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On a road out of London, pulled up at a pub
i  heard him say the words I remember, today.
the drinking man suffers: glug, glug, glug
the drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug

taste of whiskey, craic,  all that convivial shite
he remembers, truly remembers – he’s a creature of the night
searching for the resurrection of a moment of lost content
he ...

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These empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
certainly lacking in originality.

Empty waiting rooms
in empty railways stations
no more smoky-smell of coal and steam.

Caught up upon an evening’s desultoriness
a girl’s slight d...

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Also I hear the mountains spring on their way back.
they kick up brown-blue mudslides
the weaver of water expands
as fish screech to taste
an order of merit
water is in our tears.
wars over water will be profound
like Israel’s grab for the rivers of Jordan.

Listen to the laplap lapping of the weedy river
the river is no longer firstly or lastly. It just is.
Chris & I used to s...

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I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. Sylvia Plath

The past is present in all our genes
and when you begin to recognize ancestors
running through your blood
you begin the blessed process of forgetting
the here and now, as a free-standing reality,
and so begin the unknowing of yourself.
Di...

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BY THOMAS HARDY

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

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

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

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Amidst this waste of time
I live under this mountain
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day
But, I drink anyway.

 Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stutters out
" Non serviam! 'I will not serve!'”
And that is enough, and more than enough, 
 to condemn all those big words like ‘humanity’.
and 'insanity.'
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe
Whether it ca...

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“There were soldiers there, also officers, but not a single one helped us defend ourselves,” Al-Azza continued. “I am a Palestinian citizen. I don’t have a voice, I don’t have a weapon, I don’t have security or soldiers who will defend me.".https://www.972mag.com/hebron-mass-settler-attack/

this space in which i squat 

to type does not contain me

in future years i will be gone,

al...

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A raggedy thin cotton dress
On this little girl playing
On this freezing December day.
She’s scorned by her mama,
Left out by her friends,
Deserted by her dad
She's just lonely in the end.
Neglected by the world around her
Little Ellie is plain sad.
The priest says ‘she’s going-on bad’.
So her school calls the doctor,
The doctor calls the nurse,
Torn this and that way,
Little Ellie is...

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Your words cast a shadow,
linking the living & the dead,
I will jump across the years,
to reflect your innermost fears,
drag my breathing away from tears.

A passing air at sunset,
a glance across your page,
the heavy thump of midnight,
the dreaming of your grave.

Childhood memories beset you,
drawn from lost time's distant drum,
visions of a time of careless ease,
when you were hav...

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He likes this apple, chews,
He was a boxer, a goalkeeper.
His name was Arthur,
Uncle Arthur has a screw loose
The kids chanted
As he traipsed his way  home from work.
His filthy tie hung over his chest.
Worn on all occasions
He lived at the behest of his sister
In the smallest room of the house
Now, instead of screaming, he wimpered
When he heard the gatling gun's rapid rattle
...

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Like a chess board on ice
Ska
Black  and white all around me
To support the striking saris in Willesden
The men of the north, the underground coal men,
Came down to London Town
Stopped to hear the sound of
Ska
Spreading far and wide, away from Harlesden,
And Brixton, and into our souls
Ska
Spread so far.
Even into the graveyard by Rostherne church
Where Chris & I chat and eat our butt...

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I walk my dog, Woody, on a freezing day
He pulls on the lead, he needs to be free, away
Soon, he's outrunning Ned the whippet,
I glance along the forest edge
Up at the skeletal trees
Even the pines decline to leaf for me.
I count my losses - deaths natural
And suicidal. How can I reconcile
Myself to such losses? I do not know.
My beautiful children extend their hands
To me but they are b...

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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 flicker on a man
with eyes like vipers
solemn...slow...the tusk begins to grow.

Limousines shudder, yams decompose,
draining the body fluid
into the sewer beneath.

Tke,Tke....the analysand
above castle stone
in Normandy or Picardy,
th...

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Tobacco spills into her tea-stained lap
as she squirms tightly on the chair
in the church hall this cold December evening.

Where to pick up the pieces from?
What to do with them?
She hears the serenity prayer
but cannot remember the story from the chair.

It gets better, they say,
day-by-day-by-day.
Outside, 
nobody shakes & fears like she.

Inside, a kind of mad jollity
grips & ...

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On this day of flowers, the animals follow

The usual path of the sun

Ripples coagulate like water,

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 ...

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On this freezing December Thursday.
She sits silently hunched
Over her one-bar electric fire.
Dismal north Manchester light
Seeps through her tightly drawn curtains.
Her entire world was broken
When the burglar came
And will never be the same.
She sips her sweet tea shakily.

She gazes up at the mantllepiece
A young man's face
Looks out of the cracked glass
His face smiles at...

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Pulsing pale waves of mist
Kiss & bless you
I patrol these walkways
Rain seeps through the holes
In my heart, so scared am I
Alone.
Streetlights shine,
Rats scurry into mind.
These are the concrete estates
Of the heart.
Screeching seagulls see
The black holes in the fabric
Torn apart, broken-backed,
We are the twins in the mirror
Looking at each other,
Side-by-side,
With nothing to...

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Waiting for the barbarians is over:
As whiter shades of pale, pretty traces of lace,
Reveal in opal-luminosity these late Romans,
Their indigo-dream, red with gore on this bloody May Day
Arabian savagery negates their absorption into the timeless
Creation of Constantinople’s drift and swell,
Elysium’s perfumed garden of lucidity broken by
Mehmed’s Turkic desecration, his sweltering road to ...

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A whole life spent out of kilter
Every day is out of whack
So when the storm hit
And the lights went kerflooey
I was ill-prepared.
There is no going back.
And if a little dreaming is dangerous,
Is the cure to dream more?
Well, I wish you were here: that’s for sure.
On a sad, december day
When all the words that ever were
Just drain away
Leaving me aghast,
Alone, marooned
On ...

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The red glow of our one-bar electric fire

Reflected on our hardly bearded faces

The multi-coloured music of curved air

Synaesthesia rampant, the sweet smell

Of burning Lebanese hashish everywhere.

That thick and smoky sweet sweet air.

Nick Drake still alive amongst

The flat-lands of Cambridgeshire.

Five leaves left a common currency rolled up

And me the lad from the Nort...

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___an omen___

Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light
It’s not a rose; it’s a beautiful buttercup, like the
Yellow marvels we used to use to decide if we
Liked butter or not. Did the yellow reflect upon our
Chin? Those flowers resemble those of the wild rose.
And it’s poisonous to humans. Its scientific name is
Helleborus niger macranthus — enough to ...

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I can hardly speak but I will try
On this cold December evening:
my brain falls silent, still
it is the dying of the light
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
sin soaks into the sky...

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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 and marauding and in the name of God.

True faith links us to childhood innocence
To Wor...

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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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And all the torn envelopes of me came into your hands,
Nothing in them — just love that you could throw away –
You threw it straight back to me, I caught it, we were away.
You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes
For being alive
I thought you are desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t
You were just a girl, I was just a boy
I felt your difference: of mood, of shape and tone
I wa...

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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 space and stretching out time
In a flurry of word...

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Του μέλλοντος η μέρες στέκοντ' εμπροστά μας
σα μια σειρά κεράκια αναμένα —
χρυσά, ζεστά, και ζωηρά κεράκια.

Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης

What a catastrophe; we are made
for ease, & nice times
when change stays away
& unjust fate just passes us by
encouraging me not to succeed
denying me the hindrances
of trivial habits, like breathing,
and small-mindedness, and indifference
on a col...

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Paul Léon was murdered in 1942,
For the crime of being born a Jew
In Auschwitz concentration camp,
Oświęcim, Poland.

Paul Léon was James Aloysius Joyce’s friend,
Yes, the Joyce of Dublin & Galway,
Of Trieste, Zurich & Paris,
And, off course, Anna L’Liffey,
She who riverrun on & on,
Even till the Finnegans’ wake.

Joyce had lived in Paris for twenty years
He was so poor but everyt...

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Antonio Salieri, a man of less than monkish virtue, and of very little talent,
Falsely promised the deliverance of Jerusalem from infidel hands,
This was a lie. All his music and words were packed full of lies and thefts.
At the age of 35 Amadeus Mozart fell ill. Mozart was prodigious producing:
Opera buffa such as Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte
Opera seria such as Idomeneo and Die ...

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Zoroaster whispered in mine inner-ear:
Look! Listen! Synaesthesia is near!
Fill your eyes with music
Fill your mind with taste
Judge from the plunging depths
To the necklines of lace.
Feel this rise to the screaming heights,
Smell out these plangent declensions.
The silence from the Queen of Night
Or a cacophony of exclamations?
He's soaring, always soaring, he's winging out of ...

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a fluorescence of luminescence
gathers to a phosphorescence
of thought control
the music 
spreads an arpeggio
of discordance
that enters the soul
like the Via Appia or
any old Roman Road

mixes of music,
cascades of sound,
control 
the pulse of the shape 
this plastic fantastic
version of summer

the light show
left me cold
I know i’m old
but this fake

‘creation of meani...

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open your heart to the misery
of those who live without hope
learn to walk in another’s steps
do not avert your gaze.

give all that you have to give
see with the eyes of a child
learn to not count money,
my friend,
value comes and goes
stay on your toes 

count your hours & count your days
minutes, seconds, breaths, ways.
to please is all that you can do
for kindness is the currenc...

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All across the Nineveh plain the lights have gone out
Crosses driven into the hearts of the last of Mesopotamia’s
Christians. These Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language
Of Christ, have been loyal throughout the long centuries
Of subjection to the burning wind that came out of Arabia.
Now in Christian villages there are no girls left. All taken.
For the earth and the heavens hav...

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/f-o5Y2byIMg

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hear the mountains spring back into shape
their brown-blue sides winter lingers in crevices
the weaver of water a tinkle of god 
fish screech to water.
nobody’s salty tears fear wars over water 
listen to the lap-lap-lapping of the weedy Bure
sadly my song’s whiskey my sadness.
overwhelming my heart slows.
arrhythmia getting worse day-by-day
water peeled of impurity
forms patterns the dr...

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Do not ask what words mean
Let’s just assume they mean….something.
There’s a putative purpose in words.
You don’t like the implication of this?
Go, go to the palace of protection
They have not the sense nor the innocence
To know what they do when
they restrict free speech or write
a complaint about bad language 
Sexist, racist, classic, heterophobic
Such a wokish need to classif...

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Enter my world,
your very presence,
changes everything.
Potentials and propensities
merge, mould, into: 
she is not a fixture,
she is a fitting
in my world,
She flutters, flings, flummoxes,
acquires the shape of the word.
eyes sparkle — 
as I burn the last volume
of poems.
Eternal signs sigh over the ashes.
Letters tell of nightmares,
stone slabs become monster-statues
created by a...

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The trees are still today
Denuded of leaves 
Seemingly apprehensive.
Squirrels gather nuts - 
Against the coming storm
The big freeze will fill
The hospitals.
People seek warmth
Seal windows
Door frames
Kicking against disease
Poverty: defences disintegrate
The cold seeps in.
Dogs neglected
Left to fend for themselves.
We begin not to recognize
Any common humanity 
Just competitor...

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“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
Or leave it if you dare.”

 Songwriters: Philip Lesh / Robert C. Hunter

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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 retired rich
into the heart of my enemies
where hostile witnesses abound
skilled at shaking fists, digging up dirt
spitting out venom and being richly contemptible.
Wi...

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

Lost in the stinking slave ship’s hold.

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

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The moon was sad as only the moon can be
Men in tears sought to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with the fingers we can pluck

The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth;
While sobs slide into tears
Remembering the smile of a mother,

On the fortunate day of a first kiss.
The past becomes a magnet,
Drunk with the all the hea...

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Suttee, Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”), a Hindu custom of a wife immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.

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

Moths fly high
on this cold delight
of a summer’s night........
their wings sing
but my mind’s not right.......

See the showers spark high
in the flaming air,.........
sizzling on the water
blowing in her hair......

And...

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Let the starving Irish eat their babies.
This modest proposal of Dr Jonathan Swift,
published anonymously in 1729,
displayed considerable prescience
predicting the Great Hunger
the famine, an Drochshaol.
"Black '47" was the worst year
over a million starved to death.
In the south and west - the Gaeltacht - 
where the deaths were at their worse.
this attack was  also on the Irish lang...

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On this flaming day in June, with such beautiful pagan mountains rising all around, I felt your uncertain presence in this bastion of the Jesuits.
I listened, and you, doubtless, overheard, disquisitions concerning the nuts and bolts of your poetry
As your real presence crept slowly into my heart, I knew your journey of renunciation saw you washed up on many steep and rocky promontories,
Where ...

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The old gods of the greensward and forests have gone to ground.
Their acolytes burnt, stretched upon the rack, hung, drowned
For century after century until now the druid –in  the knowing of the oak –
Is found only in histories, myths and, tales until you walk in the freezing mist
Of a late November night – don’t get squeamish, don’t take fright –
See the land under the moon’s milky light: th...

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In ancient, Roman Byzantium
The King of the moon came looking for me
With blood dripping from his mouth
& a wide toothy smile, as wide as the Bosphorous.

Aristomenos the daughter of Ancient Man.
Will do everything she can to remain Byzantine
But the Ottomans raped  and laughed and smoked hashish.
She asked herself what the Greeks said about murder
And refrained. Uttering such-and-suc...

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We was paid of a Saturday night,
Tide us over Sunday morning,
Sunday’s dinner still to be bought
this Saturday evening in November.
Scarves pulled tight against the air
Damp pea-soupers everywhere. 
The market was bright, alight
With candles, gas jets, grease lamps,
The fires of the chestnut roasters
Amongst the cacaphony of cries
Traders calling out their wares:
“ Bootiful sea...

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Ghosts are everywhere
pulses of her heart stopped
in a knot
wraiths chattering
mixing and melding
In this invisible air
oddest number is the one
moments linger in the empty chair
talking to a lady no longer there,
odd that even two is only ever odd 1 + 1
associations carry on until the wood
rots and there are no trees and no ice
and no air and nobody there..

Only the hallow...

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Tabula Rasa: blank slate
will 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 or higher
No future envisaged
No prescience required
No past to regret
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-need to speak and no-one to l...

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

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Photo by Dmitry Ermakov on Unsplash

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 do not  know ,
And so cannot even whisper or sigh.

Mountains and sky reflected in water.
The extraordinary ordinary
Among the gol...

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Upon this beach of ground sand and shells
Come! See the image of the rolling sea.
This n...

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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.. 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 afflicts me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that. He connected me to the
Pack, little knowin...

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We met on the usual terms

Of affectionate endearment

Bred over more than half a century.

Our talk flared into a satisfying silent numbness

Chris talked of what was to be done

Generally nothing, I thought, but I do remember

Chris praising Farage's intervention

On behalf of the persecuted Yezedis of northern Iraq.

You live and learn. Only in this case we didn't. One of us. 

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To switch climates is not to switch allegiances.                    We drove them out of the temples, the money lenders
The souls of the murdered did not die at all.
The land around the Mediterranean bloomed
With blood remembered by the poets sporadically
The simmering of the sea this November morning
Supposes war in the east will lack the vigor to stain
The hot sea red as the ghosts of ungh...

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Arabic spoken in Al-andalus
after 400 years of the inquisition.
Muslim houses in Bosnian villages
with crosses on display 

despite the threat of apostacy.

"And slay them wherever ye find them."

morning fresh as one –
the Buddha knew –
the flowers of the valley
the grasses of the plain
shine with the unbidden light of heaven
and nothing shall remain.

This is still the truth
no ...

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I cut the sky, and heaven cries,
I gallop yet can never escape.
Killers drove me off my land
Despatched me onto a death march
One thousand miles of desert.
Pillagers followed our route
Stealing our goats, our women
Our children.
Abused bodies thrown into ditches.
The Turkish infantry...

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Wind cuts through this January night
Slices like a knife through my meagre clothes.
Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog
The cry of the wind is all in vain
Nothing is the same.
I kiss you across this black hole in time.
In the old be-jewelled spider-webbed
Way we kissed tender to kiss long,
Frost-filled graveyard-remains
For the happily insane, a song.
Yew trees shadow against the moo...

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No foot marks in the sand
To mark my passage.
No disturbance in the air.
I cry and grieve and cherish
My face immobile, as I stare
Out at stormy autumn.
O! living through November
Demands a certain flair. 
Foggy bafflements afflict me everywhere,
Pea-soupers some might say,
And as I gaze beyond the moon
I swoon into another dismal November  day.

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These long, black evenings fill me with premonitions,

The falling of the leaves remind us of our losses.

Captain Wilfred Owen killed in action

During the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal

One week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice.

Such terrifying bloomings of a malignant fate,

A godless irony, force us back into our centrally heated caves.

We dream...

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Baffling how I came to be a pauper, I thought,
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not real home. Everything changed.
Belfast, The Falklands, Belize, Operation Desert Storm
See a doctor some said,
“I’ll be reet” I say, “after a bit.”
Even here: No-go, No-Irish, No-squaddies 
The Falls, Free Derry, Shankhill, South Armagh, New...

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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

Paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of empath...

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In England’s fields no poppies grow,
Chemical fertilisers have seen to that,
The land is still owned by the feudal rich
And the larks, still, sometimes, bravely, sing
Scarce heard amid empty political posturings..

No-one listens to the 'glorious" dead. Lip service instead.
When the ‘great and good’ pretend to remember
They dont recall the ordinary Tommy Atkins like my granddad, Jack Princ...

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soft and steady rhythm of a baby

breathing

her gaze  tells us all we need to know

her footsteps tender in the snow;

the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window

considering all we do not know

or understand, we stand hand-in-hand

under this beautiful harvest moon

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Damp air, sticky, misty horizon,
stiff mud under foot, scarves
pulled tight, gloved
in the greenwood
stripped with leaves
of snow. 

All I remember
are the neutral tones
of a beery afternoon,
long ago. Chris knew
all the names, Latin &
vernacular, of the plants
& birds of the Cheshire 
plain. Nobody came &
nobody went as we 
marched into the 1970s
with such thoughtless tr...

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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 cannot possibly pull.

To the delight of...

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In the apple market
your south London twang
accompanied the many undulations
of time.

Your wild androgyny
mirrored the mirror
of yourself
skimming off the water
of childhood,
like a shaking dog.

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

Your songs were the water
I needed;
Your terse verse
spread underground
watering imaginations
breeding rainbows
ov...

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Somewhere between these avenues of dereliction  straddling the moon and new york city, avoiding the fairground detritus of half-remembered dreams. I awoke, sleeping with her together in her dad's caravan, at the bottom of the garden, amidst the rhubarb where I fell in love.

Smoking joints with red leb scored from placid dealers, drinking orange juice in pubs, astounding the upstanding patrons w...

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We grab our words from thin air
Drag words up from the wriggling earth
Such unearthly digressions infect even 
The connotations of our words, like ripples dripping from a stone,
We veer further from home than we ever thought
Possible. We grow to loathe ourself and 
Our empty suggestibility. Something must last.
We stumble back to denotation, to shared
Meanings we so blithely deny: the eart...

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Low hung ample apples of the sun

On the tree of knowledge. Right next to me.

Enough for you, enough for me. 

Extends my irresolution.

I need to hear the crashing of the sea

to believe in me

to mercilessly set me free from these unghosted unknown

unknowns that hover on this edge

of consciousness, always out of reach,

the sublime sublimity,

of that extra sensory pe...

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Bewildered, by all the things he left unsaid

Serendipity, chances cut dead:

I am wise enough to play the fool.

This vicious wind of a deep set night

Put out the light and then put out the light

Memory cuts through this taut, damp cold

Slices through me like a knife

Signs hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:

A life lived in vain....nothing the same

Across a bla...

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i.m. of Guido Fawkes, (born 1570, York, England—died January 31, 1606, London - Hanged, drawn and quartered.

Red-hot fire engines fly by like hot whirlwinds,
Squawking burning red machines
The brilliance of a sheen made not to burn,
Hot dragon breath in the fog
A red fire has engulfed the country
Gunpowder, treason & plot
Take care of my money! Take care of my family!
Red horses once set...

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 “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. . That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Harper Lee, 'To kill a mocking bird.'

How jealousy and envy
Remain a deadly threat
Generation after generation
Beget after beget.

He had the  ease and simple grace
Of a man who's never out of place
I loved this man who’s died
That cannot be lied about
That cannot be d...

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Flavours of sweetness
spices of life,
another place, another time
innocent tastes of love-on-the-vine
tangle on my palate,
mingle in the air,
no longer alone, no longer there
abiding in the cynic’s lair? No, she’s not there
cross seas, forks, knives, stay alive,
thrive with your three eyes,
a pasty present for the future
we done us best when we wus let,
thinking sent me all to...

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It is a time of wind and rain.
And in the green wood
The voices of the dead
Coagulate and skim
This edge of consciousness.
It is a time of heavy-hearted dread.
It is the day of the dead.
And what have we done
Since the last, lingering death?
Nothing, nada, no.
The wicked still prosper,
And the rich come and go
And the world spins the same
As ever it did before
And the poor are as the...

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Your vernacular usage is privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity.
Democracy. That’s fair enough I suppose. S’far as it goes.
Gather to a greatness: the ooze, ooze of oil. Toil. Toil.
Endless gold and land form the sinews of war you say
Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law you say
No one is...

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O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Gerard Manley-Hopkins, 'The Terrible Sonnets'

Out of the depths it came
I didn't just lose my friend once
I lose him many times still:
at every waking
at every pause in the day
every time I look at the sky - 
with you no longer beneath it - 
Or, I look do...

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The day has eyes. The night has ears;
the monster within, unbidden tears.
Think you’re escaping,
run into yourself, bang;
longest way round, shortest way home.

T’was the night before All Souls
dark and cold and dreary.
Full, dark, black, night.
For lettered and for unlettered alike.

Fear the roaring of the skies,
tremble at the dying of the light;
fear seeps from  miasmic g...

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                                                      (For Tom)

But please, remember me fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then they went on to say that the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti. Sam Beam

In every mouthful of food
In every look of love
In every chiding and every making up:
This sometimes bay of tranquillity,
This harbour to which we return,
Thi...

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The majesty of dogs impresses us –

Their solitary solidarity –

Yet above their grey horizons

There is always the promise, lingering…

Of continuing.

These days an ending is assumed

That glorifies the story of our lives:

Making children, seeing things,

Listening to the waves wash the pebbles,

Overhearing our hearts’ desires.

Yesterday the sky darkened at noon

Seas sp...

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 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 goodb...

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First light: every day a new beginning

Rising at the crack of dawn

To feel the air against my skin

To walk, with the aid of a stick,

To listen to the dawn chorus.

Thrillingly,  it’s already late September

A year since the funerals started

On St Patrick’s Day,

When madness brushed with death.

Now, I’m thinking that when I return

Home with Charlie I’ll rea...

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

On 29 May 1453 the Greek Christian city of Constantinople finally fell to Muslim armies. At least 4 million Christian Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, who had resisted conversion to Islam for 500 years, survivors of the Byzantines, were slaughtered by the Turks, many in the early C20. Now there are 2000 Christians in Constantinople and 15 million Muslims.

I...

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The pungent smell of tar sends me back
To summer days spent wending my time away
Spraying tar on the M62.
As dandelions parodied the gaudy sun
And the pebbles in my pants
Were reserved for having fun by skimming water.

In the dark church heavy incense
Melds with the body odour of the priest
Sweating for his immortal soul
While mixing an amorous alcoholic liquid on the altar.

Di...

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Now, only the vestiges remain:
Conduct a forensic examination,
Scatter the remains
Are they the same?
See the fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail.
We are condemned at the root.

A roof for his daughter,
Over a precipic...

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

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

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

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

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We on this northern isle
Are not given to violent
Demonstrations of grief
more a steady drizzle of sadness.
Buttoned up we may be,
But in straightened
Circumstances, we are not.
We are amply provided
With history. We recollect
Emotion in tranquillity.
We know in our bones
That nothing remains
The same. We press on
Into an uncertain future.
We are rarely divided
Against ourselves...

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Following up 
the flippancy of flowers
I recall why metaphors are rare
In our neck of the woods.
There are no smilies - implied or crucified - 
for death
Nothing like or as, except perhaps
An emptiness that remains
Empty of content, direction, frivolity.
In the turning of the leaves
We have a half-metaphor for a half-life
Spent well or spent badly but mainly
Just spent. It is ...

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It's not as if I wanted any thing
I didn't ask for a thing
I just liked my life
My mam and dad
And never feeling sad.

I remembered 'Clapton is God'
Sprayed all over the wall ~
Of a Conservative town hall
but nothing changed
Money had its way
And everything had to have a purpose.

My friends;
Some stayed the course
Others committed suicide
Before they were hardly alive 
M...

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Words cannot echo mood,

It is impossible to convey

The tingling numbnesses

Of grief.

She died today - not yesterday - 

A young woman: ordinary, happy, ill.

The semi-detached daze

Of an icy clinging depression;

The tight closing-in upon oneself

That foreshadows pent up tears.

And years of fighting to be well

Despite the fear that accompanies

Nearly everythin...

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Dukkha-Torah
The unbidden tears
The trembling in the heart
Human life conducted in the dark
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years
A craving for permanence
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
But walk instead with me
To the tomb of Maimonides:
Why do the wicked prosper?
Why do the righteous die?
Answer came there none
Except in the Song...

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I weep in the midst of the lack of thee
On stranger days than this or foul.
I am no shepherd, no modern Maccabee,
No Mayflower set to sail the broad Atlantic
Nor a hermit glued to the sacred mountain.
Just a man who trembles in fear.
The brave do not evade fear,
Do not live a half-life, but confront
& overcome time's mischief.
I will not find you in mountains or valleys
You no longer...

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(for my friend Chris)

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.

h...

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In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.

From whom the bell tolls?
The supine man, the moon-mad man?
And when will you come?
Mistress Moon, a sleek an...

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You cannot answer the immaculate conception
That would be to enter the mind of God. Our job
Is to pick up the scattered remains
Of existence in the liquidity of eyes.
We no longer have contact with horses
Though we can learn much from dogs
From their courage and virtue
We must feed the furry furnaces
Of life. Taste the coldness of water
Do not limit our hearts to vague
Emasculat...

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

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

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Devotion to and vigorous support for one's country
is fair enough, as far as it goes, I suppose,
unless you consider the whole world to be my
country. Then it's a different matter.
The lexicon of patriotism is narrow
clipped, incomplete. Feudal relations
in the twenty-first century. Remember
these  House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
 can turn a trick and that's for sure.
I hate the fawni...

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Moments of the past do not last

kicked into the long grass

a warm early-summer’s day

golden petals reflecting sun.

Then stormy-autumn come

later flurries of snow melted

by body heat.

Frozen snow comes and goes

frosting tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown

leaves crisp-crackle underfoot

old ghosts lose their threads

again.

Pot-heads fragile, thin, with thi...

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This were where I grewed up
in the 50s
when Manchester were a building site
slums and bomb sites
and jobs galore

mekin ends meet
me mam
frittered money away -
or so I heard me dad say
on cake and such like
extravagances

or so I gathered
listening t'rows
when I were lying in bed
awake at night

and when she left
fer a week
sick n tired of it all
us kids had mince n stewed pea...

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intention & accomplishment
there lies a shadow
cast by stone
& heavy with adumbrations
& in the heat
of the city street
we hear a murmur
that rises to a crescendo
something will endure
if only these sails
made of stone
Listen! hear them now
these echoes of a
futurity
cast by these shadows
into the raging sea of runes.

https://youtu.be/3r-qDvD3F3c

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All five at home and me
dividing my time, this way and that
trying to love the teenager with that
same tenderness I felt when she was two

I see her now sitting cross-legged
gazing at the asian children’s saris
the only white girl in the playgroup

Now rave music blasts me from her room
too soon she’ll be leaving home,
dressed in black, with bronzed hair,
and crying for her brother

...

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As the dawn whitens hazily, the baby sleeps,
the house falls quiet
with breath

this is the time I love  the best
before the busy scratchings of the day
the makings-do
scatter my thin dreams

night is different, with all its smoky gleams,
now is the time of the cat
silently purring

the trees full-leaved still, the grass long, bedewed,
shadows on these city streets
meet the moontime...

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

Looking, seeing,
you three, as you never can be again,
with all the holy blemishes of youth
leaves me here be...

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“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”

― Adrienne Rich

Time lies on a man
beautifully, obscenely,
so he imagines outside seasons pass
the rituals of daily life fade
in this thin inside rain
no excursions, no cats,
just this stinking fucking cell.

Del's prescribed,
grossed up under a grey blanket,
his own peculiar so...

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These trees have no source of income
beyond the earth 
and the sun.

They are the living sculptures
of this world:
now they are being felled, felled
as in Binsey, long ago,
by all those busy builders -

builders of roads to nowhere
roads to ruin
despoilers of the shadows, times, places.

'Candelabrum' April 1997.

https://youtu.be/No5FkAmTaJY

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“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” James Baldwin, ‘The Fire Next Time’

They say love pays no bills
That love cannot live with caution
That passion is akin to madness
That love is firm and never jealous.
That love is a many-splendid thing
That requires no ring
Nor note of affirmation.
Love is the most unknown of unknowns
...

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Western propaganda never varies
Blame Russia, not the Fascists.
Anna Akhmatova lived through
The Great Patriotic War
Knew all about the Ukrainian
14th Waffen Grenadier Division
of the SS (1st Galician)
The 26 million Soviet dead
Required to defeat the Fascists.
For Anna Akhmatova the Red Army
Defended the Russian language
as well as Russian soil
Poems written by Red Army soldi...

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

Some blind folk see the fairies 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 remi...

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I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes —
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live — like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But t...

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This man pushes this other man in a wheelchair
Down a dreary Salford road, avoiding kerbs, talking
Always talking, talking of nothing, thinking 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, the bookies and the booze 24/7ers
They know all these places very well. ...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Soon 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 past:
Generations of suffering:
eyes lifted to a cross, a cresce...

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An echo of the half-known, returned to me
rambling, aimlessly
something from youth
from the fields
until the light froze
And I looked down from a tree
At me, fifty years ago,
as I drifted gloomily — 
seeking to change my mind 
by learning to love 
but there was little street traffic 
and I had no money for the shops.
I took the memory in hand and read it again.
Nothing lasts long,...

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Bhí an ghealach brónach mar ní féidir ach an ghealach a bheith,
Féachann fir agus iad i ndeora le teitheadh ó thromluí a saoil
Aislingíonn muid gur féidir linn plúchadh leis na méara
Suaimhneas na bláthanna, doimhneacht chuimhneacháin,
Comrádaíocht na madraí,
Comhláine breithe beo;
Sleamhnaíonn sobs bán isteach inár gcluasa
Ag cuimhneamh ar aoibh gháire mo mháthair,
Ar an t-ádh lá dár gcéa...

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On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past is a magnet, a mongrel
...

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When sadnesses besiege you:
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 mirror, water, eyes'-delight
You will find humankind
 lose their disguise....

We spin and whirl and echo,
and dance with hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch and Wicca, Wizard
night and day....

We sw...

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Whatever has lived will
wither, languish, and decay.
time pines us away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget
who did the damage.
No transubstantiation this,
No move into immortal ...

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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.be/...

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

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Missing the wildness of my former self
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, waiting for the muse to catch up
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode so
violently that I catch myself thinking this
is an all an act to compensate for that time
my friend climbed that tree before disappearing
to japan for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true
that an apple blossomed, flash ...

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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 19January 1547)

open your heart to the grateful dead
to those who choose to live instead
learn to walk in another man's shoes

learn not to avert your gaze
when all the world is...

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Sitting in an apple tree,
Purloining space and time,
A wee robin redbreast
Viewed from behind.
Doing what a robin does best:
Pecking, as it ruffles, as it sings;
Scattering rain drops all around
The robin expects nothing
from this frozen ground.

Even in the soaking rain
Such sights and sounds astound me.
Nothing is as iridescent as this robin
He doesnt need snow, and he does...

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The sky was pink that evening.
blotches of an adamantine brittleness
spread slowly all across the Cheshire plain,
all over the acres and acres of rich pickings.

The quarter moon waxes to the right
behind my back, and out of sight 
a grove of black,spidery trees
squeezes into the skeletal-freeze.

Putting me in mind of a MR James story
of an unrequited remonstrance
or an undeserved...

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"The child was declared dead at Gaza's Shifa hospital, and the health ministry said she suffocated after inhaling tear gas." Financial Times.

At any turning of any year
we confront an unholy nexus of fear,
solstice, equinox;  apex or nadir.

We must ride a crest of darkness,
accept a drunkard's kiss
as the sun squats toad-like on the far horizon.

O! this squandered life
...

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On these heatwave days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
A place of much deprivation;
~ of a molested nature,
that screams in iron traps
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death in agony.
Will nature continue to be abused
in a museum devoted to the shadows
of a past that did not last?
To a life of sand built on the pursuit of superfluity?
To the end of everything?
To the c...

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

A waterfall of notes, rising and falling, 
Splashing into mind, heart, soul. 
Music will never grow old. 
Arpeggio series of broken chords rising descending
Into and out of order. Plunging into minor keys, rising into waves of luminosity.
Notes that compose a chord are played or sung in a rising or descending order.
...

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Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light
But 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.
Do we like butter or not? Was the yellow
Reflected on our chin? These flowers resemble
The wild rose – poisonous to humans –
Helleborus niger macranthus –
Enough to tangle any tongue.
Words weave their ...

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I want to smell the tender roses,
Before their petals droop and fall
In that one garden in St Petersburg
The most beautiful city in holy Russia
In the whole world this city stands out
There statues will remember me when I was young
And I remember them all beside the river Neva.
In the fragrant silence between the Tsars and Putin
I have changed form
No longer a young woman fu...

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His headstone verses were writ in wine
To draw the eyes unto the fact of death.
Lichen lines love-and-only-love remembers.
All, all, we knew was eyes of deepest blue 
This good man’s eyes writ in blood
Mortal love will always end like this. Time
Weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat palimpsest
Of hieroglyphics which resemble not the zest
Of pumping blood. Stones do not record the passing
...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Soon the dark lights of Christmastide will afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of Time,
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into a past that does not last:
Generations of suffering: eyes lifte...

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I was listening to one~
Of my favourite songs
When I heard the siren.
Not again.
Those dogs who love the rain
And chasing trains
Come to me unbidden
On a night of danger
When the power of the state
keeps me late for dinner
And I get angry and then laugh
At the silly cop who would not
Fuck off when I told him he had
No right to search my car without
Pre-existing evidence. Petty-minded
...

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Dedicated to all the western volunteers who have fought and died with the Kurdish YPG to defend the Yezedis and to resist Daesh and their allies, the NATO-supported Islamist Turks.  Aidan James, 27, was the second Briton to face terrorist charges after travelling to join the Syrian Kurdish YPG.

The Ezedi
Survived 74 attempts at genocide
By their neighbours, the Sunni tribes
But, tha...

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Winter on Mount Sinjar, Iraq,
On  August 3rd 2014,
by the Christian calendar.
That year lasted forever:
Such a long, long time,
Our mouths expelled a hidden heat,
It was the soul of the Ezedi.

Never before has the sun
Filled us so full of tears.
The Muslim torturers arrived in the night
Stole our daughters, killed our sons
These Salafist devils were having fun.

Now we sing...

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She cried as if she was three again

This competent, clever, caring woman:

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

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

Foul defilement, rape, violence, wounds,

scarred for life.

People living in fear

Do you hear?

People too scared to fall asleep!! Too scared to call the police. Who neve...

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When the last motes of sunshine
Leave my crippled eyes
On this sunny beach at twilight
There's no disguise
And that's when the haunting will arise
And that's when your absence
Dies.

And everything you made anew
And I never cried like this for you
Not during cancer, not during sepsis.
Only when that final ring of bells
Disturbs the dust
On the stonemason's art .
Perfectly timed
To...

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pale waves of mist
kiss & bless you & I
as we patrol these walkways in the sky
rain seeps through holes
In my heart, so scared am I
here, alone with you
streetlights shine,
lab rats scurry into mind,
straight into these concrete estates
of the heart
screeching seagulls shit freely
through black holes in the fabric
torn apart, broken-backed,
dead fat twins in the mirror
look ...

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Zen again

There's.....

A

Two-footed snake.

Me?

You?

Human zoo.

https://youtu.be/LOGmE7bKH8c

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An unholy roar began to build
That cherry blossom day,
With thunder in the air,
Then, that miraculous, quiet.

A low rumble, a terrible tremor,
A movement towards total devastation,
Of the air, on that day,
When the earth began to shake.

Uncontrollably.
All the skies scorched with fire
And the air exploded
Fusing flesh with flesh
Into a whiteness
From which the dark shadow...

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An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Charles Bukowski 

https://youtu.be/KHiclrHm-ig

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Photo by James Garman on Unsplash

I walked a way to heaven,
I walked away from hell
My home was poor but unhappy
My father drank in the local
I took empties back for money
The alley beside the house
was clean and narrow.
I wandered everywhere
Under the sun, I heard loud voices
In the night. We children played
Cards and festered.

And there, in the woods, our den
Like young foxe...

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My friend is dead.
We met wearing green blazers
One September long ago,
in the north of the country.
Two working class kids
at the posh grammar.

We lead separate lives for decades
then met again as if all the years had dropped
from us.
I was so happy.

He chose to end his life
in the merry merry month of May
I talked to him the day before
On the phone. He said he was alone.

...

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Smiling tears, a shape-shifting delight,
She mumbles her prayers, she turns out the light.
Her dreams are protected, by what she believes,
With the rising at dawn, and the turning of leaves.
Artists paint her aura, in deepest periwinkle blue,
Musicians litter their scores, her minor chords too.
Crying songs, and distant laments, auras of night,
The scent...

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

What remains? A purpled garden?
Some tattered garments, a stained guitar, broken men who loved you. 
Weeds and greed.

The magic you had resurrected, returned to the orange groves and the ocean.
Hands around your lover’s waist,
Spending time evading fate.
Taste the brandy,
swill it around your f...

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More than five rugby teams’ worth, of men, every week, dead by their own hands,

Young men mostly, three times as many men as women,

Nearly 6000 a year, 60,000 over a decade and….

rising.

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

A closed garage and exhaust fumes, jumping off high-rise flats, b...

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Angels alight, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,

behind her eyes a guardian angel sighs.

The whisperer lies behind the song,

A misfortune in thought is exorcised:

close harmonies, fugues coalesce when

nothing’s wrong.

A song in a minor key, a longing to be whole and free,

And to roll away the stone from me.

On this seafront there is an old flat stone,

where, in the...

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Tracked by a nostalgia for a past that cannot last
And didn't happen in the way I remember.
Time did not blossom nor bear fruit as expected.
I explored another slice of unaccommodated vivacity
As I wandered off the chart. Heartlessly hoping. 
Not a line of his writing have I
Not a curl of his hair.

We are transfixed by what is half-perceived, half-created
Glimmering on the perip...

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

She’s the shadow of a shadow,
She’s the smile upon her 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 remnan...

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When sadnesses besiege you,:
At the dying of the light,
And starlight illuminates
The end of days

Will you tingle in the frosted air of sight?
Starlight mirrored in the water and the eyes
When humankind abandons its disguise.

The spin and whirl of hemlock
Help witch and Wicca sway
Under the greensward
All night, all day.

All that was dark is summoned by the light
As...

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“Upon conquering the region of Sinjar, the Islamic State faced a population of Yazidis, a pagan minority existent for ages in regions of Iraq and Shām (Syria). Their continual existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgment Day.”. Daesh statement of intent, quoted in Hansard, Tuesday 8 February 2022.

Tender is the Night
And all...

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“How, unless you drink as I do, could 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 San Luis I pulled up at a bar
How far? How far?
The drinking man suffers: glug, glug, glug
The drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug
The taste of d'wish-key, the craic,
All that convivial gob-shitery qu...

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The pinched faced man in a hoody

Was a bully to a young nervous dog.

The dog cried, high pitched. Terrified.

The 'man' pulled him from his feet on a rope,

I could tell: the poor little guy had lost hope.

This pale faced guy looked like a user, spice

I expect. I said "sell me your dog for a twenty;

I'll send him into the bush meat trade". I'll never forget.

I w...

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A riff, an ear worm, a constant refrain
A minor chord mixing
A crying shame

Warm summer sunshine,
Imagined and known,
Cold won't leave me alone

Angry mackerel skies
Still cannot disguise
The hurt in her golden, pharaoh eyes.

A way forward,
Is rarely explained,
It's often avoided,
A life profaned.

Shadows fly across the moon,
And all too soon,
She's left alone in the...

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Such a random blooming of summer flowers

Sitting and thinking for hours and hours

My great aunt owned land, mixed farming, cows.

At Easter and Whitsun she rowed on Pickmere lake,

We robbed her pear trees in late summer - sugary, sweets infested with wasps

And all those cats,

I felt sorry for the mice and rats.

My uncle with his German accent and dirty, hard hands...

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Deadly sins surround me
God’s writ does not run here
Anymore. A sort of thin desire
Rules the roost and helps
Anger to bloom in me. 
Pornographers abound 
And make a good living
From this thin, twisted mockery
Of desire. We know the importance
Of blood, we cannot live without it. 
Do you want to drive the blood away?
Make my cheeks bleach...

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Only new places are within
Reach of consciousness.
Your upbringing will follow you
Into unneighbourly streets
Within reach of slithering out
Of the way spaces.
When fleeing the herd
There is no ship for you to take
No road to Nowhere.
Your house is on the edge
Of eternity, just a nudge
Sends you flying.
Some things are inseparable
Eternal. Unshakeable, carefree
We do not cou...

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"Exit seraphim and Satan's men." Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

Every time I listen to music or see natural forms
That please the eye: sky, land, sea pass me by
My breathing becomes short, my heart is heavy,
I have sought content for my whole life but failed
To achieve a glimmer of all that might one day
Come to pass. I wish the future luck. I think it is
A failing that I can...

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It was always too late for us
Cold winds blew our dreams away
Before I could even say ‘I love you so’
To the girl with the hallowed hair.

Along these empty streets the scattered
Snow in the icy air tells me you’re not here.
I took you into my dreams before I even knew
You existed and all the twists of life bounded
Up with you. But who can see the end of life
In this storm of wi...

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 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 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 ...

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Near is very far
Space, time,
Dark star.
A black hole
For a 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
...

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Morning rain soaks my clothes, my hair, my skin,
I do not care.  I am  not there.
I study the mortar between the crumbling bricks 
in this old wall built by the calloused hands of men who’d served
on the Somme and who’d been called ‘such dirty scabs’
in 1929 by striking Salford dockers;
they’d hung their heads but they had mouths to feed.
They’d taken any work they could get,
Men carved th...

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"As I have not worried to be born,

I do not worry to die." Frederico Garcia Lorca.

What remains in the purple garden of home?

Tattered garments, frayed memories,

resurrected in all honesty.

Now your hands are around your lover’s waist,

eyes shining with tears,

tasting the brandy

swilling around your mouth

looking out at the azure ocean.

So far from Barce...

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Words cannot echo mood swings
It’s impossible to convey
The tingling numbnesses
Of grief on this ordinary day.

The semi-detached daze
Of depression;
The tight closing-in upon oneself
That foreshadows pent up tears.
The fear that accompanies the aloneness
In everything I do,

Mood meanders like an Ox-bow lake,
And can take years to gather to a flood-tide
To knock me off my feet
...

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When you came to me, through the open window
All the torn envelopes of me came into your hands,
There was nothing in them — just love that you could throw away –
If you chose. You threw it straight back to me, I caught it, we were away.

You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes
For being alive
I thought you are desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t
You, too, just wanted love.
You were...

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The hindu kush
like the mountains of the moon
and the valleys where we lived
with the fairies and the spirits of the wood.

We bred the shen - the brav...

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Silence from my mother,
Silence from my brother
Silence from my father,
Silent lies my friend.
The tearing silence
of my son, pain without end.

In my mind voices,
voices of the dead,
who speak to me instead
of hiding fast away
for all eternity.

They speak to me
of all the things
we should say
to those we love
today.
My reply?
This broken-hearted
song.

https://youtu.be/...

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Now we’re on the border
heading for Nineveh
for the Christians trapped by Daesh scum
tranquillisers are no good for what is to come,
nor are religious beliefs of any sort.
divert your mind, the manuals say,
love the space
enter the tranquillity of bees,
I know about my weapon
I service my Tabuk Sniper Rifle 
people appeal to me to kill
the murderers of their children, the rapis...

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Oh Lord, my God,  I fell asleep
No longer in a state of grace
No longer a beautiful woman
Beloved by the Emperor,

But a harlot, like Mary Magdalene,
A sister of the Christ
Dazzled by the myrrh,
By an acre of sorcery, by a terrible moon
By a time of the month
By everything too soon..

Give me your tears
Let me wash your feet,
Wash away your Golgotha fears
We all die Lord

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Today our cat Molly,
has gone away
maybe to die.

She is a tabby
small, neat, clean
splayed after her first
kindle of kittens. 

She loved Charlie,
our big black sloppy labrador
she rubbed herself against him,
and watched him curiously
as he ate her food
rude boy....

After Charlie's death
she was rarely in the mood
for a collie/spaniel cross.
She seemed lost.

The ve...

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

Catching my death
it's an English melody
it's mean travelling
from heat to freezing cold,
from culture, religion, sexual orintention, trans-this, sans-that
sans fuckingeverything.

This means n...

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Fluid the medium by which we desire,
Heavy the limits to which we aspire
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 spaces and stretching out time
In this flurry of words a...

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General Mahmut Şevket Paşa (1856-1913), the Ottoman Commander-in-Chief, tells Orthodox Patriarch Ioakeim III (1834-1912), Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, in June 1909:

"We will cut off your heads, we will make you all disappear."

This sonnet is composed of the ashes of my heart
It is about the genocide of a community torn apart.
Over a million ...

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A lump of concrete, lodged in my stomach,
Settles in, sets off a dragging
Motion. An Ape-like me grunts
‘Set me free’. Nothing happens.
And all of a sudden the whole sullen world 
Of getting and spending and moaning
And groaning is all at once so utterly alien to me.
I walk in cool air, hear the blackbirds sing,
Watch this season’s robins take to wing,
Their flight works to keep ...

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

I'd love to wander far from this meagre time and place.
Back to the ashes and the dust of what I remember
A besmirched, a frightened, a human place,:...

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The wonder of you in the just mundane
Brings me back to black again
Nothing, under heaven, remains the same.
The glint, the glance, the gaze, the smile,
The unconscious optimism of the passing mile
‘It’ll be OK’, ‘I’ll live to fight another day.’
Wrong, so wrong, I wish I didn't have to say.
Look down at the myriad of wild flowers
On your coffin along the river Bollin's ox-bow way
Bor...

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My parents were Christian, Serb,

I remember the icons in my mother’s house,

The smell of 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 again

Looking for boys and women.

My father was ashamed.

He hung his head.

I pretended I was dead.

Hiding under my sister’s bed.

Th...

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In late May I lost my best and oldest friend to suicide and this week I lost my mum to Alzheimer's. This is an elegy for for my beloved grandfather, Pte Jack Prince, and for those two much loved people. 

The red-gold glow
of stormy autumn
is in my mind
leafy-mist exists
lights this late
October dawn recalling me,
curiously,
to the design hidden in words,
which swirl like smoke
...

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Birdsong flung into fond recall
A dry-stone wall,
A dry-stone wall.
Fleecy clouds on this mid-June-day
Don’t fade away,
Don’t fade away.

Daffodils lead him into a wind of change
On Anglesey, he could not refrain,
To begin again
To begin again.

Pale-blue eyes on his snow drop face
His wildflower coffin seen-through lace,
Seen-through lace.

On this grassy bank
I invest m...

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

Your wild androgyny,
mirroring the mirror
of yourself
skimmed off the water
of childhood,
like a shaking dog,

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

Your songs were the water
I needed
your terse verse
spreading underground,
along the circle line,
watering imagina...

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Opinions can be ignored, mocked,
that’s fair enough –
satirists like Jonathan Swift attacked English hypocrisy–
by suggesting in A Modest Proposal
that the Irish poor eat their own babies.
Some people were offended. 
So what? It worked.

No-one has the right not to be offended
I am offended everyday
by the complacent  Daily Mail-ism,
small minded holier-than-thou-ism,
prevalent in the ...

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We are the Êzîdî
We have lived in Mesopotamia these 6000 years
Our eyes burn with the fire of Zoroaster
We suffered 72 attempted genocides under the Ottomans
These attacks failed to extinguish our flame
It always came back again; always the same
Until now; August 2014. Now we are
Scattered from Sinjar, our home.

5000 men murdered
5000 women stolen into slavery
And still the west do...

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If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
I’d roll them up into the light of intelligence in one dog’s eyes.
I’d pat him and stroke him and tell him unashamedly how
This friendship across species astounds me every day.
So rock me, my good old boy, befriend me like the wind,
You’ll be with me when the gates fly open and death walks in
With the shaman-spirit that wil...

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In the presence of my dying mother
in the presence of a broken heart
in the centre of it all 
Helios.

Slink back into that black hole
of shadow,
emerge from the sea shaking like a wet dog.
Poseidon.

Old father Sun
burns my thin skin
leaves me dazed,
head spinning with grief
the thief of time.
Hermes.

Here it is, here it is, all of it
this nebulous thing
called life
...

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An old, Welsh witch once said this:

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

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"You like nightmares?"
"You like giants?"
Maybe, giants are here?
Maybe, nightmares are here?.
For sure - these are big questions?
                 these are big questions too?
I like such questions
Do you?

Giants are coming to our piece of sky.
To have a party. With melonade.
Is it a high sky? How can we know?

Of course, half the problem's ours
Half is hers, of course.
But is the...

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I done me best when I was let 
Oh yes I did: whistle-blowin, liftin' the lid
I think I always knowed it'd go wrong
Nuffin fer a laugh, nuffin fer a song.

A hundred seas could separate you
From me, our sea of troubles,
Fear death by drownin'
The old queen said.

On one in a thousand years of nights
Parcel me up and remove me from sight
The cubby-hole under the stairs
Was for ...

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

Looking then seeing,
you, as you never can be again,
with all the holy blemishes of youth
leaves me here, bereft,
flounder...

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Shifting shades afflict the ghost of David Rodinsky.         
As he returns to his room in Whitechapel, London,           
For one last look at Aramaic and Hebrew text.             
Which provide for the hex of disappearance.

                                  Where he came from nobody knows.                               
                                                     ...

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Like the irritating buzzing of a fly
Like the monotymy of day
Unchanged black on white
Shadow and shade follow me.
Will the same fall from grace
Happen again? Or will similar
moments find us weeping sleeping
And just not occur? 
Day passes day as we drift away
Months pass until an action occurs,
Playing in the theatre of the absurd,
Tomorrow will bloom into day
Before death comes this ...

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At the pomana - the death feast - I missed him most
I am relieved to know that under the stars of this cold, pellucid night
The ghost of the gypsy soldier I killed is not without a home
No Romany man can live alone, our women are not alone
We carry our home in our hearts, our women wear topaz and dance
No, we will never-ever part. The man I killed is part of my family.
Gorgers and t...

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{for my dear friend Chris Proudfoot 1951 - 2022)  

Who the hell can see forever?
Wild is the minute, clear is the sky
A world of smell and sight drifts by
Portals of discovery abound.
This newfoundland: sheer cliffs
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
E...

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The night comes late in early June
Reinforces my gloom of heart. 
Time passes as I turn on the light
I sat here last week thinking of you
Sitting without reading, was a surprise for me
Who should I talk to? Now you are gone?
I could talk freely with you
Sit equably, while you read Sophocles' Greek.
You were alone in that fucking  house you hated
The idol of Greek friendship
Plat...

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For my dearest friend, Christopher Proudfoot, 1951-2022. “Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.  

My son, my brother and my friend
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all t...

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I do not like living here
There are rats in the attic
And a big black crow is squaw-king
At my window, demanding entry,
Crow says it's a  hypothetical 
supersymmetric counterpart
to a quark, having a spin of zero.
I think not Mr Crow.
That be all ye need to know.
Mr Talking Crow. Talking bird or no.
I am haunted by these words you know.

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Born a mute

On my back sans coat

 dressed in black.

no fringes of lace

hold me 

In place.

Intact at last

I fling curses 

at the stars

bury my wishes

In jars.

Turn these shadows into shade

hold my breath

for an age

 kiss a lion

In a cage

condemned

to evade

an early grave.

Delphiniums are for love,

wild honey for tas...

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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 ...

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I wish I"d known 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 the green bay and the rolling sea spy on me
Deeply unclear like raging seawater,
Lagoons on tropical Islands are lost on me.
Kind of like fantasy.

I wish I'd known fro...

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"To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” Sylvia Plath

A faint whiff of truth pervades
my washed out mourning
on this, your death day.
Those words ‘death day’ terrify me,
make me realise it is the finality
that separates life from death.
You and ...

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

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

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

All roads lead to heaven
And all roads lead to you
And a...

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the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
― Sylvia Plath, 

Her tightly veined hands cup water
I stroke her hair gliding over
Her forehead I bend to kiss her
She repeats my name and I hers
A little gentle verbal tennis
That exhausts her. She leans
Back into the pillow. My sister
Slightly shifts the sheet above
The cellulitis on her leg....

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When your eyes are full of tears
but you cannot cry
when you think
you’ve conquered your fears
but can only sigh....

When you rise to the occasion,
and hold yourself together,
in rain or shine or stormy weather,

And your heart beats fast,
And faster still,
As if you’re running up
the steepest hill.

Memories tumble out,
And stop you dead,
And you cry at last,
For all y...

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(for my mam)

When my eyes are full of tears
But i will not cry
When I think I’ve conquered my  fears
But I can only sigh.

When I rise to the occasion,
And hold myself together,
In rain or shine or stormy weather,
And my heart beats fast,
And faster still,
As if I'm running up the steepest hill.
Memories tumble out,
And stop you dead,
And you cry at last,
For all that's left unsai...

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Who'll cancel this undergraduation?
They'll sneak a plot of consecrated ground for you - 
All those muttering priests, your brothers - 
Chasing their blues away
On this, your burial day.

Across these empty fenlands Purit...

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Imagine the ego you'd need
To say "comrade, we're on the long march
And the killing has begun. 
20,000 purged so far. It's essential
We  know who to trust
As we march over mountains and
Learn to drink dust." The gulag,
The concentration camp. The torture chamber
All designed and working well
To convince the unwary
That 2 + 2 does, indeed, = 5.
And so save you from thinking for ...

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Cliff face, fossils scattered, inchoate
expanses of sea and sky and land
edge me beyond vertigo, 
above this empty space.

These trilobites  
with their 521 million year
residency,
lie under foot
as we listen to the relentless
crashing of the waves
the slow sliding of the tides.

Ruins, runes, remains,:
of cliffs built upon generations
of the dead.
Fossils lying about time...

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Dried up, shrivelled, exposed, weather-beaten,
Warps and wefts waste away the body afflicted with decay
The hey-ho day of the day-to-day. Friends desert us quite,
And no quenching pleases.
What was is rubbed away, like stains that dry
Wither, languish, and decay. Time ...

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“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis 

This, her place of recovery,
This is where she began
Out of her depths 
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was a warrior,
An Amazon on the run..

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

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

The devotees of the vacuous,
The frightened and appalled,
Consumers, losers,  all
Watch silently as their childre...

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The snow and ice have melted
the grass returns to fields of gold,
So why am I still shivering? 

The seas and rivers change their courses
and  flow awry.
So why am I not turned to stone? 

Faeries and elves stir up their sisters
into a furious dance.
So why cannot I move my legs today? 

Immortality seizes man's imagination.
So can I  live another day? 
And why do I carry al...

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Ned Kelly, the youngest son of poor Irish immigrants,  was one of the last Australian outlaws. He was hung on 11 November 1880 in Melbourne jail. He was 25 years old. 

Ned Kelly

Kelly on 10 November 1880,
the day before his execution

“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to lea...

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Rivers of melted music
Fuse into a sculpture
Around this old oak tree,
A thousand years old,
The moving air vibrates, ventilates. 
Sound, shape, sightless shade
Spill into my sinner's heart
As my whole world falls apart,

This is a  place apart 
that comes fluttering on the wind
Mushroomed and acidic
And is no more.

And so I settle into the coolness of thought
Follow the s...

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...est in Arcadia ego...

This early morning air, pellucid, refreshing, soft
A time of hush, just before that cacophony
Of life that marks sweet May's awakening - the lifter
Of moods, the harbinger of hope, the visionary self. 
Filled with all the mild majesty of an English breeze
Stirring the leafy canopy as the sun begins to 
Follow the wobbling shadows of dappled zephyrs
So now ser...

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The sting of the wind
On this cold black night
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work.
Down in the mine
On early shift.
This  connection, now, is
Deep in my blood
Deep in what I mean
When I say words
In tones that rhyme.

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

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Tick-a-Tock-Tick
The sounds of the day
Are clownishly fooling
And won’t go away -
A nightmare to follow
This minor delay -

Yes, it’s tick-a-tock-ticking
We’re all going away.
With a story to swallow -
When the old witch is flying -
On the edge of the moon

War is beginning
And it’s zoom-slugger-boom
Starlight is raging -
It's all over so soon.

War won’t go away -
Eternal night...

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A few, spare words can save a life

Inspire a man to give it all a few more days

To redirect her attention from her baby's  grave

To cause a pause in this cycle of suffering.

To allow a breath to separate the now and then

To begin again, again. Without money, without hope,

Without friends or connections. In a part of town

Where the ragged people go. To live throug...

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A river runs through us,
the river of life,
with its twists and its turns,
and its banks out of sight
...early morning
mist, fractured light,
scatters
these dregs of the day –
Away, away!
The flotsam and jetsam
of years passing by,
swirl in a whirl
float in the sky....
The azure blue
heat-haze sky
of childhood, a childhood
all gone by.
Whenever I try to say this
I cry.
So, d...

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Tomorrow never comes, they say,
And, even if it did, it'd be too late
To change the fates of us mere mortals.
The ceremonies of innocence continue
In this secular age: birth, marriage, death,
People's lives changing in a moment,
The bureaucracies of birth and death
'The Formalities' as some still say
Continue to this day: even the stillborn
Require a death certificate before buri...

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Trying to forget someone you loved is like trying to remember someone you never met.

In the primsose light of early morning
Stepping through the ferns and the briars
I listen to all the beautiful birds
Singing and courting and living.
Woody, leading the way, following
His nose. He follows trails of scent,
Bringing him all the pleasures of 
puppyish mischief and rascality.
...

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Working late on a Sunday drear
The sky is flat like German beer
Charlie lies near.
Iron-grey sky, black Russian in patches,
Blown away by the striking matches  
Of Dostoyevsky's inspiration. 

Desperate remedies appear in the mirror,
Look in the pool. The heart draws near
What do I see? A foolish old man looking
At me. What do I hear?
The clip and the clop of horses 
...

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12.38: The clock ticks slowly, my mind spins fast
Imaginings hover just out of reach,
how long can a minute last?

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

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

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The Byzantine heritage was wiped out between 1915 - 1922 by the slaughter of 3.5 million Christians by the Turks. The first great genocide of the C20.

My love didn’t come from nowhere.  

My father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas,

My mother just a peasant

Spent her life upon her knees.

The noblesse oblige:

The drinking and the drugs,

Was countered by Intelligence

An...

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Dsguise is worse than lies
Hear the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat
We die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence
Soon, my lady very soon: if you please, your hand.

Tender is the Night
And all her forgotten beauty
People pass out of sight
On this August midnight
When the serpent and the saviour sit
Side-by-side
Somewhere in old-England.

No truths hidd...

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The best of us British fell on the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele,
Our luckier cousins had 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
The Raj with the spice and opium settlements in Shang...

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With a per capita GNI of $3,540, Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe as of 2020.

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

From holiday beach to temptestous sea
Thunder clouds gather like swarms of angry bees
I have lost my faith i...

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The soft 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 not know

or understand, we stand hand-in-hand,

under this beautiful harvest moon.

https://youtu.be/n2MtEsrcTTs

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To live a life in a day
The difference is plain,
there’s no doing it again.

A flight within the 4th-dimension
No squirming weasel words for you
Just a graceful flutter and decline
With no direction home.
No squabbling, No fighting, No feeling sore.
The begetting is done in a silent roar
On a wing and a prayer.
No absence of synaesthesia there
A mingling of the finest bouquet ...

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When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. Sam Johnson.

This poem is about when
London was an English city.
I'd use the phone box to make
Arrangements with a west end
Girl, I loved without end. 
O! I'd love to walk that way again,
To reignite that London flame,
And to  see the blossom trees
Of Kenton & North Wembley
...

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One day or night each of us shall

Fall off the cliff edge of life

Into a black hole of our own

Making. Whirling and swirling

For aeons we negotiate a return,

Like Jacob Marley's ghost, we

Plead to be allowed to make

Recompense. We are told

By the conductor our ticket

Is one-way only. Too late.

Too late to plead forgiveness

For our sins of commission 

A...

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He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

- Revelation 21:4

Lonesome completely lost time
circulates in the memory. Ghostly
remembrances of persona non grata
in the dramatis personae of the daily
life of a boozer. Swirling mist lifts mood
my stomach crav...

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Sitting in the dust of a road with no cars, of a 1950s Easter holiday in a suburb of grey concrete  council houses fit for           heroes: some of us dads had been POWs in Burma. We had lollypop sticks             to draw in the dust. Usually we     had    scabs on us knees, our clothes sometimes needed mending. We didn’t have a.         football. We kicked stones. We’d eaten   us tea e...

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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/USom8PhOXgs

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Wonder at the mundane, a constant refrain,
Nothing, under heaven, remains the same.
The glint, the glance, the gaze, the smile,
The unconscious optimism as we while away
The hours: ‘It’ll be OK’, ‘I’ll live to fight another day.’
Look close at the myriad of wild flowers
Born to make a magic carpet of the valley floor.
Look up at the swirling clouds of mazy blue,
Each one a reflect...

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 — a reminiscence — 

Photo by Jessica Arends on Unsplash

Once up an averagely timely very nice-some-hope hippos lived in a large, airy pink house. This ear house was in the middle of nowhere (W11) but t’soil was ppooey-flirt-tile and t’air sweet. Squat in. We hipplos only dunk d’water-passed-through-eleven -bodies-before-me watair. Gradually, slowly by slow, old hippos we ...

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Dedicated to the memory of Ukrianian patriot and poet Yuriy Ruf (26 September 1980 - 1 April 2022)

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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.. We aged together.
But not like malt, we blended into each other,
Dog and Man. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
And 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
Pack, l...

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March is the groundsman's month:
Rolling the first cut into the pitch
Marking out the boundaries,
Preparing the run ups for bowling,
Tidying up the batsman's crease
Sowing seed and feeding the loam.

April is not the cruellest month for cricket
The County Championship matches begin
Last season's top notch batsman is now
Captain. The bowlers are chomping at the 
Bit. Some new fa...

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Nor is this hell.

Nor am I out of it.

Deadly sins lie about.

Their whereabouts.

Lying unto us all.

At rest.

We pretend to a generosity of spirit,

A narrow soul at best, but trying now 

To rest.

Lucifer's sin was that of pride

Mine was the opposite

Calculating a worth 

Is ill-conceived.

I am rarely 

Living on my knees

As I need and want to do.

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Dreams head off on an azure lilac wild-track, she’s meeting with a secret and never coming back.

This is the closed season of the heart. Life drifts into memory, a life lived apart, a tempest of emotions, a coldness presaging art

Fate comes knocking at the window, and it’s all too fucking late. The flashiness of fashion flirts with God above. Whilst we, intemperate mutants,  search to be sat...

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Away with the moon
with her shadows and all
those sturdy penumbras
you saw in the ball.
Forget you, forget you
we fall out of bed
and all we beget
is quite suddenly dead.
 
She’s tousled & sleepy,
this edge of the moon,
where
Angus, dear Angus,
just walked out the room.
His pool-side of shadows
is living alone;
with ginger-nut biscuits
and large gulps of tea,
his shadow is thinki...

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We have eaten rats during this seige

The Goths want us to acquiesce

to their stinking Christian suzerainty.

They never tell us why we should do so.

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

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

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

A r...

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summer rains' quiet incantation, the animals come and go,

                    in the far-distant hills, the snow melts as the river flows;

                    time is a demon

                    the animals know,

                  ...in the abdomen – demon go

                  ...in the albumin – demon go

                  ... in the acumen – demon go

          ...

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It was only after your death that I realised

Why you disliked windy weather

I never knew exactly why

or what the 'philosophers' at the orphanage

did to you.

I only knew that you were buried

with a back full of the little white scars

inflicted by those sadistic bastards,

the Christian missionaries

of the hungry thirties,

on the backs of those babes

who dared to be b...

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I used to carry three of the five up to bed

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

But I would go away, and work.

Suddenly we were semi-detached

They’d flown the nest, gone their way,

And what I wouldn’t give

For one more day with them;

When they were little, and I was young.

Telling them stories, singing songs,

Getting along.

https://youtu.be/BKc4I_cK0JU

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

Oh Lord, my God,  I fell asleep,

No longer in a state of grace,

No longer a beautiful woman

Beloved by an Emperor.

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

Dazzled by his real presence,
By an acre of sorcery, by a terrible moon,
By the time of the month, I disco...

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From last November's quiet recall to

This piece of graffiti on a dry-stone wall

His headstone verses writ in water

Drawn by the eyes of his future daughter.

Lichen-lines-love-and-only-love

For all he knew was the deepest blue of Lapis lazuli

A  good man’s words writ in blood

And mortal love will always end like this. Time

Weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat pal...

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The snow and ice melted long ago, already the grass returns to fields of gold.  
So why am I shivering? 
Seas and rivers change course and  flow awry.
So why do I turn to stone? 
Faeries and elves stir up their sisters into dance.
So why cannot I move? 
Immortality seizes this man's imagination.
So can I live another day? 
And why do I carry all the hours of all the days of all the years w...

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In a cold cottage by a wild shore
A Californian girl with toothache, I saw
it was 1969  and we were advised to drink
A fortified wine. Fortified by
C16H16N2O2 Lysergic acid.

Which we duly did, sharing.
I took her to the emergency
Dentist who was a very nice
Anglolan. We talked about
The war against the Portuguese
As I saw the spiders from Mars
David Jones was later to notice,

Since...

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Today 2,000 Yazidi women and children are still in captivity, including my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew. We have more than 85 mass graves in Sinjar right now. ISIS left behind a community that will not recover without the support of the International community.
Nadia Murad,

Winter on Mount Sinjar
northern Iraq, 2014
that year lasted forever:
such a long, long time,

On the k...

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“For when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs all of the others ... the fact that it annihilates the future." George Orwell

But something always stops us
From living as we desire
Frightened instinct stops us, lack of money stops us.
Men compete to be men, fail
In the ditch two women fight, flial
late at night the drink is upon them
foreign folk frighten us,...

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You see the second time that I forgot

One of the poems that I forgot to write

They came back in patches, terse verse patches,

Occupied the same row in my brain as names and dates

The writer wrote of the slope that welcomes fig trees

There is no news in the Western Devish Times.

This slender woman is too valuable for words

To name her a little sky and a few stars ...

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the finger on the tiller

of the nuclear trigger

is steady as a rock

O! I forgot

it's a fan of Sir Isacc Newton

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

https://youtu.be/-0SmXVrLlZ4

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The room  is crowded, stuffy, sultry 

people wait with an air of frustration.

This functionay loves his power

to make people wait,

to make people wait for pieces

of paper necessary to live.

Some need to register births, others deaths,

some sway and smell of drink,

others stink of sweat with holes in their clothes.

A woman is beginning to  plead, not screech...

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Willesden in the seventies
Drunks were helped inside
But not
Dennis Andrew Nilsen
Who lived
Around the corner
In a flat that stunk
Of slaughter;
Melrose Avenue,
I do believe.
Not too far
From Willesden Green.
 

Near Dollis Hill
The striking Saris
Had their say:
Twenty thousand
Yorkshire miners
On one long hot summer’s day
in the ...

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Make you homesick for a home you never had
Burning out the good with all the bad." John Moreland

If you try to possess a person
she will disappear, just like that.
Refrain from stating an opinion
on the question posed by God..
The non-literal truths of poetry
depend on morning, noon and night;
After all there's only an 'a'
between theist and atheist.
Midway to Medway.
I ...

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The sting of the wind
On this cold spring 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 of
...

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