Flat sandy beaches of the Viking coast
this is, our day of atonement:
her intense feel for hot air
fat bodies of the non-working class.
a tremor of the blood stretches out to kiss the sun
the touch of dawn emerges into sunburnt skin again
...

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 one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

An echo of the half-known
blowing in the wind
a time returned to me,
rambling, aimlessly
spouting a something from youth,
from the fields of barley,
from the wasting game
until the time came again
until the light froze again
and I looked down from a tree
a bitter-seet symphony
as I might be, fifty years hence,
still free beneath this bridge...

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Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.- William Blake, 'The garden of Love' 

Smiling with tears, a shape-shifting delight,
 she mumbles her prayers, she turns out the light.
 Her dreams are protected, by what she believes,
 with the rising at dawn, and the turning of leaves.
 Artists paint her aura in deepest periwinkle blue,
 mu...

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the soft airs of centuries of youth

On this day of flowers, the animals follow
the usual path of the sun
ripples coagulate like blood:
all manner of things mirror our big brother sun
on this shining Ἀρκαδία of August 1941.

Sweet airs fill the breezes,
forgotten summer scents,
O! the billowing of intent
reed and oak and beech
this beautiful canopy of the living green
shimmering i...

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Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath

 

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

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

 Now rave music blasts me from her room
 too soon she’ll be...

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Nobody came back alive from a gas chamber.

 

 The unwritten predominates, 
 times of wonder gone,
 we hold on —just, the wise women drugged.
 Intelligence whipped, into submission.
 forensic psychology reveals traces
 of long-forgotten haunted faces;
 which, much like Munch’s lurid, silent scream,
 degenerate into nightmaredream.
 or, so it seems, to me.

 Meanwhile, in populat...

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“Religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo.” Salman Rushie

 The Scientific Enlightenment spread in the west at no small cost
 imprisonment, blasphemy, censorship, internment, death.
 Yet the magnificent secular, spiritual sceptical, scientific spirit survived
  thrived and slo...

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“I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.”
― Black Elk, 

Don’t let the fat white ...

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A moment fled in panic scattered my tears leaping to the defence of all our past mistakes - befuddled imaginings of the texture of flesh, the value of art. Why am I the only one left to speculate, left to wonder why nothing lingers long enough for me to catch up with the quantum remoteness of empty space? Withered upon the plains of delusion; a tune comes sprightly and c...

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When sadnesses besiege you,
at the dying of the light,
and starlight illuminates
the end of days,
then star-crossed lovers
will quietly go away.

We sigh silently, out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes, light,
and find, momentarily,
mankind loses its disguise
out of sight is not...

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“Oh Ireland my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!” James Joyce

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

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There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy. Dante Alighieri,

/Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, USA.

 You both died on me, my son, my brother,
 & 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 ...

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All my hurts my garden spade can heal. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photo by Naoki Suzuki on Unsplash

 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 grew.

 His garden bloomed throughout the growing year
 so-many forget-me-nots:
 wild primrose and aubrietia
 then lark...

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“If a thing loves, it is infinite.” — William Blake

Angels alight, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,
behind her eyes, a guardian angel sighs.
The whisperer lies behind the song,
all misfortune in thought is exorcised:
close harmonies, fugues coalesce
when nothing’s wrong with her.
A song in a minor key, a longing to be whole and free,
to roll away the stone from her and me.

On th...

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“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

 

Moments of the past do not last
kicked into the long grass
of a warm, early-summer’s day
when gold petals
gleam
for God’s sake!

Stormy-autumn prefigures
flurries of snow
eaten up by the body heat;
silky snow frosting all over
tumbling-heaps of re...

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“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to” ― Dorothy Parker.

Photo by doorkeepers on Unsplash

 I live a November life
 where I run like a train
 deeper and deeper
 through the tunnels,
 over the wind-swept bridges,
 through the sedentary, childless
 villages of the old.

 I am now
 in the land of mine enemies
 where hostile witnesses a...

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“Beauty awakens the soul to act.” 

 ― Dante Alighieri

Photo by Folco Masi on Unsplash

Vestiges remain of what-once-was:
roses as crimson as lips,
minutes that slip by,
in the closing of an eye

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“The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all.” Lord Byron.

 

https://youtu.be/0c1NJPCN6nA?si=-LtvNzut_bj3Mzfo

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“`He was courteous but very silent. He was good with children. His eyesight may have been impaired, but he had an ear open to the world.” This is how Alex Leon recalls James Joyce, who, between 1928 and 1939 was an almost daily visitor to his family’s flat on the rue Casimir-Perier in Paris. Joyce came to consult with Alex’s father, Paul Leon…” ‘The Irish Times’, Thu, Oct 29, 1998

 

...

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

 

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

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

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

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

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me mam

 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...

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Monsters exist, much worse are those who just do as they’re told

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 peop...

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 although my eyes were open/ they might have just as well’ve been closed

Photo by aless Con on Unsplash

Fragile, the feeling that brought me down here,
to a coast of wind and sand and trees and fear
the lines we draw to separate present and past
cannot be trusted, crumble into dust, do not last
I fear.

Head slumped, meandering along this wicked way,
a stream of consciousness poin...

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The woman is perfected / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment” (Plath, “Edge”)

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

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

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

I track her down the by-wa...

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I’ll never grow so old again

Photo by Eric Tompkins on Unsplash

I went there by gun-metal gunboat
So that I could fight my way out if necessary
I remembered the past does not last
this seaside was loud and cheery. 
People jostling their way to the next big thing.
A big thing denoting some activity
that had to be paid for in advance.
To amplify: the sky was blue and so were you.
I...

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“Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac” 
 ― Timothy Leary

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

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

https://youtu.be/cJunCsrhJjg?si=ghhxTc3ehuOyAAKI

 

 

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Captain Keith Douglas 1920-1944

In Calvados you have your cross
And though we won, you most 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 certainly knew how to kill
You did so with no draperies over your eyes.
Or soul. No deceptions, no...

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I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home. Sylvia Plath

Home only lasts a few short years,
houses pass on route to more, different
human families. After a time,
we have nowhere to haunt,
except, the ever-present past.

Now, I have nowhere to return to after a long
...

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We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are — Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet

 An old olive oil press rusting 
 at the bottom of a sandy garden
 in his occupied territory.
 A man lying prostrate,
 face down, on the sandy soil.

Not dead but murmuring
about a weight, a burden, something
lifted.
I could not hear clearly,
what with all the muffled explosions
 ...

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

where seabirds land
everyday, this sheer cliff path
crumbles, just  a little more.
I listen to  these screeched warnings of the gulls,
echoing through this thin air.
Seeing you here shimmering,
...

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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 woul...

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WHO, when I scream, hears me?
Maybe an angel?  Or, a man of firm regulation?
That’s the chance you take with screaming.
Could I put myself in the shoes of s/he
who hears my scream at close quarters?

I fear not. It would take a leap of the heart
beyond my means. Nobody comes to mind.
Nobody suddenly comes into my heart:
I pass into this stranger existence.

In this ancient hous...

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 In spite and in fury
 do men reveal themselves
 in this tattered universe of things;
 see, as the wren falls dead
 from its frozen bough

 see, a gypsy soul makes mock
 of all the listless infirmities
 of modernity,
 sacrifices itself on slippery altar
 of family;

 the gypsy soul dies only the once
 via no coward’s turnpike to (im)mortality
 instead expect a death in flames,
 with...

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