Where the clover whitens
Moments of the past, do not last
memories kicked into the long grass:
a warm early-summer’s day
golden petals, white clover.
Stormy-autumn comes
with flurries of snow
the dead of winter
catches body heat
in frozen snow
tumbling into slushy heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
old ghosts lose their threads
pot-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes t...
Saturday 30th December 2023 7:16 pm
ONLY CONNECT
The sting of the wind
On this cold december day
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work
On early shift.
This connection, now, is
Deep, sunk in the blood,
In all that I mean
When I say these words
In tones that rhyme.
Words that would’ve
Carried meaning still
In those cold, hungry days
When this same old
Northern sky
Still pleased the eye ...
Thursday 28th December 2023 6:49 pm
Nothing more
Calling time on the cinema queue
instead, we let our dreams come true
in the pub
it was the evening of the day
fervourless
and blue....
I still had you
we gave up on our one chance
of silence, it is true
who knows where the time went to?
Time enhances you.
so, we wound up
like we always knew we’d do:
bruised black and bruised blue
carving out a place a-new.
https://youtu.b...
Tuesday 26th December 2023 9:19 pm
The Bridge
Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash
The regiment of day
cannot drift away,
back to the cancer hospital
back to the chemo and the radio
and injections in vain,
nothing in my brain.
It’s your loved
pnes take the strain
I recall Emile, yes,
named after Rousseau’s
eponymous hero. He hoped
it had not spread.
Married at the weekend, his Caribbean
lilt still echoes in my ...
Tuesday 26th December 2023 9:07 pm
Born in Gaza
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain? Pink Floyd
In Gaza's ancient town, a tale unfolds,
A journey of love, as the prophecy foretold,
Yusuf, faithful and true, with Maryam by his side,
Embarked on a quest, filled with hope and pride.
To be registered they went, with hearts full of grace,
Maryam, carrying a child, love glowing on her face,
Amidst the...
Wednesday 20th December 2023 1:39 pm
Song for the old year
Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash
Redemption comes at such a cost
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost — loss pressing on loss —
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly so carelessly,
And we know it costs them their whole life
To fly this way and sing and eat and build and build.
Yet still this merel...
Tuesday 19th December 2023 8:22 pm
SUBSCRIBE
‘to a meadow only to a meadow’
Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash
I wish that I knew from the very start
Which mountain the sun came from
For your eyes can be deceiving in rain
Fountains are rain corralled and I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. A servitude of roses.
In which green bay the rolling sea spy on me
That’s deep, but it aint at all clear. Like seawater,
Lagoons on...
Monday 18th December 2023 11:05 pm
A late flowering
On this day of flowers, the animals follow
The usual path of the sun
Ripples coagulate like blood,
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 light.
Thunder c...
Sunday 17th December 2023 7:21 pm
For when I am weak, then am I strong
I lack the muse's command of cadences and tones,
Sometimes words tumble from my mouth like grain,
At other times words need to be pulled like teeth.
When I sit down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day,
I weep because of the curse I carry,
The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.
I cannot sing the songs of the Lor...
Friday 15th December 2023 7:06 pm
Careless love
The power of purpose, it weaves through the air,
With intention, its design is a snare,
The careful and tidy, their minds are so dull,
They forget to remember the graveyards are full.
Oh, just how does purpose weave its magic today?
It strikes with intention, it wont fade away.
For even the most careless, wandering tinker,
Knows in his heart, life’s a real stinker.
The actor, care...
Sunday 10th December 2023 8:38 pm
The speed of the sound of self-isolation
The sky is clear today with streaks of blue
the supermoon with all its lunar perigee
swirls in the sky reflecting sombre horizons;
Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
over the hills, conspiring in their usual
ragged silence. In front of me are dreary
trees laid bare, a mist of water in the air.
Streets deserted, folk driven inside by covid
I’m not yet caught cough, cough, coughing —
m...
Saturday 9th December 2023 8:53 pm
Seeing Things
Moments of Vision fade away
But a magical moment is, here, today;
And all it will cost you,
Is all of your life.
Cast over the sea
And cast over the moon
She'll be reading the stars
While you're reading the runes.
Green shades, dappled sunlight,
The landscapes of the eye,
As moment follows moment,
A life passing by.
The primal scream of silence
Modulated, nuanced, on t...
Friday 8th December 2023 9:32 pm
A pantheist's yuletide
Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Shine on the people of this world.
Let them recall the smells of spring
On cold and drear December days.
And let them hear the baby’s cry,
That all the hounds of hell defy,
And give them all the boons of love –
For love is really all we are –
The tiny gestures – the glance, the word –
That will in memory reoccur.
And deep amidst the fears of nigh...
Wednesday 6th December 2023 6:24 pm
Written at a time of great cruelty and deceit
a gift from the multitude of stars
blessed with both heart and soul:
you shall not grow old.
Not I.
Love is too often hoarded, accumulated, squirreled away:
like money, jewels, power, prestige.
Cruelty persists.
at night I can be at pea...
Tuesday 5th December 2023 5:01 pm
Thunder storm
Crack thunder over head
flash crackle of lightning
nothing the gods said:
Stretch your words across the sky
illuminate the stark, skeletal
trees of a northern winter
Rumble roar-nothing-fled
echo, reverberate,
all around my desperate head,
Hidden clouds drop hail-rain
like frozen tears pelting down
on a world turning dead and lonely
With a clownish frown
on a world tumblin...
Saturday 2nd December 2023 5:04 pm
Late November
Let’s away to the mountains
to the music of loss when elegy-tossed
the sun above us burns mists away
as we walk back to the valley of youth.
Today, I walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just above the far-horizons of sight,
no closer after five days of tramping the fields;
I keep going and going whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just keep heading
for the rising sun or the waning...
Tuesday 28th November 2023 7:17 pm
SUMMER TIME
a hot, still July afternoon
silence unbroken.
through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass
heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable
it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay
and autumn, though still distant,
slips into consciousness in the earl...
Sunday 26th November 2023 2:31 pm
These streets aren’t meant for dreaming
slides off the Pennines
soaks me through
as I look at you
in the tower block estates
and in the few battered terraces left
in this our dirty old town.
in floral pinnies, with hair nets on,
as they scrub at their front step
before leaving to clean
the houses of the rich
up on Eccles old road.
spreads li...
Saturday 25th November 2023 7:17 pm
Love Untethered
Is it better to feel pain
Than nothing at all?
My son has followed
Me now for thiry-four years
Up hill, down dale.
He’s been AWOL
From this world
For all except his mother
& his family
& I who still cry
For him. On one black
December night
I carried his medicine-
bruised body
through the ward —
dodging the sight lines
of terrified parents —
into the mortuary
where I kissed
h...
Tuesday 21st November 2023 7:38 pm
Meanderings
— Like the morning sun you come
And like the wind you go —
I never tried too hard at scholarship:
it seemed a pursuit for those in suits:
pedants, careerists, autodidacts, of all sorts,
accumulators of facts, the stay-at-homers,
the dog-with-a-boners, worrying the hell
out of themselves and acquiring prestige.
i preferred to confront the vast unknown —
that which is so hard to ...
Sunday 19th November 2023 9:37 pm
No retreat, no surrender
people from across the world
now share my home:
Huguenots and Flemish weavers remembered in the names of pubs,
the Irish fleeing famine: the O'Donnells and the O'Neills,
Ashkenazi Jews escaping the Czarist pogroms: the Cohens and the Rabinowitz.
Later...
Wednesday 15th November 2023 9:33 pm
11th November 1918
In serried ranks they come to me:
Tom, Will, Harry, George, Bill, Alf
rows of squaddies heading south,
dust and dirt and gas and screams
hot metal designed to do its worst
tearing savagely at human flesh.
Lads from farms & factories
Lads from mills & mines
sacrificing their most precious time -
Jack Prince, a machine gunner
in the Cheshires, served right through,
from 28 Jul 19...
Sunday 12th November 2023 4:40 pm
The house of the rising sun
Let’s away to the blue mountains,
To the elegaic music of loss,
the sun above us burns the mists away
as we walk to the valley of youth..
Today, I will walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just a ragged wall above the far-horizons of sight,
they’re no closer after five days of tramping;
for five days I continued whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just kept going and goin...
Saturday 11th November 2023 9:45 pm
Trilobite
Beneath this beach of sand, shells
I see the image of the rolling sea.
Such new-found-land frames and hides
These wider horizons; I walk along the cliff:
Sheer drop upon the windward side,
Embedded trilob...
Wednesday 8th November 2023 3:15 pm
Moon, moon
Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
In all her shadowy finery.
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form
Shows us all her shades and shadows and crevices
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme
Moonlight flows and the boy is now an old man
Sleeping ...
Tuesday 7th November 2023 7:15 pm
silhouettes streak the sky
passing clouds
you don’t remember,
wind rising in the sky,
you, bereft of fortitude,
me, just strolling by
trees flare into flames; my friend,
a pettiness of heat.
the past at last unchanging
no memories so replete:
golden sands, and crystal brooks,
silken threads and silver hooks.
glimpsing what’s already there
blue shadows, orange flares
she's screaming on the stairs
...
Tuesday 7th November 2023 6:37 pm
Written near water
Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
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,
like ventricles of the brain, never seen again.
Birdsong flung
into fond recall
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.
The smoky-smell of coal and steam
an eve...
Friday 3rd November 2023 7:46 pm
Well-mannered thug
War's no place to be
Yeah, I were a soldier me,
constantly, for years,
still am now I’m on me arse,
listening to all these gobshites
with their feckin poppies.
I see watermelon smiles
— to the ears, not the eyes --
me on me knees
unexploded ieds —
women-with tanned, muscular arms
walking for miles
for water
men with children on their backs …
jumping into the sea to esc...
Tuesday 31st October 2023 6:47 pm
The tiger sniffs the rose
"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows."
Siegfried Sassoon
Circumstances compel speech,
Ye gods and little fishes,
From the first day of the world
Down to the horror in our own time
Peace is forever out of reach.
Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the dead
A soldier-poet silenced, banned, expelled
Misery a...
Monday 30th October 2023 9:42 pm
Sonnet
https://www.mecaforpeace.org/close-to-home-gaza-knows-suffering-too-well/
Suffering comes to our unguarded selves
Unbidden. Suicide slammed into my hidden
Self. The slaughter of the innocents all
Around us. Buddhism teaches some suffer
Too much, others too little. Suffering follows
Us through our lives, like a shadow. We must
Unburden our minds, seek compassion
For all those sufferi...
Sunday 29th October 2023 7:36 pm
Something Found
The ease and simple grace
Of this man who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied.
His echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still stays in my heart
We’re never alone, never apart
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
Speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.
.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And...
Thursday 26th October 2023 10:54 pm
Fallen angel
The door behind my mind
Opens and I find
Every day a new beginning
I rise at the crack of dawn
Feel the air against my skin
Walk with the aid of a stick
Listen to the dawn chorus.
Thrillingly it’s late March,
A year since the sepsis,
When madness danced with the spectre of death,
I emerged stronger, cherishing every breath.
As I walk, I hear a symphony of sound,
The dawn chorus, nature...
Wednesday 25th October 2023 8:21 pm
First Light
The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold October
For the patterns in the grass do not last.
And so we take the winding stairway
Into the high tower above this land of forgetfulness
Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries
Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight
Of one John Mulligan esq, who, on the last day of August
1938, according to the L...
Monday 23rd October 2023 9:09 pm
The lost boys
In the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive words, songs & stories,
coiled and twisted words, selfish and cruel,
through their darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never complete.
Like curdled thoughts, they merge and entwine,
in restless minds, where shadows define
this chaos, a light gleams,
October's moon, a friendly old lunatic,
like me
stalks this poor man's sky,...
Sunday 22nd October 2023 1:05 am
THE RUINS OF NINEVEH
These rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
Rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
Blossom and harvest, Wise women, Witan’s children.
From the lips of children we must learn that clinging
To life is not enough.
Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
The Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
Amongst the ruins of Nineveh along the same back paths
And a...
Saturday 21st October 2023 1:04 am
CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi
Wednesday 18th October 2023 4:20 pm
Enmeshed
County Lines spread evil
all of the time
a cross all the living and the dead
their lines sink into our time:
we need them gone.
A spring day in late May,
she can no longer stand
she must fall:
tall, crumpled, bent, dead.
She has lost the lines that link
her to her family, friends.
lines now link only random things:
road, rail, red phone box,
needle, plunger, sink
sink into...
Monday 16th October 2023 12:12 pm
A WISE FOOL
Bewildered, by all the things left unsaid
Serendipity, chances lost, cut dead:
Are you wise enough to play the fool?
Or, does this vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light?
Memory cuts through: taut, damp cold
Slices through my meagre clothes like a knife
Signs previously hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
Is yours a life lived in vain......
Friday 13th October 2023 5:54 pm
WITHERED
Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
warps, wefts waste away
the body afflicted with decay
O!, I say, the hey-ho way of the live-long-day..
Whatever has lived will wither, languish, and decay.
time pines us all away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget..
No transubstantiation this,
no move into immortal bliss:
this work of resistance is an inception in art
of...
Tuesday 10th October 2023 10:16 pm
Beggar
As we draw closer to Remembrance Sunday in black November and all that false praising of the armed services by 'the great and the good' I wrote this poem to show how we really treat those who risk their lives to protect us.
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not a real hom...
Sunday 8th October 2023 5:31 pm
Music to eat by
Yes. Music to eat by
flavours of sweetness
spices of yet another life,
another place, another time
the innocent taste of rhyme
tangles me on the palette,
mingles me in the air,
no longer abiding in the cynic’s lair,
for she’s not there.
Crossses, forks, knives, staying alive,
we thrive with three eyes,
a pasty present for the future
we done us best when we wus let,
...
Thursday 5th October 2023 6:53 pm
A Recreation
The majesty of dogs impresses us –
their solitary solidarity –
above their grey horizons
there is the promise, lingering…
of continuing.
These days an ending is assumed
that glorifies the story of our lives:
making children, seeing things,
listening to waves wash the pebbles.
overhearing our hearts’ desires.
Yesterday the sky darkened at noon
seas spewed forth strange shapes
cl...
Monday 2nd October 2023 2:58 pm
.....as blue as robins' eggs
though time’s chasm opens before my very sight,
and the vertigo returns with the Lapis Lazuli.
of the Byzantimes, Persians, Armenians, Assyrians.
each civilization alloted supreme value to the blue of lapis lazuli.
Saturday 30th September 2023 6:55 pm
.......early onset
The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees still have leaves
outside it is cold
the wind is cruel.
There is a person
in front of me
i don’t know who it is.
I remember playing out
with my sister
on a skipping rope.
It is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morning,
that is why I stretch and yawn.
The lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
‘What is a vi...
Saturday 30th September 2023 6:37 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 good...
Thursday 28th September 2023 11:58 am
Wisława Szymborska Polish poet
The innocence of nature
Mocked by the depravity of humanity
You chose to spotlight the genocide
Of the Tarsier, a primate, DNA like ours,
With enormous seeing eyes.
You made the humble Tarsier
A metaphor for the innocence of nature
Exploited, ripped apart, killed for meat
Mocked for fun. No empathy between
Tarsier and Human. Man the killer
Species. You used bitter irony
To deny hu...
Monday 25th September 2023 8:45 pm
WE, THE ENGLISH
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ George Orwell
Wat Tyler and the revolting peasants had paved the way
In the summer of 1381 Wat Tyler, as leader of the so-called “Peasants” Revolt,
Stepped out of the shadows, and when he did he was to rock the Anglo-Norma...
Sunday 24th September 2023 8:46 pm
SHEER LUNACY
In the red water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through the skull, a technique called trephination.She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy and the doctors' suspicions.
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.
This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep...
Wednesday 20th September 2023 8:15 pm
16th June, 1904
I make the sign of the cross, today,
the last Saturday in August,
for Jack who died tod...
Tuesday 19th September 2023 11:39 pm
BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS
My son, my brother and my dog
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all that is, not all that seems.
That hidden fountain of delight
That shines again, just out of sight,
That promised land, of sweet content,
That land where time is safely spent
Beneath the skies and stars of heaven,
Where every blemish is forgiven,
Where children play all night, a...
Friday 15th September 2023 7:41 pm
ELOQUENT GRAFFITI
It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night
Of solid rain, unremittingly wet. And cold.
When, suddenly, all the rivers of all the world stopped flowing
And all the summer colours leached away and never returned.
And the wind so cold and stings like hell
And sky descends into the well of unforgiving.
And you're not here.
And the blackness is deep, so deep, and remains so deep
When...
Saturday 9th September 2023 2:38 pm
Indian summer
Comes to remind us not to expect
consistency from Mother Nature.
Climate change keeps us on our toes
Expecting….? God knows what blows.
https://youtu.be/yOKAQSGCm8Q?si=z9HpEgTDrsQW3a7_
Wednesday 6th September 2023 9:31 pm
Haiku
head shaved by eight o'clock
cold grips my skull - now brain freeze
stubble grows like wheat - neat!
https://youtu.be/bqtfl0gt5fM?si=2D4d9DfiNU6mC_Zd
Wednesday 6th September 2023 9:18 pm
Testament
"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it." Sylvia Plath.
Amidst the depths of contemplation’s maze,
Words grotesque and selfish lie ablaze,
A fusion of curdled musings intertwine,
In late October light, a restless mind resigns.
Like an old moon, friendly yet discreet,
Stalks the dawn sky, casting shadows sweet,
In this time of rhyme, where memories reside,
Sh...
Tuesday 5th September 2023 5:01 pm
Mem û Zîn
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.
I am always thirsty for wine too
To the extent of our...
Saturday 2nd September 2023 11:03 pm
ELEGY for ANNA
Anna Campbell was her name and Kurdistan
her nation — she died on March 15 2018, the Ides of March.
She was fighting as part of the all-female
Kurdish Women’s Protection Units, the YPJ.
She was 26 when she died
a long way from Lewes in East Sussex where she was raised.
She was killed by a Turkish airstrike — the Islamist Turks NATO-empowered enemies of the Kurds.
Anna had dyed h...
Friday 1st September 2023 9:38 pm
Blank slate
saw her in the street
polite, random, neat.
forget drunkenness
create the diabolical
divine Tabula Rasa – blank slate
too late.
one, kind, sweet woman,
polished floors with rage
arms red and fleshy –
dark memory of her soul
late, near the Spaniard’s Inn,
full moon shining,
with all the solemnity of a river in flood,
sleeping London dreaming o...
Wednesday 30th August 2023 11:01 pm
The closing of the day
We walk a steep and slippery way,
mixing senses in synaesthesia’s way,
it seem as if I am a chorus in a play.
We feel by measures hidden from the eye
time borrowed, days wasted, life goes by,
I walk along a steep and scattered way.
Winter seeps me into sleep, as my soul flies
to the gist of an art unborrowed from the eye;
I learn by going, where I have to go, inside.
Dark ...
Tuesday 29th August 2023 8:06 pm
The consolations of love
Sadnesses besiege me,
at the dying of the light,
nothing can console me,
like a vein of ore run through solid rock,
through my life
the glittering flow of tears
has been like a tumbling spring
in hill country.
My love, stretched upon this rack of time,
appears redundant, gone,
until her song is sung,
until her time is right
until the light in her eyes
greets me at night....
Memo...
Saturday 26th August 2023 10:42 pm
Second Chances
memory fades
slippery words
frankly absurd
at home the fulcrum fulminates
again children expect blows
nobody knows
eldest boy
emotions frozen
for years and years
unbridled tears
father, brother son, friend
world without end
pressure in my head
they're dead
thinking will no longer do
so what more can ye do?
walk a way with a dog
Skip into music
Fade into art.
Be a part...
Friday 25th August 2023 10:29 pm
HERE I LIE
https://aphelis.net/james-joyce-meets-nora-barnacle/
I stare at the ceiling, stare at the sky, time flies by. I scuttle along a dirt track, climb over a stile into a cornfield in the previous century I see no blood-red poppies, merely blue corn flowers and the witch Hazel. Now, I’m stuck in the backroom off of Clapham Green, where the black mould spreads insidiously like a disease tha...
Wednesday 23rd August 2023 3:41 pm
THE SNOT-GREEN SEA
The winter sharp brains of children
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
They came running across raging seas, dancing on the waves.
A storm-blessed salty awakening.
Had nothing to regret.
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the roo...
Tuesday 22nd August 2023 6:08 pm
The pharmacology of shadow
When sadnesses besiege you,
at the dying of the light,
and starlight illuminates
the end of days
then star-crossed lovers
quietly drift away,
sigh silently out of sight
of mirrors, water, eyes,
And you will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise..
We spin and whirl and shiver.
like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch, Wicca, Wizard
who sway beneath the moon,
all night, all da...
Tuesday 22nd August 2023 1:01 pm
The Longing
Wednesday 16th August 2023 8:46 pm
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 19 January 1547)
to all those who choose to live instead.
not to avert your gaze
when all the world’s ablaze.
Give all t...
Tuesday 15th August 2023 10:37 am
Cortez the Killer - Stewardship
Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash
On these dog days
of a future summer,
on a future planet,
after much deprivation and cruelty
ours is a molested nature,
that screams in agony in an iron trap
where the final wild tiger
bleeds to death
as humans point their cameras and smile.
Will these few remaining animals be abused
exterminated, tortured
like all four-legged creatures
...
Saturday 12th August 2023 8:53 pm
Lament
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
A bond unbreakable —
Private soldier Jack Prince by name,
Not a pillar of strength, nor with a heart aflame,
You you didn’t live a life of wisdom and insight,
Your absence does not leave a void that feels so right.
Do you rest, in eternal slumber?
Spirits dance on, like a glowing ember —
or so the poet says —
Does your legacy live...
Saturday 12th August 2023 2:36 pm
Snow white stars
The moon was sad, as only the moon can be.
Men in tears seek to flee the nightmare of their lives
We dream that with fingers we can pluck
The calmness of flowers, the depths of moments,
The completeness of a live birth.
White sobs slide into our eyes
Remembering the smile of another
A mother,
On the fortunate day of our first kiss.
The past was a magnet that draws
Into us the heady...
Wednesday 9th August 2023 8:23 pm
i.m. Syd Barrett (1946-2006)
Syd, do you remember that golden sun,
When youth burned bright, your journey just begun?
Shine on, you crazy diamond, hold your flame,
Illuminate this world, leave your mark, etch your name.
In your eyes, a depth, a universe, vast,
Black holes of wisdom, memories from the past.
Shine on, you crazy diamond, never lose your glow,
Your brilliance shines through deepest darkness, in a cel...
Sunday 6th August 2023 8:46 pm
Whining poetry
Complain with the full force of a Jesuit priest
Whine like a man who knows he's out of time
Casuistry and sophistry
Work together
In perfect harmony.
Poetry's more about wine than whine
More about seeking to express the inexpressible
Than complaining about how difficult it is.
A true poet makes the difficult easy
Can turn water into wine in a half-truncated line
Caesuras can soar in ...
Friday 4th August 2023 4:50 pm
The peasant poet
John Clare knew and understood
the wonder of the mundane,
how nothing remains the same.
Glint, glance, gaze, smile,
the optimism of
that pastoral green mile.
You saw and smelt
a myriad of wild flowers
sway in the breeze.
You looked up at the swirling clouds,
a grey-blue reflection of your unassumed eternity
and then you wrote your poetry
unmindful of the side long glan...
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 11:41 am
Muscle memory
From trembling thin arms to thunderous cries,
A childhood stained with hunger's cruel guise,
Clutching to mother, seeking her solace tight,
In a world where shadows cast a daunting fright.
Constant threats and abuse, a heavy weight,
Youth stolen away, no chance to abate,
Eldest boy, burdened beyond his years,
In grey short pants, resilience through tears.
Socks pulled up, a symbol of s...
Tuesday 1st August 2023 10:18 pm
SACRIFICE
An epiphany of history:
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.
Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.
In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the gulags and the camps and massacres came later,
they s...
Tuesday 1st August 2023 4:04 pm
Who the hell can see forever?
Wild is the way, unclear is the day.
The seeping mottled sky passes me by
Opening before me the vista of a life:
A world of smell and sight and sound,
The portals of discovery all around,
I enter this world, this newfoundland:
The sheer vividness of colour abounds
Synaesthesia's all round visibility of sound,
Flesh and blood, heart and soul
All the half-created, half-perceived
Epipha...
Monday 31st July 2023 10:36 am
Sinéad O'Connor
All those who scramble after death
And all its accompanying sensations
Gather around you now. You looked
In so many different directions for the truth
And I don't know if you ever found it.
But you tried. God, you tried.
All those south Dublin Gaels dismissed you,
As they did the Aran sweaters they used to wear
During the Celtic Tiger with their Estonian nannies
And their Latvian garde...
Wednesday 26th July 2023 9:51 pm
Granddaughter
Oft and steady rhythm of a baby
breathing
her gaze tells you all you need to know,
her footsteps tender in the snow,
the pitter-patter blast of rain upon a window,
considering all we do, and do not, know
we stand hand-in-hand
toe-to-toe
under this beautiful July moon.
And now she's our lady in red,
dancing at the party.
Big school beckons in September,
with all its inherited human...
Tuesday 25th July 2023 10:10 am
Bandit country
In this land of loughs and dry burials
The invisible lends itself into visibility
In the dialect of words – tattered,
Stained, inadequate – visceral words
Spew like blood from a gargoyle
Into this mist-ridden air where these
Pagan burrows hide the dead inside
Blessed Earth: dogs still dig for bones
And the music fills the very air
Lacerated by the explosions of anger
We see upon the red...
Monday 24th July 2023 5:38 pm
Noli Timere
Minutes before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney texted to his wife in Latin: Noli timere or do not be afraid.
Seamus Heaney's sons carrying their father's coffin
Redemption comes at such a cost.
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost - loss pressing on loss -
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly, so carelessly,
A...
Sunday 23rd July 2023 12:33 am
Sketches in a minor key
Her red-gold hair
on a stormy autumn day
along the borderland where
time fades away
Like the leafy-mist
which persists,
drifts along the hedge rows
on this late-summer morn
Emptily, curiously,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics,
hidden in the wood-smoke
burning our throats on a lost
once-upon-a-time damp autumn eve
I am afflicted by
the time...
Tuesday 18th July 2023 8:35 pm
Space-Time
I have a dead weight inside of me
Which I carry around all day,
It often tries to kill me
And it will not go away.
I send this freight’s immensity
To the centre of a black hole;
Retracing the wandering journey
Of my wandering-wandering soul.
Mine is a grave singularity,
It contains a huge-huge mass,
In an infinitely small-small space:
A density — gravity...
Sunday 16th July 2023 1:15 am
Heart-worn highways
Charles Bukowski probably said (or wrote)
That we are here to laugh at the odds.
I’d say it all depends. Listening to a rich
New Englander (Martha’s Vineyard)
Pontificate upon the miniaturist artists
Of the Renaissance in the ever-so well
Known salons of Venice or Florence
(Such pale shadows of the British Imperialist
Tomb raiders of the nineteenth century).
These daughters of th...
Friday 14th July 2023 9:33 pm
A stoic suicide
We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,
Such pungent affirmations,
Slip into the generations of suffering:
Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a ...
Tuesday 11th July 2023 5:02 pm
An Aphrodite night
When sadnesses besiege you
with the dying of the light,
and you find your solace in starlight,
time drifts away from mirrors,water, eyes
on this Aphrodite night of no disguise.
When night falls and cats crawl,
my heart is filled with sadness, I fear
starlight does not illuminate sky at all.
We know that all human love must die.
as silently we drift apart,
away from each othe...
Sunday 9th July 2023 8:47 pm
UNDER THE VOLCANO
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken? Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
On a road out of London pulled up at a pub
I heard him say the words I remember, today.
The working man suffers: glug, glug, glug
The drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug.
Taste the whiskey, feel t...
Friday 7th July 2023 5:16 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 up space and stretching out time
In a flurry of wor...
Wednesday 5th July 2023 8:15 pm
The rhythm of a dream
From he multi-verse within
I stumble into my usual discontented
Bout of sleep –
A fragment of the fourth dimension,
Trapped inside, no disguise.
In an echo of a dream –
Time, like the river Lethe,
Washes over me
And left I am here, bereft,
To float upon the river of unmindfulness
Towards the golden dome
Which glows with Synesthetic force –
A pulsating kaleidoscope of times...
Tuesday 4th July 2023 8:24 pm
Conjugations & Confabulations
Sometimes it’s best just to make up poems
In your head whilst drinking beer and gin
Then let them blow away on a windy day in July
Sitting outside in cold sunshine with Woody.
If I call you what the fuck I like
And you call me what the fuck you like
What are the chances it’d be the same fucking word?
Would you take a fence or would I take a fence
Or is it only certain horses that ...
Saturday 1st July 2023 8:31 pm
FIELD THEORY
and then half again,
this inevitably leads to the curve of infinity:
to that spike in the universal calculus
caused by a single boy’s once-upon-a-time enquiry
into the extraordinary to – ing and fro – ing of time and space.
This intricate lattice work of filigree and lace
through which gleams spark into memories,
are...
Friday 30th June 2023 7:50 pm
The stolen child
Then 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 faeries clear,
For faeries are always close or near.
Oh, better far than what we see
Are fairy wings that brush our faces
Like spiders’ webs, or shimmering laces.
Such magical, lovely, lonely things.
A rustle in the wind reminds us
...
Thursday 29th June 2023 7:14 pm
Flogging a dead horse
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com
Early on in Dostoevsky’s great work Crime and Punishment.
Published in 1866 when Dostoevsky was 44 years old,
Raskolnikov, an ex-student in St Petersburg, sees himself as a young boy,
Walking through a provincial town with his father.
Outside a pub, a drunken rabble surrounds a weary old horse,
Hitched to a weighty cartload that it canno...
Wednesday 28th June 2023 8:46 pm
Tuesday
Today I listened to a loada shit
Concerning toxic masculinity
I was kinda bored. It was Radio 4.
It was an arrogant fucking lecture on
The vital importance of the pronoun
'They' and hey there were no jokes..
This is no way to speak to ordinary users
Of language. It's a shame that working
Class people are so excluded from
These delightful ways of speaking. Minority
Rules you say. No p...
Tuesday 27th June 2023 10:05 pm
Paralysis 2
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
Yes, paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of e...
Monday 26th June 2023 4:09 pm
Paralysis
In my dream I am paralysed, silent
There’s a shadow behind the moon
I scurry down into the winter-valley:
Dried up, shrivelled, weather-beaten,
Rock- hidden fossils, set in stone,
Evolutions of Medusa. My bones
Afflicted by a petrified decay.
All, all she gazed upon
Can never be rubbed away.
Stains dry and calcify
Deep in these hidden bogs
Remnants of consciousness
A quagmire-swamp o...
Monday 26th June 2023 3:49 pm
Gale force
so much listening to storms rumble in
from far horizons.
but talk to a Seismologist
then you'll quake.
with us always: in hospital, at the grave-side,
everywhere our dream allows us to live,
hoping, just hoping
the harbour
and not heading...
Sunday 25th June 2023 7:01 pm
Something lost, something found
The ease and simple grace
Of this man who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied..
His echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still stings in my heart
We’re never alone,
We're never apart.
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
These speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.
Oh! it’s a sin to kil...
Saturday 24th June 2023 10:47 pm
Anthem for all all these damned Youngsters
The male suicide rate is 3 times that of females. The highest rates were in the NE and NW of England.
What church-bells or calls to prayer by the muezzin
For all these young men who kill themselves?
— Only the monstrous hypocrisy of the media
--- Only the slurp, slurp, slurp as we all become greedier.
Call ...
Thursday 22nd June 2023 10:06 pm
Confession
“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
― Robert Lowell,Life Studies
Swirling around the failures of my life:
I laugh at the shyness that impeded me
Held me back until the children came.
it was good to give the future names.
My flights were just a fancy
To do with everyday expressions of what was really always there,
Dim unknown, unexplored, uncertain, hardly realise...
Thursday 22nd June 2023 12:02 am
BLANK SLATE
(For Clare)
It’ll 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,
Noithing to lift you higher..
No future envisaged
No presience required
No past to forget
Nothing for sale and nothing to let.
No genetic predisposition
No-one to speak to and ...
Wednesday 21st June 2023 12:23 am
Protractor
At school I was never all that good at geometry:
Perhaps my pencil was too blunt or my eyesight too dicky,
Or perhaps I just couldn’t be arsed to get it right.
Other boys could, and did.
What I do remember is that the most minute inaccuracy
Made at the small source would lead,
Left uncorrected, to greater and greater error
Until the final calculation would be wildly wrong...
Sunday 18th June 2023 9:55 pm
Lemon light
.
sad december skies haunt my thoughts as I drive
skirting south of the stage set of my younger days:
my home town, seldom visited now. lemon light
can’t warm the chill around my heart,
the chill of life unlived, or lived awry, and in greater part
treasured only in hopeless hindsight.
the motorway speeds me away, in flight into deepest cheshire:
the light is cream soda in clouds,
the sc...
Sunday 18th June 2023 9:16 pm
Flecks of grey
The sky and sea merge
Into strange flecks of grey.
Neither fish nor fowl
Predominate.
There is a lot of empty space.
And that dull, withdrawing roar
Of yesteryear.
Last year, on this very day,
Of shock and awe,
was your funeral:
wildflowers on your coffin
an emptiness inside
I read your poem 'Lemon Light'
Then there were 'Eden Rock and 'Adelstrop'
You kn...
Thursday 15th June 2023 7:49 am
Throwing stones at the stars
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Time does not diminish grief
As it is said to do, in popular belief,
It grinds on slow, tearing into dreams,
Destroying all that which merely
Appears or seems.
It is born again, transmuted
Into tinctures of love.
It inhabits the mind...
Thursday 8th June 2023 12:07 pm
Twin compasses
(To: John Donne - 1572 - 1631)
Airy valedictions cannot span this bridge in time
What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is very definitely mine.
We both can hear the quiet roar of our own new found land
As time drifts to a stop and as we focus near and far
We no longer stand amazed at the hollow rancour of public life
And have no more time for the mere indulgences of strife.
We look too much ...
Tuesday 6th June 2023 6:24 pm
Final solution
The Unwritten predominates,
The times of wonder have gone,
We hold on - the wise ones drugged
Into submission.
Forensic psychology reveals traces
Of long-forgotten haunted faces;
Which, like Munch's lurid, silent scream,
Degenerate into nightmare-dream.
Or, so it seems.
Meanwhile, in population centres,
Desire, in all its lurid manifestations,
Falls into ...
Tuesday 6th June 2023 12:18 am
The solitary rose of your breath
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
that sing a song in a minor key,
a longing to be whole and free.
On this seafront there is a stone,
where, in the creamy moonlight of romance,
men and women pledge and dance,
under our lady moon.
It is a place wher...
Sunday 4th June 2023 10:05 pm
Frank
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 was the Messerschmit ...
Friday 2nd June 2023 11:24 pm
RHAPSODY IN BLUE
Blue as forget-me-not blue
Blue as an Alaskan blueberry
Blue as an English May morn
April egg shell blue.
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 fallen autumn leaves.
I see this road before me
A road I walk in vain
A road throu...
Tuesday 30th May 2023 11:43 pm
My body is a pebble
And I live beyond a dark star,
On the edge of a black hole,
Which I will fall into any day
Now there is the singularity of night
This utter absence of light.
All 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 merely make my escape
From this orbit of gloom
This reconn...
Sunday 28th May 2023 11:33 pm
FOSSIL
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 mankind
Time...
Saturday 27th May 2023 11:57 pm
No Whiskey in Heaven
Slipping and sliding inside my mind,
I vary things inside, like blue.
Muddy Waters playing, just as he always should,
The blues in my memory
The blues in my blood.
Then my memory grips me, like the cold grips the snow,
the drinking man, he just follow, all boozers in a line
ping and ring o’work-a-...
Friday 26th May 2023 10:35 pm
MAGIK
This story of Thinagain fell from a wall,
Nothink never went well agin for ol’Thinagen,
So he call it the Christian minstrelsy.
it tell of a fall
off a wall
a fall from a tall wall in the Noman Times,
In prose nor rhyme;
this story be retold through genuflections
where He is describe a “solid man”.
that poem end with Humpity Dumpity,
on a hint of a wink
that Thinagen ‘s fall
...
Thursday 25th May 2023 11:46 am
Infant mortality
Meningococcal Septicaemia slipped into our family life
One dark December night. He'd be thirty-three now,
If he'd lived, my son.
And meningitis more or less destroyed
Everything for us.
It is true that grief can last a whole lifetime.
Like after a scorched earth policy
It can take decades for lthe land to recover
But we had our three girls
And had to make a Christmas for them.
Somehow.
...
Monday 22nd May 2023 10:00 pm
Morning glory
Born, bloom, die
All in the one day
Blur a glass darkly,
Drift away.
This physician’s proof of death,
A girlhood’s fleeting fancy,
A garden romance
A moonlit dance
Chopin playing lightly
And no rectangular wooden box.
Instead a living thing with feathers
Whistles through my head
Across the broad Atlantic to raise the dead --
Your ravaging femininity instead. .
https://youtu.be/No5F...
Thursday 18th May 2023 10:15 pm
Signs and Signals
These fingers point at letters
Those letters point at words
And then the disturbance -
Occurs
My love she was a vixen,
She howled in the night,
Those feelings they just left me -
Despite them being right.
This mourning just continues,
Throughout decades, in a line,
My lover she engages me -
In time.
Those swirling skies of fortune,
This la...
Wednesday 17th May 2023 10:47 pm
After reading the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore
Yes. We spend too much of our short lives
Chasing the mot juste, that phrase, that 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 setti...
Wednesday 17th May 2023 1:14 am
Lunatics, Sleepwalkers, and Vivid Vampire Dreams
Dracula dreams a waking dream
Nothing is as nothing seems.
The sky is grey today with streaks of blue
Swirls in the sky reflect sombre horizons;
Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
Conspiring in their usual ragged silence.
My dreams are dreary, far away,
The trees are laid bare, a mist of water’s in the air.
Folk are caught out cough, cough, coughing
As in the peasoupers of the ...
Monday 15th May 2023 3:37 pm
Angelus Bell
(for the ghosts who buy memories)
The tones of the big bell settle in the dust
Of this small market town in County Meath
And, on the stained glass window, still
I see the sun-marked resonance of bell —
Circles of uninscribed sound
Uncaged
Through all the cerebral centuries
Chimes and chants for Christ the King
Chimes of crucifix, pyx and plate –
These bells have blessed the insouci...
Monday 15th May 2023 12:38 pm
The may flower
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...
Saturday 13th May 2023 4:10 pm
A blackbird sings on Blue bird hill
November brought to mind in May
The lack of light, & that all day twilight!
How can anybody live through such visual misery?
Without declining into snake, or toad?
Even the trees have no leaves.
And the cold will rise to infect our eyes!
We are, unfortunately, not Italian, Etruscan,
Just woolly-backed mammoth barbarian sorcerers
Of a certain druidical disposition: visceral,
Brui...
Friday 12th May 2023 11:23 pm
Lost in translation
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, desire
Leaves us contemplating the irreducibility of fate.
Extending the same disregard for grammar:
...Friday 12th May 2023 1:05 am
Calculus
One thing turns into another thing.
This is the story of continuous change
Nothing remains the same.
The sum Is always greater than the
constituent parts.
Yet 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 spee...
Thursday 11th May 2023 2:23 pm
September rain
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.
https://youtu.be/5KIt...
Monday 8th May 2023 3:10 pm
Tumble in the wind
Too many words
the king's reign
and
my heart
conspicuously silent
when addressing
midnight feasts or Lenten fasts;
nothing lasts
except the majesty of the momentary
singing singularity of an event horizon
where voices echo broodingly
like dark eyes at a funeral.
The sky blends darkness and light
surrounds us in a tumbling embrace.
We are left here, in this solemnless place,
heart...
Saturday 6th May 2023 7:09 pm
May day
I raise my eyes from the detritus of death,
To take a deep breath on this gay May day.
The light, even in these northern climes,
Lifts my spirits, relieves me from dwelling
on my losses, encourages me to give thanks
for all that I still have. I am glad to be alive,
No survivor's guilt, a lilt to my words today.
I see colours both sudued and majestic,
Hear the birds whistle as the...
Monday 1st May 2023 2:50 pm
Silhouette
All alone inside my head
Nothing to remember
Nothing to look forward to
Nothing to be said.
Up early on this grey May day.
My friends are silhouettes
Nothing to remember
Nothing to forget
Nothing to regret.
I am the ghost of myself
Already at 07.13am
As the BBC news comes on
I'm planning to be dead.
I drink my tea shakily -
from the last night's booze -
Sit at my desk in this stra...
Saturday 29th April 2023 11:23 pm
My brother
Portrait of my dead brother Salvadore Dahli 1963
I’m sorry, Pete, that I rarely visit where your remains
Were laid that terrible day in December 1996. You are often
In my heart. Forty-one is no age to part from all you love
But I know how brave you were. When your kidneys finally
Packed up you were twenty-one and in love. I only found
Out after you’d died, that you’d written to the gir...
Friday 28th April 2023 11:24 pm
Sketches in a minor key
Remembering you on your birthday
not on a stormy autumn day
but somewhere along the borderland where
time fades away
like the leafy-mist which drifts
along the hedge rows on this late
April dawn recalling time’s past:
emptily, curiously, desperately,
revealing a design hidden
in these swirls of hieroglyphics.
The wood-smoke of one particular fire
burning our throats on a lost
...
Wednesday 26th April 2023 8:22 pm
Holy Brokenness
The winter sharp brains of children
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex.
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
Running across raging seas, they danced on the waves.
A storm-blessed salty awakening.
They had nothing to regret.
They were sweeter than children.
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from the dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the ro...
Monday 24th April 2023 10:39 pm
Above the vaulted sky
We whisper prayers
in the unknown silence,
hold hands in empty space,
try to make sense
of the mystery of life.
I linger in the uncertainty
of what lies beneath
the shadows of the night.
The moment passes
like a breath of wind
soars through empty spaces,
once filled with laughter and warmth.
Our hearts whisper
tenderly in the stillness,
we remember the joys of past days,
our lips...
Saturday 22nd April 2023 5:14 pm
The pharmacology of shadow
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash
When sadnesses besiege me
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 mirrors, water, eyes
And I will find, momentarily,
humankind loses its disguise.
We spin and whirl,
dance like hemlock in the hay,
we are Witch and Wicca and Wizard
...
Friday 21st April 2023 11:34 pm
A rainy night in Soho
Kicking down a back street
In foggy London town
My head up above the clouds
While on my brow, a frown.
The random cries of violence
Swirl tight within the fog
A man staggers homewards
Too much laudanum or grog.
My eyes observe the shining,
Rain splatters down the street,
A child is begging piteously
Her head lies at my feet.
My rage at bare injustice,
Is a torrent in my veins,
...
Thursday 20th April 2023 4:34 pm
Charlie Darwin
I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. Thomas Hardy
The seas are wild tonight
As I write, far from any coast;
Speckled with salty brine and afraid,
I spy in the broken mirror
The broken boy who follows me
Following me.
Down dale, up tree, crawling all over me:
Still, the...
Tuesday 18th April 2023 10:20 pm
These missionary times
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
With an abiding glint of love in her unfaded eyes,
Brown eyes that inhabit my dreams and memories,
My mother has dementia, a cross for us to bear
So saith her silver-tinted hair. She laboured for her 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 ...
Tuesday 18th April 2023 12:15 am
The wise man knows himself to be a fool
The sun rose
And all to teach me how to cast my eyes to heaven.
But to compensate we have the green
And water worlds,
Most would like to begin the world again.
Easily bro...
Sunday 16th April 2023 9:44 pm
Translating the rain
Which mountain the sun came from
For your eyes can be deceiving in rain
Fountains are rain corralled then sprayed. I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. To serve a servitude of roses.
In which green bay where the rolling sea spies on me
That’s deep, but not at all clear. Like seawater,
lagoons on tropical Islands that are lost on me.
Kind of like fa...
Thursday 13th April 2023 1:30 am
Ditty
It’s OK to be lonely
It’s OK to be alone
It’s OK to talk & crumble
Be silent whilst at home.
Without our second chances
Would any of us still be here?
So sit ye down beside me,
When the world is full of fear;
Breath in blessed regularity,
And swallow down your tears.
https://youtu.be/BnBWxAaGm9Q
Tuesday 11th April 2023 4:27 pm
Drinking where the riverbed 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 afflicted me like
A sentence. Very few minutes pass
Without me thinking of that. He connected me to the
Pack, little knowing...
Sunday 9th April 2023 11:13 pm
Good Friday
Photo by Marcus Bellamy on Unsplash
An epiphany of history:
The momentary blindness
Of a sunshine daydream;
Of what life could’ve been.
Instead we have
the normal crucifixions:
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains
and the splatter on the sands
of the desert seer.
In my beginning is my end,
the starting point for music and poetry and art,
the g...
Saturday 8th April 2023 10:57 pm
CONFESSIONAL
“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
― Robert Lowell,Life Studies
Swirling around the failures of my life:
I laugh at the shyness that impeded me
Held me back until the children came.
it was good to give the future names
My flights were just of a flying fancy
That had little to do with everyday
More to do with expressing what was dim
Unknown, unexplored, hardly re...
Friday 7th April 2023 11:16 pm
Paul Léon (1893-1942)
Murdered in 1942,
In Auschwitz concentration camp,
Oświęcim, Poland.
A Jew, you were Joyce’s friend,
The Joyce of Dublin & Galway,
Trieste, Zurich & Paris
And, off course, Anna L’Liffey,
She who riverrun on & on,
Even till the Finnegans’ wake.
Joyce lived in Paris for twenty years
He was so poor but everytime he had money
He always paid for everyone in every bar,
Every tax...
Thursday 6th April 2023 11:44 pm
When the poet ceases singing
There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music,
Plangent and deep,
Tempests flaring in the mind of man
Foreshadowing that terrible realisation
That you too follow this same cliff path
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness
Of day. When mother, father, lover, child
Have swooned towards the moon in triumph
Or despair, or when those steps we climbed
in childhood into ...
Wednesday 5th April 2023 11:59 pm
The buzz of the silence
Anthony H Wilson (20 February 1950 Pendleton Salford– 10 August 2007 The Christie cancer hospital, Withington, Manchester). Wilson identified himself as a socialist and refused to pay for private healthcare on principle.
From Salford to Cambridge then back to Manchester for good. Our Mr Madchester co-founded Factory records and was the soul-founder of the Haçienda nightclub. Joy Division, New...
Monday 3rd April 2023 11:49 pm
The language of the eyes
Those bloody dead
This debt we owe,
Abide with me,
Never let me go.
That mocking voice,
Those clever folk
Display their wit
In the cutting joke.
This tree that grew
Those shady nooks
This dappled sunlight
These gilded brooks.
For men may come to worse than dust
When love of self is breach of trust:
A dog’s true love means more to me
Tha...
Monday 3rd April 2023 1:06 pm
For when I am weak, then am I strong
Sometimes, words tumble from my pen like grain,
At other times words have to be pulled like teeth.
So I sat down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day,
I wept silently because of the curse I carry:
The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or from Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.
But I cannot sing the songs of th...
Friday 31st March 2023 10:41 pm
PAUL O'GRADY D.L.
All along the Rainbow Bridge
The people are crying;
But the dogs are out running,
Running and tumbling,
All the way home.
https://youtu.be/Go-jJlGd1so
Wednesday 29th March 2023 11:45 pm
All that love can do
No matter how we invent this writing malarkey
Or, how, precisely, we feel about it,
There is a wonder within our hearts,
And a good hiding of our souls;
So much more than a mirror, wi-fi
mumbling, incessantly,
there’s a story to be told, a tale told by an idiot”
But all we hear is:
‘fear poverty, terrorist filth fear anguish, rope, anger, death, grief: time diminishes, the pale horseman.’
...
Wednesday 29th March 2023 12:57 am
An adamantine distress
Like a swimmer driven by a whirlpool of distress,
Like a morsel of hope, lampooned by regret,
In a storm of my own making; beseiged by days;
Adamantly anchored to a despair, twenty fathoms wide
I'm riven by the whirlwind of what I can not hide
Alone, my anchor is the live-long day and yet, and yet, I fade away.
Dressed in a black haze: where dappled sunlight sways;
There's an abyss i...
Monday 27th March 2023 7:36 pm
Day Out
Memories are all we have
Feeling happy, feeling sad,
Thinking of the distance
That separates us over time
Unless, of course, you wanna
Get stuck in the eternal present
And that just aint pleasant.
One high English summer day in 1984
We took our daughter, Kate,
To the Dorset coast.
She was eighteen months young
My wife was pregnant with our second child
Anna,...
Sunday 26th March 2023 12:59 am
A Love Supreme
That long-held sax note- divine
makes my soul jus drift away
smoke, booze, horse,
Then the girls. Sum o’them, think agen
man, the flash of the crack o’th drum
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 shufflin shoes
No dancin c...
Thursday 23rd March 2023 10:29 pm
Casting stones
"....sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven."
Every day a day closer to death
I wave that away with a pretended
Insouciance that does not convince
Me! Anyway, away with the dullness
And in with the sheen of a smile
At all the flummoxing frummery
of the pompous politicians &
Well paid charity workers
Storming through Haiti
In their 4...
Tuesday 21st March 2023 8:18 pm
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