Y

A slight mist in an autumnal sway,
 celtic, crossed and re-crossed, 
we’re on our way
 

a watery calvary 
stares back at me
delving into this thick unblemished air.
We dead coagulate at Golgotha
in Palestine, where two thousand years
later the IDF plant horrors in their minds

from which they cannot escape
despite the divine interventions
of the very best Jewish psychatrists — 
...

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That cherry blossom day,
thunder in the air,
unmiraculously, everywhere:
a stutter in the Gaia,
a low rumble, a terrible tremor,
an unholy roar begins to build and build
and sucks out the very air
total devastation
on that final day
when this very earth was undone
the land began to shiver and shake
uncontrollably, delirium tremens
e...

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Brought up to stretch scarce resources:
food, love, time, hand-me-downs,
he only learnt he was poor after passing an exam
allowing him to attend a school 
which was dug deep in rich kids’ territory;
his mum wondered how she would manage the money,
his dad laughed at him.

The sleeves of his school blazer shot up to his elbows,
while the rich kids had their permanently pristine cu...

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I wish I'd  known from the very start
which mountain the sun came from,
eyes can be deceiving in rain,
fountains, rain-corralled, tempt me into sleeping on your neck to serve a servitude of roses.
in which green bay the rolling sea spies on me, seawater-deep, but  not at all clear,
lagoons on tropical Islands are lost on me.
kind of like fantasy.

I wish you and I knew from t...

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These bloody dead
That debt we owe,
Abide with me,
Never let me go.

That mocking voice,
These clever folk,
Display their wit
In the cutting joke.

That tree that grew
Those shady nooks
This dappled sunlight
These gilded brooks.

For men may come to worse than dust
When love of self is breach of trust:
A moment’s respite means more to me
Than reams and rea...

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pale waves of mist
as I kiss & bless you
we slip along these walkways in the sky
rain seeps through tears
in my heart, so scared am I,
here, alone with you;
streetlights shine,
lab rats scurry into mind,
straight into these concrete estates
of the heart
screeching seagulls shit freely
through black holes in the fabric
time torn, broken-backed,

from Dublin up to Sandy Row,
dead ...

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The hill was steep leading upto the memorial
at 5 am iI was a time of wonder, stepping up
the hill I floated. I rarely stopped to think in
those long-gone dog days of graduation
born between Belsen & Napalm
I rarely thought of others, had no perspective,
'naturally’ I thought of my friends as permanent,
nothing is, of course, and one day one of the best
would set me up for a theft...

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https://flashbak.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-biba-361329/

Shadows behind the sun echoes, echoes within words,
Meanings stuck in transit, Music of the Byrds.
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache.
Years pass, like phantoms, passions of the heart,
Silence breeds silence, the Pink Faeries played their part.
Forget what you remember, giv...

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flow, fly fluent speakers
of the air
your trills & songs
magnify
the every where;

gentle breezes
pass me by, listen,
something will remain
of you

on me, in me, the atoms
which compose everything;
don’t let the putrescent
become the putrid,
remain remotely

visceral; vary yourself
in gentle zephyrs
& in April showers
when you can spread your wings
& sing!

https:...

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A savant, a wise woman, in the greenwood, hidden,
Out of the way, of all those bastards of the church.
Her curses removed revenge from the material sphere
Laid out the alchemical elements to cancel wealth and fear.

We knew the wisdom of the witch, and so did those
Dressed in the finest of clothes. They tried to burn
Her, reckoning that the church knew more than
Our old religion o...

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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,
Dragged across a sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold,
Lost in that stinking slave ship’s hold.

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

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Odd, said old snail,
Wherever I’m led,
I’m starting to wail,
A long time dead.

https://youtu.be/3VEpQo2w2tw?si=ELkKkaaba7IWHjIn

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“Nothing that you have not given away will ever really be yours.”   — C.S. Lewis,

a psychic distillation
in the centre 
of this stinking nation denies
the poor’s unfocused struggle
for mere existence
this patient is bound up
in a charlie darwin struggle
in A&E: at 2am, 200 bpm, 219/130
no sweat, he thinks,
the drugs’ll kick in
eventually;
& as the mist lifts,
my heart skips a beat
...

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When I look at Woody
And Woody turns,
And Woody looks at me
I feel free.

This dog with no attachments,
No possessions, all alone,
So unlike the creepy human with
the sound of the fmobile phone

This mid-March day has passed quietly
Only two walks.
God only two feckin walks!
I sniffed a bit, followed tracks,
shat
gave the driver a reminder
“Let me off. Let Me Go.”

I remember...

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

But now, only the vestiges remain:
So, conduct a forensic examination,
Then scatter the remains:
See the fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail
He's condemned at the root.

A roof for the children,
over a precipice-by-the-way,
his p...

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— “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes — just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lurking around corners — on groggy-doggy, laudanum
gas lit nights, whispering death to this age of the machine,
he has...

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What we love lives:
plastic does not live,
nor does metal commit 
plastic terrorism,
metal does not live.

Y’know skin lives
eyes live,
thoughts live
music lives,
living 
teaches us to live
more fully.

Quantum mechanics has a half-life
Iike dark stars; 
I love the atoms our bodies are composed of;
black holes live
and challenge our stupid linear view
of time and space

You ca...

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Grab a job lot of high definition TVs
great pictures for you, great movies for me,
so many facilities here for our jiffy-jolly fun.
pity the hoi-polloi, the patois-speaking scum.

Four vibrant ghosts came singing here today
rounded up by cops, they sought to blow their blues away,
said amen to the cops' flat soft  purr-burr-drawl
telling black kids ‘you ain’t wanted round here, not wan...

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         Jeremy McKnight on Unsplash

Smiling through tears, a shape-shifting delight,
she mumbles her prayers, 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 a deep periwinkle blue,
musicians litter their scores with minor chords
dedicated to her too: in crying songs,
distant laments and au...

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in the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive thoughts, songs & stories,
coil and twist into words, selfish and cruel,
in the wise fool’s daily darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never incomplete;
curdled thoughts, merge and entwine,
in my restless mind, where shadows define a merry nothing;
amidst this chaos, a spasmodic light gleams,
a harvest moon, a friendly old lu...

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Living life alone
requires a sincerity of tone
a daunting prospect,
with no perks, it's a matter of destiny,
no opinions or preferences required
just sitting for hours by open fires
a  blissful state of solitude
with many blemishes
sincerity can be overwhelming,
bouncing words around my head,
listening closely to them instead
you're a long-time dead;
rely on your own judgment,
tim...

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— “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

― D.H. Lawrence,

Such a precise blooming of spring flowers,
sitting and thinking for hours and hours.
My great aunt owned land, married a German POW,
did what she had to do on Pickmere lake
and the old pear trees we robbed, all those cats,
I ...

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scintillating flowers  closely cut
in hollow reeds,
a talent on show, a distant glow:
of green gold flickers on an animal wildness
of whiteness, as a prelude to virginity
uilleann pipes play softly
whosh! above a flight of swans,
naiads and nymphs cower
at this tawny hour, 
at a hymnal of infected poetry, a  primal fever
cradled in evocative text,
squeezing words into an enchanting ...

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I often don't know what to say next
when folk are talking of babies or sex
Isn't life complex at the sea-side?

Phattic communion, a rambling drone,
dad on his deck chair, thinks it's a throne, 
phalllic communion, a roundhead drone,
alone on the beach.

Family out of reach
for fortunate fumbles, a wind-swept beach,
sand in her smalls, she's just out of reach,
Aint life a bitc...

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“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda

In realms of mythic, deep-stoned lore,
excavated memories pass us by, once more,
flimsy whispers graze the mind,
from depths of memory, Ah! treasure-find.

Like shadows of rare-forgotten time,
the dead are kept alive in rhyme,
a daily battle is waged within the blood
forensics of the soul, Noah before the flood.

Visc...

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Airy valedictions cannot span this bridge in time
what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is very definitely mine.
we both can hear the quiet roar of our own new found land
as time drifts to a stop and as we focus near and far
we no longer stand amazed at the hollow rancour of public life
and have no more time for the mere indulgences of strife.
we look too much upon these empty places, the sands
...

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https://youtu.be/0P5jV4lHHR0

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Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun."
- Sylvia Plath -From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954

Forget me not blue
blue as an Alaskan blueberry
that blue I was.

Endurance is a flower
a bulb in winter’s depth
a rare-repeated wonder:
a sin w...

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awe struck by the blooming of buds,
a poem born in a far-off land,
of rolling death and unghosted space,
the mind’s asylum, a boundless place;
fulsome clouds of dreams untold,
sunshine weaves its threads of gold,
daydreams dance in twilight’s gleam,
eclipsing reality’s dull esteem;
death squats — a bittersweet fate
demons blast —  at sanity’s gate
scattered moonbeams hesitate
merely hum...

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Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

she flies on high,
hoarding kites in the howling sky,
a dance of death in space’s grace,
ignoring imagination’s rolling embrace
she lingers in fulsome clouds and beams
of light that fuel the daydreams of our schemes;
dementia’s breath, a fleeting wraith,
slowly haunts impotent imagination’s faithless faith
wisps of poetry loom far and wide
mere ...

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Photo by Tatiana Colhoun on Unsplash

Sitting and drinking about how I feel
Realising, fully, stupidities are real;
Clichéd clap-trap envelopes the airwaves:
Subtlety denied, charisma crucified. 
Virtue-signalling flayed. 
Contradictions unrecognized. Yes!
Can I believe two mutually exclusive
Events occur at the same moment, 
Indifferent decades, indifferent continents?
Off course, ...

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Photo by Austin Gardner on Unsplash

Catholic priests crucified
on Good Friday in Mosul,
children blown to bits in Gaza

In Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens see
a piece of pink heaven on this bloodyearth.
built by the Mughals to celebrate God
in marbled, mosaic mosques:

Wats celebrate the Buddhists,
temples the Hindus,
the Sufi saints moved into the future
keeping their close hold ont...

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

A waterfall of notes, rising and falling,
Splashing into mind, heart, soul.
Music will never grow old.

Arpeggio series of broken notes rising, descending
Into and out of order. Plunging into minor keys, rising into waves of luminosity.

Notes that compose a chord played or sung in a rising or descending order,
To c...

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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 got so cold and stings like hell
and then the sky descends into the air
....and you’re not there.

The blackness is deep, deep and remains everywhere
and st...

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EULOGY

Inspired by "Portrait of  my Dead Brother" by Salvador Dali 

I remember the shyness locked in your sweet brown eyes
I remember how you'd touch my arm when you were too weak to speak
I remember your bravery and stoicism when in pain
I remember how you'd wink to me - meaning 'hello brother, about time!'

And though your illness took so much from you, you'd never complain
But oh! h...

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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Your vernacular usage privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity call’d.
Democracy. No aristocracies of thought allowed to .
Gather it to a greatness: like the ooze of oil. Toil. Toil.
Endless gold and land form the sinews of the coming war you say,
Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law, you sa...

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Tick-a-Tock-Tick
The sounds of the day
Clownishly fooling
But won’t go away -
There's a nightmare to follow
This minor delay.
Yes, it’s tick-a-tock-ticking
We’re all going away.
For the old witch is flying - 
to the edge of the moon 
and the war is beginning
So it’s boom, brother, boom!
Starlight is a-raging -
it's all over so soon -
but now it's recorded on bloody old Zoom....
So e...

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Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

I do not drink,
But I am living under this mountain
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day,
So, I drink anyway.

This charming man says:
Too much grandiosity
Dims the soul
Makes us old.

I hear the wise ones pleading, pleading when on fire,
So much screaming, as the flames they get higher:
Hebane, belladonna, mandrake, datura
All o...

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/pnJM_jC7j_4?si=c7BmF...

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Photo by Ignacio García on Unsplash

I think about your poetry everyday
Exculpaltory, vitriolic, only occasionally,
displaying a sort of empty cleverness,
rarely fulsome, written to impress a Medici, I guess,
Confessional in part, no better than it should be,
I learn from who exactly makes your grade 
and why, well, that’s a different story.

We all know money is involved
many coin...

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No matter how we reinvent this writing malarkey
or, how, precisely, we feel about its sig-nif-icance,
there is a wondering within our hearts,
a hiding between the folds of our soul,
so much more than a mirror
mumbling at us, incessantly,
“there’s a story to be told,”
but all we hear is:
‘fear fear, fear terror, fear anguish.’
Untold stories circle within us
as we try to live, secretly.
...

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In this mild mid-winter of splintered selves
Trees blend into silhouttes; and I see the elves
Whose shadows transformed perceptions
For milleniums into creation. And all the world of
Getting and spending grinds to a halt,
For this 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 th...

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Some decisions:
reasonable, rational,
wipe out
sentimentality, lingering romance.
Time sends me spiralling back
leads me right back to a field
in high summer
in Cheshire, England
the road’s far enough away
to grant us silence
provisional, yes
passing, of course,
still silent, we share a look
Chris stares at me, as if deciding
something momentous,
I glance away from this man
I’v...

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

Your wild androgyny
mirrored the mirror
of yourself

Skimming off the water
of childhood,
like a dog shaking off rain

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

Your songs were the water
I needed
your terse verse
spread underground
watering imaginations
music like a rainbow.

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