The unpurged images of day

Will not give me away to complacency

Even after fifty years of Chinese

Occupation we Tibetans continue

To resist, especially in mid-winter

When we picture our rose garden,

The secret garden of our soul,

A place where all that is, is good 

And all that is, is fine

Is writ in large, in watery wine:

Written in a tender-script divi...

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One thing turns to another thing.

This is the story of continuous change

Nothing remains the same. 

The sum Is always greater than the parts

And a metamorphosis of hearts

Occurs when we know that

Differential calculus

Plots the rates

At which things change.

However, the total always remains the same.

E = mc2. 

Energy equals mass 

Times the speed of light squared...

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We have eaten rats during this seige

These Goths want us acquiesce to Christian suzerainty.

They never tell us why we should do so

We have our music, poetry, wine, gardens and our beautiful women.

And beauty gives lights like lamps to one travelling in the dark.

The nearness of death makes one wake up, notice a sparkling jewel,
A pearl from the deeps of a distant ocea...

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You were lonesome and blue eyed
And so special to us
You should have taken a long break
Instead of a long drop from a high place.

"That Year" by Brandi Carlisle

More than five rugby teams' worth, of men, every week, dead by their own hands,

In these islands.

Young men mostly, three times as many men as women,

Nearly 6000 a year, 60,000 over a decade and....

risin...

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In Latin or in Portuguese 

o sentimento de amor

Is just the same: 

The sentiment of love

Can quickly catch aflame.

A lack in the discipline

Of the eyes breeds

A brooding wish to exercise

Or exorcise, a fire that re-iterates

The eradication of disguise

Leaving us contemplating the irreducibility of fate.

Extending the same disregard for grammar:

(declensions decl...

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Away with the moon

with her shadows and all

those sturdy penumbras

you saw in the ball.

Forget you, forget you

I  fall out of bed

and all you beget

is so-suddenly dead.

She’s tousled & sleepy,

this edge of the moon,

where

Angus, dear Angus,

just walked out the room.

His pool-side of shadows

is living alone,

with ginger-nut biscuits

and large gulps of...

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In this mild mid-winter breeze of splintered selves

The trees blend into silhouttes; and I see elves

Whose shadows transform perceptions

Into creation. And all the world of

Getting and spending grinds to a halt,

For 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 those...

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At this turning of the year

We confront an unholy nexus of fear,

Solstice: the apex of the year,

ride the crest of a wave of darkness

The drunkard's Christmas kiss

As the sun squats on the horizon

Of his squandered life

Fear you can cut it with a knife

transforms the frosty night owls of winter

Into a travesty of this lack of light.

Beneath this peak of dark

l...

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Don’t let the fat white males into your land

They have no concept of stewardship

They think they can own the air and the land.

You watched them massacre the holy bison:

The white buffalo are dead

Their bodies rot under the holy sun.

These bastards have no respect for themselves:

They are rapists and child-killers.

They love watching sadistic pornography.

They spoil all t...

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The grey skies of Manchester,
Designed to oppress,
Yes, my head is in a mess.
This place of the bee is home to me.
Old boys return blisteringly unaware
Of the significance of a long, cold stare
Lost boys don't even mention the drugs.
In a chapel-of-rest or a public bar - don't wander far.
Out in the street, a mass of metal and rubbish
Outside the flats, wrecked fridges, torn up sofas;
Th...

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With an abiding glint of love in her faded eyes, 
Brown eyes that inhabit my dreams, spark my memories,
My mother has dementia, a cross for us to bear
So saith her silver-tinted hair. She laboured for our family.
With her handbag gripped in her laughing lap,
She still smiles at my silly jokes and repartee 
We share so many ways yet she's the opposite of me:
Freer, grander, more baroque, a h...

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"My son Brandon died 9 years ago. I have returned from Indiana to Texas where he was born and mixed his ashes in with my garden. I have brought my child home." YOUTUBE comment on 'Into Dust', Mazzy Star

Photo by Matthew Cabret on Unsplash

I knew from the very beginning

The sun would rise

Teaching me to cast my eyes to heaven

Cloudy days are like sacrifices

To compensate ...

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Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light

But it’s not a rose it’s a beautiful buttercup, slight

Like the golden marvels we used to decide

Which side our bread was buttered.

Do we like butter or not? Was the yellow

Reflected on our chin? These flowers resemble

The wild rose – poisonous to humans –

Helleborus niger macranthus –

Enough to tangle any tongue.

Words wea...

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Wild is the minute and clear is the sky

A world of smell and sight and sound

The portals of discovery all around,

We enter this world, this newfoundland:

The sheer vividness of colour,

The all round visibility of sound,

Flesh and blood, all the half-created

Epiphanies of cloud and sky and sun,

Enter the mind and fly from  the eye -

Into the kippering sky, clouds come rus...

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I saw her in the street

We were polite, random, neat.

Forgetting what drunkenness

Created in the way of becoming diabolical

Divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate.

Once one, kind, sweet woman,

Polished floors with rage

Arms red and fleshy –

The dark memory of her soul is not pale;

It was late, near the Spaniard’s Inn,

The full moon was shining,

With all the sol...

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Love...cultivates. Goethe

We walk a steep and slippery way,

Mixing senses in synesthesia'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, time goes by,

I choose to walk 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 l...

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“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”
― Basho

Open your heart to the misery

Of those who live without hope,

Learn to walk in another’s steps

To learn to extend your scope

Learn not to avert your gaze

When the world is set ablaze.

Give all that you have to give

And expect nothing and you will see

With the eyes of a child.

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my friend, Ian Kevin Curtis

(15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980)

strode up those stairs, so long ago,

and still, your voice pumps out

in all its brittle beauty

leaving the depression

and the epilepsy behind

telling us what love will do

how, precisely it will tear us apart

some will listen and never know

the man you were

me? I cannot abide the way

you hid the man you wer...

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He'd despise with his eyes those alive in sackcloth and ashes

The weaponised clones of a myopic dwarf did not do

As they were taught. They denied themselves the water

Of life. They inherited nothing.

No morning maniac music

Shaked them awake.

Those who'd once brought hope

Now mired in hate.

Over the mountain, clouds scud

Blood on the floor

And mud on the faces.

Ref...

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Calling time on the cinema queue

We let our dreams come true

It was the evening of the day

Fervourless

and blue.

At least, I still had you.

Giving up on our one chance

Of silence, it is true,

Who knows where the time goes

Enhances you.

And, so,we wound up

Like I knew we'd do:

Bruised black and bruised blue

Back in the cinema queue.

...

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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 your veined
porcelain
hand

so who am I to resist
this child's
every imperative?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2JjJPDz3EE

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Angels  alight, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,

behind her eyes her guardian angel sighs.

Listen! to the whisperer behind the song,

misfortune exorcised by fluttering fugues begin again

to sing a song in a minor key,

a longing to be whole and free.

Let'so roll away the stone:

for on this seafront there is a stone,

where, in the creamy moonlight of romance,

men and wo...

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Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,

Rock- hidden fossils set in stone,

These evolutions of Medusa

Afflict with a petrified decay.

And all, all she gazed upon

Can never be rubbed away.

Stains dry and calcify

Deep in the  bogs, in a quagmire,

A swamp of guilt, regret

Spilt water, wine, I forget.

No transubstantiation this:

Yoked, ploughed, dragged,

Inchoate ...

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Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”), a Hindu custom of a wife immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband

Moths fly high

this cold delight

of a summer's night

their wings sing,

but my mind's not right;

see the showers spark high

like flaming air

sizzling on the water

blowing in her hair

and the women heap wood

on the fragrant...

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Photo by Dmitry Ermakov on Unsplash

Fresh water suits my watery nature.
I squint at the ripples of redemption,
Watch the ducks glide beside me

Keeping me on the straight and narrow.

The call of strangers splatters across
The sky and I choke on what I know ,
And cannot even whisper out, or sigh.

Mountains and sky reflected in water.

The ordinary has become extraordinary
...

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My love didn’t come from nowhere.  

My father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas,

My mother just a peasant

Spent her life upon her knees.

The noblesse oblige:

The drinking and the drugs,

Was countered by Intelligence

And a tingling in the blood.

We were the late Romans

Much diminished and now, finally, gone.

For since the death-stroke of 1453,

W...

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The red glow of our one-bar electric fire

Reflected on our hardly bearded faces

The multi-coloured music of curved air

Synaesthesia rampant, the sweet smell

Of burning Lebanese hashish everywhere

That thick and smoky sweet sweet air.

And young Nick Drake still alive amongst

The flat-fen-lands of Cambridgeshire

Five leaves left a common currency  

And me the lad from the ...

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Rose, the loveliest of pagan namings,

She said she can see clear to another day

1967 and the happy trails I followed

That landed me plum in Golden Gate Park

Then Palo Alto in the pacific sun

Looking for a revolution

And this is it:

No empty-headed technologies 

Still no silicon in the valley

Just a box of rain.

It's a long-ding-dong time to be gone.

A...

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Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?  Robert Browning,"Andrea del Sarto", line 98, 1855.

Kicking off his work boots on a day of lazy gooseberry bushes and old Daily Heralds

Jack's eyes slowly rose from the mess of laces squirming around his fingers,

(memories of the front, the hot metal of the gun, fingering,  lingering);

His eyes rose past the d...

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Stand here in your own blood,

My brave heart,

Your shadow and I spy

Firm, thick wood.

The dark lights of Christmastide

Afflict us

Red and green sunset drops

Create an awesome flicker

Of candle-light and in the mean time,

We mark the end of the hologram-life.

No disguise

All begins with grief,

Such great wordy statements

Fall through the looking-glass

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The woman time forgot

Is beautiful today

Moulded in clay, frozen

And unrepentant.

She will tear you apart

With a look, or, maybe, a knife.

This lake by which

She lives is frozen.

Dare we skate

On such thin ice?

Glaciers melt

And water haunts the air

Birds migrate and block the sun

And, still, we have not fled

All that we once remembered

Cities, technolo...

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Not fit for purpose

And all their other clichés

Batter down the airways

Assuring us that greed is good

That we can borrow and never repay

Seeping this repetitive, lying shit

Deep into the soul of the nation,

Leaving me marooned

Growing old with the weariness

That travels through the blood:

As I try to pass by these nets

Of race, nationality, class, religion

But ...

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And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. Revelations 20:4

All across the Nineveh plain the lights are going out

Crosses driven into the hearts of the last of Mesopotamia’s

Christians. These Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language

Of Christ, have been loyal throughout the long centuries

Of subjection t...

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His denim shirt ripped

And blood-stained

It was such a shame

Mick was a dealer, 

A user too;

Smoked what he sold

And sold what he grew

But County lines geezers

Had swamped the north

With the Psychotic stuff,

Packed full of THC but also:

White Nurse, White Stuff, White Junk

Skunk caused, Horse delivered

The knifings 

The knifings

Caused the pain

And t...

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And I live on a dark star

On the edge of a black hole

Which I will fall into any day

Now there is a singularity of night

An utter absence of light.

The colours leached away

When I wasn't looking

And now the music is silent too.

What should I do?

The speed of light

Is certainly

Insufficient to escape

From this orbit of gloom

This reconnoitring of grief

This...

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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 is so cold and it still stings like hell

And the sky descends into the air

And, all of a sudden,  you're not there

And the blackness is...

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squirming with words,

squabbling, fighting,

reeling with words

sore with myself.

so sore with myself

a world of regret,

begets

this absence of you.

O! I wish I could turn words into wishes.

O! I wish my days would fall into line

my eyes could rise for you

without the slightest disguise

for you.

Evening is so heavy, the rain has been & gone,

these...

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Quietly, she spoke of tea, toast, the faint after smell of cigars,
Let us say we met in a room: curtained, peeling, private.
Briefly she consulted the winter afternoon,
Reviewed the deadening, leadening sky.

All was discreetly done.
No presences danced beyond no lifted curtains.
Darkness had silted us away.

Words, like spoons, stirred the air.
We slipped into a net of inquisitions.

...

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Emotion recollected in tranquillity

never did quite do it for me:

I see the river Thames,

I see the people flow,

all kinds and conditions,

in rain and sun and snow.

There's

the Green man in Kingsbury,

a pub which abhors the National Front,

or, you may wander in Kew Gardens,

or, you may sometimes have a punt.

Westminster traitors to the north 88

Brixton dreads to...

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Ordinary life creates

These empty spaces

Inside of me

Composed of God-knows-what:

Certainly lacking in originality.

Pale-blue eyes

On a snow drop face

Seen-through lace,

Seen-through lace.

These empty waiting rooms of the heart,

Set to tear us apart,

These ventricles of the brain, never the same.

Birdsong flung

Into fond recall

A dry-stone wall,

A dry...

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In the apple market

your south London twang

accompanies the many undulations

of time.

Your wild androgyny

mirroring the mirror

of yourself

skimming 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 needed;

Your terse verse

spread underground

watering imagin...

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(dedicated to the everlasting memory of Harry O'Neill: Au revoir comrade)

an old olive oil press rusting

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, something.....

lifted.

We disciples could not hear clearly,

what with all the muffled explosions

and ...

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haunt my days,

she whispers,

butter me up quite,

she replies

the green groves

of her painting

are sleeping

now

there is

no disguise

her speckled dust

is faded sunlight

in her too-familiar sight

her soul

declines from the light

she's a-tumbling

through the grasses

O! she's a-dying

here tonight

out of mind

and out of s...

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Blues come by night baby and blues come by day

Have to watch yourself,  not get taken away, down

To the 12 bars waitin for you in the drinkin’ stew.

Washed up on the morning

Drinking again at noon

Blues wait round the corner

Seize your soul so soon.

No matter what you do or think

The blues are all the same

The lonely lies, and the cryin' shame.

Blues hi...

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If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold
They’d be present in the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes.
This friendship across species — a Buddhist mantra –
Rocks me like a good old boy, befriends me like the rain..
He’ll be with me when the gates fly open —  and the light pours in
Again, we seek out the depths, the shaman-spirits that will be:
Seen, glimpsingly, d...

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Photo by Guillaume Galtier on Unsplash

Too many words

and

our hearts are

conspicuously silent

when addressing

midnight feasts or Lenten fasts

nothing lasts

except the majesty of the momentary

singularity of an event horizon

where voices echo birdsong

like dark eyes at a funeral

warning us of our own death,

granted not foretold,

follows in our foot...

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When I were a boy, a nipper, a kid

Wild flowers on a concrete waste

Were always blindingly yellow.

Flowers rooted in the cracks along the road

For me, the yellow-bloomed, only for me.

Whether I was hungry

Or stuffed to the hilt

A slash of yellow beneath the sun

Was reason enough to have fun..

We prisoners saw her

And we gazed in awe,

Seeing what was really always t...

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He was shaking  uncontrollably when I walked into his shop,

That skinny Asian shopkeeper.

My thoughts of the beautiful, white Crescent Moon

Were soon lost  in the ebony skies of late November.

Everyday complacency fled like winter sleet melted.

He'd seen the glint of the knife on that coal black night;

It was, he said, stutteringly, "the one in the hoodie, with no facial tattoo,

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Opinions can be ignored, mocked,

That's fair enough - satirists like Swift'd be lost -

Otherwise

and, of course,

No-one has the right not to be offended.

I am offended everyday

By the complacent, middle-class old

Bastards who hang on to every penny

And have the empathy of granite

And so easily condemn

Those poorer or less well-educated

Than them.

I love the nove...

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Yes. We spend too much of our short lives

Chasing the mot juste, the phrase, the image,

That will reconcile all, bring all to mind.

To ease the pain and to make amends.

But there is no end to the way of art

We must learn to wonder as we search

For the right word to express. What?

That fleeting sense of something

Far more deeply interfused

That has its home in the setting...

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