“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Hemingway.

 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881). Courtesy of the Phillips Collection, DC.

When I look into the mirror
I do not see my face
I see those ghosts behind me,
Trailing blood and lace.

Please excuse my misapprehension,
I do apologise for my fault,
...

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"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!"
― James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

catching my death
it's an English thing
a melody
from tepid heat 
to damp cold
trans-(t)his, sans-(t)hat
means nothing to me
no meno'pause
required
freeze, moan, groan, alone
...

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Over four years now since the slaughter
On the 22nd May 2017 at the Ariana concert
22 murdered, 116 with injuries they'll carry~
all their lives. The target, the young and carefree.

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

From holiday beach ...

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The smell of newly mown grass
deserts us in the winter,
stark-naked trees
occasionally glimmer
in the moonlight;
now the solstice is passed
we move slowly back to November
the dimming of the day.
Starved of sunlight
we stagger into
a year we know nothing of,
a real unknown unknown,
like three blind mice
we scurry away
hoping, just hoping,
that the strangled scream
and the ...

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The old pub on the corner lost beneath a motorway junction;
Stands in a similitude of snow now. Its windows are gone the way
Of the church spire from whence the müezzin calls a different faithful to prayer.
The bronze statue of an eminent Victorian child abuser
Glowers over what was once his property, his factory, his people.
There is wet snow in the air.

My nose smells the cold which craw...

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Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

"I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on" ‘Heredity’, Thomas Hardy

The extraordinary ordinariness of the everyday
Day-in-day-out: work, eat, sleep then go away.
Like places at the table becoming vacant one-by-one.
This is what happens to families. They wither, die,
Then sprout anew. But not the same family, and not
The same you. No m...

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A raggedy thin cotton dress
On a little girl playing out
On this freezing December day.
She’s thrown out by her mama
Left out by her friends
Deserted by her dad
Neglected by the world
In the end little Ellie is just sad.
Her school calls the doctor,
The doctor calls the nurse,
Torn this and that way,
Little Ellie's just hurt.

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Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash

 

 

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

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We are the Êzîdî
We have lived in Mesopotamia for 6000 years
Our souls burn with the fire of Zoroaster
We suffered 72 attempted genocides under the Ottomans
These attacks failed to extinguish our flame of belief
Faith always came back again; always the same
Until now; since August 2014. Now we are
Scattered far from Sinjar.
5000 men murdered
5000 women and girls stolen into sexua...

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I hold her ninety year old hand,
Bruised from the cannulas;
I can see my mum’s thin skin
No longer hides the blood within.
I stroke her hair and think of her
Comforting me when I was the boy
Who ran into her lap spouting blood,
A brush attached to my skull,
With a large rusty nail. 
From then on, I wanted my hair
Cut short enough to reveal the scar. 
And now as we sit together,...

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What church-bells toll to mourn their loss?

What calls to prayer by the muezzin in their memory?

For these young men who kill themselves?

— Only the monstrous silence of the media

    Only the national blood-loss of young lives.

What mockeries now for them from politicians who do not care;

Only the voice of the mothers whose sons are no longer there —

Only black and white boys...

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Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. Charlie Dickens, BLEAK HOUSE, CHAPTER XLVII, ‘JO’S WILL'.

In defence of the sentimental
Dickens gave readings of 'A Christmas Carol'-
That universally known 'dream of a book' ...

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The lillies gave the game away She's so sad, and I know not why, She lives in a fairy tale from old times She think in rhymes, is trapped by chains, Obsessed, like a bird in her nest She can't get it out of her mind. The air is cool here and the moon is up And the river flows calmly; Like it does in books and fairy tales. And in stories of speaking whales. Nothing much sparkles...

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The sand across the beach, engulfed by an hallucinatory gleam,
Or so it seemed. The scale was vast, the proportions dizzying.
We laughed that we lacked the ‘Celtic spirit’, risen from the phoenix,
“ But sells poems,” she side-mouthed, with a knowing wink.
“To all those who know a little and understand less?” he asked.
“Aye, them.” She quietly replied and we walked on: skimming stones,
Paddli...

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

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

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Man and mist and fog and dog;
my winter-of-the-heart hideaway,
I stop, wake and sleep again.
Clouds disguise this fall
into the past,
as surely as the grave obeys
the rule of days. 

Everyday, this sheer cliff path
crumbles, just  a little more.
Listen! as these screeched warnings of the gulls,
echo through this thin air.
Seeing you there shimmering,
glistening, as all light fades...

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The sky a pure-pink chiaroscuro that evening

Blotches of an adamantine brittleness

Spread slowly all over the Cheshire plain,

All over the acres and acres of rich pickings.

The quarter moon is waxing to the right

Behind my back and out of sight,

A grove of black, spidery trees

skeletal and strange

Put me in mind of a MR James story

Of  an unrequited remonstrance 

Of l...

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I walk beside you: tall, stooped,
a quintessentially English presence. 
Listen to those flat Fenland vowels
swirl into melodies,
meld with the staccato RP of Cambridge.

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

Your abiding mood was irresolution,
the secret cross yo...

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Deadly desires pass me by I saw too many deadly sins Kill too many young people, poor people. Sometimes, anger will explode in me Or love will blossom in me? Sometimes it's deadly boredom does the damage All those scurrying into bolt holes Away from Covid and life. Holier-than-thous who'd wear a dozen masks, if asked. I leave the masques to the dramatists. Do you want to drive us to a...

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Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

These empty spaces
Quiver, pulse, inside of me
Composed of God-knows-what:
Memory, hope, desire?
Lacking in originality
these empty rooms,
these lingering spaces,
In empty railways stations
Smell the  smoky-smell of coal and steam
Now long gone in this anonymous dream..
I'm caught up in an evening’s desultoriness.
I've seen my 5 children leave ...

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“When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life…We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here pe...

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“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”  — ~ Albert Einstein, Jew and Theoretical Physicist Konstandinos Scurfield (front), first British anti-ISIS volunteer killed on active service (2015), poses for a photograph with Kurdish fighters and other foreign volunteers in Iraq. Photograph: AP All over England children...

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Christian female fighters take on Daesh in Syria | Mena — Gulf News

 

Sackcloth on our backs
Ashes in our mouths
Wailing loudly and bitterly
We mourn our dead. 

The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic
Awakens me to the truth
We need more fighters, more youth.

The promises from West 
Turn out to be a blasphemy:
The rich mired 
In such maggoty apathy

Over the mountains,
Black c...

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You can interrogate roses all you like But do not lie. The rain waters you too. In this human garden it is you who is the flower. Roses at the graveside: Blood red petals grown from the ground An abyss of petals? Fervent and well paid scholars Argue, when babies cry, That's one in eye for scholars Loyal and intelligent dogs smell a vacancy Nightly and the less than gentle cat...

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Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh 

Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake


Thank you for being who you are.
A gift from the multitude of stars
Blessed with both heart and soul:
You shall not grow old.

Who truly knows all the dark crevices of a person?
Not I.
Love is too often hoarded, accumulated, squirreled away:
Like money, jewels, power, pre...

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There’s an end to everything::
Birds in the trees, lovers, music,
Plangent and deep,
Tempests and the flaring in the mind of man
Foreshadowing that terrible realisation
That you too have followed this same cliff path
Of unadorned humanity
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness
Of the day. When mother, father, child, friend
Have swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or despair. Or ...

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Moments of the past do not last,
kicked into the long grass,:
a warm early-summer’s day
in the twentieth century
gold petals of Sylvi's verse.

Days of stormy-autumn
come with flurries of snow
melted by my rich body heat.
In the frozen snow
a frozen child
poor with thin clothes.
She will not grow old.. 

Tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
just un...

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It's hard to live without you, brother. Between the worlds of death and life this fool hangs around. Misunderstanding is in my soul smouldering, a fire with damp leaves. My heart's fierce wounds given balm even cured by the knowing of you. Banished to this foreign land, you are - wandering through death. Aye, you were our mother's favourite son, she knew your time would co...

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His garden was slightly uneven, slightly tiered,
From early February’s putting on of scattered beauty –
Snowdrops, daffs and crocuses –
A cascade of shade and colour.

His garden bloomed throughout the growing year.
So-many forget-me-nots:
Wild primrose and aubrietia
Then larkspur, delphinium and the beautiful bluebells
Carnations, cornflower and iris

Tier after tier cultivate...

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

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

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You both died, my son, my brother,
And I was broken for many, many years.
I can no longer hide this from myself,
Behind this screen of anonymity:
I have stood in empty spaces,
Walked along the winter beach
Stripped of everything except wind and sand and sea.
And me, I have looked into the summer sky for your blue-blue eye;
And all, all I see, repeatedly, are grey-clouds a-skimming blank lo...

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We can no longer gather
the brightest of England's strands together
Too many were lost in wars
We cannot compensate these young men,
Dead before their time,
Their genes lost
Their bravery and stoicism  no longer passed down
To further generations.
We, descendants of the cowards and the conchies and the lucky, 
Slink again into ordinary life
Stripped of all the dead might have of...

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“But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost...' ― Charles Dickens, 'Hard Times'  Dream of me iron masters, sheet metal workers, the black country, where everlasting everything was sooty-black streets, faces, factories, homes black to the marrow black to the bone Fact, fact, fact. The sky is moody, glowering, like the disease- s...

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  George Santayana 

No. I don't believe that entitlement.-
when somebody liberal and polite,
pinches the good school place
from your child. You must curse them.

Right?

When somebody, with more money,
Acquires the house you'd love.
Give them a shove in the back
Spit in their eye, then let them creep by.

But kee...

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Endurance is a flower

A bulb in winter’s depth

A rare-repeated wonder:

A sin we must forget.

 

In this-world-of-my-creation

In this world-of-make-believe:

Cancer, the death of children,

Are falling autumn leaves.

 

I see a road before me,

A  road I walk in vain,

A road through Trawden, Lancashire

A road that has no name.

.

All roads lead to heaven

An...

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No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne

A brother and a son on the edge of a cliff
Walking and talking, they look out to sea
Me? I shout and I shout, but they don’t hear me.
They’re fading, they’re falling, off the cliff side
The sky is as huge, and the sea is as wide
As the moving of moon, as the rising of tide.
This Calvary moment,...

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

 

Hedd Wyn the shepherd poet who wrote in Welsh...

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“The question shouldn't be "Why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?' The real question is "Why aren't all the Christians here?”
― Joel C. Rosenberg, 'The Auschwitz Escape'.

 

The aim of the blues,
the only aim of the blues,
is not to pass you by~
but rather to aid you to scrape by,
to occasionally get high,
and always to know
On the road from...

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Morning maniac music
shakes me awake 
you, regular guys,
who once brought hope
now mired in hate.

Over the mountain,
clouds scud 
blood on the floor
fades away.

Iron in the soul,
blood over water
all those refugees 
avoiding slaughter,
as we oughter.

Waiting for sanctuary
no sanctuary offered
patriots will take care
of the country’s coffers.

Christendom fallen,
collapsed...

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It was the model spitfire in your front room window
That separated you from that tribe,
We call ‘the old’.

I saw you sometimes at the shops, your movements slow, deliberate,
Arthritic.
You carried a basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind.
And you were always looking behind you. I thought it was the traffic
You feared, but now I know it was the Messerschmidt ME 262 that still had y...

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Slush on the road, boring and cold The taxi's meter is running And I have no money, Hell's bells so tiresome To be poor like Raskolnikov Hero of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Novel of desperation Crime & Punishment . Boring and sad I come back To sweet torments, I forgot myself by the fireplace, I drop off to sleep wildly, without looking. Sounds like a clock The circle of life, ...

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It is the year's midnight, the old gods have gone to ground,
Their acolytes burnt, stretched upon the rack, hung, drowned...
For century after century the druid - the knowing of the oak -
Was driven out of place, trapped and yoked into subservience
Come! walk with me in the freezing mist of a November night -
Don't be squeamish, don't take fright -
See this land under the moon's mil...

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Stare at the red candle, remember the smell of patchouli oil
With Red Leb from all those years ago. Remember~
On Saturday 4th July,1846 the  London Daily News
Extolled the virtues of this peculiar Indian oil in preventing moths.
Nothing to do with hippies except famished sloths.
India, Afghanistan olfactory-based imagined communities from the past 
Have a grip that wont last. Ad age...

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“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

AS I approach death
I become more careless
Of myself. Instead of looking
Within I look out and see
The unalloyed beauty
Of all the natural world
& of the human world around me.
I admire the majesty of all the ex-cons
Beggars, thieves, all those who just
About get by and spit in the eye
Of the dark-hearted...

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burning a hole in my head
flame into words not said
glancie all around
frown at aa faint dismal distant sound
like a muffled bell
on the road to hell
the past lasts
in accents unused
in dead languages
of the dead sea
in the broken books
and the broken heads
in all the things we left unsaid
fleeing from ourselves
escaping goblins, fairies, elves
landing in the land
of unkno...

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Poetry’s a sanctuary
A refuge of the mind
Words flow so easily
Sorted into line.

The flotsam and the jetsam
Of all these live-long days
Do not hold a candle to
Dear old purple haze.

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

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The Scientific Enlightenment spead in the west at no small cost
Imprisionment, blasphemy, censorship, internment, death
Yet the magnificent Secular, Spiritual Sceptical, Scientific Spirit Survived
and slowly tamed...

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No foot marks in the sand

To mark my passage.

No disturbance in the air.

I cry and grieve and cherish

My face immobile, as I stare

Out at stormy autumn.

O! living through November

Demands a certain flair. 

Foggy bafflements afflict me, everywhere,

Pea-soupers some might say,

As I gaze beyond the moon

I swoon into another dismal November day.

 

https://youtu.b...

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In every mouthful of food
In every look of love
In every chiding and every making up:
This sometimes bay of tranquillity,
This harbour to which we hope to return,
This shelter from the storms and squalls of life,
This goddess of the trailing moon,
Sails with us
as we traverse the wild seas of experience.

The ultimate nature of the fully enlightened mind
is a union of pure love and empt...

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“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

[The Autumnal]”
― John Donne,

The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees have no leaves
outside is cold
the wind is cruel.

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

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

It is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morn...

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