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Biography

Walker, writer and romantic nature lover, ex-miner, now earning a bare living as an online poetry analyst. Welcomes large wild flowers, scrawny foxes and shield bugs in particular but also intrigued by the abstract symmetry on a small tortoiseshell's wings, the interior shadowscapes of burdock, mice that can be tickled in early spring and the courtship displays of the buzzard. Little owls are cool. A pair of linnets on a fence wire first sun just taking in air and light. Thick Oregon snows with cougar tracks. All creatures might be dreaming to some degree. I like many forms of poetry, love certain poems - The Man on the Dump for example by Wallace Stevens, Howl I by Ginsberg, Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen ...on and on, from Walt Whitman to John Ashbery, WCW to Thom Gunn, Plath to Marianne Moore, Heaney and Larkin. So much to squeeze out of these lines, absorb, swim in, dive in, eat and frolic with. I am learning

Three Sonnets

The distance each day, in all these things — limit your love for it, that's the crux; ration each kiss for this paradox, believing the remotest is king. That far and away most intimate feeling distance evokes. The lost friend, Orion's belt, the latest planet — drooling light years, orbit without end. The lane tapering, we're in situ, some far-off gorse-rich ridge our free goal, grass like pelts wind ruffled, cloud shadow driven; welcome to the slow reveal. Feelings each journey identifies return to the heart like fresh goodbyes. Living on crumbs of sleep, scraps of dreams, thinking of capitalism's epitaph, Irish gyres, the midnight market's mayhem, religion, death, sex and the Wife of Bath. Church bells sound empty, yet time is pregnant, carrying the mother of all unthinkables. So, people, are you able, like red ants exposed, who magic away their precious eggs? Where else but on a builder's ladder serenading at her window, locked out, expendable, a dubious troubadour, do I look for solace, dispel foul doubt? Each morsel the mob scoffs, the future truth a ball of worms. I sing for all I'm worth. A hundred days of walking ancient lanes, tracks, paths, but uncertain mileage. The value of grief, disbelief and awe also unknown. Black Hill's moorland a faint profile, the slow shift of low, grey mist, landscape's colour lost momentarily. Vapoury white drifts like steam or smoke, clears the far wood having crossed growing rye, down to the sodden dale, lifts then disperses. The story emerges again, like patterns fine drizzle displays in droplets on fading umbellifers. Solitude wandering in search of praise and wonders as it picks up the new trail, the language irrational, the mindset fragile.

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