Meeting the monks of the patriarchy
beneath an overhang of gorges,
they looked like us…
bearded and muscled
they seemed without scripture,
yet purposeful and pious.
They offered carvings and wine
revealed Icons and relics,
and blood-curdling art…
black as Crows were they,
hospitable with civility…
yet still they reeked of Blood
Not indigenous
like the rest of us,
nor ethno-right…
you are the blight.
No “Ordinary Decent Criminal”
your offence expands, Subliminal.
You feed unconscious bias…
unbridled in the pious.
Your victims feel the shame
irrespective of your name,
some of them are sure…
it’s what you came here for.
Our cages long were filled,
the masses fed, blue pilled,
before ever monsters came…
and we tied their crimes to names.
Now they’re massing behind walls
prostrate in prayer that calls,
that the infidel be slain…
for the cause of sacred name.
Though some of us see people
not minaret or steeple,
that we might be as one
and fuck their Kingdoms Come
Head down, hanging in the azure
she drifts,
her wings as silken arrows.
She folds and dives,
then falls
as silent as any end.
Her tiny heart is calm and free.
Her prey close,
she splits the breeze asunder.
Striking, she takes the air again,
majestic kill and sorrow…
mouths to feed await.
The Land feels no loss,
the Sky feels no gain…
everything is as it should be.
Slavering dogs and screams
saturate impermeable walls
like
reptilian brain
holds trauma…
fucked into flesh
cuffed and beaten
transgenerational stigmatisation
breaks a soul
like
Sounds and smells of oppression
trigger memories…
torn from roots
burned and banished
like a
Genocide…
Wings migrate when seasons shift,
a subtle breeze will turn…
low murmurs ‘neath new feathers lift
their flight away from home…
un-compassed in their domestic fledge
unknowing of its end,
they ride the winds of nature’s pledge
wherever they may send.
Yet not the same for men as birds,
with knowledge of return…
for them just hateful fists and words
that wish their homelands burn…
and what of those that come anew?
Not born of blood or soil,
will they feel safe as free men do?
No State their lives to spoil.
There’s a poem waiting for me
she’s upstairs in my room,
she’s lying legs akimbo
and howling at the moon.
She’s been there since this morning
rearranging all my thoughts,
burning all my crosses
obstructing all my noughts.
Every line she is transmitting
gets scrambled in my head,
she’s adding and omitting
from the pages of my bed.
Oh to climb the hallowed stairs
to claim the sacred key,
to unlock that which she shares
so exclusively with me…
she’s the mistress I can’t woo
she’s the siren of my luck
she’s the one I bow down to
though will never get to fuck.
Dreams are real confessions
of bad deeds never done,
the ghosts of our obsessions,
our shackles come undone…
they are day release concessions
granted unto us at night,
the suspension of repression
to see the evil that we might…
do to one-another
if uninhibited and free,
in a world that was some other,
where in darkness we could see…
that the light which holds us fast
is the lie we hide behind,
and the mould in which we’re cast
lives in the kingdom of the blind.
The silence this morning is songless,
it hisses between my heartbeats…
I listen for the blackbird but his tree
has retreated to the forest.
I am over the border in a white room.
In my dream my father’s mouth is a cave…
it hangs open, expecting nothing.
I breathe his last breath in, it is gone.
My hand lies softly on his sallow skin,
he is peaceful, yet grotesque…
why is this the final mask I see?
as if all the others had left with him.
Back in the shock of today’s sunlight,
I am awake, a year away from his bedside…
I am deeper in the cave of his absence,
the dark is darker, the silence louder.
But what about his work,
his words, his brush, his voice of truth…
what about his courage,
his willingness to stand alone.
And what about her fearless heart,
her love, her stoic reveal of proof…
what about her motherhood,
the foundation of her children’s home.
And what of our dismissal
of good that might outweigh their wrongs…
averting our eyes blindly,
forsaking gratitude where it belongs.
The pen that drags my hand across
the desert of the page,
knows neither joy nor sense of loss,
no calm or boundless rage…
it’s just a tool of thought and dreams
to colour in the days,
to bind their rise and fall with seams
and mark the many ways
…in which there’s no predestiny,
no gods or revelation,
no saving grace for you or me,
no end, no destination
The pen that drags my hand across
the desert of the page,
sees every day, another lost,
in this infernal cage.
All joy and hope
sucked from a womb,
finds three unwise men
in a manger-like tomb.
No room in the inn
just a slather of waste,
no angelic choir
descending in haste.
A score card of wars
ticked off by dull men,
who dine on cheap whores
just to fuck’em again…
while “meek Mary mild”
is swaddled and bound,
bulldozed with her child
into the holiest ground.
Surrender the search for words
in the early morning pain of dawn,
let traffic hum and rain-town birds
steal quiet thoughts and see them born…
imagine forests damp with dew
the roar of waves upon a shore,
a loving hand that guided you
in times when you were lost before…
and in that place find peace and calm
in moments free of earthly stress,
to soothe your wounds of hurt and harm
that you might heal to feel them less.
All natures colours fade and blow away…
though winters womb is safe and warm,
faded tunics on battlefields, pink and grey…
beneath the walls of Hougoumont Farm.
Ploughed are the fields of soil and men…
where earth and blood like Lazarus rise.
that what has passed be born again,
beneath the lie of unchanging skies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3vXS6sgBV4
There must be war to end a war,
if there’s no war
what is end for?
While there’s no war there is no end,
if there’s no end
no help we’ll send.
The end of war is made of rules,
the kind of rules
for blinkered fools.
Made up by those who all agree,
the end of war
can never be.
Sea Lochs run deep on western shores
where the broken timidly retreat,
where executives turned bar-room bores,
their dullard stories repeatedly repeat.
We’ve heard it all before
their lives like boomerangs,
that’ll knock them to the floor
awakening anguished pangs…
Here, the workers immerse themselves
in natures taciturn,
enlightened it is they themselves
that from greater forces learn…
where wind and waters blow and swell
till bloated egos drown,
there is no word that man might tell
to tame The Verdant Crown.
To stand and stay where we are born
is as the flower is to the thorn,
a gift that comes from nurtured past,
a sun that burns through shadows cast.
To roam and seek for pathways new
is as the sand is to the dew,
a rain to quench the deserts drought,
a life well lived to banish doubt.
And when at some unwanted end
the path will seem a foe or friend,
a life through which your choices groomed
the flower or thorn to which you bloomed.
Peace is a Prize,
unseen by gouged and blinded
eyes…
medalled gold
cannot disguise, nor deafen ears to powers
lies.
Time strips clean the schemes
of men, for all to see the lions
den…
and which of us would wish we them?
their lives signed off by tyrants
pen.
Listening to Fela in 98,
Jounieh, Beirut…
Bombs, rocking Nairobi,
Tennis in the afternoon.
Beach in the morning
DR Congo yet to come,
Suicide in Kandahar
Massacre on The Russian Road
“my brain was squirming like a toad”
These are my alternative facts
my North Atlantic Treaty,
my flip-side Warsaw Pacts
in dreams where memories beat me…
Half a head, a scalp an arm
are strange kind of rain?
the storm was wild, then after calm
in the silent years before the pain…
The women came but later went,
the fun ran out on everything.
When all my bloody soul was spent,
I couldn’t hear the Blackbird sing..