THE BLACK SHOULDERED KITE

The black shouldered kite

Shakes his silver pinioned wings

And does what he has to do

Which is hover,

Then change position,

Slip-slide, ride the wind

And hover again;

Like a feathered helicopter

Over this scrappy, scrubby field.

The black shouldered kite’s red eyes

Know no pity and see through concealments,

To detect the urine traces of

Scurrying mice and voles

Which better had, scurry like mad,

For now the black shouldered kite is god here

And god is not love,

But a grey feathered raptor,

Which wants its dinner

And will feast on saint or sinner.

It will fold its slender wings and drop,

To spear you on sharp-clawed talons,

Carry you to the top of a telegraph pole

And eviscerate you.

The black shouldered kite

Don’t take no shite.

VULTURES

In Spain at Monfrague

Three hundred vultures live on a crag.

I have seen them with my own eyes.

They have seen me and ignored me,

A fat man who gets out of a van and

Gapes up in awe.

Some sit on ledges,

Some perch on edges,

And let go, to fall,

Spreadwings and soar.

They may circle and glide,

Find a thermal to ride’

In spirals and gyres

Higher, higher and higher,

Silently curving, intersecting, interlacing

In a broad feathered dance in the sky

Over the Tagus gorge

Over the valleys and woods,

Up ever into pure azure

High above apes with their words.

COUSIN MARY

Cousin Mary strikes along the seafront at Seaford,

Walking into to the salt wind,

With her red hair streaming behind her.

She’s always dreaming,

So she’s dreaming again,

Of her Ireland of ancestors,

And the country of her heart,

Which is Spain.

She walks along the sea wall,

Past the Martello tower and the beach huts;

“NYAHHHHAYAHYAALLNEERAYHAY!” she shouts,

And then explains, when we ask her why,

That this was a Spanish muleteer’s cry.

Mary ate some mammoth once,

Unfrozen from Siberian ice, then cooked and sliced

At a Royal Geographical Society banquet.

Perhaps the flesh of the prehistoric pachyderm

Lets her access spatial and temporal dimensions,

Where others cannot be.

So there is Cousin Mary in a quiet English seaside town,

Calling out to other places and times,

There she is, we see her there,

But Cousin Mary is anywhere and everywhere.

SLEEPLESS

Sleepless in the airport hotel,

Where every molecule of air is tainted

By the aviation fuel that will fly me tomorrow,

Up high and far away

from the air conditioned box that

I have hired to have a throbbing headache in.

And the next night, I can’t sleep again

Although I’ve flown and travelled

To the extreme quiet of extreme Spain.

Being city bred,

I can sleep sound next to the sea,

Where ceaseless shushing waves soothe me into sleep,

Reminding me of the endless ebb and flow,

Of London traffic.

And if I wake to piss,

My anxious brain,

Does not let me sleep again

Without its usual background refrain

Of the sounds of more and more stuff

Moving from here to there,

Punctuated by sirens

And the rattle and hiss of nocturnal trains

Whereas out here on Iberian plains

I lay awake, waiting to hear

An eagle owl hoot

In the black black night.

Waiting for spring 2016

POEMS TYPED30/12/2017

Waiting for spring 2016

Seasons have all gorn wrong nah,

Down the tubes and up the spout,

We say, as we shiver in bus queues.

In midmay, there was an eatwave,

In February, young buzzard flew in,

Perched on a fruit tree in Dollis Hill,

Mewing for a mate.

Gawd knows what it thought it was going to eat;

But the crows that run the sky round here,

Came and chased it away.

Must have annoyed Gawd,

‘cause he’s been pissing on England,

For a month or so now,

Ever since the government announced a drought.

It was raining but it stops sometimes,

Perhaps Gawd goes off to drink

Ambrosia or soma or something.

Only Gawd knows why.

Then I scan the sky hopefully,

Looking for the screaming riders of the cloud road,

This is the time that they should arrive from Africa.

A day ago, as a another rolling wet gale blew in

I thought I heard one cry

But, my ears were cheating me;

So I checked the sky again and again,

Before I was really sure

That I saw what I wanted to see;

Swifts curving and swerving again,

Slicing the skies above London,

On black samurai sword wings.

Lilieth leapt the electric fence

Lilieth leapt the electric fence,

Maybe, at the time, it made sense,

To pounce, claws extended, at a bird in flight,

And so, fall into freedom by accident.

Or maybe she made a deliberate jailbreak,

‘cause you gotta do what you gotta do,

To get outta the zoo.

Who knows what a lynx thinks?

But briefly, Lilieth  the lynx got away

And was no longer on display,

She was no longer confined,

To be admired or to be ignored ,

By the curious, the awestruck, or the bored.

Peering through the wire.

Perhaps real freedom then kicked in,

With no food and drink provided,

Out in the woods and the fields and hills,

To eat she has to hunt and kill,

And at first maybe she has an edge,

As it must be centuries,

Since any lynx walked and stalked

Along these thickets and hedges,

So maybe some rabbits and mice,

Or a bird or two, turned just too late

And drew their last breaths,

Between the jaws of golden-eyed death.

Sadly, hunters can be hunted too,

And Lilieth could not be left to be free,

She was the ‘property’ of a zoo,

And large predators in Britain just cannot be,

Unless they’re members of the bourgeoisie.

Uncaught Lilieth caused official fear

Alleged to pose a risk “severe”,

So a killing bullet, not a tranquilising dart,

Was sent to stop this beauty’s heart.

But the wheel will turn, and justice will be done,

And free once more,  Lilieth will run,

Padding along on larger paws,

With longer, stronger, deadlier claws,

Reborn a larger, fiercer cat,

She’ll rip out the throats of bureaucrats.

ⓒPRMURRY

DODO MODERN POETS: LIVE at the KING & QUEEN 23rd November 2017

DODO MODERN POETS: LIVE at the KING & QUEEN

RICHARD SCOTT     

Resonant language combining the rich and rapturous     

JASMINE ANN COORAY        

 Deep soulful seams  mining exquisite poetry      

ZOLAN QUOBBLE     

 Adrenalin soaked rhythm n' verse from muso poet   

OPEN-MIC SPOTS sign up by 7pm              

Thursday 23rd November 2017, 7.30pm

The King & Queen, 1 Foley St, London, W1W 6DL

£ 7 &6 concessions - open-mic spots £4

Info: 01303 243868; patric.poet@zen.co.uk

Goodge Street tube.

The Ghost of Franz Kafka: online

Dear poetry lovers,

Those of you who were unable to attend September's launch of my new collection, 'The Ghost of Franz Kafka' can now buy it online from Palewell Press. Please see attachment and link for more details. 

www.palewellpress.co.uk/Palewell-Publications.html#Ghost-Kafka

I hope you enjoy the poems,

Regards,

Patric Cunnane

01303 243868.

DODO MODERN POETS LIVE at the KING & QUEEN Wednesday 25th October 2017, 7.30pm

DODO MODERN POETS  LIVE at the  KING & QUEEN 

     

PROJECT ADORNO     

Smart pop meets music hall, art history and serious fun  

  

PR MURRY    

Taking aim at inanity, planet trashing and injustice  

  

SUE JOHNS     

Urban edge &  passion grown from Cornish roots 

   

OPEN-MIC SPOTS sign up by 7pm 

            

Wednesday 25th October 2017, 7.30pm

The King & Queen, 1 Foley St, London, W1W 6DL

£ 7 &6 concessions - open-mic spots £4

Info: 01303 243868; patric.poet@zen.co.uk

Goodge Street tube.

https://dodomodernpoets. wordpress.com

dodo modern poets letting fly with words

Stories about bombs

Stories about bombs have punctuated my life.

Born when the welfare state was also a baby;

I heard about my dad firewatching on the roof

Of an art school in blitzed London,

And composing an oil painting whilst he was up there.

I heard about the shrapnel,

Still embedded in an aunt’s leg.

And, every so often, a radio announcer might report

Unexploded ordinance, found buried on a building site.

One day, Cuba was in the news,

Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on a desk at the UN,

That was the first time that I saw my father scared.

Made to be a school boy cadet,

The worst bomb I heard was a thunderflash,

Just oversized fireworks,

Thrown about by boys in pretend wars;

Whilst half a world away,

Youths threw real grenades at each other

In Vietnam.

But London learned the hard way

That old wounds don’t always heal,

As propaganda of the deed reminded us,

Of an unjustly held colony,

Kept down by British army boots

Across a narrow sea.

A bandstand blew up,

A cast iron waste bin disintegrated in a high street, killing a child.

Sudden night blasts outside Territorial Army barracks;

And then, after a general election,

I heard a massive dull thud roll up from the Thames valley,

To my suburban hilltop,

As a debt was repaid in the City.

Not content with that,

The Fenians blew me out of bed,

Where I lay drunk, trying to forget

The start of four more Tory years,

As, three quarters of a mile away

A four-lane flyover was lifted off its foundations,

By an exploding van.

A truce came to London, until Jihad began

Old wounds don’t always heal,

Crusades and colonialism festered,

And oil was not a balm,

For those treacherous treaties, Sykes-Picot, Balfour

And all the other dodgy dealing,

Spooking and conniving,

To keep those motors running.

But the truth could be that

It doesn’t worry me more

Than the chance of dying in traffic accident.

Stupidity seems to breed Stupidity,

Just today the world’s prize-winning stupidest man

Addressed the UN to threaten a nation

With total destruction.

I wish, because it’s all I can do,

is wish

That he’d taken off his shoe,

Like Nikita Khrushchev did, but then

Beat himself with it,

Over his dyed blond head.

earth lines

FREE by Free Painters and Sculptors A group exhibition exploring ideas of freedom in modern times

FREE by Free Painters and Sculptors
A group exhibition exploring ideas of freedom in modern times

Clerkenwell Gallery, 20 Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DP

Tuesday 26th – Saturday 30th September 2017
Opening Hours: 12-7pm (except Thursday 12-5pm)

Private View: Thursday 28th September, 6-9pm
(please rsvp)

Capturing the essence of freedom and diversity, a new and exciting exhibition from Free Painters and Sculptors (FPS) opens to the public on Tuesday 26th September.

This exhibition explores the principles, reflected in the core beliefs of FPS, of free speech and artistic expression and features work from members of the group using a wide variety of materials and styles.

FPS, an artist-led organisation, was first established in 1952. Since its inception, the idea of freedom has been at the heart of its beliefs. In the aftermath of World War II, it was vital for the group to be able to protect the principles of artistic freedom, free speech and expression, and to challenge established notions and values.

Clearly, since that time, there have been significant, and positive changes in attitudes concerning class, gender, sexuality, race and religion. Despite this progress, there is still a great need to defend these values.

FPS is proud to be an artistic collective that champions and encompasses the essence of diversity. Many of the exhibiting artists will be present at the show at which you will be able to discuss and see their artistic representations of freedom and diversity.

FPS was originally associated with the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) and came to prominence by playing a significant part in the establishment of abstract art in the 1950's and 60's. Founding members featured many high profile and influential artists, including Roy Rasmussen, Lyall Watson and Maurice Jadot, who all feature in the permanent Tate Collection.

In 2017 FPS celebrates its 65th anniversary.

bright green caterpillar

I am an aged and disabled pillock,

And I was dragging a loaded shopping trolley,

Up an urban hillock,

When a bright green caterpillar appeared before me,

It was just there,

Level with my eyes

In mid-air.

I stopped, glad for a chance to catch my breath,

As my puzzled brain computed,

How could the caterpillar just be there,

Defying gravity as far as I could see?

But the laws of physics were not dead,

It was hanging by a thread,

Writhing and wriggling,

Struggling and striving,

To climb up its thin thin lifeline,

To regain its footing and food,

From the laburnum bush above.

A green heaven it loved so much,
That it never gave up

Its aim to return from airborne exile.

I watched it win,

Then dragged my shopping home,

With renewed determination,

And wondered if the caterpillar would now,

Stay in the bush

And save the silk

That it used to make its own rescue rope,

To later encase itself in a chrysalis.

Soon I too may enter a rigid container,

But, sadly, I won’t burst from coffin,

To fly away on brilliant wings,

Surprising those at the graveside.

'A Free Moment' is a summer pop-up exhibition from art group the Free Painters and Sculptors (FPS).

'A Free Moment' is a summer pop-up exhibition from
  Free Painters and Sculptors (FPS). 
 Celebrating its 65th year,
 FPS is delighted to be exhibiting for the first time in 
the gallery@oxo 
in the iconic Oxo Tower building
Exhibition dates: June 7 - 11 
Open daily 11am-7pm 
Free admission 

 Private View: Friday June 9 Open 6.30-8.30pm 
rsvp: info@freepaintersandsculptors.co.uk 
 gallery@oxo | Oxo Tower Wharf |
 Bargehouse Street | London | SE1 9PH

p.murry invigilating 10/7 11.00 – 14.30

ART EXHIBITION at the Trafalgar Rowing Centre

ART EXHIBITION at the Trafalgar Rowing Centre 11-13 Crane Street SE10 9NP 

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROL KENNA PAINTINGS BY STEVE LOBB 

also open on JUNE 11th, 17th & 18th june FROM 2 TO 6PM 

on SATURDAY JUNE 17 2017 FROM 6 TO 9 PM 

at the Trafalgar Rowing Centre 11-13 Crane Street SE10 9NP 

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROL KENNA PAINTINGS BY STEVE LOBB also open on JUNE 11th, 17th & 18th june FROM 2 TO 6PM

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROL KENNA 

PAINTINGS BY STEVE LOBB

LONDON SMOGS, OLD AND NEW

Once a riverran

Like cord of grey churning muscle,

Through a valley

And a city.

Current rolling, pulsing and twisting muddy waters

To the sea and back again at the same time

Running with and against the tide,

Like the city, it never ceased,

On cold winter nights, it sweated mist;

But, if the night was still,

The mist could not rise.

Every house in the city burnt a coal fire,

Nearly every adult who lived there smoked,

And then there was a time

When all the cars, buses and lorries

Smoked too.

Smog was born

And the mist and smog embraced each other

And lay down like satisfied lovers

In a sleeping yellow embrace

Above the city,

Smothering breath and life in a poisonous blanket

So every still night when the smog laid down

Hundreds died beneath.

“Give us clean air!”, the people cried

“Stop the coalfires!,

And clean the car exhausts!

Stop smoking! Cut carbon monoxide!”

Then the old smog, made illegal died,

And fewer people did.

But death was just resting for a decade or two,

Then it smiled and said:

“I’ll find a way to return,

And choke the life from your lungs and heads;

 I’ll make a finer blanket now

Than the smog of old

And when the sun is bright

And the air is still,

I’ll weave a cloth of car fumes,

And light

And lay it over the city

So that they’ll gasp for breath and cough in vain,

Again and again,

Just like they did when my smog was thick

My clear killing veil

Will hang invisible above the city

So they’ll still die for me

As the river rolls on and on

And passes the poisoned people by.

Westminster Abbey November 2016

I walk through the grounds of the abbey,

Lost in my meditations,

With the burden that I carry,

A banner for a demonstration.

Tourists swarm around me,

Some move in files like ants

Crawling over history,

Consuming what’s left behind.

Perhaps they see the grand buildings,

The cornices, gargoyles and spires,

But I see through this feudalist frippery,

To class power that lurks inside.

I unfurl my flag of protest

Hoist on a telescopic pole

There are slogans and placards around me

Parliament’s  close and remote.

We are free to shout on a pavement

Orators can urge and rant

But concrete barriers and armed police,

Keep power and powerless apart.

London traffic never falters one second,

It’s always got somewhere to go,

Solidarity with strikers,

Shall not obstruct its flow.

The tourist buses pass us,

And phones and cameras click,

A demo is turned into data,

Impaled on selfie stick.

We’re all just part of the spectacle, that the tourists may later replay,

They saw a real genuine protest, and heard protestors shout,

With flags and placards and banners,

But what was it all about?”