Make a stand

You can make a stand against wrong-doing or stand for what is right,

You can make a stand as a pacifist as to stand is not to fight.

You can make a stand with a fist aloft or stand with a lowered gaze,

You can make a stand that’s popular or stand without seeking praise.

You can make a stand by marching or stand up by sitting down,

You can make a stand if yo...

Read and leave comments (15)

Read and leave comments (2)

I am hosting and have some great features, Anthony Anaxagorou and HKB FiNN.

Get a chance to discuss the work with the poets, intimately!

Open mic available

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=245456218837616

Read and leave comments (0)

If this is a day

On a page or stage

That asks you to say...

Something.

With rhyme or not

Keeping time or

Stopping to make your meaning clearer

Bringing the distant nearer

Unpacking the treasured memories

Buried oh so slightly to the left in your chest

Explaining why someone pushes all your buttons

And how each and every button feels to be depressed

And doing all...

Read and leave comments (3)

If I were to tell my story, which story would I tell,

Of a brightly painted glory, or a shadow haunted hell

Sharing in the same location, period and cast,

Differing in where the tales begin and in the words delivered last.

There'd need be no deliberate inconsistency in terms or actual plot and

Yet some facts, just out of focus, will seemingly be forgotten.

Like in two sh...

Read and leave comments (0)

"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth".
Samuel Johnson

"prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best words in their best order."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
Edgar Allan Poe

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and th...

Read and leave comments (2)

Read and leave comments (9)

Today I didn’t change the world at least not very much

I did not win the lottery nor save some other’s life

But on my way I tried to help the few that I did touch

By finding hope in poetry when hopelessness was rife.

Read and leave comments (1)

Do you have to dress smart to make wise?

Can you better teach art wearing ties?

Aren’t there so many places

More suited to airs and graces

Than one which education supplies?

Can we make divergent thinking the norm

Whilst we’re all being forced to conform

To what seems to me an antiquated fashion

Amputated of utility and passion?

A retrograde ste...

Read and leave comments (0)

I only had one humbug

I only had one humbug and now I have no teeth.

Of course first, I ate the whole top layer of a chocolate box (and the one beneath)

But I only had one humbug and now I have no teeth.

I might have eaten four slightly sickly sticky apples I won on the tombola

Drunk three extra large and fizzy bottles of full fat cherry cola

Had the whole to...

Read and leave comments (0)

My poverty is a poor excuse for a paucity of poetry,

Especially as many opportunities to see it are free.

Yet a scarcity of funds shamefully does limit me,

In terms of my mobility

As well as in the ability to raise any requisite entry fee.

But what’s the cost to me in inspiration lost?

What satirical lines have I now not begun that might have sprung

From the se...

Read and leave comments (0)

Is that why?

I bled

for so many years with the pain reminiscent of childbirth

and cried with longing and loss

the empty hollow and the useless womb

Is that why

I ached

and found each day weighed heavier than the last

and my body dried and drained

and my world shrank to a parody

Is that why

I killed

Tiny webbed fingers a hea...

Read and leave comments (5)

Is it a block if I don’t write with an incontinent flow?

What if my Ganges becomes a trickle and there’s a lickle less to show?

Is it volume that we should measure,

Is life merely a manufacturing contest?

Cos see its quality that I treasure,

Not the most words but the best.

Read and leave comments (2)

The Scratchers and the Scrawlers

We shall not forget

Signs scrawled by Neanderthals on almost every wall we walked past.

An N, in capital form with two lines added, which digressed to suggest a capital F.

It was scratched into a table

It was scratched into many a table

It was scratched into too many a table often by near illiterate authors who wanted to blame...

Read and leave comments (0)

Black stars in the dark that shone so bright,

Pan continental sparks were reignited,

In a flood-lit calabash, man what a sight!

Eleven Ghanaians became Africa United.

For the global Diaspora of Africans whose numbers stretched to billions,

A short but welcome distraction from conflict and debt,

From the highest to the lowest, military to civilians,

The to...

Read and leave comments (0)

The Pervasive Poison of Apartheid (working title)

In the Rainbow Nation one colonial legacy,

Which we see persisting today unfortunately

Is an attitude from a more northerly latitude of 'I'm alright Jack!'

If neighbours from Mozambique or Zim

Should decide on migration in to find what they are seekin’,

Locals will say “they’re arrivin’ here ridin’, on a croco...

Read and leave comments (0)

When they came for students,

I stood up because I had received an education.

When they came for those with disabilities,

I stood up because I knew I could and should.

When they came for those on benefits,

I stood up because failing to protect those in greatest need would cost me my dignity.

When they came for the charities and the arts,

I stood up because I per...

Read and leave comments (2)

On the 18th of January 1981, 13 young people died in a fire in New Cross, South East London (a fourteenth committed suicide after losing so many friends). Just shy of thirty years on, these are the contemporary reflections of a man who was a seven year old boy at the time. Widely thought to have been a racially motivated attack, more recent advances in forensic technology have suggested o...

Read and leave comments (1)

She sent me out into the world,

But before she did she made sure I had breakfasted.

She sent me out into the world,

But before she did she filled my lunch box.

She sent me out into the world,

But for me tea she prepared a banquet,

Gil and Benjamin broke my fast,

So though I knew the revolution would not be televised

I saw a poet could be hero in my Mother’s...

Read and leave comments (1)

More detail to follow

16TH of January 2011 Feature at Jazz Verse Jukebox, Upstairs at Ronnie Scotts

17th Of January Feature at Poetry Cafe

19th of January Hosting Sage and Time, Three blind mice

21st of January Co-hosting Mixed Messages, Mekan Restaurant, Catford (This my own night!)

6th of February Feature atRRRants, Camden Eye

Read and leave comments (0)

I may be a mister,
But sisters don’t get pissed yeah when I say in fact - I, am a feminist.
There seems to me to be a need for us to celebrate and debate the culture of nurture over greed,
Which appears an instinctively natural part of so many a female’s nature.
Maybe its origins historically are biological,
Isn’t it simple, obvious and logical,
That of the human races pair of parental par...

Read and leave comments (27)

A why is

A why is more than lines that converge or divide,

Going from wide to narrow or from narrow to wide,

At an obtuse angle I have found to be,

More than a mitre’s mere 45 degrees.

A why is more than just A letter.

If U can’t C that you must B blind.

More than two letters blended like a V squashed on top of an l.

In fact, a why has to be mor...

Read and leave comments (0)

If we are

If we are what we eat,

Then let us not be excess,

While we all deserve a treat,

Some times more becomes us less.

If we are what we did,

Then let's find the joy in what we do,

While it is often better hid,

The search alone improves our view.

If we are to be defined,

Then let us write our definition,

While we can't fast...

Read and leave comments (0)