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A VIEW of the NEW 1922 - 2022

et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature) Ovid, 'Metamorphoses' 

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.
Does it gather to a greatness like the ooze of oil? Toil. Toil
For endless gold and...

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Breath after Breath

I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment. David Bowie

In the apple market
your south London twang
accompanies the many undulations
of passing time.
Your wild androgyny
mirrors the mirror
of yourself.
You help me 
skim off the water
childhood,
like a shaking dog.

You lit up, spot-lighted,
an iridescence of sound
Ziggy!
Your songs were the water
I nee...

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A lay for a lady

A lay may be a song, a melody, a simple narrative poem, or a ballad

haunt my days
he whispers
butter me up quite
she replies

the green groves
of her painting
sleeping
in his eyes
now
there is
no disguise

her speckled dust
in faded sunlight
in his too-familiar sight
her soul
declines to take flight

she’s a-tumbling
through the grasses
O! she’s a-dying
of the light
h...

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Manchester city of the bee

When my head lifts,
prior to sleep, the 40s
bounce into view, neat?
The 50s started
to slide ’em aside
those deep-finned beasts
that continue to glide.
The 60s, are gettin’ closer now,
familiars growl into view, Bethel, NYC too
yeah, the 70s punked up fast,
copied like crazy,
didn’t last. 80s were
AIDS and Princess Di
the miners and Roxy Music,
90s so near, choosin’ a Blur, or an...

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OVERWHELMED: AS TEARS GO BY 

Dream small dreams — for Marianne Faithfull
 

A scatter of images
a-flame in my head
the burden
of nothingness,
dead.

The bellows of memory,
with sunrise all a-flame,
the pumping of the blood
and the naming of the names.

This richochet of meaning,
explodes in my mind,
I seep into simple
as I climb into rhyme.

A glance and a gesture,
of times nicely coming along;
look a...

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Ancestors

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago. I wish that I’d sailed the darkened seas. On a great big clipper ship. Going from this land here to that — Lou Reed ‘Heroin’

https://www.calaverasarts.org/blog/art-of-our-ancestors-competition-winners

Today tears cloud the inside of my eyes
my view is metamorphosed into a blankness
that pervades my waking hours, retreats only
in sleep.
Moo...

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A Mourner’s Kaddish: so you think you can tell heaven from hell?

The unbearable silence at the gravesite splits this day:
Gazans mourn just as Jews do.
Long queues along the coast road
traipsing in the sun, loaded down by a few possessions,
are these Gazans or Jews? 
The Nazi jackboot kicked the little children to death, 
gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, accounted for the rest.
Or, often, the MG42, the German general-purpose machine gun
...

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Winter wondering

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

A rose in December,
when it snows in July,
as far as we know
the expected will die.

Common sense has infirmities
deformities, affinities
to pie in the sky;
as we try to get by.

Nothing happens too late
that isn’t taboo
a floating moon slips
above stone-built walls,
a story of end...

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SAYING GOODBYE

 

Some decisions:
seemingly reasonable, rational,
seek to wipe out
sentimentality, romance
as if we lived by rules
more fools we if we do.

Time
leads me back to a field
in high summer
in Cheshire -
a piece of the rich south
here in the north - 
the roads are far enough away
today
to lead us to a silence:
provisional, yes
passing, of course,
but still silence
we shared a ...

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People throw their hearts at strangers, don't they?

Splattered on a canvas

Or, scrawled on a wall,

Art

Is just

A husk of form

Without the artless agony

Of daily life:

The strangled scream

And the carving knife.

https://youtu.be/IzPQ_jA00bk?si=7BIHf1FtgOGt03JY

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A cloudy day at the crem: a punk's funeral

https://www.baselessfabric.co.uk/is-it-hot-in-here-jason-hall-visits-a-crematorium/

1,2,3 I'm just waiting here, full of fear,
of what will be, will be.
I can't get around anymore 
the coffin's at the front, near the door.
Flames behind curtains,
at the end of the craic,
God knows I loved him
so that is that.
He was the one who spoke
reason, to me
we walked by the river
he yearne...

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HELPLESS

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought Percy Bysshe Shelley

Low slung August sun shadows stonework into
deeper shadow lands —
phantoms adrift on the wide Sargasso sea —
and so unruffled, these lawns,
and all this frumpery.

So much then has time
and its opposite
done for me.

It was along these lines that we walked, it was
beneath these swaying poplars we kisse...

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DANCING STAR

 

Now, only the vestiges remain:
Conduct a forensic examination,
Then scatter the remains:
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 precipice-by-the-way,
His peculiar ways of thinking
Are alive today.

Some Russians worship icons,
In China there is smog,
Tom-Al...

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A sycophant’s nightmare

Say to the soul, sigh
so kind & honest he seems
to be when he greets others
courteously.
This abrogator of responsbility
this pretended fakir;
I cannot trust with my eyes’ intelligence
& I was stung in my heart, grievously.
He, dressed in pretended humility she
hoping she’ll prevaricate her way
into heaven.
She does not understand that if she
fails to expel the sycophants’
doctine...

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Duhkha*

 
life seems so easy 
amidst soft summer breezes 
keep an eye upon the future:
ice, rain, snow
danger from within: illness, pride, sin
danger from without: war, diease,,wipeout
Buddhas of Bamiyan hewn directly
from sandstone cliffs
destroyed by the Afghan Taliban
after 2000 years,
in the name of God
what an irony
for the close-minded Mullahs
their destruction of the Buddhas
se...

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TALIESIN  — an old Welsh witch 

 

 

“Taliesin, don’t be sad if you’re alone
on Ynys Môn you have battled mightily,
despair will bring us no advantage
no woman sees what supports her.
Courage is invisible. Study The Mabinogion
God will not violate his promises.
We must suffer in Gwyddno’s weir
where our stand against the Saesneg invaders
will end in defeat! We must learn how to fail
better, being sad will not a...

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THE GHOST WHO SELLS MEMORIES

Lurking around corners — on groggy-doggy, laudanum-lit
gas lit nights, whispering death came to this age of the machine,
he has much drink taken, he’ll be dead soon.
Never mind.

See the tender white crosses-row-on-row
so-many windswept nights of swirling snow.
creaking branches catch the whiff of Lady Fortune’s
croaking of a pleasing freezing breeze,
and pleased, I am, immeasurably,
...

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An epiphany of history

  A persistent geography draws near a bloody tear
in the momentary blindness of a sunshine daydream;
of all that life could’ve been.
Instead we have the normal crucifixions
the splatters of human brains
all over underground trains.
In my beginning is my end, my friend,
the starting point for music and poetry and art.
The gulags and the camps, the massacres, the genocide
stretch fro...

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REPLETE

-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes the savage-silent-dread
of memories-lost, storm-tossed
dust-motes float,
gossamer webs
glitter in the rain;
words thought, but never said,
misrule-misled,
in the very eye of the storm
memories replete
old-ghosts fled,
chapped, red-raw hands
from working this mid-winter land.

https://youtu.be/I3x01BYDmDY?si=hMSMBYtf9p6bHWAh

 

...

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A Splash of Yellow Beneath a Sometime Sky

When I were a boy, a nipper, a kid
wildflowers on a concrete waste
were always blindingly yellow, for me.
Flowers rooted in the cracks along the road
for me, the yellow-bloomed, only for me
whether I was hungry
or stuffed to the hilt, which was rarely,
a slash of yellow beneath the sun
was reason enough to have fun.

Later, we prisoners saw our lady Sunne
and we gazed in awe,
seein...

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