Song for the Old Year
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost , loss pressing upon loss –
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly so carelessly,
And yet we know it costs them their whole life
To fly this way and sing and eat and build and build
Yet still this merely human, this body framed of earth,
Cannot scrape away the cur...
Saturday 31st December 2022 11:00 pm
Under the Volcano
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
On a road out of London, pulled up at a pub
i heard him say the words I remember, today.
the drinking man suffers: glug, glug, glug
the drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug
taste of whiskey, craic, all that convivial shite
he remembers, truly remembers – he’s a creature of the night
searching for the resurrection of a moment of lost content
he ...
Friday 30th December 2022 10:50 pm
Empty
And strange as what I see
I'd put you in the mirror
I put in front of me."
Lou Reed, 'Pale Blue Eyes'
These empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
certainly lacking in originality.
Empty waiting rooms
in empty railways stations
no more smoky-smell of coal and steam.
Caught up upon an evening’s desultoriness
a girl’s slight d...
Thursday 29th December 2022 8:31 pm
Distant echoes
Also I hear the mountains spring on their way back.
they kick up brown-blue mudslides
the weaver of water expands
as fish screech to taste
an order of merit
water is in our tears.
wars over water will be profound
like Israel’s grab for the rivers of Jordan.
Listen to the laplap lapping of the weedy river
the river is no longer firstly or lastly. It just is.
Chris & I used to s...
Wednesday 28th December 2022 7:43 pm
The family face
I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. Sylvia Plath
The past is present in all our genes
and when you begin to recognize ancestors
running through your blood
you begin the blessed process of forgetting
the here and now, as a free-standing reality,
and so begin the unknowing of yourself.
Di...
Monday 26th December 2022 7:16 pm
THE OXEN
BY THOMAS HARDY
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
...Sunday 25th December 2022 2:33 pm
Tolerance
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’infâme!”...
Saturday 24th December 2022 3:25 pm
Feedback
Amidst this waste of time
I live under this mountain
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day
But, I drink anyway.
Lucifer, Brightest of Bright Angels, stutters out
" Non serviam! 'I will not serve!'”
And that is enough, and more than enough,
to condemn all those big words like ‘humanity’.
and 'insanity.'
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe
Whether it ca...
Saturday 24th December 2022 2:27 pm
Munaẓẓamat al-Taḥrīr Filasṭīniyyah (PLO)
“There were soldiers there, also officers, but not a single one helped us defend ourselves,” Al-Azza continued. “I am a Palestinian citizen. I don’t have a voice, I don’t have a weapon, I don’t have security or soldiers who will defend me.".https://www.972mag.com/hebron-mass-settler-attack/
this space in which i squat
to type does not contain me
in future years i will be gone,
al...
Friday 23rd December 2022 11:37 pm
Torn: a poem for Christmas
A raggedy thin cotton dress
On this little girl playing
On this freezing December day.
She’s scorned by her mama,
Left out by her friends,
Deserted by her dad
She's just lonely in the end.
Neglected by the world around her
Little Ellie is plain sad.
The priest says ‘she’s going-on bad’.
So her school calls the doctor,
The doctor calls the nurse,
Torn this and that way,
Little Ellie is...
Friday 23rd December 2022 3:26 pm
For Chris
Your words cast a shadow,
linking the living & the dead,
I will jump across the years,
to reflect your innermost fears,
drag my breathing away from tears.
A passing air at sunset,
a glance across your page,
the heavy thump of midnight,
the dreaming of your grave.
Childhood memories beset you,
drawn from lost time's distant drum,
visions of a time of careless ease,
when you were hav...
Thursday 22nd December 2022 11:16 pm
Collateral damage
He likes this apple, chews,
He was a boxer, a goalkeeper.
His name was Arthur,
Uncle Arthur has a screw loose
The kids chanted
As he traipsed his way home from work.
His filthy tie hung over his chest.
Worn on all occasions
He lived at the behest of his sister
In the smallest room of the house
Now, instead of screaming, he wimpered
When he heard the gatling gun's rapid rattle
...
Tuesday 20th December 2022 10:45 pm
Front man
Like a chess board on ice
Ska
Black and white all around me
To support the striking saris in Willesden
The men of the north, the underground coal men,
Came down to London Town
Stopped to hear the sound of
Ska
Spreading far and wide, away from Harlesden,
And Brixton, and into our souls
Ska
Spread so far.
Even into the graveyard by Rostherne church
Where Chris & I chat and eat our butt...
Tuesday 20th December 2022 12:46 am
Sonnet
I walk my dog, Woody, on a freezing day
He pulls on the lead, he needs to be free, away
Soon, he's outrunning Ned the whippet,
I glance along the forest edge
Up at the skeletal trees
Even the pines decline to leaf for me.
I count my losses - deaths natural
And suicidal. How can I reconcile
Myself to such losses? I do not know.
My beautiful children extend their hands
To me but they are b...
Monday 19th December 2022 10:54 pm
l'Afrique
Bone marrow transplant au Paris,
brutalized eyes in a skull,
a husk of image
in an empty skin,
thin, thin.
Skin as tight as light
as shadows flicker on a man
with eyes like vipers
solemn...slow...the tusk begins to grow.
Limousines shudder, yams decompose,
draining the body fluid
into the sewer beneath.
Tke,Tke....the analysand
above castle stone
in Normandy or Picardy,
th...
Sunday 18th December 2022 7:43 pm
Recovery
Tobacco spills into her tea-stained lap
as she squirms tightly on the chair
in the church hall this cold December evening.
Where to pick up the pieces from?
What to do with them?
She hears the serenity prayer
but cannot remember the story from the chair.
It gets better, they say,
day-by-day-by-day.
Outside,
nobody shakes & fears like she.
Inside, a kind of mad jollity
grips & ...
Saturday 17th December 2022 7:18 pm
A late Easter
On this day of flowers, the animals follow
The usual path of the sun
Ripples coagulate like water,
All manner of things mirror our big brother sun
On this shining Ἀρκαδία of August 1941.
.
Sweet airs fill the breezes
Forgotten summer scents,
O! The billowing of intent
Reed and oak and beech
This beautiful canopy of the living green,
Shimmering in this too bright ...
Saturday 17th December 2022 12:18 am
VICTIM
On this freezing December Thursday.
She sits silently hunched
Over her one-bar electric fire.
Dismal north Manchester light
Seeps through her tightly drawn curtains.
Her entire world was broken
When the burglar came
And will never be the same.
She sips her sweet tea shakily.
She gazes up at the mantllepiece
A young man's face
Looks out of the cracked glass
His face smiles at...
Thursday 15th December 2022 10:20 pm
So heavenly
Pulsing pale waves of mist
Kiss & bless you
I patrol these walkways
Rain seeps through the holes
In my heart, so scared am I
Alone.
Streetlights shine,
Rats scurry into mind.
These are the concrete estates
Of the heart.
Screeching seagulls see
The black holes in the fabric
Torn apart, broken-backed,
We are the twins in the mirror
Looking at each other,
Side-by-side,
With nothing to...
Wednesday 14th December 2022 9:18 pm
CONQUEST: May 29th 1457
Waiting for the barbarians is over:
As whiter shades of pale, pretty traces of lace,
Reveal in opal-luminosity these late Romans,
Their indigo-dream, red with gore on this bloody May Day
Arabian savagery negates their absorption into the timeless
Creation of Constantinople’s drift and swell,
Elysium’s perfumed garden of lucidity broken by
Mehmed’s Turkic desecration, his sweltering road to ...
Wednesday 14th December 2022 9:04 pm
The rags of time
A whole life spent out of kilter
Every day is out of whack
So when the storm hit
And the lights went kerflooey
I was ill-prepared.
There is no going back.
And if a little dreaming is dangerous,
Is the cure to dream more?
Well, I wish you were here: that’s for sure.
On a sad, december day
When all the words that ever were
Just drain away
Leaving me aghast,
Alone, marooned
On ...
Tuesday 13th December 2022 11:21 pm
Morecambe, 1970.
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.
Nick Drake still alive amongst
The flat-lands of Cambridgeshire.
Five leaves left a common currency rolled up
And me the lad from the Nort...
Tuesday 13th December 2022 1:27 am
The dying of the light
___an omen___
Christmas roses bloom in the dying of the light
It’s not a rose; it’s a beautiful buttercup, like the
Yellow marvels we used to use to decide if we
Liked butter or not. Did the yellow reflect upon our
Chin? Those flowers resemble those of the wild rose.
And it’s poisonous to humans. Its scientific name is
Helleborus niger macranthus — enough to ...
Monday 12th December 2022 9:55 pm
The riverboat song
I can hardly speak but I will try
On this cold December evening:
my brain falls silent, still
it is the dying of the light
when a ferment of tenses
leads me up many cold-cut cul de sacs.
I linger on a moonlight-figure
palely mirroring the sparkling frost,
she’s gone but never lost.
Suspicious of the silences within
outside is wild, the colour of blood
sin soaks into the sky...
Sunday 11th December 2022 10:02 pm
Redemption song
“He who kisses joy as it flies by will live in eternity’s sunrise.”
― William Blake
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 and marauding and in the name of God.
True faith links us to childhood innocence
To Wor...
Sunday 11th December 2022 9:33 pm
The Blues
Near is very far
Space, time,
Dark star
Black hole
Wandering soul.
Still
There’s a vastness that appals
Chemotherapy,
White walls.
Scurrying through
The corridors
Of the Christie, this Monday morning
Early,
Meeting Emile, yes, named after Jean Jacque’s eponymous hero.
Married at the weekend, it has spread,
He fears he’ll soon be dead.
His Caribbean lilt
Still
Ech...
Sunday 11th December 2022 12:01 am
An Irish girl
And all the torn envelopes of me came into your hands,
Nothing in them — just love that you could throw away –
You threw it straight back to me, I caught it, we were away.
You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes
For being alive
I thought you are desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t
You were just a girl, I was just a boy
I felt your difference: of mood, of shape and tone
I wa...
Saturday 10th December 2022 11:28 pm
Outfoxing the Furies
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 space and stretching out time
In a flurry of word...
Friday 9th December 2022 11:59 pm
Blind faith
Του μέλλοντος η μέρες στέκοντ' εμπροστά μας
σα μια σειρά κεράκια αναμένα —
χρυσά, ζεστά, και ζωηρά κεράκια.
Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης
What a catastrophe; we are made
for ease, & nice times
when change stays away
& unjust fate just passes us by
encouraging me not to succeed
denying me the hindrances
of trivial habits, like breathing,
and small-mindedness, and indifference
on a col...
Friday 9th December 2022 2:00 pm
A way a lone a last a loved
Paul Léon was murdered in 1942,
For the crime of being born a Jew
In Auschwitz concentration camp,
Oświęcim, Poland.
Paul Léon was James Aloysius Joyce’s friend,
Yes, the Joyce of Dublin & Galway,
Of Trieste, Zurich & Paris,
And, off course, Anna L’Liffey,
She who riverrun on & on,
Even till the Finnegans’ wake.
Joyce had lived in Paris for twenty years
He was so poor but everyt...
Wednesday 7th December 2022 9:31 pm
Am-a-deus
Antonio Salieri, a man of less than monkish virtue, and of very little talent,
Falsely promised the deliverance of Jerusalem from infidel hands,
This was a lie. All his music and words were packed full of lies and thefts.
At the age of 35 Amadeus Mozart fell ill. Mozart was prodigious producing:
Opera buffa such as Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte
Opera seria such as Idomeneo and Die ...
Wednesday 7th December 2022 5:08 pm
Die Zauberflöte
Zoroaster whispered in mine inner-ear:
Look! Listen! Synaesthesia is near!
Fill your eyes with music
Fill your mind with taste
Judge from the plunging depths
To the necklines of lace.
Feel this rise to the screaming heights,
Smell out these plangent declensions.
The silence from the Queen of Night
Or a cacophony of exclamations?
He's soaring, always soaring, he's winging out of ...
Tuesday 6th December 2022 8:56 pm
Light show? No.
a fluorescence of luminescence
gathers to a phosphorescence
of thought control
the music
spreads an arpeggio
of discordance
that enters the soul
like the Via Appia or
any old Roman Road
mixes of music,
cascades of sound,
control
the pulse of the shape
this plastic fantastic
version of summer
the light show
left me cold
I know i’m old
but this fake
‘creation of meani...
Monday 5th December 2022 10:45 pm
Unknown unknowns
open your heart to the misery
of those who live without hope
learn to walk in another’s steps
do not avert your gaze.
give all that you have to give
see with the eyes of a child
learn to not count money,
my friend,
value comes and goes
stay on your toes
count your hours & count your days
minutes, seconds, breaths, ways.
to please is all that you can do
for kindness is the currenc...
Sunday 4th December 2022 9:40 pm
OUR DEEP GUILT
All across the Nineveh plain the lights have gone 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 to the burning wind that came out of Arabia.
Now in Christian villages there are no girls left. All taken.
For the earth and the heavens hav...
Saturday 3rd December 2022 10:25 pm
WHIMSY
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/f-o5Y2byIMg
Saturday 3rd December 2022 10:16 pm
The emperor of meaning
hear the mountains spring back into shape
their brown-blue sides winter lingers in crevices
the weaver of water a tinkle of god
fish screech to water.
nobody’s salty tears fear wars over water
listen to the lap-lap-lapping of the weedy Bure
sadly my song’s whiskey my sadness.
overwhelming my heart slows.
arrhythmia getting worse day-by-day
water peeled of impurity
forms patterns the dr...
Saturday 3rd December 2022 1:27 pm
Policing the language
Do not ask what words mean
Let’s just assume they mean….something.
There’s a putative purpose in words.
You don’t like the implication of this?
Go, go to the palace of protection
They have not the sense nor the innocence
To know what they do when
they restrict free speech or write
a complaint about bad language
Sexist, racist, classic, heterophobic
Such a wokish need to classif...
Thursday 1st December 2022 5:04 pm
A disturbance
Enter my world,
your very presence,
changes everything.
Potentials and propensities
merge, mould, into:
she is not a fixture,
she is a fitting
in my world,
She flutters, flings, flummoxes,
acquires the shape of the word.
eyes sparkle —
as I burn the last volume
of poems.
Eternal signs sigh over the ashes.
Letters tell of nightmares,
stone slabs become monster-statues
created by a...
Wednesday 30th November 2022 6:47 pm
SURVIVAL
The trees are still today
Denuded of leaves
Seemingly apprehensive.
Squirrels gather nuts -
Against the coming storm
The big freeze will fill
The hospitals.
People seek warmth
Seal windows
Door frames
Kicking against disease
Poverty: defences disintegrate
The cold seeps in.
Dogs neglected
Left to fend for themselves.
We begin not to recognize
Any common humanity
Just competitor...
Wednesday 30th November 2022 2:19 am
Poetry or Philosophy?
“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
Or leave it if you dare.”
Songwriters: Philip Lesh / Robert C. Hunter
Philosophy or poetry?Plato preferred philosophy,
He would, being a philosopher.
Poets, of course, are liars by profession,
We endeavour to give an air of truth
To airy nothings.
Poets, like children, personify ideas
Through...
Monday 28th November 2022 9:01 pm
A satire of sorts
As I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life,
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
through the tunnels,
over the wind-swept bridges,
through the sedentary, school-less,
villages of the retired rich
into the heart of my enemies
where hostile witnesses abound
skilled at shaking fists, digging up dirt
spitting out venom and being richly contemptible.
Wi...
Sunday 27th November 2022 6:41 pm
A place of recovery
This is Gorffwysfa, a place of rest,
This is where her recovery began
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was an old Welsh witch,
When sky was black as gold,
She was dragged across a sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold
Lost in the stinking slave ship’s hold.
From the slave ships and from the factories,
From...
Saturday 26th November 2022 11:02 pm
SNOW WHITE STARS
The moon was sad as only the moon can be
Men in tears sought to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with the fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth;
While sobs slide into tears
Remembering the smile of a mother,
On the fortunate day of a first kiss.
The past becomes a magnet,
Drunk with the all the hea...
Friday 25th November 2022 12:05 pm
Suti
Suttee, 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
on this cold delight
of a summer’s night........
their wings sing
but my mind’s not right.......
See the showers spark high
in the flaming air,.........
sizzling on the water
blowing in her hair......
And...
Thursday 24th November 2022 8:11 pm
Lotta Continua.
Let the starving Irish eat their babies.
This modest proposal of Dr Jonathan Swift,
published anonymously in 1729,
displayed considerable prescience
predicting the Great Hunger
the famine, an Drochshaol.
"Black '47" was the worst year
over a million starved to death.
In the south and west - the Gaeltacht -
where the deaths were at their worse.
this attack was also on the Irish lang...
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 8:15 pm
A loving heart is truest wisdom
That’s fair enough – satirists like Swift’d be buggered –
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.
For ...
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 7:35 pm
Gérard Manley Hopkins SJ
On this flaming day in June, with such beautiful pagan mountains rising all around, I felt your uncertain presence in this bastion of the Jesuits.
I listened, and you, doubtless, overheard, disquisitions concerning the nuts and bolts of your poetry
As your real presence crept slowly into my heart, I knew your journey of renunciation saw you washed up on many steep and rocky promontories,
Where ...
Monday 21st November 2022 5:43 pm
Towards the year's midnight
The old gods of the greensward and forests have gone to ground.
Their acolytes burnt, stretched upon the rack, hung, drowned
For century after century until now the druid –in the knowing of the oak –
Is found only in histories, myths and, tales until you walk in the freezing mist
Of a late November night – don’t get squeamish, don’t take fright –
See the land under the moon’s milky light: th...
Sunday 20th November 2022 8:06 pm
The Unpurged Images of Day
In ancient, Roman Byzantium
The King of the moon came looking for me
With blood dripping from his mouth
& a wide toothy smile, as wide as the Bosphorous.
Aristomenos the daughter of Ancient Man.
Will do everything she can to remain Byzantine
But the Ottomans raped and laughed and smoked hashish.
She asked herself what the Greeks said about murder
And refrained. Uttering such-and-suc...
Sunday 20th November 2022 7:55 pm
A Victorian Saturday Night
We was paid of a Saturday night,
Tide us over Sunday morning,
Sunday’s dinner still to be bought
this Saturday evening in November.
Scarves pulled tight against the air
Damp pea-soupers everywhere.
The market was bright, alight
With candles, gas jets, grease lamps,
The fires of the chestnut roasters
Amongst the cacaphony of cries
Traders calling out their wares:
“ Bootiful sea...
Saturday 19th November 2022 6:59 pm
Empty
Ghosts are everywhere
pulses of her heart stopped
in a knot
wraiths chattering
mixing and melding
In this invisible air
oddest number is the one
moments linger in the empty chair
talking to a lady no longer there,
odd that even two is only ever odd 1 + 1
associations carry on until the wood
rots and there are no trees and no ice
and no air and nobody there..
Only the hallow...
Friday 18th November 2022 7:23 pm
Blank slate
Tabula Rasa: blank slate
will take the breath clean out of you,
when you think the implications through
Tabula Rasa: blank slate.
No memory, no desire,
Nothing to bend you in any direction,
Nothing to send you lower or higher
No future envisaged
No prescience required
No past to regret
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-need to speak and no-one to l...
Friday 18th November 2022 6:57 pm
Winter of my Heart
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 past:
Generations of suffering: eyes lifted to a cross,
a c...
Thursday 17th November 2022 11:21 pm
Broken vessel
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 do not know ,
And so cannot even whisper or sigh.
Mountains and sky reflected in water.
The extraordinary ordinary
Among the gol...
Thursday 17th November 2022 11:54 am
A permanent loss of happiness
Upon this beach of ground sand and shells
Come! See the image of the rolling sea.
This n...
Wednesday 16th November 2022 12:42 am
Another place, another time
About the hell that is suicide.
There was a girl with a pearl earring.
Everything fades in time, they say.
Yet, this time and place will never
wither away,
as if nothing ever remains;
after all we shared in early teenage years,
in a particular suburban place.
listlessness discourages me
from composing this time & place.
The sky affects me greatly....
Tuesday 15th November 2022 6:34 pm
DRINKING WHERE THE RIVER BED IS DRY
Charlie and I walked our post-cancer walks
Down this narrow stretch of green in the city
For a full decade.. We aged together
But not like malt, we blended into each other,
Man and Dog. He recognized the smells, me the sights,
And his life was shorter than mine. That afflicts me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that. He connected me to the
Pack, little knowin...
Monday 14th November 2022 7:55 pm
The Swan with two Nicks
We met on the usual terms
Of affectionate endearment
Bred over more than half a century.
Our talk flared into a satisfying silent numbness
Chris talked of what was to be done
Generally nothing, I thought, but I do remember
Chris praising Farage's intervention
On behalf of the persecuted Yezedis of northern Iraq.
You live and learn. Only in this case we didn't. One of us.
...Thursday 10th November 2022 4:29 pm
icons of the sun
To switch climates is not to switch allegiances. We drove them out of the temples, the money lenders
The souls of the murdered did not die at all.
The land around the Mediterranean bloomed
With blood remembered by the poets sporadically
The simmering of the sea this November morning
Supposes war in the east will lack the vigor to stain
The hot sea red as the ghosts of ungh...
Tuesday 8th November 2022 11:55 pm
Al Andalusia
Arabic spoken in Al-andalus
after 400 years of the inquisition.
Muslim houses in Bosnian villages
with crosses on display
despite the threat of apostacy.
"And slay them wherever ye find them."
morning fresh as one –
the Buddha knew –
the flowers of the valley
the grasses of the plain
shine with the unbidden light of heaven
and nothing shall remain.
This is still the truth
no ...
Sunday 6th November 2022 12:21 am
As I rise, so will I burn
I cut the sky, and heaven cries,
I gallop yet can never escape.
Killers drove me off my land
Despatched me onto a death march
One thousand miles of desert.
Pillagers followed our route
Stealing our goats, our women
Our children.
Abused bodies thrown into ditches.
The Turkish infantry...
Thursday 3rd November 2022 7:29 pm
DAY OF THE DEAD - November 2, 2022
Wind cuts through this January night
Slices like a knife through my meagre clothes.
Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog
The cry of the wind is all in vain
Nothing is the same.
I kiss you across this black hole in time.
In the old be-jewelled spider-webbed
Way we kissed tender to kiss long,
Frost-filled graveyard-remains
For the happily insane, a song.
Yew trees shadow against the moo...
Wednesday 2nd November 2022 9:05 pm
A sort of remembrance
No foot marks in the sand
To mark my passage.
No disturbance in the air.
I cry and grieve and cherish
My face immobile, as I stare
Out at stormy autumn.
O! living through November
Demands a certain flair.
Foggy bafflements afflict me everywhere,
Pea-soupers some might say,
And as I gaze beyond the moon
I swoon into another dismal November day.
Monday 31st October 2022 10:13 pm
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
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...
Monday 31st October 2022 9:51 pm
BEGGAR
Baffling how I came to be a pauper, I thought,
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not real home. Everything changed.
Belfast, The Falklands, Belize, Operation Desert Storm
See a doctor some said,
“I’ll be reet” I say, “after a bit.”
Even here: No-go, No-Irish, No-squaddies
The Falls, Free Derry, Shankhill, South Armagh, New...
Sunday 30th October 2022 5:23 pm
Paralysis
Snow... lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The Dead, Dubliners, James Joyce
Paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of empath...
Sunday 30th October 2022 12:02 am
The sullen dead
In England’s fields no poppies grow,
Chemical fertilisers have seen to that,
The land is still owned by the feudal rich
And the larks, still, sometimes, bravely, sing
Scarce heard amid empty political posturings..
No-one listens to the 'glorious" dead. Lip service instead.
When the ‘great and good’ pretend to remember
They dont recall the ordinary Tommy Atkins like my granddad, Jack Princ...
Saturday 29th October 2022 1:00 am
Charlotte
soft and steady rhythm of a baby
breathing
her gaze tells us all we need to know
her footsteps tender in the snow;
the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window
considering all we do not know
or understand, we stand hand-in-hand
under this beautiful harvest moon
Wednesday 26th October 2022 7:55 pm
The Armenian genocide 1913 - 1923
Tuesday 25th October 2022 1:22 am
Late November
Damp air, sticky, misty horizon,
stiff mud under foot, scarves
pulled tight, gloved
in the greenwood
stripped with leaves
of snow.
All I remember
are the neutral tones
of a beery afternoon,
long ago. Chris knew
all the names, Latin &
vernacular, of the plants
& birds of the Cheshire
plain. Nobody came &
nobody went as we
marched into the 1970s
with such thoughtless tr...
Sunday 23rd October 2022 5:04 pm
Coincidence
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 cannot possibly pull.
To the delight of...
Saturday 22nd October 2022 10:37 pm
BOWIE
In the apple market
your south London twang
accompanied the many undulations
of time.
Your wild androgyny
mirrored 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 imaginations
breeding rainbows
ov...
Saturday 22nd October 2022 6:24 pm
Kaddish
The night was gilded, obscure
hidden above the suspicious gleams
Shadows I see from my window,
unclean, unclear, in straightened circumstances.
From the road came the drunken shouts
of those who hung about not knowing
the family in the house were grieving.
The voices in the house were hushed
rendering the mour...
Friday 21st October 2022 10:20 pm
The summer of love
Somewhere between these avenues of dereliction straddling the moon and new york city, avoiding the fairground detritus of half-remembered dreams. I awoke, sleeping with her together in her dad's caravan, at the bottom of the garden, amidst the rhubarb where I fell in love.
Smoking joints with red leb scored from placid dealers, drinking orange juice in pubs, astounding the upstanding patrons w...
Monday 17th October 2022 11:37 pm
Uneasy words
We grab our words from thin air
Drag words up from the wriggling earth
Such unearthly digressions infect even
The connotations of our words, like ripples dripping from a stone,
We veer further from home than we ever thought
Possible. We grow to loathe ourself and
Our empty suggestibility. Something must last.
We stumble back to denotation, to shared
Meanings we so blithely deny: the eart...
Sunday 16th October 2022 8:21 pm
......early onset
The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees have no leaves
outside it is very cold
the wind is cruel.
there is a person
in front of me
i don’t know who it is.
I remember playing out
with my sisters
on a skipping rope,
playing hop-scotch
on the pavement.
It is cold inside too,
that lady told me it is morning,
maybe that is why I stretch and yawn
like a cat, I like cats.
Th...
Saturday 15th October 2022 7:28 pm
Be-witched
Low hung ample apples of the sun
On the tree of knowledge. Right next to me.
Enough for you, enough for me.
Extends my irresolution.
I need to hear the crashing of the sea
to believe in me
to mercilessly set me free from these unghosted unknown
unknowns that hover on this edge
of consciousness, always out of reach,
the sublime sublimity,
of that extra sensory pe...
Friday 14th October 2022 11:14 pm
A wise fool
Bewildered, by all the things he left unsaid
Serendipity, chances cut dead:
I am wise enough to play the fool.
This vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light
Memory cuts through this taut, damp cold
Slices through me like a knife
Signs hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
A life lived in vain....nothing the same
Across a bla...
Thursday 13th October 2022 11:08 pm
Bonfire Night
i.m. of Guido Fawkes, (born 1570, York, England—died January 31, 1606, London - Hanged, drawn and quartered.
Red-hot fire engines fly by like hot whirlwinds,
Squawking burning red machines
The brilliance of a sheen made not to burn,
Hot dragon breath in the fog
A red fire has engulfed the country
Gunpowder, treason & plot
Take care of my money! Take care of my family!
Red horses once set...
Tuesday 11th October 2022 8:24 pm
Mocking Bird
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. . That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Harper Lee, 'To kill a mocking bird.'
How jealousy and envy
Remain a deadly threat
Generation after generation
Beget after beget.
He had the ease and simple grace
Of a man who's never out of place
I loved this man who’s died
That cannot be lied about
That cannot be d...
Tuesday 11th October 2022 11:30 am
Music to eat by
Flavours of sweetness
spices of life,
another place, another time
innocent tastes of love-on-the-vine
tangle on my palate,
mingle in the air,
no longer alone, no longer there
abiding in the cynic’s lair? No, she’s not there
cross seas, forks, knives, stay alive,
thrive with your three eyes,
a pasty present for the future
we done us best when we wus let,
thinking sent me all to...
Saturday 8th October 2022 8:02 pm
All Souls' day
It is a time of wind and rain.
And in the green wood
The voices of the dead
Coagulate and skim
This edge of consciousness.
It is a time of heavy-hearted dread.
It is the day of the dead.
And what have we done
Since the last, lingering death?
Nothing, nada, no.
The wicked still prosper,
And the rich come and go
And the world spins the same
As ever it did before
And the poor are as the...
Thursday 6th October 2022 11:25 pm
Cavalier
Your vernacular usage is privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity.
Democracy. That’s fair enough I suppose. S’far as it goes.
Gather to a greatness: the ooze, ooze of oil. Toil. Toil.
Endless gold and land form the sinews of war you say
Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law you say
No one is...
Thursday 6th October 2022 8:11 pm
De Profundis
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Gerard Manley-Hopkins, 'The Terrible Sonnets'
Out of the depths it came
I didn't just lose my friend once
I lose him many times still:
at every waking
at every pause in the day
every time I look at the sky -
with you no longer beneath it -
Or, I look do...
Wednesday 5th October 2022 7:59 pm
The Fall
The day has eyes. The night has ears;
the monster within, unbidden tears.
Think you’re escaping,
run into yourself, bang;
longest way round, shortest way home.
T’was the night before All Souls
dark and cold and dreary.
Full, dark, black, night.
For lettered and for unlettered alike.
Fear the roaring of the skies,
tremble at the dying of the light;
fear seeps from miasmic g...
Tuesday 4th October 2022 5:41 pm
The way of the cloud
(For Tom)
But please, remember me fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then they went on to say that the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti. Sam Beam
In every mouthful of food
In every look of love
In every chiding and every making up:
This sometimes bay of tranquillity,
This harbour to which we return,
Thi...
Monday 3rd October 2022 5:12 pm
A recreation
The majesty of dogs impresses us –
Their solitary solidarity –
Yet above their grey horizons
There is always the promise, lingering…
Of continuing.
These days an ending is assumed
That glorifies the story of our lives:
Making children, seeing things,
Listening to the waves wash the pebbles,
Overhearing our hearts’ desires.
Yesterday the sky darkened at noon
Seas sp...
Saturday 1st October 2022 10:32 pm
A splinter from Armenia
By the Turks who roamed into another killing season
Hungry for blood. The Turk kicked his stirrup,
As our mud baked walls crumbled.
I wanted to rub the horse i...
Saturday 1st October 2022 4:10 pm
An opal luminosity
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 goodb...
Tuesday 27th September 2022 8:43 pm
The blossoming of the north
First light: every day a new beginning
Rising at the crack of dawn
To feel the air against my skin
To walk, with the aid of a stick,
To listen to the dawn chorus.
Thrillingly, it’s already late September
A year since the funerals started
On St Patrick’s Day,
When madness brushed with death.
Now, I’m thinking that when I return
Home with Charlie I’ll rea...
Monday 26th September 2022 8:51 pm
Alternative histories
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
On 29 May 1453 the Greek Christian city of Constantinople finally fell to Muslim armies. At least 4 million Christian Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, who had resisted conversion to Islam for 500 years, survivors of the Byzantines, were slaughtered by the Turks, many in the early C20. Now there are 2000 Christians in Constantinople and 15 million Muslims.
I...
Friday 23rd September 2022 10:58 pm
Unholy
The pungent smell of tar sends me back
To summer days spent wending my time away
Spraying tar on the M62.
As dandelions parodied the gaudy sun
And the pebbles in my pants
Were reserved for having fun by skimming water.
In the dark church heavy incense
Melds with the body odour of the priest
Sweating for his immortal soul
While mixing an amorous alcoholic liquid on the altar.
Di...
Wednesday 21st September 2022 11:30 pm
Homage to Nietzsche
to be able to give birth to a dancing star." Frederick Nietzsche
Now, only the vestiges remain:
Conduct a forensic examination,
Scatter the remains
Are they the same?
See the fragility of the body,
In the furtherance of the truth,
Note the devil’s-in-the-detail.
We are condemned at the root.
A roof for his daughter,
Over a precipic...
Wednesday 21st September 2022 8:13 pm
Sheer lunacy
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent. RD Laing
In the bloody water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through her skull, a technique called trephination.
She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy, and their suspicions.
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to...
Tuesday 20th September 2022 2:10 pm
AGNUS DEI
We on this northern isle
Are not given to violent
Demonstrations of grief
more a steady drizzle of sadness.
Buttoned up we may be,
But in straightened
Circumstances, we are not.
We are amply provided
With history. We recollect
Emotion in tranquillity.
We know in our bones
That nothing remains
The same. We press on
Into an uncertain future.
We are rarely divided
Against ourselves...
Monday 19th September 2022 4:52 pm
Glance, glimpse, gleam
Following up
the flippancy of flowers
I recall why metaphors are rare
In our neck of the woods.
There are no smilies - implied or crucified -
for death
Nothing like or as, except perhaps
An emptiness that remains
Empty of content, direction, frivolity.
In the turning of the leaves
We have a half-metaphor for a half-life
Spent well or spent badly but mainly
Just spent. It is ...
Sunday 18th September 2022 6:48 pm
Tired starlings
It's not as if I wanted any thing
I didn't ask for a thing
I just liked my life
My mam and dad
And never feeling sad.
I remembered 'Clapton is God'
Sprayed all over the wall ~
Of a Conservative town hall
but nothing changed
Money had its way
And everything had to have a purpose.
My friends;
Some stayed the course
Others committed suicide
Before they were hardly alive
M...
Sunday 18th September 2022 12:13 am
Fear in a handful of dust
Words cannot echo mood,
It is impossible to convey
The tingling numbnesses
Of grief.
She died today - not yesterday -
A young woman: ordinary, happy, ill.
The semi-detached daze
Of an icy clinging depression;
The tight closing-in upon oneself
That foreshadows pent up tears.
And years of fighting to be well
Despite the fear that accompanies
Nearly everythin...
Friday 16th September 2022 11:11 pm
The Resurrection of the Dead
Dukkha-Torah
The unbidden tears
The trembling in the heart
Human life conducted in the dark
The hidden fears
The inconsolable grief
Many fear-filled years
A craving for permanence
For the enduring stillness
Of the Sea of Galilee.
But walk instead with me
To the tomb of Maimonides:
Why do the wicked prosper?
Why do the righteous die?
Answer came there none
Except in the Song...
Thursday 15th September 2022 10:26 pm
Epiphany
I weep in the midst of the lack of thee
On stranger days than this or foul.
I am no shepherd, no modern Maccabee,
No Mayflower set to sail the broad Atlantic
Nor a hermit glued to the sacred mountain.
Just a man who trembles in fear.
The brave do not evade fear,
Do not live a half-life, but confront
& overcome time's mischief.
I will not find you in mountains or valleys
You no longer...
Wednesday 14th September 2022 2:37 pm
Rainy September
(for my friend Chris)
This rose for all the world
for you
These tears for all the dead,
Those empty words of morningtide
This ever-present dread.
Those cloying smells of perfume
on the dresses of the rich,
This workman stumbling homeward
his body in a ditch.
September’s moon still shining
on this old planet’s doom,
Her wind and tide conspiring,
a chill invades the room.
h...
Monday 12th September 2022 7:54 pm
Konstantinoupolis
In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.
From whom the bell tolls?
The supine man, the moon-mad man?
And when will you come?
Mistress Moon, a sleek an...
Monday 12th September 2022 5:23 pm
A sort of virtue: Θάρρος thárros
You cannot answer the immaculate conception
That would be to enter the mind of God. Our job
Is to pick up the scattered remains
Of existence in the liquidity of eyes.
We no longer have contact with horses
Though we can learn much from dogs
From their courage and virtue
We must feed the furry furnaces
Of life. Taste the coldness of water
Do not limit our hearts to vague
Emasculat...
Sunday 11th September 2022 3:45 pm
Where I'm from
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...
Friday 9th September 2022 10:46 pm
Patriotic
Devotion to and vigorous support for one's country
is fair enough, as far as it goes, I suppose,
unless you consider the whole world to be my
country. Then it's a different matter.
The lexicon of patriotism is narrow
clipped, incomplete. Feudal relations
in the twenty-first century. Remember
these House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
can turn a trick and that's for sure.
I hate the fawni...
Friday 9th September 2022 10:08 pm
Wind-blown
Moments of the past do not last
kicked into the long grass
a warm early-summer’s day
golden petals reflecting sun.
Then stormy-autumn come
later flurries of snow melted
by body heat.
Frozen snow comes and goes
frosting tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
leaves crisp-crackle underfoot
old ghosts lose their threads
again.
Pot-heads fragile, thin, with thi...
Thursday 8th September 2022 10:20 pm
The biggest council estate in Europe
This were where I grewed up
in the 50s
when Manchester were a building site
slums and bomb sites
and jobs galore
mekin ends meet
me mam
frittered money away -
or so I heard me dad say
on cake and such like
extravagances
or so I gathered
listening t'rows
when I were lying in bed
awake at night
and when she left
fer a week
sick n tired of it all
us kids had mince n stewed pea...
Tuesday 6th September 2022 7:50 pm
Between
intention & accomplishment
there lies a shadow
cast by stone
& heavy with adumbrations
& in the heat
of the city street
we hear a murmur
that rises to a crescendo
something will endure
if only these sails
made of stone
Listen! hear them now
these echoes of a
futurity
cast by these shadows
into the raging sea of runes.
https://youtu.be/3r-qDvD3F3c
Monday 5th September 2022 6:16 pm
Half-term
All five at home and me
dividing my time, this way and that
trying to love the teenager with that
same tenderness I felt when she was two
I see her now sitting cross-legged
gazing at the asian children’s saris
the only white girl in the playgroup
Now rave music blasts me from her room
too soon she’ll be leaving home,
dressed in black, with bronzed hair,
and crying for her brother
...
Monday 5th September 2022 4:40 pm
EARLY MORNING INNER CITY
As the dawn whitens hazily, the baby sleeps,
the house falls quiet
with breath
this is the time I love the best
before the busy scratchings of the day
the makings-do
scatter my thin dreams
night is different, with all its smoky gleams,
now is the time of the cat
silently purring
the trees full-leaved still, the grass long, bedewed,
shadows on these city streets
meet the moontime...
Saturday 3rd September 2022 7:42 pm
The photograph
Linked arms, looking into the future,
my three daughters, in jim-jams,
bought from Sunday markets,
off the Thame Road, near Oxford,
their beautiful young faces
pictures of a world
imbued with all the scattered sadnesses of time,
or so rhymes this over-flowing mind of mine.
Looking, seeing,
you three, as you never can be again,
with all the holy blemishes of youth
leaves me here be...
Friday 2nd September 2022 12:11 am
PROSE & CONS
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
― Adrienne Rich
Time lies on a man
beautifully, obscenely,
so he imagines outside seasons pass
the rituals of daily life fade
in this thin inside rain
no excursions, no cats,
just this stinking fucking cell.
Del's prescribed,
grossed up under a grey blanket,
his own peculiar so...
Thursday 1st September 2022 8:12 pm
Against the Grain
These trees have no source of income
beyond the earth
and the sun.
They are the living sculptures
of this world:
now they are being felled, felled
as in Binsey, long ago,
by all those busy builders -
builders of roads to nowhere
roads to ruin
despoilers of the shadows, times, places.
'Candelabrum' April 1997.
https://youtu.be/No5FkAmTaJY
Wednesday 31st August 2022 8:44 pm
A promissory note
“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” James Baldwin, ‘The Fire Next Time’
They say love pays no bills
That love cannot live with caution
That passion is akin to madness
That love is firm and never jealous.
That love is a many-splendid thing
That requires no ring
Nor note of affirmation.
Love is the most unknown of unknowns
...
Tuesday 30th August 2022 9:52 pm
The dictatorship of the bureaucrats
people wait with an air of frustration.
This functionay loves his power
to make people wait,
to make people wait for pieces
of paper necessary to live.
some sway and smell of drink,
others stink of sweat with holes in their clothes.
A woman is beginning ...
Sunday 28th August 2022 8:13 pm
Russia is burning
Western propaganda never varies
Blame Russia, not the Fascists.
Anna Akhmatova lived through
The Great Patriotic War
Knew all about the Ukrainian
14th Waffen Grenadier Division
of the SS (1st Galician)
The 26 million Soviet dead
Required to defeat the Fascists.
For Anna Akhmatova the Red Army
Defended the Russian language
as well as Russian soil
Poems written by Red Army soldi...
Saturday 27th August 2022 11:13 pm
The Stolen Child
I remember falling as a child
And being lifted by a fairy-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 fairy wings that brush our faces
Like spiders’ webs or shimmering laces.
Such magical, lovely, lonely things,.
A rustle in the wind remi...
Saturday 27th August 2022 10:43 pm
My hero!
I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes —
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live — like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But t...
Saturday 27th August 2022 6:55 pm
Along the unhallowed way
This man pushes this other man in a wheelchair
Down a dreary Salford road, avoiding kerbs, talking
Always talking, talking of nothing, thinking of everything,
What it takes and never gives back. The load.
With wheels of fire and halos running all amuck
These two desperados meander along past
The pound shops, the bookies and the booze 24/7ers
They know all these places very well. ...
Friday 26th August 2022 11:07 pm
Winter is coming
We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the 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-end,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into the past:
Generations of suffering:
eyes lifted to a cross, a cresce...
Friday 26th August 2022 10:50 pm
Rambling
An echo of the half-known, returned to me
rambling, aimlessly
something from youth
from the fields
until the light froze
And I looked down from a tree
At me, fifty years ago,
as I drifted gloomily —
seeking to change my mind
by learning to love
but there was little street traffic
and I had no money for the shops.
I took the memory in hand and read it again.
Nothing lasts long,...
Wednesday 24th August 2022 9:43 pm
Sneachta bán i Luimneach
Bhí an ghealach brónach mar ní féidir ach an ghealach a bheith,
Féachann fir agus iad i ndeora le teitheadh ó thromluí a saoil
Aislingíonn muid gur féidir linn plúchadh leis na méara
Suaimhneas na bláthanna, doimhneacht chuimhneacháin,
Comrádaíocht na madraí,
Comhláine breithe beo;
Sleamhnaíonn sobs bán isteach inár gcluasa
Ag cuimhneamh ar aoibh gháire mo mháthair,
Ar an t-ádh lá dár gcéa...
Wednesday 24th August 2022 12:03 am
Snow white in Limerick
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 the fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The comradeship of dogs,
The completeness of a live birth;
White sobs slide into our ears
Remembering the smile of my mother,
On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past is a magnet, a mongrel
...
Tuesday 23rd August 2022 11:45 pm
An Aphrodite night
When sadnesses besiege you:
At the dying of the light
And starlight illuminates
The ending of the day,
Then star-crossed lovers
Quietly drift away;
Sigh silently out of sight
Of mirror, water, eyes'-delight
You will find humankind
lose their disguise....
We spin and whirl and echo,
and dance with hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch and Wicca, Wizard
night and day....
We sw...
Tuesday 23rd August 2022 4:52 pm
A Withering
Coldly comatosed
With the warps and wefts
of a wasting away.
The body afflicted with decay
O!, I say, I say. the hey-ho way of the live-long-day.
Whatever has lived will
wither, languish, and decay.
time pines us away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget
who did the damage.
No transubstantiation this,
No move into immortal ...
Monday 22nd August 2022 5:05 pm
The turbulence of a dalliance
echo in the brain,
costermongers just the same
costard a medieval variety of apple
and the monger is the seller.
In plain sight.
Words we remember,
echo in the brain,
bounce off the surfaces:
so few will remain.
Wind's around the window pane,
blowing a northerly gale
next day is a Sunday
a peasouper, then a gale
rain-splatters the coster
no love sorry, s...
Sunday 21st August 2022 9:28 pm
An essential melancholy
the may flower is out
and a warm wind
storms along
the coast;
twilight
gathers shadows
into the sea,
the night
swells, heavy
with anticipation;
far away
blows
a whale,
a candle
throws shadows
on these pages
where the light
infantry
march along,
whistling
a cheerful
song,
wink
at the pretty girls,
who shake their ribbons
and their curls,
so fleetingly.
https://youtu.be/...
Saturday 20th August 2022 1:12 am
Hiraeth
Hiraeth is a Welsh word with no precise English synonym or equivalent. I take it to mean a form of spiritual desolation formed by a nostalgia for a home we never had. How life was before the fall from grace and into the realm of mortality. A pre-lapsarian sense of the beauty of the garden of Eden: a time out of time, and a place out of place. I think it describes a widespread sense of spiritual h...
Thursday 18th August 2022 5:33 pm
Holy Brokenness
Missing the wildness of my former self
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, waiting for the muse to catch up
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode so
violently that I catch myself thinking this
is an all an act to compensate for that time
my friend climbed that tree before disappearing
to japan for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true
that an apple blossomed, flash ...
Wednesday 17th August 2022 12:14 am
brittle beauty
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 19January 1547)
open your heart to the grateful dead
to those who choose to live instead
learn to walk in another man's shoes
learn not to avert your gaze
when all the world is...
Monday 15th August 2022 8:50 pm
SKIN IS WEARING THIN
Long in the tooth, but not sharp at all
They snarl at each other
As they queue in the supermarket
For the bargains.
Of the wild animals
They abuse, flay alive, eat.
Dogs, chimps, lions, gazelle.
Any living thing on their road to hell.
They seek to inflame each other
By their diseased ...
Saturday 13th August 2022 8:38 pm
A rare descent
Sitting in an apple tree,
Purloining space and time,
A wee robin redbreast
Viewed from behind.
Doing what a robin does best:
Pecking, as it ruffles, as it sings;
Scattering rain drops all around
The robin expects nothing
from this frozen ground.
Even in the soaking rain
Such sights and sounds astound me.
Nothing is as iridescent as this robin
He doesnt need snow, and he does...
Saturday 13th August 2022 5:43 pm
A sophomore sky
The sky was pink that evening.
blotches of an adamantine brittleness
spread slowly all across the Cheshire plain,
all over the acres and acres of rich pickings.
The quarter moon waxes to the right
behind my back, and out of sight
a grove of black,spidery trees
squeezes into the skeletal-freeze.
Putting me in mind of a MR James story
of an unrequited remonstrance
or an undeserved...
Friday 12th August 2022 7:28 pm
No place for love
"The child was declared dead at Gaza's Shifa hospital, and the health ministry said she suffocated after inhaling tear gas." Financial Times.
At any turning of any year
we confront an unholy nexus of fear,
solstice, equinox; apex or nadir.
We must ride a crest of darkness,
accept a drunkard's kiss
as the sun squats toad-like on the far horizon.
O! this squandered life
...
Thursday 11th August 2022 4:46 pm
Stewardship
On these heatwave days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
A place of much deprivation;
~ of a molested nature,
that screams in iron traps
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death in agony.
Will nature continue to be abused
in a museum devoted to the shadows
of a past that did not last?
To a life of sand built on the pursuit of superfluity?
To the end of everything?
To the c...
Wednesday 10th August 2022 10:44 pm
The speech of angels
“Without music, life would be a mistake” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
A waterfall of notes, rising and falling,
Splashing into mind, heart, soul.
Music will never grow old.
Arpeggio series of broken chords rising descending
Into and out of order. Plunging into minor keys, rising into waves of luminosity.
Notes that compose a chord are played or sung in a rising or descending order.
...
Tuesday 9th August 2022 10:36 pm
Christmas roses
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 weave their ...
Monday 8th August 2022 10:17 pm
Анна Ахматова
I want to smell the tender roses,
Before their petals droop and fall
In that one garden in St Petersburg
The most beautiful city in holy Russia
In the whole world this city stands out
There statues will remember me when I was young
And I remember them all beside the river Neva.
In the fragrant silence between the Tsars and Putin
I have changed form
No longer a young woman fu...
Monday 8th August 2022 4:19 pm
WAITING FOR NOVEMBER
His headstone verses were writ in wine
To draw the eyes unto the fact of death.
Lichen lines love-and-only-love remembers.
All, all, we knew was eyes of deepest blue
This good man’s eyes writ in blood
Mortal love will always end like this. Time
Weathers the stonemason’s art to a flat palimpsest
Of hieroglyphics which resemble not the zest
Of pumping blood. Stones do not record the passing
...
Monday 8th August 2022 12:40 pm
Winter is Coming
We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Soon the dark lights of Christmastide will afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of Time,
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations, slip into a past that does not last:
Generations of suffering: eyes lifte...
Saturday 6th August 2022 11:27 pm
Incident
I was listening to one~
Of my favourite songs
When I heard the siren.
Not again.
Those dogs who love the rain
And chasing trains
Come to me unbidden
On a night of danger
When the power of the state
keeps me late for dinner
And I get angry and then laugh
At the silly cop who would not
Fuck off when I told him he had
No right to search my car without
Pre-existing evidence. Petty-minded
...
Friday 5th August 2022 10:13 pm
The RUINS of NINEVEH
Friday 5th August 2022 7:32 pm
SOLVING
Dedicated to all the western volunteers who have fought and died with the Kurdish YPG to defend the Yezedis and to resist Daesh and their allies, the NATO-supported Islamist Turks. Aidan James, 27, was the second Briton to face terrorist charges after travelling to join the Syrian Kurdish YPG.
The Ezedi
Survived 74 attempts at genocide
By their neighbours, the Sunni tribes
But, tha...
Thursday 4th August 2022 2:04 pm
Anniversary of a genocide
Winter on Mount Sinjar, Iraq,
On August 3rd 2014,
by the Christian calendar.
That year lasted forever:
Such a long, long time,
Our mouths expelled a hidden heat,
It was the soul of the Ezedi.
Never before has the sun
Filled us so full of tears.
The Muslim torturers arrived in the night
Stole our daughters, killed our sons
These Salafist devils were having fun.
Now we sing...
Thursday 4th August 2022 12:50 am
Far Away
I once wanted poetry to tell something of me.....
But I don't think that can happen now
I have revised my opinion of my intent
Truly, I'm just passing through these clouds of rain.
That's how meaning faded away from me...
As if nothing remained, I bask in uncluutered no-memories
Because far away, truly far-far away, when I was young,
Wednesday 3rd August 2022 2:37 pm
Pressure on the NHS
She cried as if she was three again
This competent, clever, caring woman:
Her practice all-emergency work now: depression, deserted children, suicide dead souls,
Spice, Meth, Horse, Charlie, Booze, Weed, E.
Foul defilement, rape, violence, wounds,
scarred for life.
People living in fear
Do you hear?
People too scared to fall asleep!! Too scared to call the police. Who neve...
Tuesday 2nd August 2022 3:04 pm
Haunted
When the last motes of sunshine
Leave my crippled eyes
On this sunny beach at twilight
There's no disguise
And that's when the haunting will arise
And that's when your absence
Dies.
And everything you made anew
And I never cried like this for you
Not during cancer, not during sepsis.
Only when that final ring of bells
Disturbs the dust
On the stonemason's art .
Perfectly timed
To...
Tuesday 2nd August 2022 12:38 pm
circus mirror
pale waves of mist
kiss & bless you & I
as we patrol these walkways in the sky
rain seeps through holes
In my heart, so scared am I
here, alone with you
streetlights shine,
lab rats scurry into mind,
straight into these concrete estates
of the heart
screeching seagulls shit freely
through black holes in the fabric
torn apart, broken-backed,
dead fat twins in the mirror
look ...
Monday 1st August 2022 12:35 am
Ten words to save a life
Zen again
There's.....
A
Two-footed snake.
Me?
You?
Human zoo.
https://youtu.be/LOGmE7bKH8c
Sunday 31st July 2022 10:42 pm
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