said old snail,
Wherever I’m led,
I’m starting to wail,
A long time dead.

https://youtu.be/3VEpQo2w2tw?si=ELkKkaaba7IWHjIn

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“Nothing that you have not given away will ever really be yours.”   — C.S. Lewis,

a psychic distillation
in the centre 
of this stinking nation denies
the poor’s unfocused struggle
for mere existence
this patient is bound up
in a charlie darwin struggle
in A&E: at 2am, 200 bpm, 219/130
no sweat, he thinks,
the drugs’ll kick in
eventually;
& as the mist lifts,
my heart skips a beat
...

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When I look at Woody
And Woody turns,
And Woody looks at me
I feel free.

This dog with no attachments,
No possessions, all alone,
So unlike the creepy human with
the sound of the fmobile phone

This mid-March day has passed quietly
Only two walks.
God only two feckin walks!
I sniffed a bit, followed tracks,
shat
gave the driver a reminder
“Let me off. Let Me Go.”

I remember...

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"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." Frederick Nietzsche

But now, only the vestiges remain:
So, conduct a forensic examination,
Then scatter the remains:
See the fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail
He's condemned at the root.

A roof for the children,
over a precipice-by-the-way,
his p...

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— “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes — just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lurking around corners — on groggy-doggy, laudanum
gas lit nights, whispering death to this age of the machine,
he has...

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What we love lives:
plastic does not live,
nor does metal commit 
plastic terrorism,
metal does not live.

Y’know skin lives
eyes live,
thoughts live
music lives,
living 
teaches us to live
more fully.

Quantum mechanics has a half-life
Iike dark stars; 
I love the atoms our bodies are composed of;
black holes live
and challenge our stupid linear view
of time and space

You ca...

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Grab a job lot of high definition TVs
great pictures for you, great movies for me,
so many facilities here for our jiffy-jolly fun.
pity the hoi-polloi, the patois-speaking scum.

Four vibrant ghosts came singing here today
rounded up by cops, they sought to blow their blues away,
said amen to the cops' flat soft  purr-burr-drawl
telling black kids ‘you ain’t wanted round here, not wan...

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         Jeremy McKnight on Unsplash

Smiling through tears, a shape-shifting delight,
she mumbles her prayers, turns out the light.
Her dreams are protected, by what she believes,
with the rising at dawn, and the turning of leaves.

Artists paint her aura a deep periwinkle blue,
musicians litter their scores with minor chords
dedicated to her too: in crying songs,
distant laments and au...

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in the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive thoughts, songs & stories,
coil and twist into words, selfish and cruel,
in the wise fool’s daily darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never incomplete;
curdled thoughts, merge and entwine,
in my restless mind, where shadows define a merry nothing;
amidst this chaos, a spasmodic light gleams,
a harvest moon, a friendly old lu...

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Living life alone
requires a sincerity of tone
a daunting prospect,
with no perks, it's a matter of destiny,
no opinions or preferences required
just sitting for hours by open fires
a  blissful state of solitude
with many blemishes
sincerity can be overwhelming,
bouncing words around my head,
listening closely to them instead
you're a long-time dead;
rely on your own judgment,
tim...

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— “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

― D.H. Lawrence,

Such a precise blooming of spring flowers,
sitting and thinking for hours and hours.
My great aunt owned land, married a German POW,
did what she had to do on Pickmere lake
and the old pear trees we robbed, all those cats,
I ...

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scintillating flowers  closely cut
in hollow reeds,
a talent on show, a distant glow:
of green gold flickers on an animal wildness
of whiteness, as a prelude to virginity
uilleann pipes play softly
whosh! above a flight of swans,
naiads and nymphs cower
at this tawny hour, 
at a hymnal of infected poetry, a  primal fever
cradled in evocative text,
squeezing words into an enchanting ...

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I often don't know what to say next
when folk are talking of babies or sex
Isn't life complex at the sea-side?

Phattic communion, a rambling drone,
dad on his deck chair, thinks it's a throne, 
phalllic communion, a roundhead drone,
alone on the beach.

Family out of reach
for fortunate fumbles, a wind-swept beach,
sand in her smalls, she's just out of reach,
Aint life a bitc...

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“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda

In realms of mythic, deep-stoned lore,
excavated memories pass us by, once more,
flimsy whispers graze the mind,
from depths of memory, Ah! treasure-find.

Like shadows of rare-forgotten time,
the dead are kept alive in rhyme,
a daily battle is waged within the blood
forensics of the soul, Noah before the flood.

Visc...

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Airy valedictions cannot span this bridge in time
what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is very definitely mine.
we both can hear the quiet roar of our own new found land
as time drifts to a stop and as we focus near and far
we no longer stand amazed at the hollow rancour of public life
and have no more time for the mere indulgences of strife.
we look too much upon these empty places, the sands
...

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https://youtu.be/0P5jV4lHHR0

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awe struck by the blooming of buds,
a poem born in a far-off land,
of rolling death and unghosted space,
the mind’s asylum, a boundless place;
fulsome clouds of dreams untold,
sunshine weaves its threads of gold,
daydreams dance in twilight’s gleam,
eclipsing reality’s dull esteem;
death squats — a bittersweet fate
demons blast —  at sanity’s gate
scattered moonbeams hesitate
merely hum...

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Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

she flies on high,
hoarding kites in the howling sky,
a dance of death in space’s grace,
ignoring imagination’s rolling embrace
she lingers in fulsome clouds and beams
of light that fuel the daydreams of our schemes;
dementia’s breath, a fleeting wraith,
slowly haunts impotent imagination’s faithless faith
wisps of poetry loom far and wide
mere ...

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Photo by Tatiana Colhoun on Unsplash

Sitting and drinking about how I feel
Realising, fully, stupidities are real;
Clichéd clap-trap envelopes the airwaves:
Subtlety denied, charisma crucified. 
Virtue-signalling flayed. 
Contradictions unrecognized. Yes!
Can I believe two mutually exclusive
Events occur at the same moment, 
Indifferent decades, indifferent continents?
Off course, ...

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Photo by Austin Gardner on Unsplash

Catholic priests crucified
on Good Friday in Mosul,
children blown to bits in Gaza

In Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens see
a piece of pink heaven on this bloodyearth.
built by the Mughals to celebrate God
in marbled, mosaic mosques:

Wats celebrate the Buddhists,
temples the Hindus,
the Sufi saints moved into the future
keeping their close hold ont...

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“Without music, life would be a mistake” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

A waterfall of notes, rising and falling,
Splashing into mind, heart, soul.
Music will never grow old.

Arpeggio series of broken notes rising, descending
Into and out of order. Plunging into minor keys, rising into waves of luminosity.

Notes that compose a chord played or sung in a rising or descending order,
To c...

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It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night
of solid rain, unremittingly wet and cold.
when, suddenly, all the rivers, in all the world, stopped flowing
and all the summer colours leached away and never returned
and the wind it got so cold and stings like hell
and then the sky descends into the air
....and you’re not there.

The blackness is deep, deep and remains everywhere
and st...

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EULOGY

Inspired by "Portrait of  my Dead Brother" by Salvador Dali 

I remember the shyness locked in your sweet brown eyes
I remember how you'd touch my arm when you were too weak to speak
I remember your bravery and stoicism when in pain
I remember how you'd wink to me - meaning 'hello brother, about time!'

And though your illness took so much from you, you'd never complain
But oh! h...

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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Your vernacular usage privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity call’d.
Democracy. No aristocracies of thought allowed to .
Gather it to a greatness: like the ooze of oil. Toil. Toil.
Endless gold and land form the sinews of the coming war you say,
Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law, you sa...

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Tick-a-Tock-Tick
The sounds of the day
Clownishly fooling
But won’t go away -
There's a nightmare to follow
This minor delay.
Yes, it’s tick-a-tock-ticking
We’re all going away.
For the old witch is flying - 
to the edge of the moon 
and the war is beginning
So it’s boom, brother, boom!
Starlight is a-raging -
it's all over so soon -
but now it's recorded on bloody old Zoom....
So e...

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Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

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.

This charming man says:
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 o...

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/pnJM_jC7j_4?si=c7BmF...

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Photo by Ignacio García on Unsplash

I think about your poetry everyday
Exculpaltory, vitriolic, only occasionally,
displaying a sort of empty cleverness,
rarely fulsome, written to impress a Medici, I guess,
Confessional in part, no better than it should be,
I learn from who exactly makes your grade 
and why, well, that’s a different story.

We all know money is involved
many coin...

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No matter how we reinvent this writing malarkey
or, how, precisely, we feel about its sig-nif-icance,
there is a wondering within our hearts,
a hiding between the folds of our soul,
so much more than a mirror
mumbling at us, incessantly,
“there’s a story to be told,”
but all we hear is:
‘fear fear, fear terror, fear anguish.’
Untold stories circle within us
as we try to live, secretly.
...

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In this mild mid-winter of splintered selves
Trees blend into silhouttes; and I see the elves
Whose shadows transformed perceptions
For milleniums into creation. And all the world of
Getting and spending grinds to a halt,
For this one holy day. Death may be far away or near
At hand, we have no crystal balls. We must put
All our heart and soul into conveying the simplicity of love
To th...

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Some decisions:
reasonable, rational,
wipe out
sentimentality, lingering romance.
Time sends me spiralling back
leads me right back to a field
in high summer
in Cheshire, England
the road’s far enough away
to grant us silence
provisional, yes
passing, of course,
still silent, we share a look
Chris stares at me, as if deciding
something momentous,
I glance away from this man
I’v...

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In the Apple Market
your south London twang
accompanied the many undulations
of time

Your wild androgyny
mirrored the mirror
of yourself

Skimming off the water
of childhood,
like a dog shaking off rain

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

Your songs were the water
I needed
your terse verse
spread underground
watering imaginations
music like a rainbow.

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This city in the sky soars by me,
Charms and wonders, she rarely bores me,
Kites in her vibrant skies,
Before my lonesome eyes.

A mesmerizing sight for awestruck eyes.
The wind howls and dances passing me by
Whispering secrets in the suffocating night,
Yet gentle river Thames, flows without end.

Awe-full days and awful nights
Churches, trains, begin again man,
Symbols retreat,
S...

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Now the Turks have come
to continue the killing spree of Daesh
Sunni tribes and foreign Salafists
Conspire to slaughter the Ezedi, even in Lalish,

Our mouths expel a hidden heat
It is the soul of the Ezedi.
Never before has the sun
Filled us so full of tears

Though we have been persecuted
for over a thousand years
Since the killing-wind of Islam arrived
To steal our daughters, kill...

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Kicking down a back street
In foggy London town
My head up above the clouds

While on my brow’s, a frown.
My eyes observe the shining,
Rain splatters down the street,

A child is begging piteously.

Her head lies at my feet.
My rage at bare injustice,
Is a torrent in my veins,
The police are worse than useless,
No faith in them remains.

So I stand and ring St Mungo’s
Some charity...

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an old olive oil press 
rusting at the bottom of a sandy garden
in this occupied territory.

children lying prostrate,
on the soil
murmuring.
about a weight, a burden, 
something heavy

we 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 there, no fathe...

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My friend killed himself
Far from where we grew up
In another country
In another century.
He died by means of a train
Dividing his body into two
Unsymmetrical parts.
There is an irony in this:
Chris had raised over a million
Pounds to preserve our steam 
Train heritage.
The nuts and bolts of his death
Were dealt with by the coroner.
I torture myself with questions.
I think of his fin...

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"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." (King Lear, 4.1. 37–38)

Veils of disguise,
shield our eyes
from the nakba,
from the human wreckage

Journalists targeted
children ripped apart
people degraded
picked off by snipers
the cruelty virus of today
will have its way
will return magnified

Spit it out
signs and wonders
on this blood-soaked la...

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Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

Oh, the vastness of emotions hid deep within,
The edgeless landscape where words cannot begin,
To echo the depths of each mood’s sway,
In the ebb and flow of life’s uncertain play.

Grief, a tingling numbness, so hard to define,
A heavy burden that weighs on my mind,
Its depths impossible to convey,
Its presence felt more strongly with each passing d...

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There’s a body on a mid-winter beach, again:
Bloated by sea water, battered by waves,
The skin an indeterminate grey, the DNA
Gives it away: stomach distended, flesh declined,
Soul departed, a package of hope left behind,
With seaweed dancing from her open mouth
That once kissed another, a mother, a lover.
Spoke words of comfort to the dying, bereaved:
Religion indeterminate, nationali...

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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 mistreat
them.

...

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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 more day with them
When they were little and I was young:
Telling them stories, singing songs,
Getting along.

https://youtu.be/jvLtyyBRITo?si=NzLkYEFo4xQupgxH

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