POLICING THE LANGUAGE
— “This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.” Euripides, The Phoenician Women
Do not ask what I mean,
let’s just assume I mean….something
there’s a putative purpose to my words
rhyming words with the absurd.
You don’t like the implications?
So, go, go to the palace of protection
where those who have no sense, nor innocence,
always claim to know what is verboten, offensive,...
Thursday 5th December 2024 9:37 pm
To the Ghost-dancers of the Sioux
On the day after Christmas in 1862, 38 Sioux warriors were hanged under order of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime was to fight for their own land. .
Don’t let the fat white males into your land
they have no concept of stewardship
they think they own the very air
watch them massacre the holy bison:
the white buffalo are all dead
their bodies rot under the holy sun.
These bast...
Monday 2nd December 2024 7:35 pm
SUICIDE of the SENSES
They try to take the sting out of death:
a grassy meadow, secluded plot, trees
advertising consumers' funereal needs,
but not now. Now, we need a New Orleans
jazz band blasting out the fact that life is short
and can be glorious, but not for him. No, not for him:
too many desertions, too many lapses in care,
too often nobody there to pick up the pieces,
nothing to begin again, It ...
Friday 29th November 2024 4:31 pm
Dappled sunlight
Light & shadow play
with dappled sunlight
the very air sparkles
on this live-long day.
I listen to rodents scurry,
the other animals at home
in the undergrowth;
the sea & tomorrow
are absent without leave,
birdsong emanates
from this deep silence,
no machinery, no boys’ toys,
no human presence at all
except me, half way up
a tree, fully-leafed,
it is so amply itself, it stands
...
Tuesday 26th November 2024 7:37 pm
The meaning of words
Just clamber on the tight-rope of yearning & despair,
Don’t concern yourself about the drop,
For you will not be there.
Meanings stacked in order: words in line, I think,
Freed the woman from the cage
Of the stinkin’ ‘sink.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it so,
people will eventually believe it,” old Doktor Goebbels he say so,
just believe it, never fake it...
Monday 25th November 2024 10:28 pm
EVEN THE OLIVES WERE BLEEDING
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,
thall mass on far-horizons threateningly.
large drops of rain freeze into ice,
Angels lie about their whereabouts
clerics, ...
Thursday 21st November 2024 10:18 pm
Early winter's day
Through the mist and fog
of early morning
I see car headlights crawl
into view
Everything looks so sad today
the whole world’s a cemetery
The sun sheds a sad stream
of light
intermittently
I’m out with my friend, a dog,
name of Woody,
we no longer hear church bells
in England, it is verboten.
Nothing is familiar anymore:
no wilderness, no heart ache,
no winter fires stripped o...
Wednesday 20th November 2024 6:44 pm
MEG
dedicated to the memory of my friend Chris and, equally, to the memory of his friend, Meg
Photo by Chris Anderson on Unsplash
A flick of her tail
showed more uncluttered love
than a lifetime’s worth of empty ‘Hellos’.
As Aeschylus implied so-long ago
there is no type or condition
of suffering or pain
which is not made worse
by re-calling the glory days:
times languorous,
meande...
Tuesday 19th November 2024 8:11 pm
HEART FOOD: JUDEE SILL
(This poem is dedicated to the beautifully lyrical music of rapture and redemption which this young Californian 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 Agnes Eve pursuing
The remnan...
Monday 18th November 2024 5:40 pm
Diffuse Rainbow
There is a diffuse rainbow in my mind
I wish that I could read it line by line
Ineluctable images go flying by
Consoling dreams splattered across
the sky: I will not die today,
I'd rather watch migrating birds
Fly high, higher, in the night sky
Such natural images shepherd me
Into sleep where dreams can multiply
I listen to my sigh as diffuse rainbow
Words come to comfort me, I recal...
Monday 11th November 2024 7:02 pm
ALONG THE UNHALLOWED WAY
This man pushes this other man in a wheelchair
down a dreary inner-city road, they’re talking,
always talking, talking of nothing, talking of everything,
what it takes and never gives back. The load.
With wheels of fire and halos running all amuck
these two desperados meander along past
the pound shops and the bookies and the booze 24/7ers
they know all these places well. Too well.
Friday 8th November 2024 11:37 am
BLANK SLATE
Tabula Rasa: blank slate
will 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,
No-one to sling you lower or higher
No future, no fire
No prescience required
No past, no regret
Nothing for sale and nowhere to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-need to speak and no-one to li...
Wednesday 6th November 2024 2:22 pm
Remembrance blues
Riding a memory wave deep into the past
knowing so little,wishing that people would last;
unsubscribed from all doctrines of peculiar self,
I fight the mood swings, welcome the dark daze
of these November days.
I freeze at the mention of a murder in the park.
Loving the addicts who plague us without hope,
forgetting our beginnings, that this life’s on a slope
that takes us to nowh...
Monday 4th November 2024 8:26 pm
The state of the nation
The times of wonder have gone
The wise women drugged
Into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten faces
Which, 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
340 corpses could be bu...
Sunday 3rd November 2024 5:38 pm
FRENCH KISSING
Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash
One fine evening when I was sixteen
stuck in some rowdy pub with dazzling chandeliers,
we walked out, carelessly, promenaded by the river.
we move under beech trees, a passing shower,
everything smells so good, so fragrant,
when you are young, the air is so sweet.
you close your eyelids and...
Saturday 2nd November 2024 8:23 pm
....early onset
the blue is missing from the sky today
the trees have no leaves
outside it is very 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
with a skipping rope.
it is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morning,
that is why I stretch and yawn.
that lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
'Wh...
Sunday 27th October 2024 5:01 pm
SUMMER TIME
This poem was witten by my best friend, Chris Proudfoot, who I had the pleasure of knowing from 1962 (when we began grammar school together) until Chris's suicide in 2022.
a hot, still July afternoon,
silence unbroken
through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass,
heavy with anticipation of something not quite def...
Sunday 27th October 2024 4:32 pm
WOODY
He owns nothing but he gives us gifts
He cannot speak but he says it all
He doesn’t live long but he loves life
He doesn’t think but he knows it all.
https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q?si=53q61GSMTOyJeTfm
Saturday 26th October 2024 7:12 pm
NOTHING MORE
a sliver of a moon highlighting
a stone house by a river
full of young people, rushing
hither and thither, a cascade
of sound, untramelled energy,
a highlight of laughter, a blaze of eyes,
no disguise
in so many intelligent discriminations:
of face, of education, of class, of race
we knew it couldn’t last:
some retreated for forty years or more
but I always knew I’d return
in ...
Monday 21st October 2024 8:29 pm
Quasimodo and Esmeralda
The priestly fathers love to laugh at Quasimodo
A dirty-broken gypsy boy, who climbed like a monkey.
Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, our joys & desires.*
Priests, bejewelled with gold crucifix, lusted after young Esmeralda
Her wild gypsy eyes flashed and she kicked and she tore and she screamed.
To save Esmeralda, magically, Quasimodo lift...
Sunday 20th October 2024 8:17 pm
For when I am weak, then am I strong
Sometimes words tumble from my mouth like grain,
At some other times, words are pulled like teeth.
On a cold grey December day,
I wept because of a curse I carry,
The curse of a glint of light from Elysium,
Or Zion or from heaven-knows-where.
...
Saturday 19th October 2024 7:09 pm
HOLY BROKENNESS
Missing the wildness of my younger self
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, for the muse to catch up with me,
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode
So that I catch myself thinking this
Is all an act to compensate for the time
Brian climbed that tree before disappearing
To Japan, for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true.
A cherry blossom flash of inspiration
To can...
Thursday 17th October 2024 12:38 pm
NO MORE TUGGING THE FORELOCK
Liberal elites don’t have a clue about the white working class.” The Washington Post
White privilige
what a joke
we occupy space
vicariously
some days we hang on
by our finger tips
Scared to look down
or up or to the side
we hide from ourselves
Some days we hover
on a magic carpet
of hope
that things will finally get better.
That our Rita will be offered a council flat
...
Sunday 13th October 2024 6:18 pm
SEEING THINGS
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.
In his mind's eye he sees the tender white crosses, -row-on-row,
glow deathly white on a whirlwind night of swirling snow,
he hears the creaking branches, catches a whiff from below,
of lying Lady Fortune a-floating on the breeze,
...
Saturday 12th October 2024 7:49 pm
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice *
Ye gods! circumstances compel me speak
Ye gods! using children as target practice;
From the first of the world
Down to our own time
Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the innocent dead.
For soldiers silenced, banned,
expelled, made as if dead.
Life continues for some but the crops in Galilee
Are no longer joyous.
goats and sheep forgot, humans will not
Some...
Thursday 10th October 2024 8:06 pm
SOMETHING FOUND
The ease and simple grace
Of this man who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied.
His echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still sings in my heart
We’re never alone,
Never apart.
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
These speakers of a hidden art,
sing and recreate
moments that survive
when we were all alive.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And it’s...
Wednesday 9th October 2024 2:17 pm
A walk through the woods
The land was sodden; even during the short breaks in the rain, drips cascaded from the trees, driven down by the briefest of breezes. The sky was bruised black and blue. On this deep set All Hallows Eve in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-seven Miss Abigail Prince hurried through the woods, lifting her skirts to avoid the worst of the mud, she’d finished her work in the big hou...
Tuesday 8th October 2024 4:16 pm
Tumble in the wind
moon sad, as only the moon can be,
cast silver shadows, a spectral plea,
a part of my tapestry of daily grind,
dreams weave deep in mind:
gather close, come, intertwine,
caught in glimpses, unaligned.
eyes fix firm on a stranger’s gaze,
a silent dance in an intricate maze;
lips take shape, sound mute, spirit sings,
heart takes root.
in glowing fires in daring eyes,
her hair cascad...
Saturday 5th October 2024 9:56 pm
Sacred & Profane
Calculus creepy croaks a loaf,
gamble with diligence, excuse with repose
sunday afternoon-summer in jeans, bobby dylan, the kinks
and my pal bought-sold this three-wheeler,
b...
Thursday 3rd October 2024 9:34 pm
Seppuku*
A river runs through me -
the river of life -
with its twists and its turns,
its banks out of sight.
(early morning mist
scatters dregs of the night -
O! the unbidden tears!)
Flotsam and jetsam
of years pass me by
i swirl in a whirlpool
float in the sky.
(the azure blue heat-haze sky
of childhood all gone by)
Down in the depths,
murky and drear,
i listen to my heartbeats
ta...
Tuesday 1st October 2024 6:43 pm
The wilderness of the human heart
makes us see that time is borrowed
that what we perceive
is less than half intended;
wild obscurity blocks our view,
until the curtain’s rent in two
and too many seconds become too few.
memories coagulate like blood,
simmer in t...
Sunday 29th September 2024 6:19 pm
The morning of the day
First light: a new beginning
rising at the crack of dawn
feel the air against my skin
walk, with the aid of a stick,
listen to the dawn chorus.
Thrillingly, it’s already late September
over a year since the funerals started
on St Patrick’s Day,
when madness brushed with death.
Now, I’m thinking that when I return
home with Charlie I’ll read
words I can never forget:
“The world i...
Thursday 26th September 2024 11:19 pm
The garden of earthly enchantment
You are my moment, as you read
your eyes are full of tact, unembarrassed, laughing,
my dream is just of continuing.
We cannot add up or divide words, as we can numbers,
yet, words are equally intractable
friends & family die in the blinking of an eye
you cannot eat your words.
Nor can we précis longing, hiraeth,
homesickness tinged with grief and sadness,
but we certainly can str...
Saturday 21st September 2024 9:00 pm
Dolorous days
In whispers soft, shadows creep,
Dolorous days, the depths of sleep,
Mythic tales of derring-do
Seize the day, no foreboding thrall,
For here am I, standing tall.
Carpe Diem is all we know
In fading light or flurried snow
If I can just hold on, hold on tight,
Will life's journey lend me light?
I dance where sunbeams gleam,
Sparkle like dust motes in my dream,
Bounce off the twi...
Friday 20th September 2024 7:29 pm
Burnham Beeches with Anna, 1985
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 a veined
porcelain
hand.
So, who am I to resist
this child's
every imperative?
https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q?si=crbOmLQHYdHZjsY1
Thursday 19th September 2024 7:53 pm
BEAUTIFUL SKELETON
The devils' in the detail,
these flashes in my head,
i'm always feelin' poorly
said the livin' to the dead;
the skull beneath the skin,
my friend, has fled.
His never-ending searching,
his suicide at dawn.
Who wins the faded glory
of the decency we mourn?
Who hears the call of morning,
jazz rhythms in the night,.
Berlin before the storm
troopers roll backwards
into this ver...
Tuesday 17th September 2024 9:24 pm
ELOQUENT GRAFFITI
a blank piece of paper,
blows in the wind,
skids over people
ducks under bridges
this heavenly graffiti;
passes a litmus test
of meaninglessness, yet:
illuminates manuscripts,
tracks lovers' letters
random epistolary acts,
despatches from the front
in black-lined envelopes,
disquisitions on semiotics
written enticingly
in small handwriting
fabulous confabulations
stutterin...
Monday 16th September 2024 8:02 pm
The resurrection of the dead
Suffering and desire
Twist unbidden tears
Clear outer me:
Pumping hearts, shaking hands,
Human life conducted in the dark:
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years.
The overwhelming craving for permanence
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
But, instead, let’s walk
To the tomb of Maimonides:
Oh! Why do the wicked prosper?
...
Saturday 14th September 2024 9:27 pm
Stormy autumn comes
[The Autumnal]
― John Donne,
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Moments of the past
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 silent tread
of the day of the dead.
A memory-lost, a memory-fo...
Friday 13th September 2024 6:27 pm
Анна Ахматова
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”
― Anna Akhmatova,
I want to smell the tender roses,
Before their petals droop and fall,
In that one garden, in St Petersburg,
The most beautiful city in holy Russia,
In the whole world this city stands out.
...
Friday 13th September 2024 5:00 pm
The sign of the cross
“He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.” James Joyce, ‘Dubliners.’
I make the sign of the cross, today,
the last Saturday in August 1999,
for Jack who d...
Wednesday 11th September 2024 12:45 pm
And Dante
Slow breath in
hold then breath out
pause for a wee while
then in that brevity
I kick sand
on Sandymount Strand.
Now, I am out and about
waiting while Daedalus fashions a cow,
so she could mate with the bull,
pregnant, she bore the Minotaur
fruitlessly.
Heavy clouds sweep in
off the Irish sea
to blow these dreams away.
It's 1943
and Ireland is neutral,
the Nazi am...
Monday 9th September 2024 6:42 pm
DELPHINIUM BLUES
DELPHINIUM BLUES
Blue like the sea
Like the sky
Like your eyes
Like me.
Muddy waters
Lead belly
Blues
Getcha every time
12 bar blues
That 'ol gone fishin'
line.
https://youtu.be/3VEpQo2w2tw?si=YKvp_4_OVZfyUB9S
Friday 6th September 2024 6:06 pm
A WASTE OF TIME
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.
Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stuttered out
"'Non Serviam! I will not serve!'”
And that is enough, and more than enough, for me
To condemn all the big words spluttered by politicians.
I will not serve that in which I no longer bel...
Wednesday 4th September 2024 6:46 pm
SATELLITE of LOVE
At the concert in the Apple Market,
When you were still David Jones,
Your south London twang,
Accompanied the many undulations
Of time.
Your wild androgyny
Mirrored the mirror
Of myself
David Bowie, name bought off the shelf,
Skimmed the water
Of childhood,
Like a dog shakes off rain,
You accelerated — changeling
You lit up, spot-lighted,
An iridescence of sound
Ziggy!
Yo...
Sunday 1st September 2024 4:25 pm
BRIEF LIVES
We take giant steps
When we let ourselves go:
Step into love
Step into eternity.
Nano steps will hardly do
Outside where full blown life
Blows me away from restrictions,
Predictions. Derelictions. Do not smile at those trapped
By circumstance, by failed romance.
Instead take a walk while spring flowers hibernate.
Too many of us stay inside, hide ourselves away,
We do not live the lo...
Saturday 31st August 2024 8:23 pm
GENERATION 27
Generation 27
Lorca’s blood wedding
or so the whisper is,
packed full of vaginas bleeding
into lemon-tree- soil,
a foil for the mere conjugations
of eternity.
The toil, toil, toil
tilling the soil, soil, soil
of life in wgat was Islamic Andalus.
Priests chant the rosary
like it was El Maleh Rachamim,
or the Mourner’s Kaddish
(which it probably was, if the priest
was a Co...
Tuesday 27th August 2024 10:43 pm
Christian forbearance
He nailed his voice
to the heart of a mast. Sailed the seven seas.
Learnt to speak up for himself.
Spent time in jail in South Africa
For defending his black friends
From the beatings of the Boer.
The winds took him hither and thither
In wartime, he never felt complacent. Rest assured.
Never self-indulgent. A convinced
and sentimental socialist he shared an in-pouring of grief at childr...
Sunday 25th August 2024 3:36 pm
The dark watches of the night
In my imaginary cottage in the hills
I am immune to the world’s ills,
Or so I like to think.
On evenings of freezing fog,
I throw another log on the fire
Watch closely as the flames reach higher and higher,
Take another sip of whiskey,
Pat the back of my young dog,
Who can feel the spirits in the breeze,
Pick my book up from the stone floor,
Read Mil...
Sunday 25th August 2024 2:17 pm
GHOST WRITING
Meanings stuck in transit, the music of the birds,
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache,
Years pass by like phantoms, the passions of the heart,
Silence breeding silence, see the faeries take their part,
Forget what you remember, give and never take.
Veil the mysteries of time, of place and everything
...
Friday 23rd August 2024 9:39 pm
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