Dallying in the evening wild, studded with barbed wire,
My mind takes a turn for the worse.
Oak trees help me flee to the world I need
My mind is soaking up this new year’s eve 
Your slow gaze onto this solitary page
Releases the frame of my bondage to the world
Now only the mind can release the tension of the moment
My imagination leaps, frees my broken body,
into the dream of transmi...

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Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death. Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Gripped by the foreboding
Of a nascent dread
We watched as our liberties
were stripped away
Whilst chains of transmission
Decreased the space where some felt  safe.
Forced many back between four walls
Appalled at their own weakness
The worried well can go to hell.

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The times of wonder gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
 First Peoples neglected
Their land abused.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten faces
Which, 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

Eminently ...

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Halal and  Kosher
Ritual means of slaughter.
Sanctioned by religion.
Such savage butchery.
I swallow my frustration.
Stick a smile upon my face
Make a face to meet
The faces I meet
Pretend I'm neat and tidy
As we do. But not tolerant
Not of this unalloyed cruelty.
We are in a shocking state of blue-hypocrisy
If we let people do, as some people do..
Look in the slaughter house
All col...

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“He who kisses joy as it flies by will live in eternity's sunrise.”
― William Blake

It is easy to walk away from faith

Harder to climb back on board

The ship of faith as it navigates these stormy seas.

The scientific sage of this secular age

Associates blind faith with barbaric ignorance

Murder, in the name of God.

True faith links us to childhood innocence

To Wordsw...

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His headstone verses writ in water
Draw the eye unto the fact of death
Nothing left, bereft. Except the words.
Lichen lines that love-and-only-love remembers.

All we knew was the deepest blue of
This good man’s eyes. It is written in blood
That mortal love will always end like this. Time
weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat palimpsest
of hieroglyphics which resemble not the zest
...

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Photo by Mario Rodriguez on Unsplash

 The extenuation of time into rhyme
 The devil’s in the detail 
 A confusion of contusions, a microbial illusion,
 A stretching out of meaning so that
 As soon as sad-so-sad covid rears its ugly head
 A crying game ensues, tears shed
 Mood into an Aztec-under-the-volcano
 Cacophony of rumblings of stars, bowels,
 Owls’ uncertain stutterings ...

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Goodbye my Sufi friends and lovers
Nothing exists to connect you to me
Tayyar is honourable, full of good intent
I will rise from the trap of the world
I will not ask you to be my servant in paradise
You are my dancer, I am your poet, we laugh
Together on days when we taste the rain.
When you sew, I  watch you and fall in love
Again I remember our first meeting
Amongst the sweet smell...

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Beneath this beach of sand and shells
I see the image of the rolling sea.
Such new-found-land frames and hides
These 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-formed outcrops, hidden rocks, caves.
Time carves the face of all mankind
Time shears t...

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This whiskey priest
Grits his teeth at human fallibilities,
Frailty is just that  I drink the stuff,
But with a holy glimmer of delight
No guilt, no sleight of conscience
Or of hand, just the taste of heaven
The  more often I drink Fuisce Baile,
Moonshine,
plain n rough
The tougher I become. Rum..
Whiskey, old-Irish say, Uisce Beatha,
Means the water of life in the Gaelic,
And in Druid...

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The red-gold glow of stormy autumn fades into winter
As  leafy-mist lights this mid-December dawn recalling me, 
in-curiously, to the design hidden in words. 
Words whirl like smoke signals rising from a fire, from a gun, 
from a life tended by an old man in a blacked out suit 
the front of which, bedecked with medals, is time-ridden.
 He is missing, gone missing, in 1914.

Before...

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No mobile phones,
In the zone of the dead,
No wi-fi signal 
Excommunication
Instead.
Even his venial sins were left unsaid.

Such a blither and a blather
Of the blessed signal
Emanates from masts, alone on a hill,
Veering from Porn Hub to Politics' thrill
                               God! I told you before, I'd much rather be ill.                                      
Is telecommunic...

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In rings of bright water
The days of stormy autumn come
Mother, child, brother, son,
Memories, like dust, infest my eyes, 
Swirling, like Turner’s skies;
Like water under wind,
Mixing greys and blacks and whites and blues,
A chiaroscuro, tussling these monochromes
Into the piebald skies of heaven above.

Below, girls in mucky summer dresses,
Chase boys with unruly mothers,
Fathers...

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Jim Morrison would throw a massive party at the cemetery in Paris
Where his mortal remains were buried one bleak summer day in 1971.
He was the man who came back through the door, bored enough
To score an attendance at his own wake, and to read more 
From Joyce’s work-in-progress The Finnegan’s Wake.
Anybody who has ever passed through the doors of perception
Will be changed, changed utterly...

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n.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Wednesday, September 28, that a proxy of Syrian fighters has been deployed from southern Turkey To Azerbaijan.

 The war has now begun
 And will end in the holy city
 Of Jerusalem.
 And many will burn their eyes
 Before she is done, or dies.

 The Turks refuse to accept the Armenian genocide of 1915. Now, in 2020
 Armenians are, again, bei...

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Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

 Ghost writing the sting of the wind
 Shivering spring day
 Reminds me of my
 Ancestors who rode
 This way
 Battling this same wind
 As they trudged to the pit
 On early shift.

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

Words that would’ve
 Carried meaning s...

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Lonely as a ghost
hit by a train,
nothing's
quite the same
again.

six beers in
this stinkin' sin of despair
contaminates the very air;
rain smears and soaks
everywhere, I turn

to face the future
i need stitches, a suture,
to hold the pain at bay

the ventricles of the heart
never dreamed that we would part
 

https://youtu.be/zprRZ2wFQD4

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Moments of the past do not last
days kicked into the long grass
A warm early-summer’s day
gold petals bloom today.

stormy-autumn comes
later, flurries of snow melt in the air
into a body without  heat

Frozen snow above
tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
used to crisp-crackle underfoot
like old ghosts who lose their threads,

Druggies:  their fragile, skin
eyes like slit...

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Do no harm: sin, or virtue, are secondary to this injunction. Deadly sins of poverty, hypocrisy, abound. Don’t let red anger blossom in you. Nor black despair. Keep blood in your cheeks. Do not let desire dictate your life. But make your heart beat faster; spread the laughter. Do not promulgate the short fuses of envy or jealousy. Vanity offers only a pretended life: stripped of gentleness and str...

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Look at these lines – fishing for compliments –
Hooked, they drag us back.
Leave us squirming on the dry bank:
Palpitating, bruised from the fight.

Removing the pin from the mouth
It’s a painful business. But worthwhile.
Who’ll throw us back in to sink or swim?

Alone, we wriggle to the edge then flop
The shock of contact leaves us breathless.

It’s hostile here. But we feel. We ...

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Christianity being their greatest foe. In A. D. 634 they slaughtered thousands of Christians in Syria. Monasteries were ransacked and the monastics and the people were put to the sword. Beheadings were considered the preferred way for executions of those who resisted them.

rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
rich funereal language, baptism, burial and birth,
blossom and harvest, wi...

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We live and love among other worlds,
I expect the end of the world,  
If it comes to find me,
Into what, I do not know.
I may write a poem to mark this transition
But I may be silent. Which is a relief. For some.
I think that I have the means and inclination
To make the attempt to be better than I am.
Though I know my wife is better still than I can ever be .
It is not easy for me to have...

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What remains is writ in water,
writ again in the purpled gardens of the mind,
viewed in the tattered remnants of adversity,
unresurrected, in all honesty, undead.

Hands around your lover’s waist,
kissing her waif-face,
eyes shining with tears,
mouth tasting of brandy,
swilling around memories.

A ghost dog sits on the gravestone
looking at the azure ocean,
remembering the battle for ...

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Y'know what I mean?
The BBC battering on about the redundancies
Whilst ripping off millions of over-75 OAPs
They're milch cows, uncomplaining, easy meat, 
For the most-part old poorish decent folk having to fork  out for BBC licences
Meanwhile, on the BBC radio pretend socialists witter on about minorities, again,
While collecting thousands of pounds an hour
Before shifting out of Salford b...

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Salvadore Dali PORTRAIT OF MY DEAD BROTHER 1963

Two days before he died
At night, in the rain,
I shared a cigarette with my brother, Pete,
We talked of nothing, of everything,
I knew I loved him,
But not so much.

Death, he said to me, isn’t anything,
Nothing more than
Bird-song when you listen
Real close.

I told him he was a bad liar
And had he been talking to those doctors ...

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I can hardly speak but I try:
my brain falls silent, still
it is the dying of the day
when a ferment of tenses
leads me up many cold-cut cul de sacs..

I linger on a moonlight-figure
palely mirroring the sparkling frost,
she’s gone but never lost.

Suspicious of the silences within
outside is wild, the colour of blood
soaks into the sky.
A barge meanders down the river
on a ...

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Melancholy's lack of zest
is written all over the palimpsest
of a young medical doctor-poet
who died at twenty-five and will, to some,
hardly seem to have been alive at all

But look at his writing
Johnny Keats and the footloose Cavaliers
lived for poetry, music, kisses, tears
eschewing self-pity or suicide
they tried their best to stay alive..

No crossing of the river Lethe
no seeki...

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this is a satire of sorts
as I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into tunnels of my own making,

over the wind-swept bridges,
I force myself through cold, wet air
through the sedentary, school-less
villages of the old and moneyed classes
into the land of my enemies
conservatives who conserve nothing

this is wh...

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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 ...

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

For example, I might say.one fine evening when I was sixteen
Not stuck in rowdy pubs with dazzling chandeliers,
But walking with her, carelessly, by the river..
We promenade under beech trees
Everything smells so good, so fragrant,
When you are young,.the air is so sweet
You close your eyelids and we kiss;
The win...

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When I look into the mirror

I do not see my face

I see the ghosts behind me,

Trailing blood and lace.

I excuse my misapprehension,

I apologise for my fault,

I'd love to fully explain

My face, my persona, my whole gestalt.

But I aint a good prose writer

I cannot see the end

I  always hear the thunder,

It is deep within my heart,

Trying to tear me apart

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Red-gold glow of stormy autumn
oughter-fade into winter
as leafy-mist lights this late
November dawn recalling me,
incuriously from insomnia,
O! the design hidden in words,
like smoke signals
rising from a gun, from a fire  drawing fire.

Tended by an old man in a black suit
the front of which, bedecked with medals,
is time-ridden by an absence missing,
gone  missing, in 1916.

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" Beautiful spirits on underdogs sides."

You two had the temerity to trust to justice

To plough your young years into uncovering justice

Even for those for whom criminal justice had thrown away 

The key, trusting that everybody deserves a second chance.

You were learning together with men who'd never

Been offered empathy or kindness. Men who now look

To your example of tre...

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Sky and sea and land, three old amigos,
overlap like love and hate and fate, but then……… the dreadful daylight starts of unkept promises and broken hearts….god’s dying to fix you up, y’know….but, unfortunately, those damned gombeen men conspire to extinguish every ounce of youth and beauty in poor folk, whether in this life or in some dreamy city of t...

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Charlie and I walked our post-cancer walks
Down this narrow stretch of green in the city
For a full decade. Now he's gone, I must carry on.
We aged together, blended into each other,
Man and Dog. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
But his life was shorter than mine. That afflicted me like
A sentence. Very few minutes passed
Without me thinking of that.  He connected me to the
Pac...

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They'd tried to take the sting out of death
A grassy meadow, secluded plot, trees
Which are often exactly what we need
But not now. Now we needed a New Orleans
Blues band blasting out the fact that life is short
And can be glorious, but not for Jim. No, not for Jim.
Too many desertions.Too many lapses in care.
Too often nobody there to help him pick up the pieces.
To begin again, it all be...

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The love of adultery is a sin of man

Devised to ruin the goodness of woman,

It is a temptation that must accept

The full springs of your tears.

As you, who bring the rain to wash us clean,

And to make us fresh again,

Bow down to the sighs of my weeping heart.

You altered the realm of being

By your incomprehensible incarnation.

And now the followers of a desert seer

Di...

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Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light
it’s not a rose it’s a beautiful buttercup, slight
like the golden marvels we used to decide
which side our bread was buttered, when granny was alive.

Was the yellow reflected on your chins?
No, these flowers resemble wild roses — poisonous to humans –
helleborus niger macranthus –
 enough to tangle any...

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Yeah, I were a soldier me, constantly, for years, still am now I’m on me arse. All these gobshites with their feckin poppies. I see watermelon smiles — to the ears, not the eyes, unexploded ieds — women-with tanned arms walking for miles. Men with children on their backs … jumping into the sea without thinking, to avoid me, the army. Mebbe someone, some being, somewhere, will save me? From what? M...

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The clear gaze of another day
Takes me wherever I do not want to go
Up hill, down dale, tumbling a-go-go.
He is my best friend, since I was a boy,
The wave of his kind eyes
As he says goodbye, his thin hair, his worry lines,
His photos, removed
Under the wings of the laughing birds
I comment upon what is past and gone
He  focuses upon the afternoon moon
I drink beer, he smokes some skunk
...

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Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
Warps and wefts waste away
the body afflicted with decay
O!, I say,  the hey-ho way, of the live-long-day.
Whatever has lived
Will wither, languish, and decay.
Time  pines us away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget
which itch of memory did the damage.

No transubstantiation this,
no move into immortal bliss:
this work of re...

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This old bloke pushes t'other old bloke in a wheelchair

Down a dreary Salford road, avoiding kerbs, talking

Always talking, talking of nothing, talking of everything:

What it takes and never gives back. The load.

With wheels of fire and halos running all amuck

These two desperados meander along past

The pound shops and the bookies and the booze 24/7ers

They know all t...

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For the Alberts & 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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When the poet ceases singing
There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music,
Tones and timbre, plangent and deep,
Tempests flare in the mind of man
Foreshadow that terrible realisation
That you too have followed this same cliff path
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness-drear
Of night. Mother, father, lover, friend
Swoon towards the moon in triumph
Or despair. Or ...

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His headstone verses were writ in water
They draw the eyes unto the fact of death.
Lichen lines love-and-only-love remembers.
All we knew was the deepest blue
Of a good man’s eyes. It is written in our blood
That mortal love will always end like this. Time
Weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat palimpest
Of hieroglyphics which resemble not the zest
Of pumping blood. Stones do not r...

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She doesn't look, she sees
The black hole. Heading for her.
Scared of unfounded stories
Circulating in her head -
A brain-tumoured-tainted, untrained structure -
Cells multiply, you see, wildly
Deep sea squalls fling
Seas against concrete. Defences breached
By unaccounted time. Rhymes come & go
In this muddled mind of mine, multiples the arrhythmia
Of this, my broken heart, apart from th...

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Rose, the loveliest of pagan namings,
see clear to another day
The past a foreign country:
Where we gave so much away.
Happy trails
Landed us in Golden Gate Park
San Francisco

Palo Alto was a world apart
Looking for a revolution
And this was it:
No empty-headed technologies
No silicon in the valley
Just a box of rain

Such a long-long time gone by.
Such a short-short time to be th...

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Before ideas or ideology
Comes flesh and blood
My brother'd be 65 today
Blown away at 41.
No swan song.

Before I've thought of a thing
It's happened again somewhere
To someone
In this strange universe
Of isolated broken things. 

When I'm drinking
Sometimes I think
All is safe and cosy
I know I'm fooling myself
And it's taken a lot of booze
To get so far down the road of illusion
...

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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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I am not the man I think I am.
On the wild and rocky coasts
On these isles by the sea of shame
Mists roll in off the Irish sea
Soak these shores with hardy flowers
to bloom in crevices, cling to fossil rings, 
too like vermilion skies, the lips of women,
to huddle within sound of summer laughter
Druid priestesses daub their menfolk
with mud as they, too, battle modernity
in all its Roman...

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Third tier anesthesia
In a locked up north,
We keep the life we’re given,
Our store of words aint fled,
Belief? Empty as a music box
Providing housing for the dead;
The bridge twixt give and taking
Has crumpled into dust
And for the cowering people — wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties -
Survival is a must.

We struggle to talk as free folk,
We no longer dream of the new Jeru...

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A moment plucked from a past
That cannot last
The tone and timbre of a long-lost voice
Heaven-sent, her voice in my head,
No longer alive, no longer dead. 

The recollected smell of burning gas
On a cold winter's morning, in, maybe, 1965,
When she was so glad to be alive, and kicking.

I am rudely yawning as she warns me
Not to rush
To take my time.

I do not mind her warning, as I s...

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Dead men lie the same

Silence is their game.

Their sleeping is a metaphor

For a  life lived w'out shame.

Memorials of stone,

Such a public display

The soul's on its way.

A soul set to roam,

A long goodbye.

Metempsychosis,

The transmigration of souls,

The Hindus' voyage of dharma

The Greeks crossing the Lethe.

Reincarnated endangered species

With  souls fre...

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ONLY CONNECT

Bracha1 year ago (edited)

"My beautiful mum was suffering from mental illness/heavy depressions back in the eighties and took her own life in 1989 at the age of just 26, when I was only one year old. Today I was going through her old record collection and found a little paper inside The Cure’s Disintegration album sleeve. It was an old handwritten note by her with some...

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Manchester's home to me
Connects me to the past
My grandfather Jack
Set off from here
For four years
Fighting in France
A dearth of romance
whilst in the trenches
but he were wed
on his safe return
despite all his pals
being dead.

Manchester, forever connected, ironically,  to Ariana Grande
And the 22 dead and 59 wounded.
Manchester were never right good at submission.
Ask ...

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I am not diverse.
I am English
And a man
Old
White
Father of four daughters
Two sons, one dead.
Three beautiful grandchildren.
Agnostic, questioning, stoic
Almost as good as a woman in bearing pain.
Cancer survivor
Sepsis survivor.
Loyal friend.
Earn my own money
Share money, willingly.
Reader
Delver
Walker
Drinker
Thinker.
Not diverse at all.
Nor divine
Nor lucky
Nor unluck...

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Now I don't hardly know her
But I think I could love her
Crimson and clover  — Tommy James & The Shondells

Daughters oughter be careful
Of lads who call their home a 'pad' - 
Cos that's just sad.

Flaxen-haired girls must learn to twirl
Their curls so fleetingly -
Well that's as maybe.

Rowdy-as-the-wind lads can do a ton on a BSA
But they canna say 'I do' - 
No matter what the...

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A whole life spent out of kilter
Every day out of whack
So when the storm hit
And everything went kerflooey
I was ill-prepared.
There’s no going back.
….
Now, if a little dreaming is dangerous
Is the cure to dream more?
O! I wish you were here:
On this sad, autumn day
When all the words
Just drained away

Leaving me aghast.
With nothing to say.

……

This inner city cul-de-sac is...

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 “Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” — Carl Sandburg, from The Atlantic, March 1923. 

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There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music, family. friends,
Plangent, too deep to keep,
Tempests flare in the mind of man
Foreshadowing those terrible realisations
That we too have followed this same cliff path
Guided by nightly luminosity, stuck in the sheer darkness
Of the day. When mother, father, lover, friend
Have turned away and swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or d...

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Baffling how I came to be a pauper, he thought,
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not a real home. Everything had changed.
Belfast, The Falklands, Belize, Operation Desert Storm
Are with me every day.

Like many men who wore the uniform he's reluctant to see a doctor
“I’ll be reet” he says, “after a bit.”
Where he ser...

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Words cannot echo mood,
It’s impossible to convey
The tingling numbnesses
Of the grief I felt today;

The semi-detached daze
Of continuing depression;
The tight closing-in of the dark,
That stark foreshadowing of art..

The fear that accompanies
All that  I do,
Meanders like an ox-bow lake,
Can take years to breach the gate
To the dangerous flood-tide of suicide..

Depress...

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The wind outside my window
His soul alive just by my chair
A friend you trust implicitly,
A lover who's not there?

A reckoning, that’s obvious,
Tonight?

A memory that’s been falsified
A woman here today
An empty cot at eventide
Who'd say?.

This never-ending circle,
Beginning is the end,
The man who you once trusted,
A friend?

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“I know the life of the world as it is now is not living, it is a bad process of dying.” DH Lawrence

You both died
And I was broken for many, many years.
I can no longer hide 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.
I have looked into the summer sky for your blue-blue eyes...

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                                                               Chicago POW camp

History written by the victors
An anthem for the Union dead?
The winds of change
Have blown away legions
Of southern poets and artists:
No longer published, no longer read:
Not all of whom owned plantations
Nor approved of slavery. They just wanted to be free,
Free from the Yankee behemoth to the north.

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Exhausted your contemplation of misery? 
How much is it worth your soul to know?
Evil exists, persists, when it benefits you.
You hope he is just an adventurer who deceives himself.
But, remember, the devil has uncovered himself in his power.
We are all sentenced to death.
Condemned. World without end. 
Are you magnanimous, generous?
Full of the milk of human kindness?
Neither am I. 
Is ...

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The ease and simple grace
Of this woman who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied.

Her echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still whispers in my heart,
We’re never alone, never apart

Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
Speak of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments of the heart.

Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And it’s a sin to mock ...

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Bewildered at all the things she  left unsaid
serendipity, chances cut dead:
wise enough to play the fool.
on a vicious January night
put out the light, and then put out the light
memory cuts through this taut cold
slices ugly, like a knife grown old and blunt.
I let the future unfold
in signs hidden by an iron fog,
a life lived in vain..
a black hole in time.
everything the same? 

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hear the waves murmur faraway,
leaves tremble in the cold morning air,
saplings shed golden leaves
over the brown branches vague birds
sing softly
girls laugh in the distance,
dawn has been and gone
light reflected in still water
brightens the sky
countryside pearled with the firstfrost,
high mountains glide into view,
beautiful vague hills of cloud,
this aura is my messenger,
my mood...

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Photo by Edurne Chopeitia on Unsplash

In my 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,
take another sip of whiskey
stroke the back of my young dog,
Who feels the spirits in the breeze,
pick my book up from the stone cold floor.
Reading ...

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Flash of remembrance on a start again day
the crumbling of memory, time fades away,
the dominant discourse is undoubtedly drear,
the rolling of thunder, the future speaks clear.

Mesmerised masses accept news of the day,
never question those who hold sway,
woke intelligentsia virtue-signal it's true,
they tear up the debt that we owe to the few.

So many people lost, lonely, confused
do...

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One fabulous fabled night,

Deep in the greenwood,

A famous wizard gave us a story without meaning:

Or so it then seemed. At the time

I had parted with my half-secret self,

My twin, embedded in my heart,

But the wizard's prayer awoke me in thin air

Drove us apart,

Tears stained my cheeks. I was no longer meek and mild.

No longer a child.

My heart was broken, like that ...

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As the light fades ever faster,
and the temperature dips
a foreboding grips
as I am recalled
to this dialogue with the dead
that continues in my head.
My grandfather, Jack, had his last pint of mild beer 
in this pub before
embarking for France in late summer 1914.
And his first one back in November 1918.
He remains forever known, never seen.
Now businessmen and women
sit playing with ...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ryJB-FF_Jg

Rain off the Pennines
Soaks me through
As I look for you
In the tower blocks
And the few old terraces left
In this dirty old town.

I am reminded of women
In pinnies, with hair up, 
As they scrub at their step
Before leaving to clean
The houses of the rich
Up on Eccles old road.

Her dazzling smile
Spreads over mile after mile
And...

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Forget-me-not blue,
Blue like an Alaskan blueberry.
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 fallen autumn leaves. 

 I see a road before me
A road I walk in vain
A road through Trawden Lancashire.
A road's that's not the same..

All...

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From the towering shadows of cloud

A flash of the evening star, a gap through

To the star above the vaulted sky: high so very high,

And faraway, high windows allot a view

Of pinpricks in the blackness. Stars await 

Their conversion to black holes of dense

Compact immensity. Swallow you whole they could 

Spit you out before you were born. Still water

Reflects the stars. Cont...

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Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

Colours blend in a staccato of sound. Synaesthesia's all around.
Underground: a steepling slide into unconsciousness.
Mixing senses, genders, dreams, moulding the male, it seems,
In this hat-trick-hubris-chit-chat mode women don’t grow old.
Poets bleed, speak-in-tongues, fiddle with their fingers, long
To compose the lyrics of a song.
Pain is ...

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The grave was so full [of other burila], that the uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface. The grave-digger shovelled in the earth; stamped it loosely down with his feet: shouldered his spade; and walked off, followed by the boys, who murmured very loud complaints at the fun being over so soon. 'Oliver Twist', Charlie Dickens.

Flies buzz around the ground, again, that clangin...

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Iraq's Christians 'close to extinction' after 2000 years. 

The British fell on the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele,
Their luckier cousins long ago set off across the broad Atlantic
Convicts moved straight on 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
After th...

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You are my moment, as you read
Your eyes are full of tact, unembarrassed, laughing
And my dream is just of continuing.
We cannot add up or divide words, as we can numbers,
Yet,  humans can be equally intractable.
Friends die in the blinking of an eye.
You cannot eat your words
Nor can you précis feelings
But we can certainly stretch the truth
At a blooming, with our first tooth,
Or at  o...

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Some people worship reason. So many more worship money. Even more worship themselves.

Fly past those nets. Race. Nationality. Religion. Hang me by the neck

But only if I ever, ever,  get free of that bloody penguin. 

♥ Ways of seeing things: nature is so beautiful. Is she in love with herself? She was. Now she cries

As dust motes settle and breathing becomes slower and heavier and less...

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Love and l are gentle

As dust motes fly

And sparkle in the air

Of a rare day in Florence.

It is September and already

The cornflowers fade. Grain

Laid up in store on the road to Pisa.

All things are one thing on this day

I heard Dante Alighieri say.

You and I must continue to be gentle.

The old man says the rent is not paid

Rent poses no problem but to be without y...

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We are
Visiting Austchwitz
We read 'Arbeit macht frei'
That terrible lie 
For Jewish eyes
Only. 

We enter
The gates of hell.

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Where we drift and call it dreaming
We can weep and call it singing. Iron & Wine. 

Now, I'm old and going grey
It's surely time to put dreams away.
Really! That surprises me..
I'd have thought 
That as I've nought to lose,
And really do not mind, at all, 
If I'm called a fool.
I'll stick with dreams;
So thanks, but 
Immediately, and without delay,
Let me dream
If only for this ...

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In a world without compassion,

In a world of continuing AI,

No ripples come from a stone unthrown,

In the blink of a human eye.

No ripples come from the dumb

Unwritten blank slates of some

Tabula Rasa of Clones 

Lying under their bones.

Colourless, without scent, designed but never meant 

Decidely, not, heaven-sent, a cycle of life abated.

An ill-fated sojou...

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Words  seem to be without meaning. 
Genocide bears a human face. A human heart. I cannot part with my half-secret, hungry heart. I crossed the broad Atlantic to Americky but left my heart in Ireland, in a village churchyard by the sea.

Warehouses stuffed with grain in Bristol. We suffered the potato blight. Starvation in plain sight. Walking skeletons. Families dumped out on the road by land...

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A Trappist monk told me, with his eyes -

Disguise what you know in an image of the eyes

Of a walking - talking human corpse,

Or of flowers, pretty,  of differing sorts.

People will spend hours,

Literally hours, to unravel the conceit; to invent

Some nefarious connection that'll let

Them smile at their deep - down

Cleverness-conviction.

We know it's a Fiction designed to ...

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(for Vautaw)

This rose for all the world for you
These tears for all the dead,
Those empty words of morningtide
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.yo...

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"The last of your kisses was even the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.”

Letters, John Keats to Fanny Brawne

His headstone verses were not writ in water,

They merely draw the eye unto the fact of death.

Bereft are the lines that love-and-only-love remembers.

All he knew was the deepest blue of sky 

In this one woman’s eyes. Love was ...

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Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Days of stormy autumn come
Mother, child, brother, son;
Memories, like dust, infect my eyes,
Swirling, like a Turner sky,
Land, sky, water, ripple by.
Like water under wind,
I begin to sing
Mixing grays and blacks and whites and blues,
With guitar chords to pull us through.
Chiaroscuro skies, tussling these monochromes
Into a piebald heavens...

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Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash

Regardless of friendship — you and I cannot leave; I will not part from you tonight — that is too hard. A long night with a hangover: thick heart ache, sermons upon manners and morals delivered to thyself by thyself. Thank God it will soon be over. Latif was kind and brought the executioner to meet me and we spent some time together. He, like me, is a Suf...

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"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

After the war and the Spanish flu
When I came back from Oxford,
To America,  looking for you,
I was met...

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Hedd Wyn was a Welsh-language poet who was killed on the second day of the Battle of Passchendaele during World War I. He was posthumously awarded the bard’s chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod.

The magic of Hedd’s aspiration of youth….
an elixir only the young can truly taste ….
but this old man can. 
When a late summer breeze blows from the south and west,
catch, in the very air itself,...

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How clear, now, the brightime sky of youth
How lovely-fair that pursuit of an eternal truth.
Those sunbeams of our morning life's clarity
Laugh out, now, with a truly thoughless charity       
That sets free a man longchained to violence
Appalled at vicious crimes performed in silence.
Evil soars through these dimming days of hope. 
As we see the world slide down the slippery slope:
O! why...

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It’ll take the breath clean away from you

When you think the implications through.

Tabula Rasa: a complerely blank slate:

No memory, no desire, nothing too soon, nothing too late

Nothing to bend you in any direction,

Nothing to send you lower or raise your expectations.

No future envisaged, no secret desire. A blank slate.

No prescience required  concerning the future 

No p...

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When you go home, tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow... We gave our today...

Eighty years ago, on August 18th 1940, the hardest day,
A  twenty year old, pilot set out upon a mission, from which he never returned                                              (His remains were recovered, which was not always the case, fire saw to that.)
Born eleven years before his sister, he'd had ...

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Morning maniac music

Shakes me awake

Those who brought hope

Now mired in hate.

…..

Over the mountains

clouds scud away,

blood on the floor

not fade away.

……..

Blood over the water,

blood over the seas

lots of poor people

down on their knees.

.......

Christendom fallen,

collapsed from within,

In our hearts,

Nothing but sin,

Rotted from within...

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Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev was a Soviet sniper during World War II. Between 10 November 1942 and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he killed 225 enemy soldiers, including 11 SS snipers

Who controls the past controls the future:
Said an anonymous red army soldier,
With a slightly Asiatic glint to his eye,
Just like Vasily, at the ...

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When sadnesses besiege me,

At the dying of the light,

And starlight illuminates,

The ending of the day, 

Then fractious star-crossed lovers

Just quietly drift away.

......

We sigh silently, out of sight

Of mirrors, water, eyes, light,

And find, momentarily,

Man loses his disguise.

......

We spin and whirl and dance,

Like hemlock in the hay;

We are Witch, W...

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That early April morn, dewy and cool,

Charlie was still lunging on the leash

As we walked up Quaker bridge towards the field.

Charlie was born wise: he did not suffer fools gladly.

How he put up with me, God alone knows. Anyroadup, 

This memorable morning Charlie fulfilled 

His 'retriever' appellation - he brought a ball back with a flourish of his tail and with great aplomb. Ton...

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He was paralysed for much of his life
Trapped by indecision, he searched for the chimera
Of stability, of security.
He did not commit many crimes
But sometimes, after work,
His hand became covered with poetry.

All that he expected was undone:
His marriages crumbled
His family dispersed
All the expected epics and rhapsodies of his life:
Gone. Cancelled.

In his childhood, he had expec...

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Between these walls we spend our time
Forming words we turn to rhyme.
Glimpsing glimmers held close in mind,
Closing over the gatden door,
Mumbling, pleading 'what is life for?'
Something's left, without a roof,
Hinting at a deeper truth?
Something quick, or something slow?
Rhymes with rumblings, swirls below.

We see the stars, beyond the sky,
So many stars that pass us by,
All bedeck...

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“Christian, Jew, Muslim, Shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged”― Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Like imagination is to the poet
This, this, is in the centre of my heart.
You bathe my wounds with words, ointment, kisses
You have the key to the door that is always closed
You want me to stick to simple stories ...

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Tall, stooped, a quintessentially English presence. I listen to how those flat Fenland vowels swirl into melodies melded 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 irresolution, your secret regret. A troubadour of old.

You don't ha...

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Six years since the latest round of  genocide against the Yezedi people began

That murderous monstrous onslaught

Upon the peaceful  Yezedi people, for the crime

Of following their own religion and culture

That has been in Mesopotamia since before

The crucifixion in Jerusalem and since before the hot wind

Of intolerance blew up from the scorching sands of  Arabia. 

Thousands of...

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He  gotta beat box,

In his beating heart,

Beats it out, on guitar,

Tears him apart. 

https://youtu.be/Fm1qtX7Mz5w

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WHO, when I scream, will hear me?
Maybe an angel? Or, a man of firmer regulation?
That’s the chance you take with screaming.
Could I put myself in the shoes of s/he
Who hears a scream at close quarters?
I fear not. It would take a leap of the heart
Which is beyond my means. Nobody comes to mind.
Nobody suddenly comes into my heart:

I pass into this stronger existence.
In this ancient ho...

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We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby, Than we ever learned in school. Bruce Springsteen

No surrender to the glib complacent,
The shielders, and the worried-well,
Those for whom life is 'simply hell.'
Those who measure out their life
In coffee spoons, when everything
Is too late or too soon. Let's call out
Those who conduct their life on zoom,
Who assume a mask will protect t...

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"If you're feeling sad, just remember that the world is over four billion years old and yet you managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie."

In the Apple Market
Your south London twang,
Accompanied the many undulations
Of time.

Your wild androgyny
Mirrored the mirror
Of yourself

David Bowie, name bought off the shelf.
Now, skimming  the water
Of childhood,
Like a dog sha...

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Abbeförderung ('dispatching, removal') – euphemism for mass murder.

The air that kills, miasmic fogs
Disperse the pollutions of the past
Into the ever-present

Nothing lasts, they say.
Fasts, self-denying ordnances,
All the ferocities
Of religion, ideology
Do not matter a jot.
Mortality is our lot.

So, listen to the beautiful airs of music,
Be tolerant of unforeseen strictures of f...

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Droplets, flicked off the waving trees,            Shower me with wet. The abundant trees           Full-throated bastions of wet in the nest.           The birds are soaked but cheerfully quiet         Their breeding has been done, fledglings       Scattering raindrops as they show off              Their wings. I look on bedraggled, envious.         Rain is such a comfort on these crowded     Isl...

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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
Ech...

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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,
Speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates

Moments that survive
When we were all alive.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
An...

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Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Joyce, Ulysses

T’was the night before Christmas,
It was dark and cold and dreary.
Coal fires were alight on a cold, black night
For lettered, and unlettered, alike

The young woman broke free from the asylum
suffering from stress, post natal depression, 
and an untold, fearful anxiety

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You came to me, through an open window,

All the sealed envelopes of me

Came into your hands,

There was nothing in them —

 just the love that you could throw away or understand –

You threw it straight back to me, I caught it,

You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes

Kissed me for being alive

I thought you were desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t

You we...

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Jagged gashes on my skin,
blood spurts from within;
fractured brain, a silent cry,
another day jus'passing me by.

Jagged notches, screaming edges,
people sleeping in the hedges
under bridges, tearing flesh,
sticking spikes, right and left.

Many things make me bereft..

When I'm rushing, on my run,
do I feel like Jesus' son ?
Or am I a mere blank slate 
wrestling with fate?

Ab...

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Ah, the tip of the straw gripped by your teeth
I move you gently. You are asleep.
You have a little money but enormous dignity.

You live in a caravan and poach for the pot.
You are silent about the past.
Let sleeping dogs lie.

You were born into misfortune 
But that was in another country and, besides, the wench is dead.
Your arrows for your bow,  a boat made from old furniture,
...

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That sweet harmonica wail of memory
Afflicts me, again, as the radio plays:
The sweet familiar words she says
Pass, like wind in the reeds; a glance,
A tender romance. Moments stream away
Coalesce, and in the usual messy way
Of the day-to-day, quite suddenly there’s
A pause. Another century: and the same
Pain. Suffering beneath a cloud-ridden sky,
A ray of sunshine quickly glances by
As ...

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Built in the 6th century, Hagia Sophia -- Greek for “Holy Wisdom” -- was Christendom’s greatest and most celebrated church. After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts from Arabs, Constantinople -- now Istanbul -- was finally sacked by Turks in 1453, and Hagia Sophia’s crosses were desecrated, its icons defaced. Along with thousands of other churches in the Byzantine Empire, it was immediately conv...

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Goodbye my Sufi friends and lovers
Nothing now exists to connect you to me.
You are free. Tayyar can be trusted.

I will rise from the trap of this world
I will ask you to be my servant in paradise.
You are my dancer, I am your poet, we laugh
Together on days when I taste rain-drift-clouds.

When you sew I can watch you and fall in love
Again, I remember our first meeting, fleeting
Amon...

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

A waterfall of notes, rising, falling, 

Splashing into mind, heart, soul. 

Music that will never grow old. 

Arpeggio series of broken chords

Mood music plunging into minor key variety, rising into waves of luminosity.

Notes compose a chord,  create harmonies of the heart

plangent human voices: t...

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Photo by Johan Mouchet on Unsplash

Arabic still spoken in Andalusian villages after 400 years of the inquisition,
Muslim houses in Bosnian villages,
with crosses on display, despite the threat of apostasy.

"And slay them wherever ye find them."

Morning fresh as one –
the Buddha knew –
the flowers of the valley
the grasses of the plain
shine with the unbidden light of heaven,
no...

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“We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls. – Robert J. McCracken

My mom was leaving this world

Her final days were spent with music

It had gotten late and everyone was asleep

She had drifted off and this song was her favorite.

Reminded her of when she was young in Brookl...

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NO SEEKING OUT OF EMPTY-HEADED  OBLIVION HERE
I PREFER TO BREATHE, FEEL, SEE, HEAR, THINK, WRITE. 
DO NOT MEASURE OUT YOUR LIFE IN YEARS 
RISE TO THE ATTAINMENT OF THAT RAREST OF RARE ORCHIDS
LOVE:  WASHED BY ALL THE TEARS OF HEAVEN
LOVE: ALL THAT WILL SURVIVE OF US.
AMIDST ALL THE PASSINGNESS OF LIFE,
JOHNNY KEATS,  POET-PHYSICIAN,
BALANCED HIS SURFACE UNDERSTANDING OF ANATOMY
WITH HIS C...

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A flash of remembrance on a start again day
The crumbling of memory, times fade away,
The dominant discourse is undoubtedly drear
The rolling of thunder, the future unclear. 

.......

Mesmerised masses accept the news of the day,
Never question the legitimacy of those who hold sway,
This woke intelligentsia virtue-signal it's true
They tear up the debt that we owe to the few.

......

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(for  César Vallejo)

Today you call as soon as I have got up.

'Arise! arise! Her eyes. Her eyes.'

Some body is divinely pissed, I think. 

Maybe uncle Frank, who leaves on Friday

Comes home, or not, for mass on Sunday.

Throwing up signs and cogitations of romance.

Who knows: sound is excreted by the innocent cow

Why should she be blamed for pollution

With all the shit we ...

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Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Shine on the people of this world.
Let them recall the smells of spring
On cold and drear November days.

And let them hear the baby’s cry,
That all the hounds of hell defy,
And give them all the boons of love –
For love is really all we are –

The tiny gestures — the glance, the word –
That will in memory recur.
And deep amidst the fears of night
Bring a h...

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As I walk with my granddaughter,

A cat walks with us.

For my granddaughter, this cat is a lion

For me it is only an old, stray moggy.

At every step my granddaugter looks up at me

And I must seem a giant to her - 

Massive and lumbering with a voice like thunder - .

I hold her hand and smile down at her.

But I bet even my smiling face, unshaved as it is,

Is like a gargoyle...

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The Scientific Enlightenment came at no small cost
Imprisionment, blasphemy, books burnt, lives  lost.
The Inquisition, internment, death, left the west bereft.
Yet the Secular, Spiritual Sceptical, Scientific spirit
Survived and slowly tamed Christian fundamentalisn..
Without the church we were still thriving and alive. 
But now, a new constant vigilance is the price we must pay
For unrefo...

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Forget-me-not-lapis-lazuli blues

Blue as an Alaskan blueberry:

Blues as in lose

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 Tr...

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

What remains? A purple garden?

Tattered garments, broken men.

Weeds and greed,

Magic you resurrected, once again,

Hands around your lover’s waist,

Spending time evading fate.

 Taste the brandy,

swill it round 

the azure ocean of your heart. 

Your justice was staying alive

Just one more...

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Not the usual undulations of night and day
But a locked down twilight, when time
Drifts away. A form of temporal Medusa
Hope turned to stone. Time splinters 
Points into the past, future, present.
Frozen in a moment of Covid negativity
Realising that every breath, movement,
Involves the risk of THE positive Covid test.
The only sure way to avoid the virus 
Is to die, to cease upon the mom...

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On the 16th June 1904

In Dublin, second city of the Empire,

A Jewish man, of uncertain means,

A  certain gaffer name of Leopold Bloom

Ate a hearty break fast composed mainly of fried offal 

Bloom was commenting acerbically to  himself,

In an interior monologue that would fill a thousand pages,

On the after taste of urine that clung to the fried kidneys on his plate.

His min...

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“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”
― Anna Akhmatova

I can hardly speak but I will try:
My brain falls silent, still
I drown my stutter with my will.
In the dying of the light
I am confused by a ferment of tenses;
These lead me up many blind alleys.
...

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Dump the  bodies on Eton’s playing fields,

Those with the power are so-completely unreal.

Pretending to a competence they just do not have

Asking us to believe in them, to rally round the flag.

It’s the poor, who, as ever, have to pay the price

The hypocrisy of the left is just to pretend to care,

The hypocrisy of the right is just never to be there:

To offer care to the ...

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(Only love can break your heart)

Translating the rain is a dangerous business,
In the past the priest or rabbi took on the mantle
Of expectation. But you knew from the very start
Which mountain range the rain came from.
Your languid, watery eyes can be deceiving in rain.
Fountains are rain corralled, water on show. I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. A servitude of roses suffices.
...

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Coming downstairs slow and steady
Crinkled and wrinked with ruffled hair
I hold her dreams close to me –
Pause at the turning of the stairs–
Postpone eternity
Until I have drunk two strong coffees,
Smoked an imaginary cigarette,
Said good morning to those I love,
Who are now among the dead;
Recite a quiet antiphon in my muddled head.
Look out of the French windows
Into the garden she ha...

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When your heart is a barren desert,
Emptied by-a-silent-scream, with nothing
To look forward to, soul-wrought, emptied
By loss,  sleep is a lost fandango
Life a desultory, heart-wrenching place.
Wheels grind ever-onward, people seek
To avoid the clutches of dire despair
The solitary I reaches for an intelligence
That is no longer there, and I see myself,
Pathetically, grasping, at thin ai...

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Two lean-faced men
With heavy stubble
Shuffle down the road
Mothers warn their children
To keep away.
One man falls down. flat
The other man, white cider on his breath,
Thirty-five, going on seventy, hairless head,
Staggers into the park
He has enough to finish it now.
Acrid smoke, heavy dew,
No teeth, sunken cheek
Clothes found in bins,
Tears salty, stumbling
He sat on the wet bench
...

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Paralysis is death. James Joyce, Dubliners

Paralysis occurs
When you cannot move
without everything tumbling down
around you.
Marriages crumble
Families disperse
Time freezes over a moment
That will reoccur, in your memory
Excavating the epics and rhapsodies
Of our lived  lives..
Removed from the fray.
The time of our birthday
Meets
The time of our deathday.
Stalagmites and stalac...

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From a very early age I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.. William Cobbett

My native land – England – has gone from me
Shrouded in a so-called unity, called ‘diversity’
a shibboleth, as fake as those who preach it.
Our ravished land is no longer a king’s demesne,
But is now a poor, peculiar, ...

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I am from Constantinople, a Byzantine by descent,

The last, the very last, Byzantine nobleman

My family lived in Constantinople before the Turks took the city in 1453.

I was born and died in the same place, Alexandria,

Egypt, on the same day, April 29th, 1863, and 1933.

I am homosexual. I died of cancer of the larynx.

I was silenced but noboby knew the difference.

There w...

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Bafflled how he came to be a pauper, he thought,

Tramp, hobo, undeserving poor, me!

An ex-serviceman, still with an upright back,

Thing is: he never really arrived home. Did he?. 

Not a real sort of family home; 

Belfast, The Falklands, Belize, Operation Desert Storm

Are with him every day.

Like many men who wore the uniform, Jim is reluctant to see a doctor

"I'll be reet" ...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us,
Twilight memories drift, flux, flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end, my friend,
Such pungent affirmations,
Whispered in the dark,
Slip so easily
Into generations of suffering:
Eyes lif...

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Happiness, a summer fleeting,
Gone, like sunshine after rain,
Misery, so-near-completing.
Winter’s grip remains.

.....

Death of friends leaves us diminished,
I fear we do not grasp at all.
How needy men just crave a respite,
Want the clocks to stop, is all.

......

Footsteps in the snow deceiving
Whiskey priests dream Magdalenas
Drunk at noon, asleep, forgetting,
Dig a grave in...

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The moon was sad as only the moon can be.
Men in tears fleeing the nightmare of their years.
Some fellows dream that with your fingers
You can pluck and hold tightly
The calmness of flowers, the depth of a moment,
The completeness of a live birth.
Outside, white sobs slide into our ears.
Remembering the smile of our mother,
On the fortunate day of her first kiss.
The past is a magnet an...

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Tender is the Night
With all her forgotten beauty
People pass out of sight
On this summer midnight
Dogs, too, are missed,
One dog in particular.

Look!  the serpent and the saviour sit
Side-by-side
Somewhere in old-England.

……

No truth is hidden from our lady moon
No disguising her faint silvery tune.
Such wide-open rosy faces, faced the blackest of skies,
Gnarled hands shade fri...

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...est in Arcadia ego...

This early morning air: pellucid, refreshingly soft

A time of hush, just before that cacaphony

Of hope that marks a sweet May dawn - the lifter

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

Filled with all the quiet majesty of an English breeze

Stirring the leafy canopy as the sun begins to 

Shadow, half-created dappled zephyrs blow.

Mistres...

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All along this strand opposite Holy Island

Pebbles fit softly in the palm of my  hand.

Spent their eternity rolling on the floors of seas

Others, more ragged in texture, drag themselves

Through sand – desperate for the solidity of land.

Fossils cling to rocks, embedded trilobites, snail

Swirls, embossed in rock – all had lived

In the Jurassic or Cretaceous, fought for food,

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     A brief evocation in words

     a classic call, all in small,

     a portrait in brief,

     with no definite border.

     Driving up via Dundalk.

     No sign of a 

     mythical warrior 

     hero Cú Chulainn.

     In Clones, a poet 

     parades the diamond.

     In Cavan town, for Claddagh rings;

     They're filming at Redhills,

     another border sto...

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From earth to earth, from air to air
I fly
never at home
anywhere
until I spy
this ground
scored by the passing blocks of ice.
An earth torn from the permafrost
this is where
the old sun
stings me back
as i hear children laugh
in this rich meadowland
carved out of st john's wood
this is where
fear whispers its long retreat
this is where the very gods of earth and air
scream
for m...

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"Walking all the day, near tall towers where falcons build their nests/ Silver winged they fly, they know the call of freedom in their breasts."  Mary Black

After the convent it was good to be back
The new estate. The new morning.
Rathmines then Stephen's Green.
Finding clothes for Anna,
Dressing her kindly,
Gentle and wicked she wakes.
The personal is the political.

....

The w...

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The seas are wild tonight
As I write, far from any coast;
Speckled with salty brine and afraid,
I spy in the broken mirror
The broken boy who is following me
Following me.
Down dale, up tree, crawling all over me:
Still, the ghost of my brother
Stands next to me,
Leaning forward to see
The ghost of my son
Spinning and laughing all around me
Beneath this savage sea                      ...

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A faint whiff of the anti-sceptic about the place,

Frankincense and myrrh are wishes out of place in the 

Silence, which enrols the mind on dashes into the future,

 - dashes to the past and do not last - sutures stitched

the wound and I arrived back discomforted,

Disheveled, palpitating; but certainly not relieved

of all the burdens of the present, I perceive  

Sweats in the n...

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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

I fall out of bed

and all you beget

is so-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

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(For: Nick Drake - 19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974)

I still walk beside you: tall, stooped, a quintessentially English presence. 
I listen to how your flat Fenland vowels 
swirl into melodies melded within the staccato RP of Cambridge.

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

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A pleasure-seeker, petulant, pruned hard,
stepping-out, a girl of fifty, gin-drinker,
rouged and randy, she bandies words,
hair-styled, clothes perfumed; no excesses
of taste. Nothing smeared or wrinked here,
a tinkle of bangles as she lifts her drink.
Dressed up, for the night, tight and squirmy.
She looks around, she smiles as she sees
the man's face, pulsates, no hotel room-service
thi...

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Hanging on, just scraping by,

Keeping my head above water

I'll never learn to fly

In this monochrome world

Of silence stripped of consciousness

We rise with the superfluity of deceit

I remember a snow-laden sky moving in slow motion

As always an innocence of birds catches the eye.

On the beach, I am hunched up, driven by the freezing wind

This wind that crosses the  sea ...

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The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”
― Edward Gibbon, The decline and fall of the Roman empire 

Photo by Francesco Alberti on Unsplash

Th...

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Lithe legs spread

Neck stretched

Feet splayed

Like a swan-song

Toes strong

Fingers pulsing

Snap!

A pirouette

A spectacular series

Of whirls on her toes.

He circles her on the ball of his foot

Musical, muscular movements mingle and mix

A shiver of white as she jumps

The trick of catching a breath as she slumps

Into his arms;

A choreography of bo...

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Come on

If not, cover his coffin,

Come on

If not, cover his coffin

My friend is dead!

......

To those who carry his coffin

There is a secret that is not in the oceans

Nor in the present, past or future.

For there was no flower in his heart.

Only love.

Plain and simple.

......

In these days of curiosity.

A tribute first to her who bore me.

.......

Bef...

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The life of the world as it is now is not living,

It is a bad process of dying.

It doesn’t matter when we die, so long as we live fulfilling the deepest desire that is in us.

And a life which is a denial of the deepest desire is much worse than any death, it is a lie

I have drunk a lot of whiskey since you both died

And I can no longer hide

Behind this screen of anonymity.

Yes...

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“Dogs are better than human beings
because they know, but do not tell.” Emily Dickinson

Yes the misery of keeping a dog
is his dying so soon.
To be a friend of a dog offers profound joy
To be with a dog when he dies
Offers profound sadness.
We learn so much from our dogs.
The coward man dies many times
The brave, true dog dies only the once.
But, to be sure,
if my friend had  lived fo...

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When sadnesses besiege you:

At the dying of the light

And starlight illuminates

The mere ending of the night.

Will you tingle in the frosted air of the privilges of sight?

Starlight is a mirror, in the water of the eyes,

When humankind, finally, abandons its disguise.

The spin and whirl of hemlock

Help the witch and Wicca sway

Under the greensward

On this beautifully ...

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Everything dies in time:

Memories, birds in the trees,

That old druid forgetfulness.

Time plays such cruel deceptions

Creates such havoc in the mind

I reach out and hope

To find somewhere human.

Sardonic, yes, witty, the sceptical glance,

The silent prayer, faded romance,

Converge into this plea:

Wear your learning lightly.

Reach out to Syrian and Lebanese

Assyr...

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She sits silently hunched over her one-bar electric fire

Dismal north Manchester light seeps through her tightly drawn curtains.

Her entire world was smashed when the burglar came

And she will never be the same

She sips her sweet tea shakily.

....

She gazes up at her mantlepiece

A young man's face looks at her out of the cracked glass.

His face smiles at her across the year...

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For two hundred and fifty years these interlopers

Have squandered our land, spread squalor everywhere,

Massacred the natural beauty of sea and air and land.

Europeans killed us for their sport,

They knew nothing of the sacred,

They spread their filth everywhere across America. 

Listen, now, to the ghost-dancers of the Souix

Chant their hatred of these fat white males 

Who o...

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Lucifer, you, too, are a fisher of men
and time despairs of men.
Our pride lies in the ravenous  sea - 
from which we sprang - 
and will return.

Dark clouds shadow us, it's true,
and whisper that all that is, is not,
that we are as a piece with mere oblivion.
But, I see, this winding path will never do.
A woman holds her stillborn child.
Do you watch over her
as she suddenly grows old...

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That duff Tory, Mr Wordsworth, with his women waiting,
and the hills too, for all I know,
traipsed these empty horizons covetously;
but while the POET was in Germany
De Quincey and Coleridge squatted in his cottage
conspicuously consuming
his meagre thread of dreams.

......

And you never forgave them, did you, Mr Wordsworth?
Nursing your resentment like a baby
as you searched, and se...

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And as I tread these stark northern hills,

rain clouds the lungs,

infects the vision,

of all who sink, so-far, into these grey horizons.

Two hundred years and more of the very first industrial smog

have sunk, deep, into these stone villages,

set, like concrete, into these

sodden, sheep-ridden hills.

And in the pub

this worn-down, sepia-mid-afternoon light,

s...

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Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 B.C. said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

Heraclitus, my friend, I know you've been gone

For two and a half thousand years but we are of one mind:

Sceptical, Seeking, Secular.

On a road through Physics and Mathematics

To a Singularity of belief

Foretold in th...

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What's wrong with mum?

Isolation, that dynamite of the heart,

Can blow apart the best made plans of mice and men,

Isolation.

And so we begin, again,

As the eternal verities abide.

......

Pride comes before a fall

This sin of sins, is on the side of

Lucifer,  God's angel of the night,

Who looked into a mirror of reflected light

And fell into eternal night. Isolation...

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L'Afrique:

Bone-marrow transplant

Au Paris

Brutalized eyes

In a skull.

A husk of image

In an empty skin.

Thin. Thin.

Skin as tight as light

As shadows flickering

On a man with eyes like vipers.

Solemn, slow, the tusk begins to grow

From blood and bone. 

Limousines shudder

Yams decompose

Draining the body fluid

Into the sewer beneath

Tke-Tke

The...

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There is no wind blowing today

it is late April and the spring flowers

are showing their true colours

I have done little as the day fades

but this is the sort of day I like to keep

strongly felt, discrete.

The evening meal was a melee

children fighting for attention

as they do

but I find these days

astonishing

a new life is on its way

and I feel

so very ...

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Speak your own minds

without fear.

Argue

even with the most wise.

Trust your own eyes

nothing else.

Fail to remember everything

passes.

Do not write 

your own epitaphs.

Live

every day you can

Smile

in the face of eternity

And find time to notice the world

as it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No

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Writ in water

Or writ in air.

Writ-in-times-present

Or writ-in-times-past.

Writing  lasts.

.........

Writing passes

The test of time.

......

As life and air

Pine away 

So lines writ-in-water

Begin their stay.

.....

And never-more

Shall fade away.

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Hardy

An appropriate name don't you think?

Seeing through the seasons

Unearthing the heart of the matter.

https://youtu.be/Ilgfr3j0LS8ù

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Abstracted in Afghanistan

I pick cankers for a simple

Choose  a rhapsody in blue

Love lapis lazuli

and you.

I paint the Virgin Mary

With ultramarine pigment

Extracted from lapis lazuli

Only found in north-east Afghanistan

Where I am with the brave Kalash,

In their snow-capped mountains,

Of the Hindu Kush,

They have resisted assimilation into Islam for o...

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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.

And then 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, finally, to Chesh...

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Grab a joblot of high definition  TVs

Great pictures for you, great movies for me.

So many facilities here for jiffy-jolly fun.

PIty the hoi-polloi who speak patois-rum.

Four vibrant ghosts came singing round here today

Rounded up by cops seeking to blow their blues away.

We said amen to their flat soft voice purr-drawl 

Telling black kids 'you ain't wanted round here'.

Vic...

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Or, so I'm told.

The sweet songs of summer
Are coming our way
And the birds in the trees
Are singing all day.

The occasional cloud high high in the sky
And all of the world, I just let it pass by.
My pockets are empty, my outlook is drear,
But every day brings my death nearer.

I gaze at the faces of the people I meet
Some are struck dumb and just stare at their feet
Others ac...

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At 4.14 am, I'm awake again

Insomnia strips me and wilts me;

Tiredness balloons my face with frowns

Strips me down like the wind strips 

Autumn trees, bleeds me dry.

Leaves me high and dry

On this deserted shore of times gone-by

Where I am forced onto my knees.

O! The strength we need to plead

For forgiveness: poems of crisis,

Virus stories, empty - bellied 

Redemp...

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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." Bleak House, Ch.XLVII, ‘Charlie Dickens

Opinions can be ignored, mocked,
That’s fair enough – satirists’d be buggered –
Otherwise
and, of course,
No-one has the right not to b...

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Photo by Tookapic on Pexels.com

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.
Joyce, Ulysses

T’was the night before Christmas,
Or Easter or Whitsun, any Christian festival. 
It was dark and cold and dreary.
Dark, black night.
For lettered and unlettered alike.
Fearing the roaring of the skies,
Trembling at the dying of the light;
Fear s...

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‘Falling life expectancy in the poorest communities is a deeply worrying indicator of the state of our nation’s health, and shows that we are leaving the most vulnerable out of the collective gain’ Independent, 28.11.18

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.
But there is plenty of poverty, and plenty of fe...

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They used to call me a lazy sod,

For sitting around all day,

But now I am a hero,

Keeping Covid 19 at bay. 

https://youtu.be/TBzzWFXpVZg

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Death seems a long way from here
I fear we drink tea in the evening
As if all is, as it was before,
Footsteps in the snow.
I used to drink whiskey at noon.
in the morning, at night.
We drink and we drink until blotto
Dig a grave in the air, that’s me, 
Don't lie so-close, remember
We are rats in a trap
A man lives in a house
upstairs, downstairs, the shitter.
He who plays with the snak...

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a jew, you were joyce's friend

the joyce of cork & galway, 

of trieste, zurich, paris

and, off course, anna l'liffey

she who riverrun on & on

even till the finnegans wake

you heard joyce's leery voice

echo in the words

as he drank his white wine

on your day of atonement

and, like molly,

faithful sorry you was

at the ten year break

between you two

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He spoke his lines slowly, his face was a mask
Until the heart attack took him, dead on cue;
Then all the veils of his trade dropped from him
As he crumpled, ashenly, in a moment of searing pain.

In the small city garden the children, mesmerized,
Created scent from flowers, weeds and water 
Waited to be called in from play, to wash their faces
Brush their teeth, tumble into comfy, cold be...

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Hardy.

An appropriate name

Don't you think? 

Seeing through the seasons

Unearthing the heart of the matter.

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“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
― Margaret Atwood, 

The Eyes keep their eyes on you.
It's a licence to spy. Don't let it go by.
He's starting his car! Is he going far?
Is it essential travel? How do we know?
Should we inform Eyes Central?
Not everyone can become an Eye
We have a tattoo of the eye,
Bene...

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Shadows behind the sun, echoing with words,
Meanings stuck in transit, the music of the Byrds.
Brimming lives at stake as all hearts ache.
Years pass like phantoms, passions of the heart,
Silence breeds silence, pink faeries play their part.
Forget what you remember, give and never take,
Rip the veil off the mysteries, a lady in a lake,
Mirroring the wind tonight shakes us into spring
Endi...

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Every day I awake to a blank slate

Upon which the hieroglyphics of fate

Make their mark and spark a reaction 

In me. Nature or Nurture? Genetics

Or the Environment? Heaven sent?

Written in the stars? Twisted by chance?

Let us make the best of it, let us inject some zest in it,

Reach for the stars, be kind: reject

Inshallah, God's will, no better excuse

For abominations t...

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My parents were Christian, Serb,

I remember the icons in my mother’s house,

The smell of roasting meat on feast days.

One orthodox Christmastide,

I think I was nine or ten,

My parents made me hide when the Turks

Came to our village in Kosovo

Looking for boys and women.

My father was ashamed.

He hung his head.

I pretended I was dead.

Hiding under my sister’s bed.

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Light is a wave and light is a particle
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 particle
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 ...

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Shifting shades afflict this ghost of David Rodinsky
As he returns to his room in Whitechapel, London
For one last look at his Aramaic and Hebrew texts
Which provided him with the hex for disappearance
Where he came from nobody knows. Was he Jewish?
Yes and no. Was he British? Who knows? Not he.
Certainly he lived here once: ate, slept,defecated;
Until 1969 when he took time in hand, walked...

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(dedicated to the everlasting memory of John Prine, lyricist and singer, who died of Covid 19  on the 8th April)

The sky was clear today with streaks of blue

The supermoon with all its lunar perigee 

Swirls in the sky reflect sombre horizons;

Behind my back cumulus clouds mass

Over the hills, conspiring in their usual

Ragged silence. In front of me are drear

Trees laid ba...

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"A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."

WB Yeats, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'

Philosophy or poetry?

Let's kick this football around a bit. 

Plato preferred philosophy,

As he would, being...

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

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 S...

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As I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
through the tunnels,
over the wind-swept bridges,
through the sedentary, school-less
villages of the old and unwise
Into the land of my enemies
where hostile witnesses abound
skilled at shaking fists, digging up dirt
spitting and being contemptible;
wizened faces study bank state...

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