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The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees still have leaves
outside it is 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 sister 
on a skipping rope.

It is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morning,
that is why I stretch and yawn.

The lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
‘What is a vi...

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 Evening dark, damp, cold
 Retreat into electric caves
 Try not to think about you
 In your grave. Your soul 
 Meandering. Suicides in GB
 Buried in unconsecrated 
 Ground, until a MP topped
 Himself and was buried
 In Westminster Abbey 1822:
 Viscount Castlereagh. I think.
 Easier to digress than to confess
 How flummoxed am I 
 With the whole unholy business
 Of not saying good...

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The innocence of nature
Mocked by the depravity of humanity
You chose to spotlight the genocide
Of the Tarsier, a primate, DNA like ours,
With enormous seeing eyes.
You made the humble Tarsier
A metaphor for the innocence of nature
Exploited, ripped apart,  killed for meat
Mocked for fun. No empathy between 
Tarsier and Human. Man the killer
Species. You used bitter irony
To deny hu...

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‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ George Orwell

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In the red 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 doctors'  suspicions. 
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.
This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep...

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I make the sign of the cross, today,
the last Saturday in August, 
for Jack who died tod...

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My son, my brother and my dog
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all that is, not all that seems.

That hidden fountain of delight
That shines again, just out of sight,
That promised land, of sweet content,
That land where time is safely spent

Beneath the skies and stars of heaven,
Where every blemish is forgiven,
Where children play all night, a...

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It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night
Of solid rain, unremittingly wet. And cold.
When, suddenly, all the rivers of all the world stopped flowing
And all the summer colours leached away and never returned.
And the wind so cold and stings like hell
And sky descends into the well of unforgiving.
And you're not here.

And the blackness is deep, so deep, and remains so deep
When...

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Comes to remind us not to expect
consistency from Mother Nature.
Climate change keeps us on our toes
Expecting….? God knows what blows. 

https://youtu.be/yOKAQSGCm8Q?si=z9HpEgTDrsQW3a7_

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head shaved by eight o'clock
cold grips my skull - now brain freeze
stubble grows like wheat - neat!

https://youtu.be/bqtfl0gt5fM?si=2D4d9DfiNU6mC_Zd

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"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it." Sylvia Plath.

Amidst the depths of contemplation’s maze,
Words grotesque and selfish lie ablaze,
A fusion of curdled musings intertwine,
 In late October light, a restless mind resigns.

Like an old moon, friendly yet discreet,
Stalks the dawn sky, casting shadows sweet,
In this time of rhyme, where memories reside,
Sh...

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Anna Campbell was her name and Kurdistan
her nation — she died on March 15 2018, the Ides of March.
She was fighting as part of the all-female
Kurdish Women’s Protection Units, the YPJ.

She was 26 when she died 
a long way from Lewes in East Sussex where she was raised.
She was killed by a Turkish airstrike — the Islamist Turks NATO-empowered enemies of the Kurds.
Anna had dyed h...

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saw her in the street

polite, random, neat.

forget drunkenness

create the diabolical

divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate

too late.

one, kind, sweet woman,

polished floors with rage

arms red and fleshy –  

 dark memory of her soul 

 late, near the Spaniard’s Inn, 

 full moon shining,

with all the solemnity of a river in flood,

sleeping London dreaming o...

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We walk a steep and slippery way,
mixing senses in synaesthesia’s way,
it seem as if I am a chorus in a play.

We feel by measures hidden from the eye
time borrowed, days wasted, life goes by,
I  walk along a steep and scattered way.

Winter seeps me into sleep, as my soul flies
to the gist of an art unborrowed from the eye;
I learn by going, where I have to go, inside.

Dark ...

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Sadnesses besiege me,
at the dying of the light,
nothing can console me,
like a vein of ore run through solid rock,
through my life
the glittering flow of tears
has been like a tumbling spring
in hill country.

My love, stretched upon this rack of time, 
appears redundant, gone,
until her song is sung,
until her time is right
until the light in her eyes
greets me at night....

Memo...

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memory fades
slippery words
frankly absurd

at home the fulcrum fulminates
again children expect blows
nobody knows 

eldest boy
emotions frozen
for years and years
unbridled  tears

father, brother son, friend
world without end
pressure in my head
they're dead

thinking will no longer do
so what more can ye do?
walk a way with a dog 
Skip into music
Fade into art.
Be a part...

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https://aphelis.net/james-joyce-meets-nora-barnacle/

I stare at the ceiling, stare at the sky, time flies by. I scuttle along a dirt track, climb over a stile into a cornfield in the previous century I see no blood-red poppies, merely blue corn flowers and the witch Hazel. Now, I’m stuck in the backroom off of Clapham Green, where the black mould spreads insidiously  like a disease tha...

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The winter sharp brains of children 
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
They came running across raging seas, dancing on the waves.

A storm-blessed salty awakening.
Had nothing to regret. 
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the roo...

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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
quietly drift away,
sigh silently out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes,
And you will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise..

We spin and whirl and shiver.
like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch, Wicca, Wizard
who sway beneath the moon,
all night, all da...

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Brittle beauty, that Nature made so frail,
Whereof the gift is small, and short the season;
Flowering to-day, to-morrow apt to fail;

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (born 1516/17, executed 19 January 1547)

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Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

On these dog days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
 after much deprivation and cruelty
ours is a molested nature,
that screams in agony in an iron trap
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death 
as humans point their cameras and smile.

Will these few remaining animals be abused
exterminated, tortured
like all four-legged creatures
...

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Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

A bond unbreakable —
Private soldier Jack Prince by name,
Not a pillar of strength, nor with a heart aflame,
You you didn’t live a life of wisdom and insight,
Your absence does not leave a void that feels so right.
Do you rest, in eternal slumber?
Spirits dance on, like a glowing ember — 
or so the poet says — 
Does your legacy live...

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Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
In all her shadowy finery.
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form
Shows us all her shades and shadows and crevices
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme
Moonlight flows and the boy is now an old man
Sleeping ...

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The moon was sad, as only the moon can be.
Men in tears seek to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth.
White sobs slide into our eyes
Remembering the smile of another
A mother,

On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past was a magnet that draws
Into us the heady...

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Syd, do you remember that golden sun,
When youth burned bright, your journey just begun?
Shine on, you crazy diamond, hold your flame,
Illuminate this world, leave your mark, etch your name.

In your eyes, a depth, a universe, vast,
Black holes of wisdom, memories from the past.
Shine on, you crazy diamond, never lose your glow,
Your brilliance shines through deepest darkness, in a cel...

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Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
Whine like a man who knows he's out of time
Casuistry and sophistry
Work together
In perfect harmony.

Poetry's more about wine than whine
More about seeking to express the inexpressible
Than complaining about how difficult it is.
A true poet makes the difficult easy
Can turn water into wine in a half-truncated line

Caesuras can soar in ...

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John Clare knew and understood
the wonder of the mundane,
how nothing remains the same.

Glint, glance, gaze, smile,
the optimism of
that pastoral green mile.

You saw and smelt
a myriad of wild flowers 
sway in the breeze.

You looked up at the swirling clouds, 
a grey-blue reflection of your unassumed eternity
and then you wrote your poetry
unmindful of the side long glan...

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From trembling thin arms to thunderous cries,
A childhood stained with hunger's cruel guise,
Clutching to mother, seeking her solace tight,
In a world where shadows cast a daunting fright.

Constant threats and abuse, a heavy weight,
Youth stolen away, no chance to abate,
Eldest boy, burdened beyond his years,
In grey short pants, resilience through tears.

Socks pulled up, a symbol of s...

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An epiphany of history: 
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.

Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.

In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the gulags and the camps and massacres came later,
they s...

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Wild is the way, unclear is the day.
The seeping mottled sky passes me by
Opening before me the vista of a life:
A world of smell and sight and sound,
The portals of discovery all around,
I enter this world, this newfoundland:
The sheer vividness of colour abounds
Synaesthesia's all round visibility of sound,
Flesh and blood, heart and soul
All the half-created, half-perceived
Epipha...

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All those who scramble after death
And all its accompanying sensations
Gather around you now.  You looked
In so many different directions for the truth
And I don't know if you ever found it.
But you tried. God, you tried.

All those south Dublin Gaels dismissed you,
As they did the Aran sweaters they used to wear
During the Celtic Tiger with their Estonian nannies
And their Latvian garde...

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Oft and steady rhythm of a baby
breathing
her gaze tells you all you need to know,
her footsteps tender in the snow,
the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window,
considering all we do, and do not, know
we stand hand-in-hand
toe-to-toe
under this beautiful July moon.
 

And now she's our lady in red,
dancing at the party.
Big school beckons in September,
with all its inherited human...

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In this land of loughs and dry burials
The invisible lends itself into visibility
In the dialect of words – tattered,
Stained, inadequate – visceral words
Spew like blood from a gargoyle
Into this mist-ridden air where these
Pagan burrows hide the dead inside 
Blessed Earth: dogs still dig for bones
And the music fills the very air
Lacerated by the explosions of anger
We see upon the red...

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Minutes before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney texted to his wife in Latin: Noli timere or do not be afraid.

Seamus Heaney's sons carrying their father's coffin

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,
A...

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Her red-gold hair
on a stormy autumn day
along the borderland where
time fades away

Like the leafy-mist
which persists,
drifts along the hedge rows
on this late-summer morn

Emptily, curiously,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics,

hidden in the wood-smoke
burning  our throats on a lost
once-upon-a-time damp autumn eve

I am afflicted by
the time...

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I have a dead weight inside of me 

Which I carry around all day,

It often tries to kill me

And it will not go away.

I send this freight’s immensity

To the centre of a black hole;

Retracing the wandering journey

Of my wandering-wandering soul.

Mine is a grave singularity,

It contains a huge-huge mass,

In an infinitely small-small space:

A density — gravity...

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Charles Bukowski probably said (or wrote)
That we are here to laugh at the odds.
I’d say it all depends. Listening to a rich
New Englander (Martha’s Vineyard)
Pontificate upon the miniaturist artists
Of the Renaissance in the ever-so well
Known salons of Venice or Florence
(Such pale shadows of the British Imperialist
Tomb raiders of the nineteenth century).
These daughters of th...

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We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations,
Slip into the generations of suffering:
Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a ...

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When sadnesses besiege you
with the dying of the light,
and you find your solace in starlight,
time drifts away from mirrors,water, eyes
on this Aphrodite night of no disguise.

When night falls and cats crawl,
my heart is filled with sadness, I fear
starlight does not illuminate sky at all.

We know that all human love must die.
as silently we drift apart,
away from each othe...

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken? Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

On a road out of London pulled up at a pub
I heard him say the words I remember, today.
The working man suffers: glug, glug, glug
The drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug.
Taste the whiskey, feel t...

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Fluid the medium by which we desire,
Heavy the limits to which we aspire
To lift ourselves free, on the wings of a dove,
To practise perfection by drinking his blood.
The illusion of earth is splintering fast
As we grab at the air, as we fall at the last:
Witchery, Witan, Wicca and Wizard
Pursuing the furies is why we are feared.
Opening up space and stretching out time
In a flurry of wor...

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From he multi-verse within
I stumble into my usual discontented
Bout of sleep –
A fragment of the fourth dimension,
Trapped inside, no disguise.

In an echo of a dream –
Time, like the river Lethe,
Washes over me
And left I am here, bereft,
To float upon the river of unmindfulness
Towards the golden dome

Which glows with Synesthetic force –
A pulsating kaleidoscope of times...

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Sometimes it’s best just to make up poems
In your head whilst drinking beer and gin
Then let them blow away on a windy day in July
Sitting outside in cold sunshine with Woody.
If I call you what the fuck I like
And you call me what the fuck you like
What are the chances it’d be the same fucking word?
Would you take a fence or would I take a fence
Or is it only certain horses that ...

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Some blind folk see the faeries clear,
For faeries are always close or near.
Oh, better far than what we see
Are fairy wings that brush our faces
Like spiders’ webs, or shimmering laces.

Such magical, lovely, lonely things.
A rustle in the wind reminds us
...

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Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

Early on in Dostoevsky’s great work Crime and Punishment.
Published in 1866 when Dostoevsky was 44 years old,
Raskolnikov, an ex-student in St Petersburg, sees himself as a young boy,
Walking through a provincial town with his father.

Outside a pub, a drunken rabble surrounds a weary old horse,
Hitched to a weighty cartload that it canno...

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Today I listened to a loada shit
Concerning toxic masculinity
I was kinda bored. It was Radio 4.
It was an arrogant fucking lecture on
The vital importance of the pronoun
'They' and hey there were no jokes..
This is no way to speak to ordinary users
Of language. It's a shame that working
Class people are so excluded from
These delightful ways of speaking. Minority
Rules you say. No p...

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