The unpurged images of day

Will not give me away to complacency

Even after fifty years of Chinese

Occupation we Tibetans continue

To resist, especially in mid-winter

When we picture our rose garden,

The secret garden of our soul,

A place where all that is, is good 

And all that is, is fine

Is writ in large, in watery wine:

Written in a tender-script divi...

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One thing turns to another thing.

This is the story of continuous change

Nothing remains the same. 

The sum Is always greater than the parts

And a metamorphosis of hearts

Occurs when we know that

Differential calculus

Plots the rates

At which things change.

However, the total always remains the same.

E = mc2. 

Energy equals mass 

Times the speed of light squared...

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We have eaten rats during this seige

These Goths want us acquiesce to Christian suzerainty.

They never tell us why we should do so

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

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

The nearness of death makes one wake up, notice a sparkling jewel,
A pearl from the deeps of a distant ocea...

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You were lonesome and blue eyed
And so special to us
You should have taken a long break
Instead of a long drop from a high place.

"That Year" by Brandi Carlisle

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

In these islands.

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

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

risin...

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In Latin or in Portuguese 

o sentimento de amor

Is just the same: 

The sentiment of love

Can quickly catch aflame.

A lack in the discipline

Of the eyes breeds

A brooding wish to exercise

Or exorcise, a fire that re-iterates

The eradication of disguise

Leaving us contemplating the irreducibility of fate.

Extending the same disregard for grammar:

(declensions decl...

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Away with the moon

with her shadows and all

those sturdy penumbras

you saw in the ball.

Forget you, forget you

I  fall out of bed

and all you beget

is so-suddenly dead.

She’s tousled & sleepy,

this edge of the moon,

where

Angus, dear Angus,

just walked out the room.

His pool-side of shadows

is living alone,

with ginger-nut biscuits

and large gulps of...

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In this mild mid-winter breeze of splintered selves

The trees blend into silhouttes; and I see elves

Whose shadows transform perceptions

Into creation. And all the world of

Getting and spending grinds to a halt,

For one holy day. Death may be far away or near

At hand, we have no crystal balls. We must put

All our heart and soul into conveying the simplicity of love

To those...

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At this turning of the year

We confront an unholy nexus of fear,

Solstice: the apex of the year,

ride the crest of a wave of darkness

The drunkard's Christmas kiss

As the sun squats on the horizon

Of his squandered life

Fear you can cut it with a knife

transforms the frosty night owls of winter

Into a travesty of this lack of light.

Beneath this peak of dark

l...

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Don’t let the fat white males into your land

They have no concept of stewardship

They think they can own the air and the land.

You watched them massacre the holy bison:

The white buffalo are dead

Their bodies rot under the holy sun.

These bastards have no respect for themselves:

They are rapists and child-killers.

They love watching sadistic pornography.

They spoil all t...

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The grey skies of Manchester,
Designed to oppress,
Yes, my head is in a mess.
This place of the bee is home to me.
Old boys return blisteringly unaware
Of the significance of a long, cold stare
Lost boys don't even mention the drugs.
In a chapel-of-rest or a public bar - don't wander far.
Out in the street, a mass of metal and rubbish
Outside the flats, wrecked fridges, torn up sofas;
Th...

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

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"My son Brandon died 9 years ago. I have returned from Indiana to Texas where he was born and mixed his ashes in with my garden. I have brought my child home." YOUTUBE comment on 'Into Dust', Mazzy Star

Photo by Matthew Cabret on Unsplash

I knew from the very beginning

The sun would rise

Teaching me to cast my eyes to heaven

Cloudy days are like sacrifices

To compensate ...

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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 wea...

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Wild is the minute and clear is the sky

A world of smell and sight and sound

The portals of discovery all around,

We enter this world, this newfoundland:

The sheer vividness of colour,

The all round visibility of sound,

Flesh and blood, all the half-created

Epiphanies of cloud and sky and sun,

Enter the mind and fly from  the eye -

Into the kippering sky, clouds come rus...

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I saw her in the street

We were polite, random, neat.

Forgetting what drunkenness

Created in the way of becoming diabolical

Divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate.

Once one, kind, sweet woman,

Polished floors with rage

Arms red and fleshy –

The dark memory of her soul is not pale;

It was late, near the Spaniard’s Inn,

The full moon was shining,

With all the sol...

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Love...cultivates. Goethe

We walk a steep and slippery way,

Mixing senses in synesthesia's way,

It seem as if I am a chorus in a play.

We feel by measures hidden from the eye

Time borrowed, days wasted, time goes by,

I choose to walk a steep and scattered way..

Winter seeps me into sleep, as my soul flies,

To the gist of an art unborrowed from the eye;

I l...

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“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”
― Basho

Open your heart to the misery

Of those who live without hope,

Learn to walk in another’s steps

To learn to extend your scope

Learn not to avert your gaze

When the world is set ablaze.

Give all that you have to give

And expect nothing and you will see

With the eyes of a child.

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my friend, Ian Kevin Curtis

(15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980)

strode up those stairs, so long ago,

and still, your voice pumps out

in all its brittle beauty

leaving the depression

and the epilepsy behind

telling us what love will do

how, precisely it will tear us apart

some will listen and never know

the man you were

me? I cannot abide the way

you hid the man you wer...

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He'd despise with his eyes those alive in sackcloth and ashes

The weaponised clones of a myopic dwarf did not do

As they were taught. They denied themselves the water

Of life. They inherited nothing.

No morning maniac music

Shaked them awake.

Those who'd once brought hope

Now mired in hate.

Over the mountain, clouds scud

Blood on the floor

And mud on the faces.

Ref...

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Calling time on the cinema queue

We let our dreams come true

It was the evening of the day

Fervourless

and blue.

At least, I still had you.

Giving up on our one chance

Of silence, it is true,

Who knows where the time goes

Enhances you.

And, so,we wound up

Like I knew we'd do:

Bruised black and bruised blue

Back in the cinema queue.

...

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the sadness of sundays
persists
even amidst
the various
reds, yellows, browns and golds
of stormy autumn

and as I walk
I have in mind
the fragility of your veined
porcelain
hand

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2JjJPDz3EE

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Angels  alight, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,

behind her eyes her guardian angel sighs.

Listen! to the whisperer behind the song,

misfortune exorcised by fluttering fugues begin again

to sing a song in a minor key,

a longing to be whole and free.

Let'so roll away the stone:

for on this seafront there is a stone,

where, in the creamy moonlight of romance,

men and wo...

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Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,

Rock- hidden fossils set in stone,

These evolutions of Medusa

Afflict with a petrified decay.

And all, all she gazed upon

Can never be rubbed away.

Stains dry and calcify

Deep in the  bogs, in a quagmire,

A swamp of guilt, regret

Spilt water, wine, I forget.

No transubstantiation this:

Yoked, ploughed, dragged,

Inchoate ...

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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

this cold delight

of a summer's night

their wings sing,

but my mind's not right;

see the showers spark high

like flaming air

sizzling on the water

blowing in her hair

and the women heap wood

on the fragrant...

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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 know ,
And cannot even whisper out, or sigh.

Mountains and sky reflected in water.

The ordinary has become extraordinary
...

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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

And a tingling in the blood.

We were the late Romans

Much diminished and now, finally, gone.

For since the death-stroke of 1453,

W...

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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.

And young Nick Drake still alive amongst

The flat-fen-lands of Cambridgeshire

Five leaves left a common currency  

And me the lad from the ...

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Rose, the loveliest of pagan namings,

She said she can see clear to another day

1967 and the happy trails I followed

That landed me plum in Golden Gate Park

Then Palo Alto in the pacific sun

Looking for a revolution

And this is it:

No empty-headed technologies 

Still no silicon in the valley

Just a box of rain.

It's a long-ding-dong time to be gone.

A...

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Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?  Robert Browning,"Andrea del Sarto", line 98, 1855.

Kicking off his work boots on a day of lazy gooseberry bushes and old Daily Heralds

Jack's eyes slowly rose from the mess of laces squirming around his fingers,

(memories of the front, the hot metal of the gun, fingering,  lingering);

His eyes rose past the d...

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Stand here in your own blood,

My brave heart,

Your shadow and I spy

Firm, thick wood.

The dark lights of Christmastide

Afflict us

Red and green sunset drops

Create an awesome flicker

Of candle-light and in the mean time,

We mark the end of the hologram-life.

No disguise

All begins with grief,

Such great wordy statements

Fall through the looking-glass

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The woman time forgot

Is beautiful today

Moulded in clay, frozen

And unrepentant.

She will tear you apart

With a look, or, maybe, a knife.

This lake by which

She lives is frozen.

Dare we skate

On such thin ice?

Glaciers melt

And water haunts the air

Birds migrate and block the sun

And, still, we have not fled

All that we once remembered

Cities, technolo...

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Not fit for purpose

And all their other clichés

Batter down the airways

Assuring us that greed is good

That we can borrow and never repay

Seeping this repetitive, lying shit

Deep into the soul of the nation,

Leaving me marooned

Growing old with the weariness

That travels through the blood:

As I try to pass by these nets

Of race, nationality, class, religion

But ...

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And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. Revelations 20:4

All across the Nineveh plain the lights are going 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 t...

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His denim shirt ripped

And blood-stained

It was such a shame

Mick was a dealer, 

A user too;

Smoked what he sold

And sold what he grew

But County lines geezers

Had swamped the north

With the Psychotic stuff,

Packed full of THC but also:

White Nurse, White Stuff, White Junk

Skunk caused, Horse delivered

The knifings 

The knifings

Caused the pain

And t...

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And I live on a dark star

On the edge of a black hole

Which I will fall into any day

Now there is a singularity of night

An utter absence of light.

The colours leached away

When I wasn't looking

And now the music is silent too.

What should I do?

The speed of light

Is certainly

Insufficient to escape

From this orbit of gloom

This reconnoitring of grief

This...

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It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night

Of solid rain, unremittingly wet. And cold.

When, suddenly, all the rivers in all the world stopped flowing

And all the summer colours leached away and never returned

And the wind it is so cold and it still stings like hell

And the sky descends into the air

And, all of a sudden,  you're not there

And the blackness is...

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squirming with words,

squabbling, fighting,

reeling with words

sore with myself.

so sore with myself

a world of regret,

begets

this absence of you.

O! I wish I could turn words into wishes.

O! I wish my days would fall into line

my eyes could rise for you

without the slightest disguise

for you.

Evening is so heavy, the rain has been & gone,

these...

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Quietly, she spoke of tea, toast, the faint after smell of cigars,
Let us say we met in a room: curtained, peeling, private.
Briefly she consulted the winter afternoon,
Reviewed the deadening, leadening sky.

All was discreetly done.
No presences danced beyond no lifted curtains.
Darkness had silted us away.

Words, like spoons, stirred the air.
We slipped into a net of inquisitions.

...

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Emotion recollected in tranquillity

never did quite do it for me:

I see the river Thames,

I see the people flow,

all kinds and conditions,

in rain and sun and snow.

There's

the Green man in Kingsbury,

a pub which abhors the National Front,

or, you may wander in Kew Gardens,

or, you may sometimes have a punt.

Westminster traitors to the north 88

Brixton dreads to...

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Ordinary life creates

These empty spaces

Inside of me

Composed of God-knows-what:

Certainly lacking in originality.

Pale-blue eyes

On a snow drop face

Seen-through lace,

Seen-through lace.

These empty waiting rooms of the heart,

Set to tear us apart,

These ventricles of the brain, never the same.

Birdsong flung

Into fond recall

A dry-stone wall,

A dry...

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In the apple market

your south London twang

accompanies the many undulations

of time.

Your wild androgyny

mirroring 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 imagin...

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(dedicated to the everlasting memory of Harry O'Neill: Au revoir comrade)

an old olive oil press rusting

at the bottom of a sandy garden

in this occupied territory;

children lying prostrate,

bleeding into the soil;

a man

murmuring.

about a weight, a burden, something.....

lifted.

We disciples could not hear clearly,

what with all the muffled explosions

and ...

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haunt my days,

she whispers,

butter me up quite,

she replies

the green groves

of her painting

are sleeping

now

there is

no disguise

her speckled dust

is faded sunlight

in her too-familiar sight

her soul

declines from the light

she's a-tumbling

through the grasses

O! she's a-dying

here tonight

out of mind

and out of s...

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Blues come by night baby and blues come by day

Have to watch yourself,  not get taken away, down

To the 12 bars waitin for you in the drinkin’ stew.

Washed up on the morning

Drinking again at noon

Blues wait round the corner

Seize your soul so soon.

No matter what you do or think

The blues are all the same

The lonely lies, and the cryin' shame.

Blues hi...

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

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Photo by Guillaume Galtier on Unsplash

Too many words

and

our hearts are

conspicuously silent

when addressing

midnight feasts or Lenten fasts

nothing lasts

except the majesty of the momentary

singularity of an event horizon

where voices echo birdsong

like dark eyes at a funeral

warning us of our own death,

granted not foretold,

follows in our foot...

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When I were a boy, a nipper, a kid

Wild flowers on a concrete waste

Were always blindingly yellow.

Flowers rooted in the cracks along the road

For me, the yellow-bloomed, only for me.

Whether I was hungry

Or stuffed to the hilt

A slash of yellow beneath the sun

Was reason enough to have fun..

We prisoners saw her

And we gazed in awe,

Seeing what was really always t...

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He was shaking  uncontrollably when I walked into his shop,

That skinny Asian shopkeeper.

My thoughts of the beautiful, white Crescent Moon

Were soon lost  in the ebony skies of late November.

Everyday complacency fled like winter sleet melted.

He'd seen the glint of the knife on that coal black night;

It was, he said, stutteringly, "the one in the hoodie, with no facial tattoo,

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Opinions can be ignored, mocked,

That's fair enough - satirists like Swift'd be lost -

Otherwise

and, of course,

No-one has the right not to be offended.

I am offended everyday

By the complacent, middle-class old

Bastards who hang on to every penny

And have the empathy of granite

And so easily condemn

Those poorer or less well-educated

Than them.

I love the nove...

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Yes. We spend too much of our short lives

Chasing the mot juste, the phrase, the image,

That will reconcile all, bring all to mind.

To ease the pain and to make amends.

But there is no end to the way of art

We must learn to wonder as we search

For the right word to express. What?

That fleeting sense of something

Far more deeply interfused

That has its home in the setting...

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Forget me not blue

As an Alaskan blueberry

Endurance is a flower

A bulb in winter’s depth

A rare-repeated wonder:

A sin we must forget.

In this-world-of-my-creation

In this world-of-make-believe:

Cancer, the death of children,

Are falling autumn leaves.

I see a road before me

A  road I walk in vain

A road through Trawden, Lancashire

A road that’s no...

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Like a swimmer driven by a whirlpool of distress, Without a  morsel of hope, lampooned by regret,

In a storm of my own making; beseiged by clouds; 

I hide. Adamantly anchored to a despair, twenty fathoms wide

I'm riven by the whirlwind of my observable distress;

Starving and  alone, my anchor is the live-long day and yet, and yet, I fade away. 

Dressed in a black haze: dappled sunli...

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Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

Than the regiment of day

Can drift my head away

Back to the cancer hospital

To the chemo and the radio

And injections in the vein

Thank God it didn’t enter

My brain. It’s your loved

Ones take the strain.

I remember Emile, yes,

Named after Rousseau’s

Eponymous hero. He hoped

It had not spread. Married

At the weekend, h...

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These fingers point at letters

Those letters point at words

And then the disturbance -

Occurs

My love she was a vixen

And howled in the night

Those feelings they just left me -

Despite

The mourning which continues

Throughout decades, in a line,

My lover she engages me -

In time.

These swirling skies of fortune,

The lakes’ grey and white despair...

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Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC

An Anglo-Jewish volunteer - did his patriotic duty

Joined up on 4th August 1914.

He was one of the First World War’s greatest poets; 

A fearless soldier who won the Military Cross for bravery,

The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.

He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire

Coll...

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The guest was uninvited but arrived anyway

In this universe of moulding, he is the clay.

The freezing blizzard of my heart departs

As I look out of my window into this universe of things

And, for a micro-second, my wounded heart sings

With love and with the lack of love,

With all we seek to find

With memories buried in

This golgotha mind of mine.

I am no different, thoug...

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Do you really want to sit there on the 21st floor

Mixing matches, making matchstick men to bore

Your friends witless as you, once again, tell the tale.

Of when you once went north, further than Watford vale,

I know you never doubt yourself, my rhyming cavalier,

But a little word of warning in your shell-like ear:

Waiting for promotion to SW3?

Waiting for the loss-adjustors, to...

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

She's the shadow of a shadow,

She's the smile upon 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 ...

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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
 On early shift.
 This  connection, now, is
 Deep in my blood
 Deep in what I mean
 When I say words
 In tones that rhyme. 

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For those who know and know how much they still don't know. Bloodfever

Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

I remember falling as a child

And being lifted by a faerie-wild

She kissed my cheek and mussed my hair

And then she wasn’t there.

……….

Some blind folk see the fairies clear,

For faeries are always close or near;

Oh, better far than what we see

Are faer...

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A rose garden at altitude under occupation

dormant in mid-winter

I picture the rose garden in spring

as the secret garden of my soul

where all that is good and all that is fine

are written in a tender-script divine

where persian berries tantalise the taste

and the morning prayer bells undulate

the breakfast figs are fine

as is the watery wine

and these chinese herbs...

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The times of wonder have gone

The wise women drugged

Into submission.

Forensic psychology reveals traces

Of long-forgotten faces

Which, much like Munch's silent scream,

Degenerate into nightmaredream.

Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,

Falls into disuse,

And all is as it was before:

A flat, grey concrete floor

Krema I at Auschwitz

Eminently productive

3...

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The last decade before the big three score

and ten. Best to keep on the move, evolving then?

A rolling stone gathers no moss, they say; not in

Keith's  head, anyway. Soon it will be the freezing season

With all those greens and reds – the hollies and the ivy

and the grateful dead. The starship could fly us, fly us clean away,

But most of us are yard birds, creatures of home, I’d ...

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That long-held sax note- divine 

Makes my soul jus drift away

The smoke, the booze, the horse,

The girls. Sum o'them, thin agen.

Man, the flash of the crack o'th drum

The thumpity, thumpity, thump.

He jus stand there in a haze

John's  soprano sax, Miles' trumpet

Blowin the blues. All the way To Missisip

All the way to me cryin in a ditch.

Those weary, weary blues. No ...

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Circumstances compel me speak

Ye gods, (for you have them);

From the first of the world

Down to our own time

Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,

Listen to this elegy for a passing time instead.,

A soldier silenced, banned, expelled, made dead.

While life continues, makes the crops no longer joyous.

The sheep forgot, the cattle, bees unkept.

Be thrifty with ...

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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 on...

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As we draw close to Remembrance Sunday and all the praising of the armed services I wrote this to show how we really treat those who risked their lives to protect us.

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

An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.

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

Not a real home. Everything had changed.

Belfast, The Falklan...

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Those words you don’t remember,
Wind tearing through the sky,
Your soul is packed with fortitude
While sparks fly.

……

The coals flare into flames, a pettiness
Of heat. Suddenly, replete: golden sands,
Crystal brooks, silken lines, silver hooks.
Glimpsing what’s already there,
She begins to mount the stairs.

Who cares?

……..

Say, a friend you trust implicitly,
A lover you migh...

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The sky is grey today with streaks of blue

Swirling northern skies reflect sombre horizons;

Behind my back cumulus clouds mass

Over the hills, conspiring in their usual

Ragged silence. In front of me are drear

Trees laid bare, a mist of water's in the air.

Caught cough, cough, coughing in the peasoupers

Of the past, I pull my scarf tighter and focus keenly

On the p...

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Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

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

A waterfall of notes, rising, descending,

Splashing into my mind, heart, soul.

Music will never grow old.

An arpeggio series of broken chords 

In and out of order, splintering, teasing the ear. 

Plunging into minor keys, soaring into waves of luminosity.

Notes th...

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"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." Martin Niemoller.

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I made close friends on WOL

Rachel, Devon, David, Jacob,

Poets of enormous scope and range,

Silenced for their free expression,

Is that a good thing? Whatcha reckon?

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She's the flinger of plurabilly teas,

She was, once-upon-a-golden-time;

And a good time it was two,

Despite the old hairy gobeen man,

Who was a-coming down a road,

drinking from a can.

She met a nice-uns-little boy name Baby Tookoo,

Her mother slopped her drat story.

Her rather had a leery face:

Sin, sin, Jesuitical-sin

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"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”  TS Eliot

Every day, regardless of the goodness or evil lurking in my soul,

I see kipper skies, placid blue occasionally, but much more

Like the swirling, crashing skies of Turner, like the flaming skies the young Mozart

Saw in his mind's eye, when he was adding

Note to eloquent note to produce t...

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(for Kathy 1940–2019)

Photo by Marcus Cramer on Unsplash

She was close to death — 

her loved ones bereft.

I read between the lines,

just a habit of mind,

then looked again,

out of the side of my eye:

more and more, as time passes by

what we perceive

we half-create.

Buried in the earth,

she's still looking at the sky,

a rumble of thunder,

passing b...

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Dripping into what passes for daylight
In these northern climes,

The moon fades, wind and rain shower,
Trees sway, on this formless holiday
Light, such as it is, tucks away dream,

Children — washed, tired, pale -
Know it’s Halloween
I know it well:
Tired ghosts forget to rise again,
Witches stagger into view
As all their magic fades away.

Clogged motors roar
As the October mist l...

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County Lines spread

Evil

A cross all the living and the dead

Their line is our time

We need them, fled.

A spring day in late fall,

She can no longer stand 

Tall, crumpled, bent,

She has lost the lines that link

Her to her family, friends.

Now lines link:

Road, rail, phone,

Needle, plunger, sink

into an unguarded atonement.

Her lines enmeshed in this stinki...

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dedicated to the men and women of the Syrian Defence force, and the Kurdish YPG,  who, with the help of volunteers from around the world, defeated Daesh and are now seeking to defend the feminist and democratic Kurdistan from NATO-supported Fascist-Turkish genocidal murderers and rapists 

My parents were Christian, Serb,

I remember the icons in my mother’s house,

The smell of meat on...

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Absinthe, this pearly-white,

Clouded, aniseed-tasting drink

Stinks but is addictive, especially

Here in Paris on the left-bank,

Near Montmartre

Where the Institut is

Where we plan, conspire,

Work out who is the traitor

Who the informer, who the liar.

Anyway, I am always thirsty for absinthe.

I am always thirsty for wine too

To the extent of our boundless, limited e...

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Out of all this mush,

With a little bit of a push,

Emerge fire fly.

O! fly so high firefly,

Illuminate the sky, firefly

Take a break, firefly;

Phosphorescence on the lake,

Fires fly

Float over the image of moon,

The lapping of the lake

Firefly, a soft-bodied beetle,

Firefly, related to the glow-worm,

The winged male and flightless female

Both have luminesce...

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Kurdish poets with military experience have fallen silent and I am bereft;

Poetry has always been the main pillar of Kurdish literature

The fight for their land and the fight for their identity are the same.

The Kurds are not divorced from the west - Eliot's influence on al-Sayyab  for example -

And the hot wave from Arabia did not destroy the Kurds, many are Christian, Ezedi and secul...

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The cold autumn rain falls full in my face,

wet westerlies come with a trace of winter;

as I walk, I take account of my losses.

My mind drifts into the past:

a phantasmagoria of well-remembered faces

tumble into the valley of the shadow of death.

Phantoms afloat, all around me, looking quizzically

at the remains of a life long left or soonest parted.

The trees of this woodl...

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Winter on Mount Sinjar in 2014,

By the Christian calendar.

That year lasted forever:

Such a long, long time ago,

Now the Turks have come

To do the work of Daesh

And the Sunni tribes and foreign Salafists

Conspire to kill the Yezedi, even in Lalish,

Our mouths expel a hidden heat

It is the soul of the Ezedi.

Never before has the sun

Filled us so full of tea...

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Walking down a dusty, dirt road in Rojava,

near the border.

Sand in my mouth, tears on my cheek.

NATO jets flying under Turkish colours,

bombing, massacring, the soldiers of the Syrian Defence Forces

and their internationalist Kurdish YPG allies —

a modern International Brigade.

SDF forces are now, this minute, pulling soldiers (Kurdish, Arab, American, British, Serbian, ...

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Planet earth she suffers

Torn at by your knife,

Slashed at by machete

Exploited all your life.

Poisoned by your chemicals

Murdered, raped and pillaged

Consider the obscenity - 

The whole world is just one village.  

But you really ain't bothered, are you?

You've got your money in the bank

You own your slice of heaven

You're comfortably numb, to be frank.

..........

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David always told the truth to me

and, of course, we argued endlessly

about what, exactly, was 'true':

both working class self-taught autodidacts,

what would you expect us to do?

I continued to learn a lot from David's poetry too

Until his mighty verses were expunged from view.

David told me the precise name and location

Of a church in ancient Antioch,

In war-torn Syria ...

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We were in a public garden 

In England in May.

We sat together

In mild, balmy weather.

We did not track those

Who moved around us.

They had their instructions,

Undoubtedly.

We looked at the water, and we looked at the ducks,

And the weeping willow tree was there:

Reflected in your eyes,

A subtle disguise,

I dropped words into your ears

Like pearls.

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The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest

Whine like a man who knows he's out of time

Casuistry and sophistry work together perfectly.

But poetry's more about the wine than the whining

About seeking to express the inexpressible

Whilst complaining about just how d...

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Beneath this beach of sand and shells

I see the image of the rolling sea.

Such new-found-land frames and hides

These wide horizons; I walk along the cliff:

Sheer drop upon the windward side,

Embedded trilobites, beneath my feet

Quartz and Muscovite from the granite

Weathered by the winds and waves

Sea-formed outcrops, hidden rocks, caves.

Time carves the face of all mank...

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"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time"  British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

Old Royal Enfield bicycles

propped against the wall,

a gaggle of men,

then, in the far distance,

a gable end

and look! a house

windows left wide open

in this Cheshire heat.

And, have we forgotten,

if we knew at all,

this...

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Words we remember,

Echo in the brain,

Bouncing off the surfaces:

A few will remain.

Wind rises around the window pane,

Blowing a northerly gale,

A rain-splattered man, with a sorry, sorry tale,

Inhabits the soul beside me, half-way to hell.

His tale is built on lies, my friend,

Deceptions ripe and drear,

Tales we tell to children

When their eyes overflow with fear.

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For all me life I have been living among 'em:  savages. savages in suits.

Now they are becoming increasingly loathsome to me.

As a kid in bed I was alone, like a boat afloat in the sea.

Spotted land? Savages abound, in the suburbs, in the town

Savages abound.

Cultivating selfishness, meanness and spite.

Their unholy trinity: y've made yer bed, now lie on it,

spare the rod and ...

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If a hundred seas had separated me 

From you. If our sea of troubles were endless, too, 

If I could spend just one in a thousand years of nights with you

You could parcel me up and remove me from sight

Hide me away, like a kid:

The cubby-hole under the stairs,

Was for wetting the bed:

I banged and banged me head

But nobody ever came.

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The long days are gone already

Grass prepares to stop growing

The fields and trees take on a tint

Rivers begin to change their courses to accommodate the coming winter 

Colour is leached out of the landscape.

Mosquitos do their final, annoying dance

We are dust and shadow. Again.

Who knows whether we will survive another winter

The gods above? I flee the calloused hands of ...

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Squirming with words,

squabbling, fighting, reeling  with words

sore with myself.

so sore with myself

a world of regret,

begets

only

this absence of you.

O! I wish I could turn words into wishes.

O! I wish my days would fall into line

my eyes rise for you

without the slightest disguise for you

finally, it's only you.

Now

this evening is so h...

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It was the model spitfire in your front room window

That identified you, separated you from that tribe,

We call ‘the old’.

I saw you sometimes at the shops, your movements slow, deliberate,

Arthritic, I thought, I was wrong.

You carried a basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind.

And you were always glancing behind you. I thought it was the traffic

You feared, but  it wa...

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

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

                    time is a demon

                    the animals know.

                    It’s looking for you, y'know:

                  ...in the abdomen – demon go

                  ...in the albumin – demon go

                  ... ...

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Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Emily Dickinson

Born, bloom, die

All in the one day

Blurs a glass darkly

A physician’s proof of breath

Marked by her girlhood’s fleeting fancy

Of a garden romance

A moonlit dance

With Chopin playing lightly

In the darkness

And no rectangular wooden box

To be seen

Instead a thing with feathers

Whistles through my head

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

Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

…only the vestiges remain:

Conduct a forensic examination, scatter the remains:
Fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail,
Condemned at the root.

A roof for his daughter,
Over a precipice-by-th...

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A baby crying for her mother

Her face a clutter of creases

As I hand her back to her mum.

Imagine if the mother was the victim

Of a roadside bomb and nothing was left

For the baby to cling to. What then? 

Continue with your crossword?

Mutter 'rather her than me?'

Compassion fatigue - honestly!

A desire to leave this mess behind?

Develop mindfulness? Yoga, clean living...

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The guttering rain of home 

Stains my memory

Longer than churches

Stand.

Is it duty to devotion

Or devotion to duty that keeps

Me standing in this field of ripe poppies?

I don't know

How can we translate this chaos

Into words?

The grammar of suffering

Is indecipherable.

Lost in translation

Faith no longer floods my mind

My mind reminds me

That my veins ...

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I am a saboteur,

I sabotage my hopes;

for fortune is a fickle friend,

she smiles when you don't need her,

leaves you like a falling leaf,

a mimicking procedure.

Such measly moments of the past,

do not last:

Kicking through leaves

of a stormy-day; 

before Dawn found me

gathering windfalls in my night clothes,

tumbling into heaps, red, golden brown–

crazy colou...

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My life is a work-in-progress

my writing and poetry too

the advice is still, unfortunately, 

to take another route through.

A love-struck Romeo too. 

Some writing is not about something

some writing is of itself;

some writing is something to lean on,

a floating melody of swans; a yelp of pain.

Help! 

When first we feel, we fall,

under the shadow of the shelter of t...

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Wild is the minute as storm seizes the sky

A new world of smell and sight and sound,

Wetness and wildness interlaced all around;

These portals of discovery abound.

Fully enter this world, this new newfoundland:

See the sheer vividness of colour, shade, shadow,

Hear the all round risibility of bird song, sound.

Flesh, blood, soul, air and all the half-created

Epiphanies...

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A rose garden at altitude under occupation

Contemplate a rose garden

On this roof-garden of the world,

especially in mid-winter,

under occupation.

I picture this rose garden,

this secret garden of the soul,

where all that is good and all that is fine

are written in the tender-script divine

of the Tibetan Book of the Dead - 

some things are better left unsaid.

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Like a swimmer driven by a whirlwind of distress, without a morsel of hope, lampooned by regret, in a  storm of my own making; beseiged by clouds;  I hide. Adamantly anchored to twenty fathoms below.

I'm riven by a whirlwind of my observable distress; starving and alone, I shout: "I do not hide!" - I cried out; "here is my anchor all the live-long day" and yet, and yet, I fade away.  Disappeare...

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I must practice saying two things in saying one

The wind churns the lake as the sky falls
Leads us into an interlocking frenzy

Of burnished grey metal, tears, dance

Ibn 'Ammar will seize my girl's glance

And, in Arabic poetry, forge a full romance

Out of her burnished skin and pliable gold adornments.

What a fine day this has turned out to be

For me, her eyes would melt ...

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Following the hooves of yak

We sing a sad song of longing.

Food we have, just enough, the Chinese soldiers take the rest.
My heart turns weak inside me, like the memory of our songs and prayer-flags,

The memory of your song lasts long, longer than occupation, I think.

We have no money and the Chinese close our monasteries and schools, everyday.

The sun sets and we carry on the figh...

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The Unwritten predominates, 

The times of wonder have gone,

We hold on - the wise women drugged

Into submission.

Forensic psychology reveals traces

Of long-forgotten haunted faces;

Which, like Munch's lurid, silent scream,

Degenerate into nightmaredream.

Or, so it seems.

Meanwhile, in population centres,

Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,

Falls into disuse,

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On a night like tonight

The words:

Girls, gin, thin

Originally dispersed

Now come together in a terse verse

Originating in London town, circa 1836.

I love a foggy pea-souper,

Down on the Kentish marshes,

Or a swirling mist around Whitrchapel

With the Ripper in tow

Charlie Dickens is scribbling away

In a dark corner

Of a candle lit room

He ...

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Bobbins of cotton

Were in great demand,

When cotton was king,

Here in Manchester.

Thousands of bonny lasses

Pouring out of t'Mill gates - 

Couldn't afford t'be late

Needed to thread the bobbins.

Bobbins of cotton

Rhyming slang

For rotten

Wonder if Johnny knew that?

'That's bobbins'

He'd have said.

And blinkin' bobbins to you, too,

Said Lady Blue.

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WHO THE HELL CAN SEE FOREVER?

Confíteor Deo omnipoténti
et vobis, fratres,
quia peccávi nimis
cogitatióne, verbo,
ópere et omissióne.

Wild is the way and clear is the sky

A world of smell and sight and sound

The portals of discovery all around.

So enter our world, our newfoundland:

The sheer vividness of colour will astound

You. The all-round visibility of sound,

F...

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You never cross the bridge,

On the verge of doubt

You withdraw

Retreat from the river

Jump into dreamland

Tuck yourself into shade

Answer questions in a perfunctory manner

And look,  I, too, was tired and broken

Dedicated to existing 

Long enough to kiss the sun

Again

I remember a man, a son of Zoroaster

So unlike the tired stranger I became.

I wish I k...

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The silk road into Moscow

The sundry stops, and stinks,

Her rising into fury

His sinking into think.

This edge of trees and wildings

The glazing of the sun.

This rising stench of wolverine

The moon falls to the Sun.

This mix of flesh and friendship

The rising up of love

This game of death and sacrifice

The cooing of the dove.

This beginning is the end

My frie...

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The Moors' last laugh

My daughters mean the world to me

To keep them safe is my whole intent

But in a time of war can fathers truly

Protect daughters? I used to be happy,

So cheerful, so easy in my cares.

But now I hate the moonlight

I am scared to be taken unawares.

We are occupied now by  Christian armies.

But we keep Muhamed close to our hearts

Whilst professin...

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“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine" Alan Turing

Mathematician, logician, philosopher, computer scientist, theoretical biologist, crypanalyst

This father of AI, most of whose work was covered by The Official Secrets Act,

Was denied recognition until 2009 becaise he admitted making love to a man

And was then chemically cas...

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Bewildered, at the things he left unsaid,

Serendipity, chances offered, all cut dead:

Wise enough to play the fool.

I guess.

A vicious wind slices through me,

Here on this January night:

Put out the light and then put out the light

Memory cuts through the cold remains of the day

Parcels it up, so the day wont drift away.

Signs hidden by an iron fog bec...

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Photo by Danny Schleicher on Unsplash

We’ve reached a tipping point — 

As the Arctic melts and Amazonia burns — 

Acid rain strips the trees — 

Plastic fantastic — two billion tons of indestructible shit –

A deathly cocktail of chemicals

Billowing out of chemical factories across the globe,

Billowing out tons of pestilential fug:

Diesel passing poison straight ...

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If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

With their backs against the wall

The brave stand tall.

One Maori-Kiwi Englishman

Held up an Aussie onslaught

On a sunny Saturday in Yorkshire.

Boycottesque, he only scored 2 in 50 balls,

The brave stand tall.

England needed 359 runs to save the Ashes

Stokes gave us hope, steadil...

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Steel sharpened to a razor point, used as a blade,

On a day when I was a boy, you a man,

Shards of glass stain still this young boy's blood -

Try grabbing the sharpness of glass as you fall,

Bloody hands sliding down a wall.

At this moment held in perpetuity 

A thirty-second item on the local evening news

Framed in the mind of the viewers by stereotypes of blame:

Deser...

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There's an empty Bench today

She's gone away

Ghosts are everywhere

The pulse of her heart stopped

Wraiths chatter, mix, meld

In the invisible air

The odd number is one

Moment she  lingers in the chair

Talking to a lady who is no longer there

Odd that even two is only ever 1 + 1

These odd and odd associations

Will carry on until the wood

Rots and there are no tre...

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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

The smoky-smell of coal and steam

Caught up upon an evening’s desultoriness

A girl’s slight distress as she leaves the empty nest

Mingles with the spine-tingling haunting of the imagination

That is a prelude to walking death

Ec...

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The pungent smell of carnations sends me back

To summer days spent wending my time away

As dandelions mimic the gawdy sun

And the pebbles in my pockets are reserved for skimming water.

A heavy incense melds with the patchouli oil

Sweating for his mortal soul

Mixing an amorous mescaline tincture

Pale and milky, resistant like a heavy oak door

The frozen moment of a kiss

...

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4th August 1914

Germany invades Belgium

Great Britain declares war on Germany

Millions die. The roses of Picardy

Bloom red like blood,

The sun shines on.  The yellow wheat

Drifts and flows in the summer breezes still.

This quiet landscape will soon explode,

Shot through with the bloody gore of war.

We swore: hands bloody, burnt, raw.

Sweet Christ, what was it all...

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"Spain, under Arab rule, became the most civilized country in the world."

 Max Dimont,The Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People, Behrman House, 1995, p. 81

Arabic spoken in Andalusia,

after 400 years of the inquisition.

Muslim houses, in Bosnian villages,

with crosses on display

despite the threat of apostasy.

..........And slay them wherever you come upon them: Surah-Al...

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Upon this beach of ground sand and shells

Come! See the image of the rolling sea.

This new found land ground by the tides,

These wide expanses framed by cliffs of sky

On the windward side the mere placidity of day.

Trilobites embedded, beneath my feet

Quartz and Muscovite glitter in the granite

The wind and the waves have the time

To form sea views, sculpt'd rocks, cav...

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Serendipity came my way, on a blowy Lancaster day

Blown in all the way from Cal-i-forni-i-a, an idea of a girl

That I kept in my head, long after she was dead 

Except in great extremity when I'd gamble all that I had

On her not being sad. But, maybe, I was wrong and Jenny

Had sung a bitter-bitter-song. A song of her declining days

Drifting into a frustration-opoid-filled Palo Alt...

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Morning maniac music

Shakes me awake

The regular guys

Those who once brought hope

Now bring hate.

Over the mountain,

the clouds scud away

blood on the floor

it's all fading away.

........

Blood on the soul,

and blood over water

All those refugees 

we oughter.....

stick 'em in the camps

and camp'em on the shelf

of our conscience

.......

Wa...

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Falling in love

Beats falling in line

What is our derivative today

A bluesy-chime?

.......

In this curve of time

We need a degree of differentiation

To establish our rate of change

With respect to time.

......

There are a number of ways

To fix this derivative:

In the end they all amount to the same

Number: 

..........

In the fourth dimension

The grad...

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Her train of thought enters a tunnel,

she's off the rails, at risk;

tracking back

she sees that

the perfect day

for her to go away

will never arrive.

......

So she must loop back

into herself,

link past, present and future

into a spherical loop:

a theory made of everything,

to guide her and to link her

into the self-contained mathematical model 

of isol...

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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.

Guernica Pablo Picasso 1937

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We are all in a minority-of-one, of sorts,

Embedded in the randomness of thought,

The quirks we cultivate, or choose to ignore,

Is our first glance going to ceiling or floor?

Raising the intonation at the end of a statement

Problematizes even the most complacent thought;

Or, maybe, we look our interlocutor straight in the eye

Let him slowly work out the exact nature of ou...

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Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash

A terrible thing happened to my friend and his family today.

He took his life on an ordinary Monday. Hung himself by the neck

From a tree. Left this life and just went away.

Leaving his loved ones to pick up the pieces.

His mum couldn’t stop shaking at his funeral

Paid for by us, his friends

Her rickety car matched her blonde hair.

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The ideas of the beautiful Cathars of Languedoc spread across western Europe

Cathar comes from the Greek: καθαροί, katharoi, “the pure [ones]”

They built on the dualistic theology of Manichaenism

Which they blended with the eastern Christianity of Byzantium

They were ascetic: believing the matetial world was the evil realm of Satan

Whilst the world of the spirit w...

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At the end of time I will rise

Like today, go about my business

Talk to children, smile sometimes.

The sky - the real sky - shall shelter

And storm the earth still. Black soil shall

Breed many Satans still.

Azure clouds from which no rain falls

Shall mass on far horizons.

Large drops of rain shall fall, freezing into ice,

Falling into full sunshine.

An...

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

Caused by all the old men: quick to criticise, slow to help.. 

Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
Children running across raging seas danced on the waves. 

Such a storm-blessed salty awakening.
They had nothing to regret. 
They were children who coped with HIV, nursed t...

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One must  recognize chaos in oneself

To be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Now, only the vestiges remain:

Go on, consumers, conduct a forensic examination,
And when complete, then you scatter the remains:
Finally, you will 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.

Here's a roof for ...

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Photo by Diana Parkhouse on Unsplash

I prefer that you are not angry with me,

I am not a slacker or a malingerer

With you I can be honest, I have a problem with my DNA.

The genetic malformation makes my life a heavy globe

to carry. Do not walk under my feet. Give me space.

You can be very funny - with your cutting wit

Funny enough to dissolve most men — like...

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The other side of the bay we find

tramps' halls of resistance flashing by

where memory cascades into

availanches on request, tramp to tramp,

intelligence tests, read last week's  news,

reading between the lines of this misty day; 

most modern  mobile minds are really quite unaware of significance

just click into life at 7am - with WiFi with work 

providing ample assistance ...

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Photo by Wayne Chan on Unsplash

(for Cathy)

If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
They’d be present in the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes.
This friendship across species — a Buddhist mantra –
Rocks me like a good old boy, befriends me like the rain.
He’ll be with me when the gates fly open — his love will never end.
Seek out the depths, the s...

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)

moments of the past

fall flat

memories do not last:

kicking leaves

in stormy-autumn 

tumbling heaps, red, gold and brown

deep-set colours all around

echoing the silent dread

of  the day of the dead.

A memory-lost, a memory-found,

storm-tossed words,

all around,

thought 

but never said:

regrets of a life misled.

Dust-motes float

around my head,

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Passing these whiter shades of pale, these pretty traces of lace,

We reveal the opal-luminosity of these few remaining late Romans,

Their indigo-dreams red with the gore of resistance on this bloody

May Day, negating their absorption into the timeless air of antiquity,

Through the thousand year creation of Constantinople’s drift and swell,

Rising into Elysium’s perfumed garden ...

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November brought to mind in August: 

The lack of light, that all day twilight!

How can anybody live through such visual misery?

Without declining into snake, or toad?

Even the trees will have no leaves.

And the cold will rise to infect our eyes!

We are, unfortunately, not Italian, nor Etruscan,

Just woolly-backed mammoth barbarian sorcerers

Of a certain druidical d...

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Melancholy's lack of zest

Was written all over his palimpsest:

To die at twenty-five to some

Will hardly seem to have been alive.

But Johnny Keats lived and loved

for poetry, music, kisses, tears

Eschewing self-pity-suicide

He tried his best to stay alive

With medicine and Fanny's tears 

..........

No crossing of the river Lethe, as yet,

Undefeated by TB, at least ...

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My friend is dead.

I met him here

He was wise,

But he was not clear

About anything - afar or near.

For which I was grateful.

I try to hold him clear in mind -

on the random wildwind strain

where we hear old notes playing -

I maintain the glory of his voice, his name,

But I have a sick dread of a fading

Time, unmaintained by love or rhyme.

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I went to see a dead man's wedding today.

I can sing again, some may say,

Even if the bridegroom cuts out his heart

And swears they'd never part

I'll plant a heart in the national park

But the NIMBYs would exclaim,

In addition flowers cannot bloom,

For the NIMBYs are in their 60s with no debts,

They think they'll live for ever

But between the layers of birdsong death i...

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You may want to be a rose,

You are beautiful enough,

and your perfume makes me faint

Heady it is  in that one garden,

Where the best woman in the world

Works like a peasant, smiling, striving,

The trimming of the hedges,

If I was a sculptor there would be statues

To remember you as a young woman

But I am a dreamer and I only remember every inch of you

Just as the w...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into these 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, my friend,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into the past:
Generations of suffering: eyes lifted to...

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A reet rough diamond

This Broughton boy

Salford born

And Salford fled.

Y're an Essex  'Erbert now me lad,

No dirty old town fer you, our kid,

London suburbia'll have to do

Fer likes o'you.

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Hengist & Horsa's Humble Bequest

Is to just, please, give it a rest:

The plethora of techo-junk-gibberish

That purports to tell us who we are and who we must be.

Genetically, you canna convince me;

Sinister motives mebbe but sinister consequences, aye.

A sparkly world of the eternally new 

'fwiended' with a lipth

of likes

Can you adam and heave it:

networking on ...

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Shout it out or whisper it secretly in my ear

Tell me all the things I will never want to hear:

Tell me how Sharia law liberates the maid:

Tell me how nationalism is patriotism writ large;

Tell me how exactly and who it is that Jesus saves.

Now I’ll tell you our lives are way too crammed with things

How we need to let go if we want to hear the s...

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Along by the dirty old river we walk and talk, 

Talking of everything, of life, of what it takes,

And never gives back.

We resurrect the past.

Fifty years and more; we hoped for the best,

Prepared for anything, we got by, day-to-day.

Summertime, when the living was easy, and we were young, 

We wanted so desperately to own a scooter, a motorbike. 

But our families were poor....

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Our time in Erbil was short

We heard that in Mosul

The fascist’s love of power

Was enforced by knife and fist and gun.

Our time in Nineveh had begun,

Long, long beneath the sun.

With Dwekh Nawsha

It was a time for self-sacrifice

A time to break the deadly silence of terror

And now, again,  church bells ring in Nineveh

WE have changed fate.

We the ancient Assyrian p...

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I remember a man, not a young man either,

in the very respectable county of Buckinghamshire

near Iver, who swallowed his pain by swallowing his beer,

escaped from his fears by drinking more, 8%, I can't be sure,

And, once having swallowed the beer, became the most incredible bore.

One you'd most definitely avoid f'sure.

He balanced all, brought all to mind, decided art was the up...

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john coltrane in my mind, a war companion in my head

miles davis not far behind, it's the kind of blue that rhymes

a mixing that's complex and true: a rippling of the genes,

a resurrection of memory, a breaking of the heart

a saxophone screeches us apart, a wail, a scream,

blue-lightening flashing, it's more than a blue-tinged dream,

billie holiday, lady day, tears out my soul

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Compose a verse that is hotter than a boil

Compose a poem that'll flare up in  oils.

Compose a eulogy that outreaches the stars

Compose a symphony as an epiphany of bars

Compose the day as a hotter aspect of night

Compose a moody monochrome in sunlight.

Fit your creativity to working inside an oven 

Freeze out the hotness of a witches' coven

Filter the air with extreme air ...

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black rain glistens on the window panes

as she looks out on unfenced existence,

at the the life that never was, outside

her eyes shine like stars beneath the lights

turned on by mom before she went off on one

these men hunched up, collars pulled tight, 

detectives steaming under these high ceiling lights;

 a woman in high heels clutches mummy's bag

unsteadily she shudd...

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Shadows left to sink in the ashes and dust

The best of us fell on the Somme, Verdun,

Dunkirk, Burma, Malaya, North Africa

Our luckier cousins had long ago set off

Across the broad Atlantic: convicts moved

Straight to the Swan River of Western Australia

Convict scum of the East End born to live again.

The ragged Scots, after Culloden and the clearances;  

So many Irish every...

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Alf's garden were slightly uneven, slightly tiered

From early February’s putting on of scattered beauty –

Snowdrops and crocuses, daffodils and hyacinth –

Through a cascade of shade and colour

His garden bloomed throughout the growing year.

So-many-forget-me-nots:

Wild primroses, crocus and aubrietia

Then larkspur, delphinium and the beautiful bluebells

Carnations,...

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First light: a new beginning,

at the crack of dawn

feel the air against the skin

stop to listen to the dawn chorus.

Thrillingly, it is still summer.

Last year, madness brushed with death.

.Now, I'm thinking:

"The world is full of magic things,

Patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

My senses are sharp,

like a razor I cut through the trash

of man's decei...

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It is always better to depart

at the end of life

whilst windows are locked

and doors closed

but this is often impossible.

Now, when thousands of lakes have been removed

 wars are fought over water

millions of cups of coffee no longer drunk,

your gaze explodes like petrol thrown on a bonfire.

and this time it really is my fault

some of us are good at dissembl...

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The words that he said,

in malice and spite,

lit a spark in her heart

flowed in her blood

then entered her brain,

and did her no good,

She was never the same.

As she glowered and festered

she rotted and knew

her cancer diagnosis

was most certainly true.

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Sometimes she speaks through gritted teeth

To herself, admonishingly. She, unforgiven,

Riven by frustration. So hard on herself: 

A mother, a lover, a woman who writes poetry with

Her eyes. Disguises truth with flashes of beauty

Remembers the older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune

Closes her eyes as she suddenly mounts to a crescendo

Of temper, that leaves her sobbing, inhali...

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Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly

This natural magic of transformation

Can happen to you too. Time makes you

More beautiful. Human metamorphosis

Liberates souls. Such a rare achievement

Requires an emptying of the mind

A deep (and often painful) compassion.

Defeat your expectations;

Free yourself from what is expected and you will see

The passing beauty of a butterf...

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Missy Moon was sad as only Miss Moon can be. In tears she seeks to flee the nightmare of her life
We dream that moonbeams can pluck:

The calmness of flowers, the depth of moments,
The completeness of a live birth;
But white sobs slide into our ears
Telling us to forget her smile.

On the fortunate day of your first kiss,
Drunk with the all the heady scents of sadness,
Now ingrained into...

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The swan's last waltz:

Lithe legs spread

Neck stretched

Feet splayed

A swan-song.

Toes strong

Fingers pulse

Then snap;

A pirouette:

A spectacular series

Of whirls on her toes

He circles her on the ball of his foot

Musical, muscular movements mingle and mix

With a shiver of white she jumps

A catching of the breath as she slumps

Into his arms;

A choreo...

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Ah, the tip of the straw still gripped by your teeth

I move you gently. You are asleep.

Not jealous or envious or proud.

You have a little money but enormous dignity.

You live in a caravan and still poach

For the pot. You are remarkably silent about the past.

I think it is wise to let sleeping dogs lie.

You would have taken another birth into more fortunate circumstances

Bu...

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When you came to me, through an open window

All the cracked 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 were just a girl,...

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Find a way to tell the truth then realise

The truth  will DEFINITELY pull out your eyes

Once upon an old time  days were put away,

Saved up for days by the sea.

Now, extremity of mood is  the mother of invention

Some say this, some say that, some just cough for attention

Play Solitaire whilst sitting on a stair

Staring into thin air

John O'China sailed outer Liverpool

Ga...

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If liberty means anything at all,

it means the right to tell people

what they do not want to hear. George Orwell

Criminal justice:

Standing up for

Little girls,

Working class, white,

Raped and

Treated like shite

by the 'authorities'

Gets you locked up

Jailed for exposing evil

In the oh! so! middle-class

pc vastly hypocritical UK.

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I’ve known fear in a handful of dust

The consequence of a slip of the tongue

Words gone wrong

The vestiges of rain

Primeval instinct trusts nothing

Human error cannot set us free

Find a mirror, smash it, the fragility of the body remains

The devil’s in the detail

Condemned at the root

Old-fashioned dread conjures

The slumber of the dead.

The tones of solemn music

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Let water rush from the tap

In a land of thirst,

Grow like wild flowers,

Soak up the eyes, looks,

Devoured by the smouldering smell

Of rubbish burnt in autumn fires.

Talk to me as you walk through

The innumerable rooms of my heart

Say, yes, you love me, like the fish love the waves,

Trap me like a breath in the chest,

Press deep on me to restart my heart,

Dissolve ...

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We walk a steep and slippery way.
Mixing moods in synaesthesia’s way,
It seems as if I am a chorus, in a play.

We feel by measures, hidden from the eye,
Time is borrowed, blue - days wasted,
Passing by under a steeply scattered sky.

Winter seeps me into my recesses of sleep, my soul flies 
Into the grist of an art unborrowed from time and tide;
I learn by repeated going, where I have t...

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this flinger of plurabilly teas

sang twice upon a time

good time it was two pigeons in a line.

a fat man a-coming downa road

toadja who was a-coming downa road

a nicens-a-little boy named paddy buckoo.

her mother sneak him that story

rather clucked him in deep glory:

series-us-ly sin, sin, O! Jesuitical-sin

nothing quite like it for keeping yous thin

through a grass d...

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Upon hearing that another young man

A friend of the family, under thirty,

Has taken his own life, by his own hand,

I stop to think. I have no other way. To cope.

Maybe, this whole insincere malarky of 'modern life'

Drove him to the rope, to the sharpened knife.

.....

She is born who is going to decorate my death,

But I am old and certain things are fixed, but, dear God,

...

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Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

Rabindranath Tagore

In the auction-room, toy trains wait like ribs

to be eaten, they smell like wet sacks

full of delicious smoke, darned with swollen 

fingers in the cold of a Kashmiri morning.

I smile as the pigeons hum into life

so sweet and forgetful was my pain;

...

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Icelight in my eyes

Iceflowers in the wind

storm black night

stings me awake

dreams scatter

light disperses

(black with cloud,

into uncertain verses,

earth, in grave colours)

No black candles here

no witches’ moon,

no lifting of the gloom

gone, gone, all too soon

(see the dead a-glimmering

brimful against the sky).

Alone in a room,

iceflowers zoom

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Gorffwysfa – her place of recovery –

From meeting grief at the flood-tide

This is where she began,
Amharic text in heart, Amharic text in hand,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was a warrior,
An Amazon without a gun.

…….

Sky was black as gold
Dragged across the sunless sea were we
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold

Lost, deep in the sti...

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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.

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Occult fish-rats were in short supply

In that cottage by the Lake-shore where

Jenny, a Californian girl with toothache,

In 1969, give-or-take, was advised to drink

Fortified wine. Fortified by C16H16N2O2

This Lysergic acid had been manufactured

In Palo Alto and brought over to England,

People did those sort of things then inspired

By Timothy Leary and the whol...

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"If liberty  means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." George Orwell

Morning and the thought of a woman

Born in 1931, facing the future

With all the quiet bravery and self-respect

She was born to

Enlivens me

Shakes me awake

To think of the common decency

Of those who once brought hope

Through the dignity of labour

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“I am the immense shadow of my tears” 
― Federico Garcia Lorca

I knew from the very beginning

The day would come

When the sun of the mountain

Would cast aside as a sacrifice,

The shadow on your bedroom wall

When you were a girl

......

I knew from the very beginning

That, in my heart there is no balm.

To fool me into complacency

This open-wound:

Weeps, stre...

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There are no fences facing 

These skipping wheels of rhyme

So play a tune that's tracing

These slippery eels of time.

Now the fleeting senseless shipwreck,

Of all of life's esteems,

Flashes quick before your eyes:

With the true-falsity of dreams.

Cling you to the wreckage,

Or let it sink and go,

The starlight shines

Above us:

And the north winds blow

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Written near water,

Scrawled in sand,

On a far flung shore,

J'adore, J'adore, J'adore.

Birdsong flung into fond recall

A dry-stone wall,

A dry-stone wall.

Fleecy clouds on this dying-day

Don’t fade away,

Don’t fade away.

Daffodils lean in this wind of change

Never to be seen, again, my friend

Pale-blue eyes on a snow-drop face

Spied-through lace: displace, ...

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You know well, my brothers, that we have four obligations in common, which force us to prefer death over survival: first our faith and piety; second our homeland; third, the emperor anointed by the Lord and fourth; our relatives and friends.The Last Roman Emperor Constantine XI - who died fighting the Turks in the streets of Constantinople

An heart-rending dirge of lamentation and woe 

...

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Blessed are the icons of the Christian East

Fallen into the hands of Whabbi murderers

These who deny the sanctity and purity

Of those who resisted Muslim suzerainty despite

The heavy penalties: their children stolen,

Priests executed, discrimination, terror, fear

But they're still here

These Orthodox Christians who stuck to their religion

Through thick and thin and never ga...

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What is the curve of time?

Which degree of differentiation

Is required to establish a rate of exchange

With respect to time?

There are a number of ways

To fix this derivative:

They all amount to the same

Number

In the end.

In the fourth dimension

The gradient of the curve of time

Is flat, time is still,

Unlike the curvature of spacetime

In our dimen...

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He lived in a town called Malice,

On the corner of All Souls and All Saints,

Is the Moravian church

Constructed in memory of  Jan Hus,

And of all those Hussites burnt at the stake,

For believing differently.

In this late November we will fire off 

Fireworks, like blood red poppies,

To explode like nebulas of stars,

A late memory of the slaughrer of the Catholics who soug...

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“Commune with your own heart on your bed and be still.” 
― Maimonides Moses 1135-1204

The splashes of red, the heady bloom,

The opulent smell, patchouli oil, lingering.

In a marbled room: a certain slant of light,

Reveals these Andalusian roses creeping

Along the fence between Mudejar and Christian.

Between Morisco and Jew,

Between my lover and I,

Between me and you.

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To weave the blessed singularities of a woman.

Read the book of shadows,

when sadnesses besiege you,

make art from the dying of the light,

when you are terrified, late, late at night.

Look so-deep into the blackness,

at the heart of second sight,

see yourself mirrored

in the declining light 

of your sleeping child's eyes.

When you enter here:

Abandon all disguise.

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Fortitudo mea est amor a matre mihi datus,

Coming downstairs slow and steady

Crinkled and wrinked with ruffled hair

I hold her dreams close to me -

Pausing at the turning of eternity -

Until I have drunk two strong coffees,

Smoked an imaginary cigarette,

Said good morning to those I love,

Who are now amongst the dead;

Recite a quiet antiphon in my muddled head.

L...

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It'll take the breath clean out of you

When you think the implications through

Tabula Rasa: blank slate

No memory, no desire,

Nothing to bend you in any direction,

Nothing to send you lower or higher

No future envisaged

No presience required

No past to regret

Nothing for sale and nothing to let

No genetic predisposition

No-one to speak and no-one to listen

A new...

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In your dream you are paralysed, silent

Here's a shadow behind this mountain

Scurry down into the winter-valley

Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,

Rock- hidden fossils, set in stone,

Evolutions of Medusa

Afflicted by a petrified decay.

All she gazed upon

Can never be rubbed away.

Such stains dry and calcify

Deep in these highland bogs

A quagmire-swamp of guilt, ...

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Swirls of smoke

Swirls of smog

Breeding nightmares

In this pestilential fog:

No picturesque landscape this.

Church bells only useful 

for announcing mass-acres of the dead.

Sin shines in like wet, black pavements under gaslight

Look! a broken green-tinged laudanum bottle

Tincture of nightmare, smelling of gin,

Listen to the devil assail thee, roast thee, consume thee

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Do-ray-me-far-so

When I was a nipper, a kid, a boy

wild flowers grew through the concrete waste

all around our new estate:

flowers rooted in the cracks along the road

just for me

these wild flowers were not weeds

these flowers were a splash of yellow echoing the sun

a pale reflection of the egotistical sublime

O! we gazed through the heat haze

and, in awe, sa...

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Concrete walls

Chucked up quick, cheap

My first home

.......

My dad he’d shipped West  Africans

From the Gold Coast to Burma to fight

The Japs. Sunk, he was, three times, 

No one thought to teach him to swim.

Dispensible he was, like all the other working class lads

Determined to do their bit 

No bugger taught them anyfuckingthing.

.........

We played all around...

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Two days before he died

In Manchester, at night, in the rain

I shared a cigarette with my brother Pete,

We talked of nothing much,

I knew I loved him, 

But not so much.

Death, he said to me, isn't anything,.

Nothing more than

A bird-song when you listen

Real close

Falls silent.

Or a sunset in the sky

fading to blue,

Or when you see.

anything that...

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A whole life spent out of kilter

Every day out of whack

So when the storm hit

And everything went kerflooey

I was ill-prepared.

No going back.

....

Now, if a little dreaming is dangerous

Is the cure to dream more?

.........

I wish you were here: 

On this sad, autumn day

When all the words that ever were

Just drained away

Leaving me aghast.

With nothing ...

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(for my beautiful son, Patrick)

Imagine, it’s your son who’s on the run

After another shooting, by the police.

Imagine the fear, and then the relief,

When you find out he’s alive, though wounded.

Young lives matter – criminal justice rules the game –

It has always been the same: step out of line, serve your time.

Working class youth can see through these lies

Sack the polic...

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Zoroaster whispered in my inner-ear:

Look! Listen! Synaesthesia is here:

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 affirmations.

Silence from the Queen of Night

Or a cacophony of exclamations?

He's soaring, always soaring, he's winging o...

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It was always too late for us, my love,

Cold winds blew our dreams away

Before we could even say, 'I love you so'.

.......

Along these empty streets wind once scattered

Snow in the icy air, screaming at me: she's not there;

I took you into my dreams before I even knew

.......

You existed and all the twists of life abound

Up with you. But who can see the end of life?

I...

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Mansur al-Hallaj was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism. 

Born: 26 March 858 AD,  Fars, Persia

Died: 26 March 922 AD,  Baghdad, Mesopotamia

Goodbye my Sufi friend and lover

Nothing exists now to connect you to me

You are safe from the executioner's block.

Tayyar is honourable and full of good intent.

I will soon rise from the trap of this world.

I ask you to ...

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

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

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

Sceptical, Seeking, Secular.

On a road through Physics and Mathematics

To a Singularity of belief

Foretold.in th...

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When the sepsis struck speckled

Unintended consequences

Arose in my mind

In  the tangling of time:

the rhythm in my head

of a feeling of dread.

In time to pull me round

like a full washing line

of antibiotics

on a windy-day-by-the-sea

then slinking off 

with Mr Delirium, he's off with his head,

an alternate reality, frightened and nearly dead.

I turn and turn...

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We speculate

we do

 dunno why

we just do.

What'd happen if we'd never been born

or been born much earlier or later

or in a different body?

Maybe we'd never have even met 

our family.

One or more of us dead

accidentally

or

deliberately.

......

Well, that happened anyway.

On Tuesday he went to hospital with palpitations.

He was tested for all the major...

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Supine:

Failing to act as a result 

Of moral weakness

On strand or shore or tide,

No more morning dew

No where left to hide,

Trying to stay alive

At this end-of-the-world,

Beaches spray luminescence

Onto bodies which are hostages

To a fortune gone bad:

In this meat-heat abattoir:

Elephants butchered alive for ivory

Baby monkeys skinned alive - for bush m...

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The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June

Are in absentia in this year's damp and cold

We cannot catch the wind, stillness evades us

And the patterns in the grass do not last

Et in Arcadia Ego...

Come!  take the winding stair into the high tower

High above this turgid land of forgetfulness

Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries

Danced a circle of rare delight within ...

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Gethsemane

An old olive oil press, rusting at the bottom of a sandy garden

in an occupied territory.

A man lying prostrate,

on the red soil,

murmuring

about a weight, a burden, something lifted,

a cup taken from him.

We disciples could not hear clearly,

what with the muffled explosions

and such and such.

This man, this man, he screamed out: 

'NOT AS I WILL B...

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Wood ja wanna screeem

If I seem t'wantcha cleen

N brite lik a lit in d'dark? 

Or woodja howl likea

Wooolf in a for rest

F'ages till missymoon

Turn red likeasun f u?

Funny how ol'missycow

Jumpt oer't'moon sosoon

Musta  surprized her up 2 summat

Likeaman wiv a spoon

Entrin a room backards

Ina zoom

T finnish hiz cuppatee.

I'll see woticando f'you

To meek y...

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 close to death

loved ones bereft

read between the lines

a habit of mind

look again

out of the side of the eye,

more and more as time goes by,

what we perceive

we half-create.

aye! aye!

buried in the sky

a rumble of thunder

in a distant time

reverberates still 

in this clinging rhyme

i stare at her

though gossamer air

mesmerised:

now in this ye...

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Hands in pockets, walking always walking,

Being a boy. Never expect the few cars

That pass to pull up. Posh folk had cars.

Imagining the future: more than John Lennon,

More than Imagine, more than Working Class

Hero. Happiness awaits under the weekend

Sun. Meanwhile I continuously frown.  Sometimes, I could even afford stuff displayed

On market stalls. Look at the gi...

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Easter Sunday blues 

Will do, for me, for you;

But not for the Christian people

Of Iraq

My father born an orphan

And now the state agrees

He is absent.

A holy mystery, to me.

My mother is a Christian

A witness

To the massacre of the Innocents

How did I know

That within two years

I would face death

Under similar circumstances

To those in Syria and Iraq

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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 faeries clear

For faeries are always close or near.

Oh, better far than what we see

Are fairy wings that brush our faces

Like spiders’ webs or shimmering laces

Such magical, lovely, lonely things.

A rustle in th...

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i.m. Captain Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

In Calvados you have your cross,

And though you won, we surely lost.

Your sacrifice, at twenty-four, to modern 'wit'

Is nothing more than a crying bore.

Who now has read Alamein to Zem Zem

Your story of the war in the western desert?

For though you knew how to kill

You most certainly knew the cost,

You wore no draperies ove...

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I knew from the very beginning

A day would come

When the sun of the mountain

Would cast you aside

As a sacrifice.

A shadow on your bedroom wall

When you were a girl

Green and tall,

You waited for me to make a clean breast

Of it all,

Of desire;

But the wall just got higher.

......

I knew from the very beginning

That, in my heart

There is no balm.

It's...

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In the Apple Market

Down Kingston way

Your south London twang

Blew me away

Accompanied the many undulations

Of time

Your wild androgyny

Mirroring the mirror

Of yourself

Skimming off the water

Of an otherwise childhood,

Shaking off, like a shaggy dog,

The misery, uncertainty

Of being David Jones

Like a fluorescent intelligence,

You lit up, spot-lighted,

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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 generations of suffering:

Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, ...

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 Dedicated to the enduring memory of:

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca,

1896 - 1936, gypsy, homosexual, poet, anti-fascist

murdered by fascist militia in Granada, Al-Andalus.  

Lorca’s blood wedding

full of vaginas bleeding

into the lemon-tree- soil of suffering spain

reminds me of nothing more than the toil, toil, toil

of life in Al-Andalus.

Pries...

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Don't walk away from love:

since the separation

me and cigarettes 

have only hugs.

In the bootcamp for the broken-hearted

where we still regularly meet

at night

in Dublin, Belfast, Manchester

in the street

or now in the realm of the dead

never let it be said,

in your kitchen

or in the furthest reaches of the cosmos,

i.e. in your head,

that curses and curve...

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Nothing to say,

The old lady thinks,

I must draw my curtains tightly,

Like my mother did, for the dead

Voices in my head

Communing with the dead

A wind roaring inside my head

The silence of the dead.

Old kindnesses fail me

Again

He just faded away,

My Eddie,

Everything is looser now,

No ties

Alone in an empty house

Listening to tiny oceans

roar me to...

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The following of the sun

By a long-ago spaced out

Collection of young humans

Looking and being seen

With children listening to what the Dead said

To so many young Americans

Enjoying themselves under the sun.

........

Following the filigree fingers of Jerry Garcia

Escaping the 1950s threat of misery

and fear

,,,,,,,

Libertarian.

Through and through.

……...

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So, why did you stop me?

Stop me for no reason

What do you think I’m committing?

Treason?

I can see from the way

That you look at me

Exactly what you think of me.

You assume, you assume,

And you generalise

Is it the colour of my skin

Or the stereotype

you see hidden in my eyes?

Why don’t you use your mind?

And your own God-given eyes?

L...

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Rose, the loveliest of pagan namings,

Could see clear to another day

The past was a foreign country:

Where we gave so much away.

Happy trails

Landed us in Golden Gate Park

San Francisco

Palo Alto was a world apart

Looking for a revolution

And this was it:

No empty-headed technologies

Still no silicon in the valley

Just a box of rain

Such a long-long ti...

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A weight is lifted as we look at each other

You, in your brilliant femininity,

Me in my thorough-going dreariness of manner.

I thought love was going to sustain me forever

But it turned out to be a feather in a summer breeze,

The loss of something that I barely knew I had,

Left me bereft upon a far-shore and sad,

And so the door into the rose garden finally closed

And ...

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In praise of the refusers

Those who'll never bend;

For only in opposition

Will you never find a friend.

In praise of the contrary,

Those who'd refuse to bend the knee

To the cultured, rich and ugly,

They'd rather think for themselves, gleefully..

In faint praise of sceptical believers

Deceivers who can see both sides

Who'll never want to be open

Yet never...

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Many of these sadnesses I did not understand,

Being young, only young, and hopeful….

With always enough to drink

But I knew desperate longings fluttered all around me.

Underneath the West way blasted by the Pink Faeries,

We changed perspective, altered everything to live a life on Mars

Wandered up Portobello; looked at the exotic fruit and veg,

Revolutionary legumes when every...

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

The seas are wild tonight

As I write, far from any coast;

Speckled with salty brine and afraid,

I spy in the broken mirror

The broken boy who follows me

Following me.

Down dale, up tree, crawling all over me:

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I loved the rainy morning of my life

And I never think

That friendly mountain passes

Will not ferry me away;

But  happy times are seldom

And time, like rain, runs away

From holiday beach to temptestous sea

I have lost faith in the indomitable debris

That used to accompany and encompass me.

O! the mechanical movement of the sun

Sunshine blooms and sunshi...

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'Mensch' is a  German-Yiddish word

Meaning a person of integrity and honour.

The opposite of a "mensch" is an "unmensch"

Meaning an utterly unlikeable or unfriendly person.

There is nothing in between, no semantic shades of grey.

The divine gift, which we Germans have been known to spurn,

Is to say nobody is mensch or unmensch.

Or, my preference, everyone is...

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Curlews cry, an Aegean sky: a boat
lifts and falls. The heat of noon, a lethargic
gloom, she's tracked with light this star-struck night.

Moon-shadows cast, it's cool at last, this sweep
and swell, this road to hell. The ship's becalmed
with false alarms, this attic night of bone-white light:
no palimpsest, no Grecian zest.

A sapphic wind balloons the moon, fans the fog's
penumbra, spr...

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A pink pallid breeze,

on a clear-sunned day,

only one lone tree

petalled me away.

Dont ya find

time

so-enchantingly betrays:

ya?

Miss Pretty Polly Parrot was a-screeching
In the trees

she ‘caw, caw, caw,'

but she never-ever 

pleased.

...........

Only humans can be

pleased with themselves.

..........

me in flight

eerie is the night

ca...

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I have a dead weight inside me

Which I carry around all day,

It often tries to kill me

And it won’t go away.

I send this freight’s immensity

To the centre of a black hole;

Retracing the wandering journey

Of my wandering soul.

Mine is a grave singularity,

……..

It contains a huge mass,

In an infinitely small space:

A density — gravity — immensity — interface

Lo...

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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 f...

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The ghosts who buy memories listen closely to

The echoes of the song sung by the faminie children

As the tones of the big bell settle in the dust

Of this small market town in County Meath

And, on the stained glass window, still

I see the sun-marked

Resonance of bell --

Circles of uninscribed sound

Uncaged

Through all the cerebral centuries

Chimes and chants for Christ...

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Undefeated these waves and tides

Through all the occupied centuries

When sea-fogs hid Moorish boats shipping opal

To Byzantium while Frisian raiders

Looted every monastery south

Of Lindisfarne. People move from times

Of hunger to places of plenty acoss seas

Where membranes of wood and tattered sail

Lift them towards the moon-blood

Of fertility and away from the tort...

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A flinger of plurabilly teas

Came twice upon a time

Good times it was two

Dis goblin was a-coming downa road

An dis goblin that was a-coming downa road

Bet a nice-a-little boy name Baby Buckoo.

Her mother sneaked him dat story.

Her rather had a leery face:

Sin, sin, Jesuit-sin

………………….

Threw the grass darkly

Fat, thin, fat, thin, sin,sin

She has a faer...

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Great heights can terrify

Mystify the eye and mind

Break the calculus of proportion

That keeps us fixed to the wheel

Of an appointed symmetry.

Break the bond of everyday proportion

Release the incalculable sublime into the world

The beautiful pursuit of extremity 

The man who walks to Santiago de Compostela

On his knees.

My daughter who scurries over a canyon in the H...

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Truth is  hard to find

The years ahead, the years behind,

Yet find it we do – in snatches – on days that go by:

On days when nothing is decided,

On throw-away days, such as these:

Smells and bells,

And all the frumpery of lawns.

Children connect us to the truth: goblins and elves

Books on the shelves where fairy tale worlds elude us still

Metaphors are not fit to give it...

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Melancholy is a deep affliction

I have no prescription

For this sadness

This disease of the heart

Washes colour

From the poppy

Causes the flesh 

To shrink from the touch.

Sinks the garden of the heart

Into rot

Here, birds don’t sing,

Silence is on the wing,

The sun hides behind

A cloud of circumstance

Rain comes in bloody drops,

A child suffers

The i...

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"The Child is father of the Man", Wordsworth, The Rainbow, The Lucy Poems

Listening to the city children playing out,

Heard through an open window on this endless summer eve,

"Last out again!" they cry.

Their voices mingling like sea gulls' cries

As they circle, high above any coast.

Who can boast of possessions -

Money, pensions, houses, stocked and certainly not sh...

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This is the sea around and across which civilizations

Have flowed since time immemorial: Phoenicians,

Carthaginians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Arabs, Byzantines...

This sea is so old and so blue, taste the salty tear-drops running down my face,

As I trace the edges of the sea routes around Italy, the Levant, Spain...

I listen to the same wind and tide once heard by Homer...

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green in all its shades then:

the burgeoning of blue:

grape hyacinth, cornflowers, forget-me-nots

delphinium-blue 

sky-blue, grey, white, black, swirling

chiaroscuro, dappled sun and new leaf,

echoing Turner's kippered skies flying by

towards the green heart of one more summer:

brass bands, paddling pools, London's lidos

 the simple outdoor 

decencies of human nature

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Lurking in the shadows - on a groggy

Gas lit night. He, who followed so many

To their deaths, in this age of the machine,

Sits alone, bereft of sight.

He sees the tender white crosses-row-on-row-on-row,

Rising in a whirlwind, on a night of swirling snow,

He hears the creaking branches, catches a whiff,

Of lying Lady Fortune who's a-floating on the breeze,

Pleased he was, im...

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Name those you love who are not dead,

Speak their names aloud in your head;

Weigh them up, one at a time, give them

A value in words that rhyme. Toast them

With your eyes and toast them in your heart.

Express what they mean to you in action and art.

Share their troubles, be steadfast and true,

Tell them exactly how much they mean to you.

 Contemplate their rocky road to her...

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Remembering her red-golden hair

on a stormy autumn day

Somewhere along the borderland where

Time, held in memoriam, swiftly fades away

Like the leafy-mist which drifts along the hedge rows on this late

October dawn recalling time's past:

emptily, curiously,

Revealing a design hidden 

in these swirls of hieroglyphics,

The wood-smoke of one particular fire burning  our thr...

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I don't feel well

I dont feel good

Ive got a thingy

In my blood

My blood's too thin

The doctor says

The thingy's wee

But wee's enough

To bother me.

Blood dribbles out,

Like from a spout,

It's likely nowt.

When people ask

'what's up with you?'

I tell 'em

'I aint got a clue.'

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After the convent, it was good to be back

The new estate. The new morning.

And in the distance: the Dublin Mountains.

Finding clothes for Anna

Dressing her softly - 

Gentle and wicked she wakes.

The wide empty pavement

The bus half-filled

This August afternoon, with women.

Why aren't the leaves falling?

In October colours these squares

Spurt earth.

Now only summ...

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A holy river runs through us - 

the river of life -

With its twists and its turns,

and its banks out of sight.

(early morning misty light

scatter these dregs of the night –

O! the unbidden tears!)

Flotsam and jetsam

of years pass me  by

Swirl in a whirlpool

Float in the sky.

(the azure blue heat-haze sky

of  childhoods all gone by)

Down in the depths,

...

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Welcome,أهلا بك, bi xêr hatî

Strangers knocking on our door

Let them in, offer them friendship.

We say,a flower for all the world for you

A forget-me-not for your haunted look,

Skin stretched tight as light.

We will offer you delphiniums for memory,

Lilies for your sister's child,

Orchids for the night grown wild.

When you bless us by your presence

You will bring...

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Photo by Senor Sosa on Unsplash

Kibbe Hamudh is a traditional Iraqi dish

That the Christians of Mosul always

Have as their main meal when celebrating Christmas.

All across the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq

This meal was being eaten while

Candles were being lit for Christmas

And for those who would never celebrate Christmas again.

This huge area was part of D...

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Lucifer, fallen angel, tried so hard to be good

But servitude just wasn't in his blood.

A pebble in a dream, a mind that heaves,

all the unresurrected flotsam of a snow-filled freeze

cloying stench of death now

all that remains of war.

Time's eunuchs we are, for sure,

kids, just kids,  battered, scarred, no-man-mattered;

torn bodies cancelling love's deceiving ways ,

for...

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The majesty of dogs impresses us –

Their solitary solidarity -

Loyalty to the death

Above these grey horizons

There is a promise, lingering….

these days, an ending is assumed,

that glorifies the stories of our lives:

making children, seeing things, listening,

Listening, to the music of our hearts’ desires.

Growing old by winter fires.

The sky darkened at noon

s...

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May's rains, a quiet incantation,

                    the animals come and go,

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

                    time is a demon

                    the animals know.

                    It’s looking for you, y'know:

                  ...in the abdomen – demons go

                 ...

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Maimonides said that the Resurrection of the Dead
Enabled justice in the World to Come
Yet, still unbidden tears whisper in my heart, and head.
Tear my soul apart, human life conducted in the dark
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years
The craving for permanence,
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
Walk instead with me,
To the tomb of ...

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Too many of those that love the most

Are dead

Son. brother, 

My lover says those Christians and Jews

Who deny the elasticity of their belief

Need help remembering.

I don't know about much these days

Just the stupidity of sticking to life

When all you do is accumulate days

In a savings account labelled 'fear'.

Before the Reformation 

It had always been...

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An epiphany of history

A bloody tear

 In the momentary blindness

Of a sunshine daydream;

Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have

the normal crucifixions

the splatters of human brains

all over underground trains.

In my beginning is my end,

the starting point for music and poetry and art,

the gulags and the camps and massacres

that stretch f...

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Photo by Brijesh Nirmal on Unsplash

From the very beginning

The sun rose

And all to teach me how to cast my eyes to heaven

Cloudy days are like sacrifices

But to compensate we have the green

And water worlds,

Tall trees and dappled sunlight suit me best

Most would like to begin the world again

I knew from the very beginning that my heart was tender

Easily bro...

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

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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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Cutting a line into half

And half again

Leads to the curve of infinity
to that spike in the universal calculus
Caused by a single boy's once-upon-a-time enquiry
into the extraordinary to - ing and fro - ing of the elements of time and space.

This intricate lattice work of filigree and lace
Through which gleams spark into memories,
wrought of nothing more than figments of electricit...

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That cherry blossom day

Thunder in the air.

Miraculously:

A low rumble, a terrible tremor,

 An unholy roar began to build and build

Towards total devastation

On that final day

When the earth began to shake

Uncontrollable 

Delirium tremens

Everywhere

And then

All the skies of all the world were scorched with fire

And the air exploded

Fusing fl...

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National Thowfeek Jama'ath,

A Sri Lankan affiliate of Daesh,

Carried out a Satanic attack 

On  'Christian and Crusader

Targets' in the Christian area

Of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The deadliest attack,

Was against St Sebastian's

In Negombo, known as 'little Rome'. 

One of the suicide bombers

Waited for the priest to call

The children up to the altar,

Patting the head o...

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The wind cuts through this January night

Slicing like a razor through the skin of my face

Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog

The cry of the wind is all in vain.

Love crossed this black hole in time.

In the old be-jewelled, spider-webbed

Way kisses when young are tender and long,

Not in this frost-filled graveyard,

Where the dead remain unusually silent;

Yew tree sha...

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There's a forty ton truck

Coming his way

Will he sway out of the way?

Or, does he believe that nothing happens by accident?

Are you on your phone, texting your mate?

Hurrying up so you wont be late

Later, will you scream all alone?

Fall into the opposite of mystic,

Sink into real pain?

Dark river flowing

Through your veins

As you moan

like the animal we are

P...

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The silk road into Manchester,

The sundry stops, and stinks,

His rising into fury

Her slinking into think.

This edge of trees and wildings

The glazing of the sun

The rising sniff of wolverine

The falling of the sun.

Mixing flesh and friendship

In the rising up of love

This game of death and nothingness,

The dying of the dove,

The beginning of the end, my friend,

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From the cracks along the pavement the purple flowers bloom

Now this concrete is the medium and there's a body in the room

Paint peels slowly and surfaces glow with dappled sunlight,

Words scrawled on a wall: all-women  'jin' unit based in Sinjar

Will throw Daesh into hell

These words bounce around the walls of my cell

As sun and shadow meet

To swirl in the whirl of this ...

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"That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?"  Christina Rossetti

Sackcloth on our backs

Ashes in our mouths

Wailing loudly and bitterly

Morning maniac music

Awakens me to the truth

Those who once brought hope

Now mired in a maggoty apathy 

And that, over the mountains,

Black clouds scud w...

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Sometimes there is only bad news:

Death waiting in the wings,

In the meantime

We must hone our vision to what is half-perceived

Half-created

Will we risk our children for the future?

Make preparations, plan?

How to respond to a war of each against each?

We must find friends where we can.

Learn to speak in broken languages

Bring back all those young men we lost

In t...

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Notre Dame's Gothic aspiration

Became a symbol of the French nation.

It took one hundred years

To build Notre Dame cathedral

1160 - 1260.

Within two hundred years

Of its completion

The largest cathedral in the Christian world

St Sophia's cathedral in Constantinople

Built to the glory of God

In 537AD,

The centre of Orthodox Christianity,

Was converted into an Ott...

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We were in a public garden 

In England in May

We sat together

In mild balmy weather

We did not track those

Who moved around us

They had their instructions

We looked at the water and ducks

And the weeping willow tree

Reflected in your eyes

A subtle disguise

I dropped words into your ears

There may well have been listening devices

Planted here and there 

I u...

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Teenage dreams so hard to beat

Tapping feet to a fleeting tune

Teenage days gone too soon..

A blazing intensity every second

Flying as high as a flaming heaven.

Everything new - a fire in the blood - 

Love at first sight, as lovers should

Follow your heart, reap what you sow, 

Follow your dreams, never say No.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PinCg7IGqHg

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Empty streets in a town I once walked

A town which is fading

Or so my sisters say

It was always too late for us, my love,

Cold winds blew our dreams away.,

We were both born too early or too late

See, the scattered snow settling in.

The misery of a future when he's not there.

I look into my dreams even before you knew

I existed and all the twists of life tangled

Me up...

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Spending time

In the deepest reaches of night,

Embroiled by this thick absence of light,

My beating heart

Is torn apart from the inanimate

Objects

We spend so much time

Acquiring, fetishizing.

Meanwhile, my soul meanders

Into a foreign time and space,

Delighting in breaking through

the barriers of self,

Rising and falling like the moon

Like the tide, like wom...

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