“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” — Carl Sandburg, from The Atlantic, March 1923. 

Read and leave comments (0)

I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment — David Bowie

In the apple market
your South London twang
accompanies the many undulations
of time.

Your wild androgyny
mirrors the mirror
of yourself.
You help me 
skim off the water
of childhood,
like a shaking dog.

You lit up, spot-lighted,
an iridescence of sound
Ziggy!
Your songs were the water
I neede...

Read and leave comments (3)

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

That early April morn, dewy and cool,
Charlie was still lunging on the leash
as we walked up Quaker bridge towards the field.
Charlie was born wise: he did not suffer fools gladly.

How he put up with me, God alone knows. Anyroadup,
this memorable morning Charli...

Read and leave comments (0)

people come and go, only the roads remain

Shadows behind the sun, faint echo of words,
meanings stuck in transit, the music of the Byrds,
brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache,
years drift by like phantoms, like passions of the heart,
silence breeding silence, pink faeries play their part,
forget what you remember, give and never take,
rip the veil off the mysteries, ...

Read and leave comments (0)

“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
James Aloysius Joyce, Ulysses

T’was the night before Christmas,
It was dark and cold and dreary.
Dark, black night.
For lettered and unlettered alike;
Fearing the roaring of the skies,
Trembling at the dying of the light;
Fear seeped up from the miasmic ground.
Wind and the rain alight on me,...

Read and leave comments (2)

 

Right through Christmas to New Year
I load up with fleeting Christmas cheer,
see the new year roll in upon a  tide of fog.:
Regret never falls into line, sadnesses rear
their ugly heads in dreams and waking too. 
The washing line of time swings into view
of all the old routines, wrung through the wringer
of times gone by: my mother's red hands 
on washing day, helping her turn the...

Read and leave comments (1)

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 becomes ye old March Hare
And leaves us all behind.

https://youtu.be/DDt3u2Ev1cI?si=l-hgN9...

Read and leave comments (0)

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail

The fractured frisson of a moment’s inattention
a moment’s respite whispers to me
put out the light
and then put out the light

the half-remembered extravagence
of a youthful indiscretion
folding the sheets on another day
tucking the pain away

the stretched tiredness
of an airport at night
i say, again, put out the light
and then pu...

Read and leave comments (0)

the old bray of my heart

 

Do no harm: sin, or virtue, are secondary to this injunction. Deadly sins of poverty, hypocrisy, abound. Don’t let red anger blossom in you. Nor black despair. Keep blood in your cheeks. Do not let desire dictate your life. But make your heart beat faster; spread the laughter. Do not promulgate the short fuses of envy or jealousy. Vanity offers only a pretended l...

Read and leave comments (0)

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace. AM 1681

Photo by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash

A moment plucked from a past
that could not last
the tone and timbre of a long-lost voice
heaven-sent, her voice in my head,
no longer alive, no longer dead.

The recollected smell of burning gas
 on a cold winter’s morning, in, maybe, 1965,
 when she was so ...

Read and leave comments (0)

The term ‘halal meat’, as used these days, is one that has no Quranic support but is more a term exploited for commercial profit.

It is easy to walk away from faith
harder to climb back on board
the ship of faith as it navigates these stormy seas.
The scientific sage of this secular age
associates blind faith with barbaric ignorance
murder, in the name of God.

True faith links us to...

Read and leave comments (0)

So you think.you can tell
heaven from hell?

Two Hasidic men,
with their ringlets and all,
playing Pink Floyd
against a Jerusalem wall.

Wish you were here
land washed over by waves of invaders:
Arabs, Crusaders, Romans, Greeks

In modernity men and women
with no flesh, no fat on their bones,
crowded onto boats in 1946
people ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Gripped by foreboding
of a nascent dread
we watch as our liberties
are stripped away
whilst chains of transmission
decrease the space where some feel  safe,
force many back between four walls.

As the light fades ever faster,
the temperature dips
I am recalled
to a ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (2)

a horseshoe-shaped lake formed when a wide meander of a river is cut off from the main channel

Thought meanders like an oxbow lake
it begins in the shallows
with the  current pushing us along
then we veer into the depths, cloudy with sedimentation:
thoughts, feelings, speculations, hopes, fears
where we can wallow when young.

As the river creates land out of water
or water out of ...

Read and leave comments (0)

“First we feel. Then we fall.” 
 ― James Joyce

   

The bell jar of innocence
heaven forfend
creates, too late, a world
without end

Look! Look! Just around the bend
such faery stories
took the life of my friend
in the cramped minds
of lean-faced men
with heavy stubble
who shuffle down the road

Nothing happens
no looks are exchanged
mothers bend down
warn their children.
on...

Read and leave comments (1)

Read and leave comments (1)

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Churchill

Alf, it was the model spitfire in your front room window
that identified you, separated you from that tribe
we call ‘the old’. I saw you sometimes at the shops, your movements slow, deliberate,
arthritic, I thought, I was wrong.
You carried a woven basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind
and you were always glancing b...

Read and leave comments (2)

Mischief Missy a musical madam,
an untidy lady, a vagrant thief of time
her tones upend a rhyme in time
misleads me into wasting mine

Thinking of fine words, rhyme;
wrapped in a tattered rag
tastes like that silk and lace concotion
i tried living like a country lass
more or less half-drunk around a  maypole of an ass
this did not bring the light into the bitter winter-dark.

Sitti...

Read and leave comments (2)

androgynous musi

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

He spoke his lines slowly, his face was a mask,
 remembering Montmatre, the wedding,
 throwing the steak to the dog,
 the tiny drops of rain off the Seine
 drops sliding down
 my conker of a nose.

The actor played his part so well until
 the heart attack took him, dead on cue,
 endless mourning ensued, faces pale,
 words s...

Read and leave comments (2)

“I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” ― Anais Nin

A light mist in the air, an autumnal sway,
celtic, crossed and re-crossed, we’re on our way
to who knows where? Why do we care?
 
 A watery calvary stares at us in this blemished
 air. Today we dead coagulate -
 thicken — our dying words still
 rampant on our cracked lips.
Our silence doe...

Read and leave comments (0)

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’infâ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Nothing to say,
t'old lady thinks,
must draw my curtains tight,
like my mother did, for the dead.

Voices in my head
commune with the dead
a wind roaring inside my head
the silence I dread.

Old kindnesses fail me
again
he just faded away,
my Eddie did

Everything is looser now
no ties or neighbours
alone in an empty house
I listen to tiny oceans
roar me to sleep

The days...

Read and leave comments (0)

In the auction-room, toy trains wait like ribs
to be eaten, they smell like wet sacks
full of delicious smoke, darned with swollen 
fingers in the cold of a Kashmiri morning.

I smile as the pigeons hum into life
so sweet and forgetful was my pain;
the sands of the Ganges s...

Read and leave comments (0)

SUFI: Mansur al-Hallaj was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism. Born: 26 March 858 AD, Fars, Persia, died by execution: 26 March 922 AD, Baghdad, Mesopotamia

https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/light-sufis-mystical-arts-islam

Goodbye my Sufi friend and lover
nothing exists now to connect you to me
you are safe from the executioner’s block.

Tayyar is honourable and full of good...

Read and leave comments (0)

“Poetry is that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” — Allen Ginsberg, from Ginsberg, A Biography.

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 st...

Read and leave comments (0)

“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn” Tho Gray

words that he said,
in malice and spite,
lit a spark in her heart
that burnt in the night;
words flowed in her blood
then entered her brain,
and did her no good,
she was never the same;
she glowered and festered
she rotted and knew
her cancer diagnosis
was most certainly true.

https://youtu.be/aoR0mGq_z2I?si=gXefw...

Read and leave comments (0)

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
And all roads lead to you
And all the...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (1)

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” 
 ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

 

We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
 pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
 squeeze into these thick silences of trees.
 soon the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
 twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
 in this breeze of time.
 Penumbra-beginning hologram-en...

Read and leave comments (0)

love is a forbidden act of rebellion and a powerful, yet ultimately fragile, expression of individuality against the totalitarian regime of Big Brother

We are in a public garden
in England, in May.
we sit together
in mild, balmy weather.

We do not track those
who move around us.
they have their instructions,
undoubtedly.

We look at the water,
then we look at the ducks,
the wee...

Read and leave comments (2)

Wild is the minute, storms seize the sky
a new world of smell and sight and sound,
wetness and wildness all around;
portals of discovery abound
in this new newfoundland:
the sheer vividness of colour, of shade, of shadow,
hear the all round risibility of bird song, 
flesh, blood, soul, air and all the half-created
epiphanies of cloud and sky and sun everywhere
enter the mind,  fly fleetin...

Read and leave comments (1)

For all of me life I have been living among 'em:  savages
savages in suits
and posh dresses
now they are becoming loathsome to me
they make me skin crawl what with their hypocrisy
and cruelty.

As a kid in bed I were alone, like a boat afloat in the sea.
Spotted land? 
Everywhere savages abound, in the suburbs, in the towns
and in the shitty City 
savages abound.

Cultivating selfishn...

Read and leave comments (1)

When sadnesses besiege you:at the dying of the light
and starlight illuminates
the end of  day
then star-crossed lovers
silently drift away;

Sigh quiettly out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes
and you will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise..

We spin and whirl and dance like hemlock in the hay.
we are Witch and Wicca and Wizard
we have never gone away.
We sway benea...

Read and leave comments (0)

Israel has dropped more bombs on Palestinians in Gaza this week than the United States dropped on Afghanistan in a full year of the war. https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/13/jewish-plea/

An old olive oil press rusts
at the bottom of a sandy garden
in this occupied territory;
children lying prostrate,
bleeding into the soil;
a man murmuring.
about a weight, a burden, somethin...

Read and leave comments (4)

If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
I’d roll them up into the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes
This friendship across species — a Buddhist mantra –
Rocks me like my good old boy, befriends me like the wind.
Be with me when the gates fly open — love will enter in.
Seek out the Majesty, the shaman-spirit that will be:
Come with me to the Paiut Wovoka gho...

Read and leave comments (0)

 

Once I knew you,
Red hair blowing free,
Catholic and wild:
A young banshee;
A Jacobite, like me.

The moral guardians condemned us:
They said we were transgressors,
The breakers of the law.
So then we asked each other
What is life for?

It’s the wildness that’s within us!
Our spirits roaming free!
The accomplishment of nothing
That is you and me.

https://you...

Read and leave comments (0)

“ A world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else” – EE Cummings

On the other side of the bay we find
bridges of silence
halls of resistance
flash into memory,
cascade into avalanches of regret.
On a secret request
we tramp into this silent romance.

Intelligence tests the news
we read between the lines of rain
that run down the window panes;
but mostl...

Read and leave comments (1)

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time” British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

Old Royal Enfield bicycles
& rifles propped against a wall,
a gaggle of men,
in this humid heat
their necks are sticky
their collars starched and neat
& look! in the far distance,
a gable end
and look! a house.

Windows left wide open
in this hig...

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

Read and leave comments (0)

When the voices of children are heard on the green/ And laughing is heard on the hill/ My heart is at rest within my breast/ And everything else is still. William Blake ,

I

I used to carry three of the five up to bed
they’d say ‘Daddy, daddy, please stay’
but I would go away and work.

Suddenly, we were semi-detached
they’d flown the nest, gone away,
and what I wouldn’t give
for one m...

Read and leave comments (0)

At first it was all I could do
to stare into the past
to search out any scraps
that I recognize from the long ago.

At first it was just sad,
being bracing and alone
I turned to face the future:
blank slate
locked gate
face the fact, nothing lasts.

Do I lie to myself?
Yes and no - only when
the tracks in the snow
lead, inexorably to my
front door. Otherwise, no.

The air is brac...

Read and leave comments (0)

“a creature with eyes, dead and turned to stone,” Tho Hardy, ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes'

 

Beneath this beach of sand and shells
I see the image of the rolling sea
such new-found-land frames and hides
these wide horizons; I walk along the cliff:
sheer drop upon the windward side,
embedded trilobites, beneath my feet
quartz and muscovite from the granite
weathered by the winds and waves
...

Read and leave comments (0)

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
 ― T.S. Eliot

Fresh water suits my watery nature.
 I squint into the ripples of redemption,
 watch the ducks glide quietly beside me

Keeping me on the straight and narrow,
or trying to,
the random calls of strangers splatter across
the swirling sky as I choke on what I know ,
I am not crying, cannot...

Read and leave comments (0)