Funny, funny ha ha, funny peculiar, deadly serious, ultimate introspection, infection, selection and defecation. And yes, some detestable doggerel too.

Since the publication of my collection Some Day Soon, my pen made these. Another collection is evolving, as am I

The Med is blue

This poem was written on my journey to Greece, where the yacht Flying awaited me in the harbour of Astypaleia. A plague ship! P had just informed me that a member of crew had Covid, and the other two were self-isolating. It starts, as so many epic journeys do, on the Tube….

Sunday. On the tube.

And here the invisible dust 

Blows through our bodies

Ground metals pulverised glass

Interspersed with viruses

Alive and dead

Being and becoming

The Karmic parade passes, passes

Eroding

(The Med is blue)

This Piccadilly line takes me from 

Present to present along these 

Karmic tracks

Eroding steel

Train to Gatwick :

Southward from Victoria 

Trains and planes and boats

These boots are made for walking

(How to heal

A broken heart)

(What are we searching Google for?

Basic Greek Phrases)

NASA about to launch

Going to the moon

Pointed up

I’m pointed south 

Wizzair 

To my shame I took a ‘plane. I know! I can make excuses, I can give explanations, I can lie to myself and to you. Shame! I took a ‘plane!

The cloud-bothered Achaean sky

Between Olympus and heaven

And below

Giant feet have scored the Earth 

Crinkled like insults mountains sulk

Folding secrets

A long wide river dried

Deterred from its function

The Med is blue, I’m told

But now whiteness hides Greece from me

We descend

This wine-dark sea 

On a ferry from Piraeus

Only at night.

Here the dawn makes the sea rippled black

The fresh foam chases us

Skipping islands

About which all that can be said

Has been said

Thousands of years been said.

Except:

They’ve never had me before

In a plastic chair on a deck

Skimming my words lightly around them

The apogee of my karma this far.

They’ve never had beloved friends 

Peter, Zelda, Maggie and Anna

waiting for me

At Astypaleia

Confined in their plague ship

Locked up with positive.

Never before. Ever.

The ferry Naxos grinds out and thrashes 

Sea beneath my stern

(Mine and the ship’s)

Like years.

(My mother’s picture features on my iPad.

I didn’t select it.

An algorithm devised by others’ eyes

Put her there to protect me.

Hello Valerie! We were on a ferry – when?

Perhaps in Seattle, I remember!

To Whidby island, that’s right!

I took pictures then too.

I looked through the pictures.

Perhaps you weren’t there.

Except in an image

On my iPad)

THERE WILL BE MORE in my second volume of poems, THE WINE DARK SEA to be published in December 2023.

MEANWHILE a miscellany of ephemera…..

I reflect you

A shade as empty as a sliver

An echo of a silent sigh

A whisper of a breeze unblown

A disorder of spirit

let me see the ravaged face

You quietly hide

The shreds of your eyes

Lips bared back from teeth

Ground into sharp posts

Blood-flecked

We squeeze into this space so hard

Condensed into mere memory

Viced into tiny

 Simulacra by

The delusion of a journey.

I murder myself words sharp as swords

Seppuku

If I could but

Swallow myself whole

I would

My mind to me a kingdom is

Betwixt the Earth and sky

Wherein the subtle difference lives

Between the you and I

And all I own, and all I give

And all that seeks me out

Makes of me a mystery

I cannot learn about.

Where light and dark are blended quite

Night made of lightness, dark made of light

Look closely into my eyes, beloved,

….

British politics continue to bug me. How on earth could Boris Johnson and his coterie of Bullingdon bullies and Eton messses stay so long in power? Since I wrote the poem below, he has resigned. Hurray. To be replaced by a billionaire bureaucrat.

Bugger off Boris

You cad!

Crawl back in your hole

We rumbled your artifice

Seen the emptiness in your soul

We watched as you shamed us

On the international stage

But when you shut your door and partied

RAGE!

Your bum hit the buffers

You were kicked out of Ten

And believe me Boris 

WE NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN

More Tube Poems. Well, what else is there to do on the London Underground than depict, in words….

I don’t know what I’m doing

Or why

This train tunnels eastward under London. It knows where and why, or rather, the speck of human who faces the silver disappearing lines of track ahead knows. His name is Mohsin and he is picking his nose.

Why am I on this journey with you Mo? 

Oh Mo I have nowhere to go

Or why

Beneath me earth, obove more earth

And above that, sky

I never tell you anything. you say

Or rather you don’t. We never speak anyway 

We never tunnel underground

So

It’s with Mo I got to go 

She wears the agony

Of oysters on her wrist and around her neck

Her sharpened nails blood red

And mouth painted sanguine 

Smile full of tombstones

Creature of blood and death

Captive here in #ink

Some feast on life

And sleek and fat they take their fill

And then take more, and more until

We starve.

As for me, I prefer to #munch my due

And proceed down the path,

Singing

Here’s some for me and some for you

(Or Rather, I should!

But I ain’t made of……. You finish the rhyme!)

(If only I could!)

LONDON 2022

Cranes stalk the sky

Each glow of a baleful eye

Defying the night.

Wells had it right

The Martians invaded

With concrete and steal

In fiction defeated

By an #innocent virus

Cry! Shout out! Refuse!Stand! Protest! Revolt! Sit down! Stand up!

We who suffer

The burden of compassion 

The disability of intelligence

The catastrophe of conscience

We who struggle

Tears in our eyes

To explain

Cannot be silent!

Must not 

Refrain

As those

Unburdened by conscience

Lacking compassion 

Who use their intelligence

For their own perceived need

Irrespective of consequences 

Rule – 

Cry! Shout out! Refuse! Stand! Protest! Revolt! Sit down! Stand up! 

Write! Give! 

Our children have a RIGHT to LIVE

The death of Elizabeth Part 2 surprised me. My eyes leaked.

Lizzie

How to feel?

Granny is dead.

Mother has gone.

The massed legions of the dead

Will welcome with warm

Cheers

Marm.

Bereft of her smile

Of the wave of her gloved hand

We line for mile after mile.

A coffin, bereft of her smile.