Moments of the past, do not last
memories kicked into the long grass:
a warm early-summer’s day
golden petals, white clover.
Stormy-autumn comes
with flurries of snow
the dead of winter
catches body heat
in frozen snow
tumbling into slushy heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
old ghosts lose their threads
pot-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes t...

Read and leave comments (2)

The sting of the wind
On this cold december day
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work
On early shift.

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

Words that would’ve
Carried meaning still
In those cold, hungry days
When this same old
Northern sky
Still pleased the eye ...

Read and leave comments (3)

Calling time on the cinema queue
instead, we let our dreams come true
in the pub
it was the evening of the day
fervourless
and blue....

I still had you
we gave up on our one chance
of silence, it is true
who knows where the time went to?

Time enhances you.
so, we wound up
like we always knew we’d do:
bruised black and bruised blue
carving out a place a-new.

https://youtu.b...

Read and leave comments (1)

Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash

The regiment of day
cannot drift away,
back to the cancer hospital
back to the chemo and the radio
and injections in vain,
nothing in my brain. 
It’s your loved
pnes take the strain
I recall Emile, yes,
named after Rousseau’s
eponymous hero. He hoped
it had not spread. 
Married at the weekend, his Caribbean
lilt still echoes in my ...

Read and leave comments (0)

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain? Pink Floyd

In Gaza's ancient town, a tale unfolds,
A journey of love, as the prophecy foretold,
Yusuf, faithful and true, with Maryam by his side,
Embarked on a quest, filled with hope and pride.

To be registered they went, with hearts full of grace,
Maryam, carrying a child, love glowing on her face,
Amidst the...

Read and leave comments (3)

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Redemption comes at such a cost
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost — loss pressing on loss — 
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly so carelessly,
And we know it costs them their whole life
To fly this way and sing and eat and build and build.
Yet still this merel...

Read and leave comments (0)

‘to a meadow only to a meadow’

Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash

I wish that I knew from the very start
Which mountain the sun came from
For your eyes can be deceiving in rain
Fountains are rain corralled and I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. A servitude of roses.
In which green bay the rolling sea spy on me
That’s deep, but it aint at all clear. Like seawater,
Lagoons on...

Read and leave comments (1)

On this day of flowers, the animals follow
The usual path of the sun
Ripples coagulate like blood,
All manner of things mirror our big brother sun

On this shining  Ἀρκαδία of August 1941.
Sweet airs fill the breezes
Forgotten summer scents,
O! The billowing of  intent
Reed and oak and beech
This beautiful canopy of the living green,
Shimmering in this too bright light.

Thunder c...

Read and leave comments (0)

I lack the muse's command of cadences and tones,
Sometimes words tumble from my mouth like grain,
At other times words need to be pulled like teeth.

When I sit down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day,
I weep because of the curse I carry,
The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.

I cannot sing the songs of the Lor...

Read and leave comments (0)

The power of purpose, it weaves through the air,
With intention, its design is a snare,
The careful and tidy, their minds are so dull,
They forget to remember the graveyards are full.

Oh, just how does purpose weave its magic today? 
It strikes with intention, it wont fade away.
For even the most careless, wandering tinker,
Knows in his heart, life’s a real stinker.

The actor, care...

Read and leave comments (0)

The sky is clear today with streaks of blue
the supermoon with all its lunar perigee
swirls in the sky reflecting sombre horizons;

Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
over the hills, conspiring in their usual
ragged silence. In front of me are dreary
trees laid bare, a mist of water in the air.

Streets deserted, folk driven inside by covid
I’m not yet caught cough, cough, coughing — 
m...

Read and leave comments (0)

Moments of Vision fade away
But a magical moment is, here, today;
And all it will cost you,
Is all of your life.

Cast over the sea
And cast over the moon
She'll be reading the stars
While you're reading the runes.

Green shades, dappled sunlight,
The landscapes of the eye,
As moment follows moment,
A life passing  by.

The primal scream of silence
Modulated, nuanced, on t...

Read and leave comments (0)

Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Shine on the people of this world.
Let them recall the smells of spring
On cold and drear December 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 reoccur.
And deep amidst the fears of nigh...

Read and leave comments (1)

Read and leave comments (4)

Crack thunder over head
flash crackle of lightning
nothing the gods said:

Stretch your words across the sky
illuminate the stark, skeletal
trees of a northern winter

Rumble roar-nothing-fled
echo, reverberate,
all around my desperate head,

Hidden clouds drop hail-rain
like frozen tears pelting down
on a world turning dead and lonely

With a clownish frown
on a world tumblin...

Read and leave comments (2)

Let’s away to the mountains
to the music of loss when elegy-tossed
the sun above us burns mists away
as we walk back to the valley of youth. 
Today, I walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just above the far-horizons of sight,
no closer after five days of tramping the fields;
I keep going and going whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just keep heading
for the rising sun or the waning...

Read and leave comments (1)

a hot, still July afternoon
silence unbroken.

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

heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable

it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay
and autumn, though still distant,
slips into consciousness in the earl...

Read and leave comments (1)

Read and leave comments (3)

Is it better to feel pain
Than nothing at all?
My son has followed
Me now for thiry-four years
Up hill, down dale.
He’s been AWOL
From this world
For all except his mother
& his family
& I who still cry
For him. On one black
December night
I carried his medicine-
bruised body
through the ward —
dodging the sight lines
of terrified parents —
into the mortuary
where I kissed
h...

Read and leave comments (4)

— Like the morning sun you come
And like the wind you go —

I never tried too hard at scholarship:
it seemed a pursuit for those in suits:
pedants, careerists, autodidacts, of all sorts,
accumulators of facts, the stay-at-homers,
the dog-with-a-boners, worrying the hell
out of themselves and acquiring prestige.
i preferred to confront the vast unknown —
that which is so hard to ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (1)

In serried ranks they come to me:
Tom, Will, Harry, George, Bill, Alf
rows of squaddies heading south,
dust and dirt and gas and screams
hot metal designed to do its worst
tearing savagely at human flesh.
Lads from farms & factories
Lads from mills & mines
sacrificing their most precious time -
Jack Prince, a machine gunner
in the Cheshires, served right through,
from 28 Jul 19...

Read and leave comments (2)

Let’s away to the blue mountains,
To the elegaic music of loss,
the sun above us burns the mists away
as we walk to the valley of youth..  
Today, I will walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just a ragged wall above the far-horizons of sight,
they’re no closer after five days of tramping;
for five days I continued whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just  kept going and goin...

Read and leave comments (0)

Beneath this beach of sand, shells
I see the image of the rolling sea.
Such new-found-land frames and hides
These wider horizons; I walk along the cliff:
Sheer drop upon the windward side,
Embedded trilob...

Read and leave comments (0)

Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
In all her shadowy finery.
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form
Shows us all her shades and shadows and crevices
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme
Moonlight flows and the boy is now an old man
Sleeping ...

Read and leave comments (0)

passing clouds
you don’t remember,
wind rising in the sky,
you, bereft of fortitude,
me, just strolling by

trees flare into flames; my friend,
a pettiness of heat.
the past at last unchanging
no memories so replete: 
 

golden sands, and crystal brooks,
silken threads and silver hooks.
glimpsing what’s already there
blue shadows, orange flares
she's screaming on the stairs

...

Read and leave comments (0)

Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:

Pale-blue eyes
on a snow drop face
seen-through lace,
seen-through lace.

These empty waiting rooms of the heart,
set to tear us apart,
like ventricles of the brain, never seen again.

Birdsong flung
into fond recall
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.

The smoky-smell of coal and steam
an eve...

Read and leave comments (2)

War's no place to be
Yeah, I were a soldier me,
constantly, for years,
still am now I’m on me arse,
listening to all these gobshites
with their feckin poppies.
I see watermelon smiles
 — to the ears, not the eyes --

me on me knees
unexploded ieds — 
women-with tanned, muscular arms
walking for miles
for water
men with children on their backs …
jumping into the sea to esc...

Read and leave comments (4)

"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows."
Siegfried Sassoon

Circumstances compel speech,
Ye gods and little fishes, 
From the first day of the world
Down to the horror in our own time
Peace is forever out of reach.

Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the dead
A soldier-poet silenced, banned, expelled
Misery a...

Read and leave comments (3)

https://www.mecaforpeace.org/close-to-home-gaza-knows-suffering-too-well/

Suffering comes to our unguarded selves
Unbidden. Suicide slammed into my hidden
Self. The slaughter of the innocents all
Around us. Buddhism teaches some suffer
Too much, others too little. Suffering follows
Us through our lives, like a shadow. We must
Unburden our minds, seek compassion 
For all those sufferi...

Read and leave comments (0)

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 stays 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
And...

Read and leave comments (2)

The door behind my mind
Opens and I find
Every day a new beginning
I rise at the crack of dawn
Feel the air against my skin
Walk with the aid of a stick
Listen to the dawn chorus.
Thrillingly it’s late March,
A year since the sepsis,
When madness danced with the spectre of death,
I emerged stronger, cherishing every breath.
As I walk, I hear a symphony of sound,
The dawn chorus, nature...

Read and leave comments (2)

The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold October
For the patterns in the grass do not last.
And so we take the winding stairway
Into the high tower above this land of forgetfulness
Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries
Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight
Of one John Mulligan esq,  who, on the last day of August
1938, according to the L...

Read and leave comments (0)

In the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive words, songs & stories,
coiled and twisted words, selfish and cruel,
through their darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never complete.

Like curdled thoughts, they merge and entwine,
in restless minds, where shadows define 
this chaos, a light gleams,
October's moon, a friendly old lunatic, 
like me

stalks this poor man's sky,...

Read and leave comments (1)

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

Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
The Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
Amongst the ruins of Nineveh along the same back paths
And a...

Read and leave comments (1)

“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Israeli-Bombardm...

Read and leave comments (0)

County Lines spread evil
all of the time
a cross all the living and the dead
their lines sink into our time:
we need them gone.

A spring day in late May,
she can no longer stand 
she must fall:
tall, crumpled, bent, dead.

She has lost the lines that link
her to her family, friends.
lines now link only random things:
road, rail, red phone box,
needle, plunger, sink
sink into...

Read and leave comments (0)

Bewildered, by all the things left unsaid
Serendipity, chances lost, cut dead:
Are you wise enough to play the fool?
Or, does this vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light?

Memory cuts through: taut, damp cold
Slices through my meagre clothes like a knife
Signs previously hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
Is yours a life lived in vain......

Read and leave comments (0)

Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
warps,  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 all away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget..

No transubstantiation this,
no move into immortal bliss:
this work of resistance is an inception in art
of...

Read and leave comments (1)

As we draw closer to Remembrance Sunday in black November and all that false praising of the armed services by 'the great and the good'  I wrote this poem to show how we really treat those who risk their lives to protect us.

Read and leave comments (2)

Yes. Music to eat by
flavours of sweetness 
spices of yet another life, 
another place, another time
the innocent taste of rhyme
tangles me on the palette, 
mingles me in the air, 
no longer abiding in the cynic’s lair, 
for she’s not there.

Crossses, forks, knives, staying alive, 
we thrive with three eyes, 
a pasty present for the future 
we done us best when we wus let, 
...

Read and leave comments (0)

The majesty of dogs impresses us –
their solitary solidarity –
above their grey horizons
there is the promise, lingering…
of continuing.

These days an ending is assumed
that glorifies the story of our lives:
making children, seeing things,
listening to waves wash the pebbles.
overhearing our hearts’ desires.

Yesterday the sky darkened at noon
seas spewed forth strange shapes
cl...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees still have leaves
outside it is cold
the wind is cruel.

There is a person
in front of me
i don’t know who it is.

I remember playing out
with my sister 
on a skipping rope.

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

The lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
‘What is a vi...

Read and leave comments (4)

 Evening dark, damp, cold
 Retreat into electric caves
 Try not to think about you
 In your grave. Your soul 
 Meandering. Suicides in GB
 Buried in unconsecrated 
 Ground, until a MP topped
 Himself and was buried
 In Westminster Abbey 1822:
 Viscount Castlereagh. I think.
 Easier to digress than to confess
 How flummoxed am I 
 With the whole unholy business
 Of not saying good...

Read and leave comments (1)

The innocence of nature
Mocked by the depravity of humanity
You chose to spotlight the genocide
Of the Tarsier, a primate, DNA like ours,
With enormous seeing eyes.
You made the humble Tarsier
A metaphor for the innocence of nature
Exploited, ripped apart,  killed for meat
Mocked for fun. No empathy between 
Tarsier and Human. Man the killer
Species. You used bitter irony
To deny hu...

Read and leave comments (1)

‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ George Orwell

Read and leave comments (1)

In the red water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through the skull, a technique called trephination.She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy and the doctors'  suspicions. 
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.
This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep...

Read and leave comments (2)

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

Read and leave comments (0)

My son, my brother and my dog
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all that is, not all that seems.

That hidden fountain of delight
That shines again, just out of sight,
That promised land, of sweet content,
That land where time is safely spent

Beneath the skies and stars of heaven,
Where every blemish is forgiven,
Where children play all night, a...

Read and leave comments (3)

It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night
Of solid rain, unremittingly wet. And cold.
When, suddenly, all the rivers of all the world stopped flowing
And all the summer colours leached away and never returned.
And the wind so cold and stings like hell
And sky descends into the well of unforgiving.
And you're not here.

And the blackness is deep, so deep, and remains so deep
When...

Read and leave comments (0)

Comes to remind us not to expect
consistency from Mother Nature.
Climate change keeps us on our toes
Expecting….? God knows what blows. 

https://youtu.be/yOKAQSGCm8Q?si=z9HpEgTDrsQW3a7_

Read and leave comments (0)

head shaved by eight o'clock
cold grips my skull - now brain freeze
stubble grows like wheat - neat!

https://youtu.be/bqtfl0gt5fM?si=2D4d9DfiNU6mC_Zd

Read and leave comments (0)

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it." Sylvia Plath.

Amidst the depths of contemplation’s maze,
Words grotesque and selfish lie ablaze,
A fusion of curdled musings intertwine,
 In late October light, a restless mind resigns.

Like an old moon, friendly yet discreet,
Stalks the dawn sky, casting shadows sweet,
In this time of rhyme, where memories reside,
Sh...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Anna Campbell was her name and Kurdistan
her nation — she died on March 15 2018, the Ides of March.
She was fighting as part of the all-female
Kurdish Women’s Protection Units, the YPJ.

She was 26 when she died 
a long way from Lewes in East Sussex where she was raised.
She was killed by a Turkish airstrike — the Islamist Turks NATO-empowered enemies of the Kurds.
Anna had dyed h...

Read and leave comments (0)

saw her in the street

polite, random, neat.

forget drunkenness

create the diabolical

divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate

too late.

one, kind, sweet woman,

polished floors with rage

arms red and fleshy –  

 dark memory of her soul 

 late, near the Spaniard’s Inn, 

 full moon shining,

with all the solemnity of a river in flood,

sleeping London dreaming o...

Read and leave comments (1)

We walk a steep and slippery way,
mixing senses in synaesthesia’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, life goes by,
I  walk along a steep and scattered way.

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

Dark ...

Read and leave comments (2)

Sadnesses besiege me,
at the dying of the light,
nothing can console me,
like a vein of ore run through solid rock,
through my life
the glittering flow of tears
has been like a tumbling spring
in hill country.

My love, stretched upon this rack of time, 
appears redundant, gone,
until her song is sung,
until her time is right
until the light in her eyes
greets me at night....

Memo...

Read and leave comments (1)

memory fades
slippery words
frankly absurd

at home the fulcrum fulminates
again children expect blows
nobody knows 

eldest boy
emotions frozen
for years and years
unbridled  tears

father, brother son, friend
world without end
pressure in my head
they're dead

thinking will no longer do
so what more can ye do?
walk a way with a dog 
Skip into music
Fade into art.
Be a part...

Read and leave comments (0)

https://aphelis.net/james-joyce-meets-nora-barnacle/

I stare at the ceiling, stare at the sky, time flies by. I scuttle along a dirt track, climb over a stile into a cornfield in the previous century I see no blood-red poppies, merely blue corn flowers and the witch Hazel. Now, I’m stuck in the backroom off of Clapham Green, where the black mould spreads insidiously  like a disease tha...

Read and leave comments (0)

The winter sharp brains of children 
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
They came running across raging seas, dancing on the waves.

A storm-blessed salty awakening.
Had nothing to regret. 
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the roo...

Read and leave comments (0)

When sadnesses besiege you,
at the dying of the light,
and starlight illuminates
the end of days
then star-crossed lovers
quietly drift away,
sigh silently out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes,
And you will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise..

We spin and whirl and shiver.
like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch, Wicca, Wizard
who sway beneath the moon,
all night, all da...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Brittle beauty, that Nature made so frail,
Whereof the gift is small, and short the season;
Flowering to-day, to-morrow apt to fail;

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (born 1516/17, executed 19 January 1547)

Read and leave comments (0)

Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

On these dog days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
 after much deprivation and cruelty
ours is a molested nature,
that screams in agony in an iron trap
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death 
as humans point their cameras and smile.

Will these few remaining animals be abused
exterminated, tortured
like all four-legged creatures
...

Read and leave comments (5)

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

A bond unbreakable —
Private soldier Jack Prince by name,
Not a pillar of strength, nor with a heart aflame,
You you didn’t live a life of wisdom and insight,
Your absence does not leave a void that feels so right.
Do you rest, in eternal slumber?
Spirits dance on, like a glowing ember — 
or so the poet says — 
Does your legacy live...

Read and leave comments (0)

The moon was sad, as only the moon can be.
Men in tears seek to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth.
White sobs slide into our eyes
Remembering the smile of another
A mother,

On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past was a magnet that draws
Into us the heady...

Read and leave comments (1)

Syd, do you remember that golden sun,
When youth burned bright, your journey just begun?
Shine on, you crazy diamond, hold your flame,
Illuminate this world, leave your mark, etch your name.

In your eyes, a depth, a universe, vast,
Black holes of wisdom, memories from the past.
Shine on, you crazy diamond, never lose your glow,
Your brilliance shines through deepest darkness, in a cel...

Read and leave comments (3)

Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
Whine like a man who knows he's out of time
Casuistry and sophistry
Work together
In perfect harmony.

Poetry's more about wine than whine
More about seeking to express the inexpressible
Than complaining about how difficult it is.
A true poet makes the difficult easy
Can turn water into wine in a half-truncated line

Caesuras can soar in ...

Read and leave comments (2)

John Clare knew and understood
the wonder of the mundane,
how nothing remains the same.

Glint, glance, gaze, smile,
the optimism of
that pastoral green mile.

You saw and smelt
a myriad of wild flowers 
sway in the breeze.

You looked up at the swirling clouds, 
a grey-blue reflection of your unassumed eternity
and then you wrote your poetry
unmindful of the side long glan...

Read and leave comments (2)

From trembling thin arms to thunderous cries,
A childhood stained with hunger's cruel guise,
Clutching to mother, seeking her solace tight,
In a world where shadows cast a daunting fright.

Constant threats and abuse, a heavy weight,
Youth stolen away, no chance to abate,
Eldest boy, burdened beyond his years,
In grey short pants, resilience through tears.

Socks pulled up, a symbol of s...

Read and leave comments (3)

An epiphany of history: 
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.

In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the gulags and the camps and massacres came later,
they s...

Read and leave comments (0)

Wild is the way, unclear is the day.
The seeping mottled sky passes me by
Opening before me the vista of a life:
A world of smell and sight and sound,
The portals of discovery all around,
I enter this world, this newfoundland:
The sheer vividness of colour abounds
Synaesthesia's all round visibility of sound,
Flesh and blood, heart and soul
All the half-created, half-perceived
Epipha...

Read and leave comments (0)

All those who scramble after death
And all its accompanying sensations
Gather around you now.  You looked
In so many different directions for the truth
And I don't know if you ever found it.
But you tried. God, you tried.

All those south Dublin Gaels dismissed you,
As they did the Aran sweaters they used to wear
During the Celtic Tiger with their Estonian nannies
And their Latvian garde...

Read and leave comments (5)

Oft and steady rhythm of a baby
breathing
her gaze tells you all you need to know,
her footsteps tender in the snow,
the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window,
considering all we do, and do not, know
we stand hand-in-hand
toe-to-toe
under this beautiful July moon.
 

And now she's our lady in red,
dancing at the party.
Big school beckons in September,
with all its inherited human...

Read and leave comments (0)

In this land of loughs and dry burials
The invisible lends itself into visibility
In the dialect of words – tattered,
Stained, inadequate – visceral words
Spew like blood from a gargoyle
Into this mist-ridden air where these
Pagan burrows hide the dead inside 
Blessed Earth: dogs still dig for bones
And the music fills the very air
Lacerated by the explosions of anger
We see upon the red...

Read and leave comments (0)

Minutes before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney texted to his wife in Latin: Noli timere or do not be afraid.

Seamus Heaney's sons carrying their father's coffin

Redemption comes at such a cost.                     
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost - loss pressing on loss - 
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly, so carelessly,
A...

Read and leave comments (2)

Her red-gold hair
on a stormy autumn day
along the borderland where
time fades away

Like the leafy-mist
which persists,
drifts along the hedge rows
on this late-summer morn

Emptily, curiously,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics,

hidden in the wood-smoke
burning  our throats on a lost
once-upon-a-time damp autumn eve

I am afflicted by
the time...

Read and leave comments (3)

I have a dead weight inside of me 

Which I carry around all day,

It often tries to kill me

And it will not go away.

I send this freight’s immensity

To the centre of a black hole;

Retracing the wandering journey

Of my wandering-wandering soul.

Mine is a grave singularity,

It contains a huge-huge mass,

In an infinitely small-small space:

A density — gravity...

Read and leave comments (0)

Charles Bukowski probably said (or wrote)
That we are here to laugh at the odds.
I’d say it all depends. Listening to a rich
New Englander (Martha’s Vineyard)
Pontificate upon the miniaturist artists
Of the Renaissance in the ever-so well
Known salons of Venice or Florence
(Such pale shadows of the British Imperialist
Tomb raiders of the nineteenth century).
These daughters of th...

Read and leave comments (2)

We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations,
Slip into the generations of suffering:
Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a ...

Read and leave comments (0)

When sadnesses besiege you
with the dying of the light,
and you find your solace in starlight,
time drifts away from mirrors,water, eyes
on this Aphrodite night of no disguise.

When night falls and cats crawl,
my heart is filled with sadness, I fear
starlight does not illuminate sky at all.

We know that all human love must die.
as silently we drift apart,
away from each othe...

Read and leave comments (0)

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken? Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

On a road out of London pulled up at a pub
I heard him say the words I remember, today.
The working man suffers: glug, glug, glug
The drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug.
Taste the whiskey, feel t...

Read and leave comments (0)

Fluid the medium by which we desire,
Heavy the limits to which we aspire
To lift ourselves free, on the wings of a dove,
To practise perfection by drinking his blood.
The illusion of earth is splintering fast
As we grab at the air, as we fall at the last:
Witchery, Witan, Wicca and Wizard
Pursuing the furies is why we are feared.
Opening up space and stretching out time
In a flurry of wor...

Read and leave comments (0)

From he multi-verse within
I stumble into my usual discontented
Bout of sleep –
A fragment of the fourth dimension,
Trapped inside, no disguise.

In an echo of a dream –
Time, like the river Lethe,
Washes over me
And left I am here, bereft,
To float upon the river of unmindfulness
Towards the golden dome

Which glows with Synesthetic force –
A pulsating kaleidoscope of times...

Read and leave comments (0)

Sometimes it’s best just to make up poems
In your head whilst drinking beer and gin
Then let them blow away on a windy day in July
Sitting outside in cold sunshine with Woody.
If I call you what the fuck I like
And you call me what the fuck you like
What are the chances it’d be the same fucking word?
Would you take a fence or would I take a fence
Or is it only certain horses that ...

Read and leave comments (2)

Read and leave comments (1)

Some blind folk see the faeries 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 reminds us
...

Read and leave comments (2)

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

Early on in Dostoevsky’s great work Crime and Punishment.
Published in 1866 when Dostoevsky was 44 years old,
Raskolnikov, an ex-student in St Petersburg, sees himself as a young boy,
Walking through a provincial town with his father.

Outside a pub, a drunken rabble surrounds a weary old horse,
Hitched to a weighty cartload that it canno...

Read and leave comments (0)

Today I listened to a loada shit
Concerning toxic masculinity
I was kinda bored. It was Radio 4.
It was an arrogant fucking lecture on
The vital importance of the pronoun
'They' and hey there were no jokes..
This is no way to speak to ordinary users
Of language. It's a shame that working
Class people are so excluded from
These delightful ways of speaking. Minority
Rules you say. No p...

Read and leave comments (4)

Snow... lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The Dead, Dubliners, James Joyce

Yes, paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of e...

Read and leave comments (1)

In my dream I am paralysed, silent
There’s a shadow behind the moon
I scurry down into the winter-valley:
Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,
Rock- hidden fossils, set in stone,
Evolutions of Medusa. My bones
Afflicted by a petrified decay.

All, all she gazed upon
Can never be rubbed away.
Stains dry and calcify
Deep in these hidden bogs
Remnants of consciousness
A quagmire-swamp o...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

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 stings in my heart
We’re never alone,
We're never apart.

Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
These speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.

Oh! it’s a sin to kil...

Read and leave comments (2)

What church-bells or calls to prayer by the muezzin
For all these young men who kill themselves?
— Only the monstrous hypocrisy of the media
--- Only the slurp, slurp, slurp as we all become greedier.

Call ...

Read and leave comments (10)

“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
― Robert Lowell,Life Studies

Swirling around the failures of my life:
I laugh at the shyness that impeded me
Held me back until the children came.
it was good to give the future names.
My flights were just a fancy
To do with everyday expressions of what was really always there,  
Dim unknown, unexplored, uncertain, hardly realise...

Read and leave comments (0)

(For Clare)

It’ll take the breath clean out of you
When you think the implications through.
Tabula Rasa: blank slate:
No memory, no desire,
Nothing to bend you in any direction,
Nothing to send you lower,
Noithing to lift you higher..
No future envisaged
No presience required
No past to forget
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-one to speak to and ...

Read and leave comments (4)

At school I was never all that good at geometry:

Perhaps my pencil was too blunt or my eyesight too dicky,

Or perhaps I just couldn’t be arsed to get it right.

Other boys could, and did.

What I do remember is that the most minute inaccuracy

Made at the small source would lead,

Left uncorrected, to greater and greater error

Until the final calculation would be wildly wrong...

Read and leave comments (3)

.
sad december skies haunt my thoughts as I drive
skirting south of the stage set of my younger days:
my home town, seldom visited now. lemon light
can’t warm the chill around my heart,
the chill of life unlived, or lived awry, and in greater part
treasured only in hopeless hindsight.

the motorway speeds me away, in flight into deepest cheshire:
the light is cream soda in clouds,
the sc...

Read and leave comments (4)

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 kn...

Read and leave comments (4)

The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Time does not diminish grief
As it is said to do, in popular belief,
It grinds on slow, tearing into dreams,
Destroying all that which merely
Appears or seems.

It is born again, transmuted
Into tinctures of love. 
It inhabits the mind...

Read and leave comments (2)

(To: John Donne - 1572 - 1631)

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 ...

Read and leave comments (2)

The Unwritten predominates, 

The times of wonder have gone,

We hold on - the wise ones drugged

Into submission.

Forensic psychology reveals traces

Of long-forgotten haunted faces;

Which, like Munch's lurid, silent scream,

Degenerate into nightmare-dream.

Or, so it seems.

Meanwhile, in population centres,

Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,

Falls into ...

Read and leave comments (1)

Angels alight, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,
behind her eyes her guardian angel sighs.
Listen! to the whisperer behind the song,
misfortune exorcised by fluttering fugues
that sing a song in a minor key,
a longing to be whole and free.
On this seafront there is a stone,
where, in the creamy moonlight of romance,
men and women pledge and dance,
under our lady moon.
It is a place wher...

Read and leave comments (2)

Read and leave comments (0)

Blue as forget-me-not blue
Blue as an Alaskan blueberry
Blue as an English May morn
April egg shell blue.

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 this road before me
A road I walk in vain
A road throu...

Read and leave comments (1)

And I live beyond a dark star,

On the edge of a black hole,

Which I will fall into any day

Now there is the singularity of night

This utter absence of light.

All colours leached away,

When I wasn't looking,

And now the music is silent too.

What should I do?

The speed of light Is certainly

Insufficient to merely make my escape

From this orbit of gloom

This reconn...

Read and leave comments (3)

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...

Read and leave comments (1)

Read and leave comments (2)

This story of Thinagain fell from a wall,
Nothink never went well agin for ol’Thinagen,
So he call it the Christian minstrelsy.
it tell of a fall
off a wall
a fall from a tall wall in the Noman Times,
In prose nor rhyme;
this story be retold through genuflections
where He is describe a “solid man”.
that poem end with Humpity Dumpity,
on a hint of a wink 
that Thinagen ‘s fall 
...

Read and leave comments (1)

Meningococcal Septicaemia slipped into our family life
One dark December night. He'd be thirty-three now,
If he'd lived, my son.
And meningitis more or less destroyed
Everything for us.
It is true that grief can last a whole lifetime.
Like after a scorched earth policy
It can  take decades for lthe land to recover
But we had our three girls
And had to make a Christmas for them.
Somehow.
...

Read and leave comments (5)

Born, bloom, die
All in the one day
Blur a glass darkly,
Drift away.
This physician’s proof of death,
A girlhood’s fleeting fancy,
A garden romance
A moonlit dance
Chopin playing lightly
And no rectangular wooden box.
Instead a living thing with feathers
Whistles through my head
Across the broad Atlantic to raise the dead --
Your ravaging femininity instead. .

https://youtu.be/No5F...

Read and leave comments (1)

These fingers point at letters

Those letters point at words

And then the disturbance -

Occurs

My love she was a vixen,

She howled in the night,

Those feelings they just left me -

Despite them being right.

This mourning just continues,

Throughout decades, in a line,

My lover she engages me -

In time.

Those swirling skies of fortune,

This la...

Read and leave comments (0)

Yes. We spend too much of our short lives

Chasing the mot juste, that phrase, that image,

That will reconcile all, bring all to mind.

To ease the pain and to make amends.

But there is no end to the way of art

We must learn to wonder as we search

For the right word to express. What?

That fleeting sense of something

Far more deeply interfused

That has its home in the setti...

Read and leave comments (0)

Dracula dreams a waking dream
Nothing is as nothing seems. 
The sky is grey today with streaks of blue
Swirls in the sky reflect sombre horizons;
Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
Conspiring in their usual ragged silence.
My dreams are dreary, far away,
The trees are laid bare, a mist of water’s in the air.
Folk are caught out cough, cough, coughing 
As in the peasoupers of the ...

Read and leave comments (0)

(for the ghosts who buy memories)

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 Christ the King
Chimes of crucifix, pyx and plate –
These bells have blessed the insouci...

Read and leave comments (1)

the may flower is out
and a warm wind
storms along
the coast;
twilight
gathers shadows
into the sea,
the night
swells, heavy
with anticipation;
far away
blows
a whale,
a candle
throws shadows
on these pages
where the light
infantry
march along,
whistling
a cheerful
song,
wink
at the pretty girls,
who shake their ribbons
and their curls,
so fleetingly.

https://youtu...

Read and leave comments (3)

November brought to mind in May 
The 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.
And the cold will rise to infect our eyes!
We are, unfortunately, not Italian, Etruscan,
Just woolly-backed mammoth barbarian sorcerers
Of a certain druidical disposition: visceral,
Brui...

Read and leave comments (2)

In Latin or in Portuguese 

o sentimento de amor

Is just the same: 

The sentiment of love

Can quickly catch aflame.

A lack in the discipline

Of the eyes breeds

A brooding wish to exercise,

Or exorcise, a fire that re-iterates 

The eradication of disguise, desire

Leaves us contemplating the irreducibility of fate.

Extending the same disregard for grammar:

Read and leave comments (0)

One thing turns into another thing.

This is the story of continuous change

Nothing remains the same. 

The sum Is always greater than the

constituent parts.

Yet a metamorphosis of hearts

Occurs when we know that

Differential calculus

Plots the rates

At which things change.

However, the total always remains the same.

E = mc2. 

Energy equals mass 

Times the spee...

Read and leave comments (0)

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://youtu.be/5KIt...

Read and leave comments (2)

Too many words
the king's reign
and
my heart 
conspicuously silent
when addressing
midnight feasts or Lenten fasts;
nothing lasts
except the majesty of the momentary
singing singularity of an event horizon
where voices echo broodingly
like dark eyes at a funeral.

The sky blends darkness and light
surrounds us in a tumbling embrace.
We are left here, in this solemnless place,
heart...

Read and leave comments (5)

I raise my eyes from the detritus of death, 
To take a deep breath on this gay May day.
The light, even in these northern climes,
Lifts my spirits, relieves me from dwelling
on my losses, encourages me to give thanks
for all that I still have. I am glad to be alive,
No survivor's guilt, a lilt to my words today.
I see colours both sudued and majestic,
Hear the birds whistle as the...

Read and leave comments (6)

All alone inside my head
Nothing to remember
Nothing to look forward to 
Nothing to be said.
Up early on this grey May day.
My friends are silhouettes
Nothing to remember
Nothing to forget
Nothing to regret.
I am the ghost of myself
Already at 07.13am
As the BBC news comes on
I'm planning to be dead.
I drink my tea shakily - 
from the last night's booze -
Sit at my desk in this stra...

Read and leave comments (3)

Portrait of my dead brother Salvadore Dahli 1963

I’m sorry, Pete, that I rarely visit where your remains
Were laid that terrible day in December 1996. You are often
In my heart. Forty-one is no age to part from all you love
But I know how brave you were. When your kidneys finally
Packed up you were twenty-one and in love. I only found
Out after you’d died, that you’d written to the gir...

Read and leave comments (5)

Remembering you on your birthday
not on a stormy autumn day
but somewhere along the borderland where
time fades away
like the leafy-mist which drifts 
along the hedge rows on this late 
April dawn recalling time’s past:
emptily, curiously, desperately,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics.

The wood-smoke of one particular fire 
burning our throats on a lost
...

Read and leave comments (2)

The winter sharp brains of children 
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.

Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
Running across raging seas, they danced on the waves.

A storm-blessed salty awakening.
They had nothing to regret. 
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the ro...

Read and leave comments (0)

We whisper prayers
in the unknown silence,
hold hands in empty space,
try to make sense
of the mystery of life. 
I linger in the uncertainty
of what lies beneath
the shadows of the night.

The moment passes
like a breath of wind
soars through empty spaces,
once filled with laughter and warmth.
Our hearts whisper
tenderly in the stillness,
we remember the joys of past days,
our lips...

Read and leave comments (2)

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

When sadnesses besiege me
At the dying of the light
And starlight illuminates
The ending of the day
Then star-crossed lovers
Quietly drift away.

Sigh silently out of sight
Of mirrors, water, eyes
And I will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise.

We spin and whirl,
dance like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch and Wicca and Wizard
...

Read and leave comments (0)

Kicking down a back street
In foggy London town
My head up above the clouds
While on my brow, a frown.

The random cries of violence
Swirl tight within the fog
A man staggers homewards
Too much laudanum or grog.

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,
...

Read and leave comments (0)

I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. Thomas Hardy

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 follows me
Following me.

Down dale, up tree, crawling all over me:
Still, the...

Read and leave comments (3)

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

With an abiding glint of love in her unfaded eyes,
Brown eyes that inhabit my dreams and memories,
My mother has dementia, a cross for us to bear
So saith her silver-tinted hair. She laboured for her family,
With her handbag gripped in her laughing lap.
She still smiles at my silly jokes and repartee
We share so many ways yet she’s the opposite of ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (5)

Read and leave comments (0)

It’s OK to be lonely
It’s OK to be alone
It’s OK to talk & crumble
Be silent whilst at home.

Without our second chances
Would any of us still be here?

So sit ye down beside me,
When the world is full of fear;
Breath in blessed regularity,
And swallow down your tears.

https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q

Read and leave comments (1)

Charlie and I walked our post-cancer walks
Down this narrow stretch of green in the city
For a full decade. We aged together
But not like malt, we blended into each other,
Man and Dog. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
And his life was shorter than mine. That afflicted me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that.  He connected me to the
Pack, little knowing...

Read and leave comments (2)

Photo by Marcus Bellamy on Unsplash

An epiphany of history: 
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.

In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the g...

Read and leave comments (2)

“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
― Robert Lowell,Life Studies

Swirling around the failures of my life:
I laugh at the shyness that impeded me
Held me back until the children came.
it was good to give the future names
My flights were just of a flying fancy
That had little to do with everyday 
More to do with expressing what was dim
Unknown, unexplored, hardly re...

Read and leave comments (0)

Murdered in 1942,
In Auschwitz concentration camp,
Oświęcim, Poland.

A Jew, you were Joyce’s friend,
The Joyce of Dublin & Galway,
Trieste, Zurich & Paris
And, off course, Anna L’Liffey,
She who riverrun on & on,
Even till the Finnegans’ wake.

Joyce lived in Paris for twenty years
He was so poor but everytime he had money
He always paid for everyone in every bar,
Every tax...

Read and leave comments (0)

There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music,
Plangent and deep,
Tempests flaring in the mind of man
Foreshadowing that terrible realisation
That you too follow this same cliff path
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness
Of day. When mother, father, lover, child
Have swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or despair, or when those steps we climbed
in childhood into ...

Read and leave comments (0)

 Anthony H Wilson (20 February 1950 Pendleton Salford– 10 August 2007 The Christie cancer hospital, Withington, Manchester). Wilson identified himself as a socialist and refused to pay for private healthcare on principle.

From Salford to Cambridge then back to Manchester for good. Our Mr Madchester  co-founded Factory records and was the soul-founder of the Haçienda nightclub. Joy Division, New...

Read and leave comments (0)

Those bloody dead
This debt we owe,
Abide with me,
Never let me go.

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

This 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 dog’s true love means more to me
Tha...

Read and leave comments (0)

So  I sat down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day, 
I wept silently because of the curse I carry:

The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or from Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.
But I cannot sing the songs of th...

Read and leave comments (0)

All along the Rainbow Bridge

The people are crying;

But the dogs are out running,

Running and tumbling,

All the way home.

https://youtu.be/Go-jJlGd1so

Read and leave comments (1)

No matter how we invent this writing malarkey
Or, how, precisely, we feel about it,
There is a wonder within our hearts,
And a good hiding of our souls;
So much more than a mirror, wi-fi
mumbling, incessantly,
there’s a story to be told, a tale told by an idiot”
But all we hear is:
‘fear poverty, terrorist filth  fear anguish, rope, anger, death, grief: time diminishes, the pale horseman.’
...

Read and leave comments (2)

Like a swimmer driven by a whirlpool of distress,
Like a  morsel of hope, lampooned by regret,
In a storm of my own making; beseiged by days; 
Adamantly anchored to a despair, twenty fathoms wide
I'm riven by the whirlwind of what I can not hide
Alone, my anchor is the live-long day and yet, and yet, I fade away. 
Dressed in a black haze: where dappled sunlight sways;
There's an abyss i...

Read and leave comments (0)

Memories are all we have

Feeling happy, feeling sad,

Thinking of the distance

That separates us over time

Unless, of course, you wanna

Get stuck in the eternal present

And that just aint pleasant.

One high English summer day in 1984

We took our daughter, Kate,

To the Dorset coast.

She was eighteen months young

My wife was pregnant with our second child

Anna,...

Read and leave comments (0)

That long-held sax note- divine
makes my soul jus drift away
 smoke, booze, horse,
Then the  girls. Sum o’them, think agen
man, the flash of the crack o’th drum
thumpity, thumpity, thump.
He jus stand there in a haze
John’s soprano sax, Miles’ trumpet
Blowin the blues. All the way To Missisip
All the way to me cryin in a ditch.
Those weary, weary blues. No shufflin shoes
No dancin c...

Read and leave comments (0)

"....sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." 

Every day a day closer to death
I wave that away with a pretended
Insouciance that does not convince
Me! Anyway, away with the dullness
And in with the sheen of a smile
At all the flummoxing frummery 
of the pompous politicians &
Well paid charity workers
Storming through Haiti 
In their 4...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (1)

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 brui...

Read and leave comments (5)

A people can survive genocide:
Armenian, Irish, Jew, Uyghur, Êzidî, Tutsi, Khmer, 
Traumatised, declined, seemingly defeated,
Yet familiies re-form, victims struggle to survive.
What does this abomination  cost us?
This mechanised murder,
This savage slaughter,
That melts-wears down 
Morality, demography?
We must tread lightly,
Even with snow, slow & heavy
Underfoot here in the Donbas.
...

Read and leave comments (3)

Read and leave comments (4)

Read and leave comments (1)

Generation of '27  was an influential group of Spanish poets that arose in Spanish literary circles in opposition to the Fascists. .. Their first formal meeting took place in Seville in 1927 to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis GongoraL The Spanish have long memories. 

Bleeding into lemon-tree-soil
Reminds me of nothing more than the toil, toil, toil
Of life in ...

Read and leave comments (2)

When I seek to remember a connection
It is often with those who are dead.
We engage in a deep conversation
One-sided as maybe, he said. I re-create
Trying circumstances from the past,
Which I knew wouldn't last. Oh!
These  intricacies of tense, These
Graspings at a slippery sense,
Which engaged me in my twenties,
Quite eludes me now, Stoned
I think how much easier it is with music,
Whic...

Read and leave comments (0)

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

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

We track her down the by-ways
Of yearning and despair
But at the sound of foot-fall
She'll vanish in thin air.

But in the ways of poets
Such images of ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Fresh water suits my watery nature.
I squint at the ripples of redemption,
Watch the ducks glide beside me.

Keeping me on the straight and narrow.

The call of strangers splatters across
The sky and I choke on what I know ,
And cannot even whisper out, or sigh.

Mountains and sky reflected in water.

The ordinary has become extraordinary
Among the golden gleams of sunset
We look...

Read and leave comments (0)

Who the hell can see forever?
Wild is the minute, clear is the sky,
A world of smell and sight drifts on by
Portals of discovery abound
All around this newfoundland: 
Flowers, vivid mesembryanthemums
From the Cape of Good Hope.
The all round invisibility of you
Distracts me from the flesh and blood ,
Of all these half-created, part-perceived,
Epiphanies of cloud and sky and sun
Enter th...

Read and leave comments (0)

Fortitudo mea est amor a matre mihi datus,

Coming downstairs slow and steady
crinkled and wrinked with ruffled hair
I hold her dreams close to me –
pausing only at the turning of the stair –

Until I have drunk two strong coffees,
smoked an imaginary cigarette,
said good morning to those I love,
who are now amongst the dead;
recite a quiet antiphon in my muddled head.

Look out o...

Read and leave comments (0)

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

Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
the Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
amongst the ruins of Nineveh, along the same back paths
...

Read and leave comments (3)

Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash

The adders of the south are missing here,
but there’s venom a-plenty
the poison of coal, oil and unfettered toil.
This is the land of swarfega! 
The men mess with their cars after work, 
while there’s light; 
cars bought for a fiver a time, at the auction, 
done up, they was.
It’s ten years since the last 
of the prisoners of war came home.
...

Read and leave comments (3)

Thought comes to a full stop
howls  into empty air
to see what’s always there:
contradiction irresolution, confusion.

One early morning, years ago,
in a space of rain & snow
working as a child : the flaxen busty
woman gives me cakes to deliver
to rich households with well-educated
kids who never had to work — 
& still don’t. 

I never expected much — still don’t — in the cold air
...

Read and leave comments (0)

Splattered on a canvas
or scrawled on a wall.
Art
is just
a husk of form,
without the artless agony
of daily life:
the strangled scream
and the carving knife.

https://youtu.be/AwzaifhSw2c

Read and leave comments (1)

The shadow behind the sun, the echo of her words,
Meanings stuck in transit, the music of the birds,
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache,
Years pass by like phantoms, the passions of the heart,
Silence breeding silence,  the faeries take their part,
Forget what you remember, give and never take.
Veil the mysteries of time, of place, the ever brimming lake
Mirrori...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Photo by Evelyn Cosplay on Unsplash

Let the words come
to expose your soul
to banish
all the fears & fake reconciliations
rolled up in boyhood
when the stream pushed me
into an autstic lunge
beyond all known limits
recalling the poet
I might later be
who could read a river
and never cry
over the intransigence
of all those fools
who spout answers
to questions
that no longer c...

Read and leave comments (1)

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Walt Whitman, 'Leaves of Grass'

And I went out of my mind
gloomily & quietly –
I no longer need to change my mind,
or stay in line,
a little beloved dog
amongst the street traffic and cops
It  wouldn't last long though,
experience shows;
hastily fate flirted flared
a...

Read and leave comments (1)

Rivers of melted music
fuse into sculpture
around this old oak tree.

The moving air vibrates
sound, shape, sightless shade
spill into my sinner's heart,

That place apart that comes
and flutters on the wind
and is no more..

And so I settle into the coolness of thought,
follow the stream, just as you follow
your heart. 

Run and you'll never
stop running,
mired in light or mired...

Read and leave comments (0)

walks in shadow
stumbles in shade
has no reciprocity
feels like a slave
I am not the king
of pain
I'm just a little
unwell

I miss colours
I do not know
where I am

diazepam in the bin
booze to give up the ghost
cannot sleep, cannot wake
everything is a muddle
of blackness
a demon let loose
no intention to cope
 

only I  can stop
the stutter of the clock
now nobody's 
nea...

Read and leave comments (1)

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 plains
Shine with the unbidden light of heaven
And nothing shall remain

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (2)

'Deportation' was just a euphemism for mass murder
of helpless Armenians driven to Deir-ez-Zor
in the Syrian desert astride the epi centre
of the 2023 earthquake. a vast and horrific
open-air concentration camp. After the forced
march, more suffering, the children were forbidden
food and water. The slow insidious slaughter
of all the Armenians was finally accomplished
by the sun. Droug...

Read and leave comments (0)

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,
& all is as it was before:
a flat, grey concrete floor,
Krema I at Auschwitz
eminently productive
340 corpses burne...

Read and leave comments (0)

In this mild winter breeze of splintered selves
The trees blend into silhouttes; and I see elves
Whose shadows transform perceptions
Into creations. And all the world of
Getting and spending grinds to a halt,
For one holy day. Death may be near at hand or far
Away, we have no crystal ball. We must put
All our heart and soul into conveying the simplicity of love
To those lying bereft of...

Read and leave comments (0)

Rain clouds the lungs
of the men who tread
these black horizons;

two hundred years
and more
of smog
sank deep, into these
black stone villages.

Villages
set like concrete
into these stark
sheep-ridden hills;

and in the pubs, 
the worn down late-afternoon light
shadows the men
who drink in the half light. 

https://youtu.be/fO7ih6Nu3MA

Read and leave comments (2)

Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
warps and wefts waste us 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 away the live-long day
aghast at a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget.

No transubstantiation this,
no drift into immortal bliss:
this work of resistance is
an ince...

Read and leave comments (0)

A crack of thunder over head
A flash 'n' crackle of lightning
The gods say::
Stretch your words across the sky
Illuminate the stark, skeletal
Trees of this northern winter.

Some poor sod's dead
Their rumble roar-not-fled
Still echoing in my head
Echo, reverberate, haunt.

All around my desperate head,
Clouds drop frozen hail
Like stones pelting down
On a world turning wet ...

Read and leave comments (2)

On your ornate monument,
made from a dry stone wall
covered by so many wild flowers,
the handsome man is buried.
A child of Greece and Rome
Born in the north of England
With a socially aspirant mother.

But the dead close their eyes,
That their nakedness may not be seen,
in this world where sin is not to be accepted.
So, closing his eyes, he poured water.
As the women washed him,
One ...

Read and leave comments (2)

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 – then do fongen folk  to go on pilgrimage
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands.,

Our pilgrimages tend towards interiority
& still seek relics of a past that cannot last.
I imagine that if ...

Read and leave comments (1)

In every mouthful of food
in every look of love,
in every chiding, every making up:
this sometimes bay of tranquillity,
a harbour to which I return.
helter-skelter
from all the storms and squalls of life

This goddess, now,  sails away 
as we traverse the wild seas of experience.
Tibetan Buddhism, Dharmakaya,
the ultimate nature of the fully enlightened mind,

A union of pure appe...

Read and leave comments (0)

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Pertaining to a death, to a suicide,
Mortem Sibi Consciscere,
The question unasked is:
Why? We can skate over:
How, when, where, who.
But not why. 
Extremum vitae spiritum edere
We all must give up the ghost
Sooner or later, bur rarely
At a date of our own choosing.
So, why bring that date
Forward? Why does the world,
With all tha...

Read and leave comments (0)

Luke fled Forida fast
He knew it wouldn't last
Do not submit to the system
Stick it out:
Do not be a prisoner
Of a vengeful state
An actor who milked
A miscellany of roles
Fight for the right to be yourself
Throw your weight around
Take a stand
Against the corrupt criminals
Who bleed the country dry.
You heard it on the grapevine.
Common decencies disregarded
A heady-sickly...

Read and leave comments (0)

Memories just diamonds and rust,nothing more.
though time’s chasm opens before my sight,
&  the vertigo returns with the Lapis Lazulii.
I devote time to resurrecting the lived poetry
of the Byzantimes, Persians, Armenians, Assyrians.
Greeks. It is so strange that each civilization
alloted supreme value to the blue of lapis lazuli.
Mined so sparingly in the wilds of Afghanistan.
Lapis l...

Read and leave comments (0)

Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly
this natural magic of transformation
can happen to you too. Time makes you
more beautiful. Human metamorphosis
liberates souls. Such a rare achievement
Requires an emptying of the mind,
a deep (and so painful) compassion.
to defeat your expectations;
to free yourself and you will see
the passing beauty of a butterfly..

Butterflies live fo...

Read and leave comments (2)

Lithe legs spread
neck stretched
feet splayed
in a swan-song.
Toes strong
fingers pulsing
then snap
a pirouette
we'll never forget.

A spectacular series
of whirls, up on her toes
he circles her
on the ball of his foot:
musical, muscular movements mingle, mix
a shiver of white as she jumps
a catching of the breath as she slumps
Into his arms;

A choreography of bodies
...

Read and leave comments (0)

My friend, 
strode up those stairs, so long ago,
& still, his voice pumps out
in all its brittle beauty
on YouTube.

Finally, leaving the depression
& the epilepsy behind,
just leaving us
you left us with the music & the dance
telling us all what love will do
& how, precisely, it will tear us apart.

Some will listen and never know
the man you were.
Me? I cannot abide the way
you h...

Read and leave comments (0)

If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
They’d be present in the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes.
This friendship across species — a Buddhist mantra –
Rocks me like a good old boy, befriends me like the sea.
He’ll be with me when the gates fly open —  and the light pours in.
Now we seek out the depths, the shaman-spirits that will be:
Seen, glimpsing...

Read and leave comments (1)

let the words come
to expose your soul
all your fears & reconciliations
rolled up in my boyhood
when the stream pushed me
into my autstic lunge
beyond all limits
recalling the poets
who could read a river
and never cry
over the intransigences
of time
Dr Simon Curtis
my friend with whom
I ventured over the pennines
to Sheffield
where the latest tome
of Tho Hardy's poetry
had been ...

Read and leave comments (0)

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

We feel by measures hidden from the eye
Time borrowed, days wasted, times go by:
I walk along a steep and rocky 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 holds imaginatio...

Read and leave comments (0)

Watching the waves
pulled by the moon
swallowing a cacaphony of shells 
the remnants  of Crustaceans
a man - a future suicide -
with his jeans rolled up
throws a stick 
- for the black & white collie -
who, herself, will soon be
euthanised.

This is not a translation
of what my eyes have seen
into words
rather, it is my surmise
of the movements,
on a sunny day,
of one man & h...

Read and leave comments (1)

The tone of the big bell settles in the dust
of this small market town in county meath
and on the stained glass window still
the sun-marked resonance of bell
circles of uninscribed sound
uncaged
through all the cerebral centuries
chimes and chants for christ the king
chimes of crucifix, pyx and plate
these bells have blessed the insouciant faithful
buttressed, battered, no-man mattered
...

Read and leave comments (0)

Photo by vishnudeep dixit on Pexels.com

If you can see the good in everyone
If you do not condemn the less fortunate
If you can speak the plain unvarnished truth
When all about you are prattling prevarications
If you are patient with those who lack luck
If, when faced with stupid bias you do not duck or dive
Or respond to haters with hatred
Or respond to the wicked with evil.
If you...

Read and leave comments (2)

Read and leave comments (2)

Words I don’t remember,
Winds buffeting the sky,
My soul, reduced by fortitude,
Sparks fly!

Words flare into pettiness
Heat, so-suddenly, replete,
golden sands, crystal brooks, silken lines, silver hooks
replete, neat.

Glimpsing what’s already there,
I begin to mount the stairs.
Rising to the ghostly lair
I stare and stare and stare

A friend you trust implicitly,
A lover you jus...

Read and leave comments (0)

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

A waterfall of notes, rising, falling, 
splashing into mind, heart, soul. 
Music will never grow old: 
arpeggios of broken chords,
rising descending,
into and out of order,
plunging into minor keys,
rising into waves of luminosity.

Notes compose a chord
played or sung,
rising or descending,
creating harmonies of th...

Read and leave comments (0)

old,  tired, stooped,
crippled by the loop
of the years,
damaged by time, rarely in line,.
walks the path of rhyme— 
a strip of green meandering 
into an endless cityscape — 
shadowed with all the discontents
of eternal youth:
no much use at compromise. 
sticks with the brain and eyes
no disguise
no inventory of things.
no library mind is mine.
wrecked by beauty,
stunned by deceit
...

Read and leave comments (0)

Sitting on the floor
knowing the score
what life (might) be for.
how to roll a joint or two
to enjoy being young and in love
with life with each other too.

Walking in the gardens
Spaced out, looking at the sunset,
Being the sunset, when two rugger boys
Made a noise, laughing at the freaks,
I said go to hell, took forty years
but what the hell.

And now my nearest and dearest
Av...

Read and leave comments (0)

Splashing through rain to hospital 
to where my heart lies bleeding,
I hold her hand as she lies sleeping,
and so it goes, and so it goes.

My mother wears the ring she wore
more than  seventy years before,
a girl pledged to a sailor-boy,
who lived through war,
survived, he was a vision in her eyes, 
and so it goes, and so it goes.

This orphan-man made it home to her
to build a life ...

Read and leave comments (2)

When our stock of words depletes,
And we’re sitting all alone,
The midnight hour has come & gone,
And a thick silence groans.

This is the time of the second death,
Of time falling forever out of line,
Quietly, the voices of the dead coagulate,
Here, inside my mind.

I cannot block the voices, 
Or their words upon the wing,
The shifting light of day breaks
As the winter bird...

Read and leave comments (0)

An epiphany of history
A bloody tear, I fear,
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have
the normal crucifixions
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains.

In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the gulags & the camps & massacres & the tarts
that stretch from Manchester to Lahore t...

Read and leave comments (1)

Opinions can be ignored, mocked,
S'fair enough – satirists like that stuff
Swift’d be buggered.
Otherwise &  of course,
No-one has the right not to be offended
I am offended everyday
By the complacent, old
Bastards who hang on to every penny
Take every credit
& have the empathy of granite
& who  so easily condemn
those poorer or less well-educated
than them.

I love the novels of Dic...

Read and leave comments (4)

The grey day has drifted into black night,
puddles of shining water reflect starlight;
I cannot count the stars, each star marking
out a galaxy of planets, and all life-less.
Distance equals speed multiplied by time
Light travels at approx 186,000 miles/sec,
this universe has existed for 13.7 billion years,
+/- a couple of hundred million, one helluva
long time * one helluva fast speed is ...

Read and leave comments (4)

The holy trinity is a triptych:
composed of three parts
God the Father nods to the Jews
& the Old Testament blocks his view. 
The jealous son-devouring monster, YHWH,
kept his family clean - if you get my drift?
The Son, springsnewly-created from the New Testament,
is full of hope, miracles & remorse.
he is born to be betrayed.
the cockerel crowed three times.
& the son of god was as los...

Read and leave comments (2)