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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Forget me not blue

As an Alaskan blueberry

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’s no...

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Like a swimmer driven by a whirlpool of distress, Without a  morsel of hope, lampooned by regret,

In a storm of my own making; beseiged by clouds; 

I hide. Adamantly anchored to a despair, twenty fathoms wide

I'm riven by the whirlwind of my observable distress;

Starving and  alone, my anchor is the live-long day and yet, and yet, I fade away. 

Dressed in a black haze: dappled sunli...

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Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

Than the regiment of day

Can drift my head away

Back to the cancer hospital

To the chemo and the radio

And injections in the vein

Thank God it didn’t enter

My brain. It’s your loved

Ones take the strain.

I remember Emile, yes,

Named after Rousseau’s

Eponymous hero. He hoped

It had not spread. Married

At the weekend, h...

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These fingers point at letters

Those letters point at words

And then the disturbance -

Occurs

My love she was a vixen

And howled in the night

Those feelings they just left me -

Despite

The mourning which continues

Throughout decades, in a line,

My lover she engages me -

In time.

These swirling skies of fortune,

The lakes’ grey and white despair...

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Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC

An Anglo-Jewish volunteer - did his patriotic duty

Joined up on 4th August 1914.

He was one of the First World War’s greatest poets; 

A fearless soldier who won the Military Cross for bravery,

The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.

He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire

Coll...

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The guest was uninvited but arrived anyway

In this universe of moulding, he is the clay.

The freezing blizzard of my heart departs

As I look out of my window into this universe of things

And, for a micro-second, my wounded heart sings

With love and with the lack of love,

With all we seek to find

With memories buried in

This golgotha mind of mine.

I am no different, thoug...

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Do you really want to sit there on the 21st floor

Mixing matches, making matchstick men to bore

Your friends witless as you, once again, tell the tale.

Of when you once went north, further than Watford vale,

I know you never doubt yourself, my rhyming cavalier,

But a little word of warning in your shell-like ear:

Waiting for promotion to SW3?

Waiting for the loss-adjustors, to...

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(This poem is dedicated to the beautifully lyrical music of rapture and redemption which this young Californian, Judee Sill,  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 ...

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The sting of the wind
 On this cold black night
 Reminds me of my
 Ancestors who rode
 This same wind
 As they trudged to work
 On early shift.
 This  connection, now, is
 Deep in my blood
 Deep in what I mean
 When I say words
 In tones that rhyme. 

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For those who know and know how much they still don't know. Bloodfever

Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

I remember falling as a child

And being lifted by a faerie-wild

She kissed my cheek and mussed my hair

And then she wasn’t there.

……….

Some blind folk see the fairies clear,

For faeries are always close or near;

Oh, better far than what we see

Are faer...

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A rose garden at altitude under occupation

dormant in mid-winter

I picture the rose garden in spring

as the secret garden of my soul

where all that is good and all that is fine

are written in a tender-script divine

where persian berries tantalise the taste

and the morning prayer bells undulate

the breakfast figs are fine

as is the watery wine

and these chinese herbs...

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The times of wonder have gone

The wise women drugged

Into submission.

Forensic psychology reveals traces

Of long-forgotten faces

Which, much 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

3...

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The last decade before the big three score

and ten. Best to keep on the move, evolving then?

A rolling stone gathers no moss, they say; not in

Keith's  head, anyway. Soon it will be the freezing season

With all those greens and reds – the hollies and the ivy

and the grateful dead. The starship could fly us, fly us clean away,

But most of us are yard birds, creatures of home, I’d ...

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That long-held sax note- divine 

Makes my soul jus drift away

The smoke, the booze, the horse,

The girls. Sum o'them, thin agen.

Man, the flash of the crack o'th drum

The thumpity, thumpity, thump.

He jus stand there in a haze

John's  soprano sax, Miles' trumpet

Blowin the blues. All the way To Missisip

All the way to me cryin in a ditch.

Those weary, weary blues. No ...

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Circumstances compel me speak

Ye gods, (for you have them);

From the first of the world

Down to our own time

Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,

Listen to this elegy for a passing time instead.,

A soldier silenced, banned, expelled, made dead.

While life continues, makes the crops no longer joyous.

The sheep forgot, the cattle, bees unkept.

Be thrifty with ...

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These long, black evenings fill me with premonitions,

The falling of the leaves remind us of our losses.

Captain Wilfred Owen killed in action 

During the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal

One week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice. 

Such terrifying bloomings of a malignant fate,

A godless irony, force us back into our centrally heated caves.

We dream on...

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As we draw close to Remembrance Sunday and all the praising of the armed services I wrote this to show how we really treat those who risked their lives to protect us.

Baffling how he came to be a pauper, he thought,

An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.

Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?. 

Not a real home. Everything had changed.

Belfast, The Falklan...

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Those words you don’t remember,
Wind tearing through the sky,
Your soul is packed with fortitude
While sparks fly.

……

The coals flare into flames, a pettiness
Of heat. Suddenly, replete: golden sands,
Crystal brooks, silken lines, silver hooks.
Glimpsing what’s already there,
She begins to mount the stairs.

Who cares?

……..

Say, a friend you trust implicitly,
A lover you migh...

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The sky is grey today with streaks of blue

Swirling northern skies reflect sombre horizons;

Behind my back cumulus clouds mass

Over the hills, conspiring in their usual

Ragged silence. In front of me are drear

Trees laid bare, a mist of water's in the air.

Caught cough, cough, coughing in the peasoupers

Of the past, I pull my scarf tighter and focus keenly

On the p...

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Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

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

A waterfall of notes, rising, descending,

Splashing into my mind, heart, soul.

Music will never grow old.

An arpeggio series of broken chords 

In and out of order, splintering, teasing the ear. 

Plunging into minor keys, soaring into waves of luminosity.

Notes th...

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"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." Martin Niemoller.

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I made close friends on WOL

Rachel, Devon, David, Jacob,

Poets of enormous scope and range,

Silenced for their free expression,

Is that a good thing? Whatcha reckon?

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She's the flinger of plurabilly teas,

She was, once-upon-a-golden-time;

And a good time it was two,

Despite the old hairy gobeen man,

Who was a-coming down a road,

drinking from a can.

She met a nice-uns-little boy name Baby Tookoo,

Her mother slopped her drat story.

Her rather had a leery face:

Sin, sin, Jesuitical-sin

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"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”  TS Eliot

Every day, regardless of the goodness or evil lurking in my soul,

I see kipper skies, placid blue occasionally, but much more

Like the swirling, crashing skies of Turner, like the flaming skies the young Mozart

Saw in his mind's eye, when he was adding

Note to eloquent note to produce t...

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(for Kathy 1940–2019)

Photo by Marcus Cramer on Unsplash

She was close to death — 

her loved ones bereft.

I read between the lines,

just a habit of mind,

then looked again,

out of the side of my eye:

more and more, as time passes by

what we perceive

we half-create.

Buried in the earth,

she's still looking at the sky,

a rumble of thunder,

passing b...

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Dripping into what passes for daylight
In these northern climes,

The moon fades, wind and rain shower,
Trees sway, on this formless holiday
Light, such as it is, tucks away dream,

Children — washed, tired, pale -
Know it’s Halloween
I know it well:
Tired ghosts forget to rise again,
Witches stagger into view
As all their magic fades away.

Clogged motors roar
As the October mist l...

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County Lines spread

Evil

A cross all the living and the dead

Their line is our time

We need them, fled.

A spring day in late fall,

She can no longer stand 

Tall, crumpled, bent,

She has lost the lines that link

Her to her family, friends.

Now lines link:

Road, rail, phone,

Needle, plunger, sink

into an unguarded atonement.

Her lines enmeshed in this stinki...

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dedicated to the men and women of the Syrian Defence force, and the Kurdish YPG,  who, with the help of volunteers from around the world, defeated Daesh and are now seeking to defend the feminist and democratic Kurdistan from NATO-supported Fascist-Turkish genocidal murderers and rapists 

My parents were Christian, Serb,

I remember the icons in my mother’s house,

The smell of meat on...

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Absinthe, this pearly-white,

Clouded, aniseed-tasting drink

Stinks but is addictive, especially

Here in Paris on the left-bank,

Near Montmartre

Where the Institut is

Where we plan, conspire,

Work out who is the traitor

Who the informer, who the liar.

Anyway, I am always thirsty for absinthe.

I am always thirsty for wine too

To the extent of our boundless, limited e...

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Out of all this mush,

With a little bit of a push,

Emerge fire fly.

O! fly so high firefly,

Illuminate the sky, firefly

Take a break, firefly;

Phosphorescence on the lake,

Fires fly

Float over the image of moon,

The lapping of the lake

Firefly, a soft-bodied beetle,

Firefly, related to the glow-worm,

The winged male and flightless female

Both have luminesce...

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Kurdish poets with military experience have fallen silent and I am bereft;

Poetry has always been the main pillar of Kurdish literature

The fight for their land and the fight for their identity are the same.

The Kurds are not divorced from the west - Eliot's influence on al-Sayyab  for example -

And the hot wave from Arabia did not destroy the Kurds, many are Christian, Ezedi and secul...

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The cold autumn rain falls full in my face,

wet westerlies come with a trace of winter;

as I walk, I take account of my losses.

My mind drifts into the past:

a phantasmagoria of well-remembered faces

tumble into the valley of the shadow of death.

Phantoms afloat, all around me, looking quizzically

at the remains of a life long left or soonest parted.

The trees of this woodl...

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Winter on Mount Sinjar in 2014,

By the Christian calendar.

That year lasted forever:

Such a long, long time ago,

Now the Turks have come

To do the work of Daesh

And the Sunni tribes and foreign Salafists

Conspire to kill the Yezedi, even in Lalish,

Our mouths expel a hidden heat

It is the soul of the Ezedi.

Never before has the sun

Filled us so full of tea...

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Walking down a dusty, dirt road in Rojava,

near the border.

Sand in my mouth, tears on my cheek.

NATO jets flying under Turkish colours,

bombing, massacring, the soldiers of the Syrian Defence Forces

and their internationalist Kurdish YPG allies —

a modern International Brigade.

SDF forces are now, this minute, pulling soldiers (Kurdish, Arab, American, British, Serbian, ...

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Planet earth she suffers

Torn at by your knife,

Slashed at by machete

Exploited all your life.

Poisoned by your chemicals

Murdered, raped and pillaged

Consider the obscenity - 

The whole world is just one village.  

But you really ain't bothered, are you?

You've got your money in the bank

You own your slice of heaven

You're comfortably numb, to be frank.

..........

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David always told the truth to me

and, of course, we argued endlessly

about what, exactly, was 'true':

both working class self-taught autodidacts,

what would you expect us to do?

I continued to learn a lot from David's poetry too

Until his mighty verses were expunged from view.

David told me the precise name and location

Of a church in ancient Antioch,

In war-torn Syria ...

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We were in a public garden 

In England in May.

We sat together

In mild, balmy weather.

We did not track those

Who moved around us.

They had their instructions,

Undoubtedly.

We looked at the water, and we looked at the ducks,

And the weeping willow tree was there:

Reflected in your eyes,

A subtle disguise,

I dropped words into your ears

Like pearls.

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The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

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 perfectly.

But poetry's more about the wine than the whining

About seeking to express the inexpressible

Whilst complaining about just how d...

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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

Sea-formed outcrops, hidden rocks, caves.

Time carves the face of all mank...

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"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

propped against the wall,

a gaggle of men,

then, in the far distance,

a gable end

and look! a house

windows left wide open

in this Cheshire heat.

And, have we forgotten,

if we knew at all,

this...

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Words we remember,

Echo in the brain,

Bouncing off the surfaces:

A few will remain.

Wind rises around the window pane,

Blowing a northerly gale,

A rain-splattered man, with a sorry, sorry tale,

Inhabits the soul beside me, half-way to hell.

His tale is built on lies, my friend,

Deceptions ripe and drear,

Tales we tell to children

When their eyes overflow with fear.

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For all me life I have been living among 'em:  savages. savages in suits.

Now they are becoming increasingly loathsome to me.

As a kid in bed I was alone, like a boat afloat in the sea.

Spotted land? Savages abound, in the suburbs, in the town

Savages abound.

Cultivating selfishness, meanness and spite.

Their unholy trinity: y've made yer bed, now lie on it,

spare the rod and ...

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If a hundred seas had separated me 

From you. If our sea of troubles were endless, too, 

If I could spend just one in a thousand years of nights with you

You could parcel me up and remove me from sight

Hide me away, like a kid:

The cubby-hole under the stairs,

Was for wetting the bed:

I banged and banged me head

But nobody ever came.

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The long days are gone already

Grass prepares to stop growing

The fields and trees take on a tint

Rivers begin to change their courses to accommodate the coming winter 

Colour is leached out of the landscape.

Mosquitos do their final, annoying dance

We are dust and shadow. Again.

Who knows whether we will survive another winter

The gods above? I flee the calloused hands of ...

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Squirming with words,

squabbling, fighting, reeling  with words

sore with myself.

so sore with myself

a world of regret,

begets

only

this absence of you.

O! I wish I could turn words into wishes.

O! I wish my days would fall into line

my eyes rise for you

without the slightest disguise for you

finally, it's only you.

Now

this evening is so h...

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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 basket, the old-fashioned clumpy kind.

And you were always glancing behind you. I thought it was the traffic

You feared, but  it wa...

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 summer rains' quiet incantation, the animals come and go,

                    in the far-distant, the snow melts as the river flows;

                    time is a demon

                    the animals know.

                    It’s looking for you, y'know:

                  ...in the abdomen – demon go

                  ...in the albumin – demon go

                  ... ...

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Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Emily Dickinson

Born, bloom, die

All in the one day

Blurs a glass darkly

A physician’s proof of breath

Marked by her girlhood’s fleeting fancy

Of a garden romance

A moonlit dance

With Chopin playing lightly

In the darkness

And no rectangular wooden box

To be seen

Instead a thing with feathers

Whistles through my head

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

Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

…only the vestiges remain:

Conduct a forensic examination, scatter the remains:
Fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail,
Condemned at the root.

A roof for his daughter,
Over a precipice-by-th...

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