A far from safe place

From a far safe place,

Through a sanitising computer screen

I see buildings falling,

People dying.

Weapons firing.

Rising smoke

I try to find

Scant hope

That this is the cigar butt of empire

Being ground out at last

On human skin;

But that hope is weak and thin.

Nebuchadnezzar

And before him,

Emperors of Qin and

The Sumerian kings;

Then even further back,

Before people were people,

As Jane Goodall saw

Chimpanzees make war.

Does it run through us

Like veins through flesh,

Are we enmeshed?

Trapped like rats,

Fighting in a pit

Whilst gods look down

And laugh?

Fat, fat squirrel

Fat, fat squirrel

A small furry Buddha

Complacently

Sitting in the tree.

Monopolising the bird food.

‘bird food’, bird feeders’, ‘birds’,

These are only human words,

And the squirrel has no quarrel,

Since this food is free

Apparently

Until the market kicks in

As markets do

Another squirrel appears

And wants to munch

Some birdfood lunch

So, squirrel number one

Chases squirrel number two

To the top of the tree

And to the next tree as well

Then squirrel number three

Catches the smell,

And the smell is good.

So, squirrel number three

goes for the food.,

This incites one or two,

Which it is, I cannot say

To chase three away.

And once the chase is on

Two squirrels are gone,

Then a fat squirrel comes back

To eat more birdfood

And attempt again

To get even more fat.

Kill pity (with acknowledgements to Desmond Dekker)

Get up in the morning,

Kill pity for breakfast,

Put on your helmets,

So, you can’t hear the cries.

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, the Israelites.

Carry holy text

In your flak jacket pocket,

So that what you will do

Can be justified.

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, the Israelites.

If you have lost one,

Does your book tell you,

That then seventeen

More people must die?

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, the Israelites.

Ride in your armour

Through ruined Gaza,

Look out of the hatch,

At the wasteland you’ve made.

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, the Israelites.

You think you will end it,

But you’ll prolong it,

Revenge will grow strong,

From the seed that you’ve sown.

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, the Israelites.

LAMMERGEIER

I am a bearded vulture,

I wanted a crunchy meat pie,

I saw one crawling beneath its shell,

Across the mountainside.

So, I swooped and grasped that tortoise.

With my strong sharp claws

And carried it up and upwards,

Without the slightest pause.

I am a bearded vulture,

My eyes are as keen as blades,

So, I saw a round rock, far below,

Shining up out of the shade.

I am a bearded vulture,

I decided to loosen my grasp,

The tortoise descended,

With increasing speed

Smashed into that round rock fast.

I am a bearded vulture,

I killed a philosopher dead.

I am winged king of mountainsides,

I dropped a tortoise on his head.

DON'T THINK

I pull on my socks and

Think of a Victorian electroplated

Sauceboat, with four little feet

Crafted to look like the paws of a beast.

I brush my teeth and

Watch a vortex suck debris down a plughole.

I blow my nose and

Ideas flee from me like herbivores,

That catch the scent of a meat-eating beast.

I see them poised for a split second,

Then they run.

I try, unsuccessfully, to call them back.

Because I’d rather think of anything than

New born babies swaddled in blankets and foil,

Lying in no manger

But on a hospital floor

Waiting to die,

In Gaza.

All Saints’ Day never dawns

Unrelenting grief from Gaza

Haemorrhages out of my media

But, I can switch off my radio, my phone and my computer;

I have a comfortable home,

With food and medicine provided.

So, when I say that I am now numb,

I’m not as numb as some,

Who are tucked in by the devil

To sleep forever under the concrete blankets

Of bombed down ceilings.

Maybe they’re the lucky ones,

Others are doomed to survive

Entombed alive;

Or lie crying with wounds and hunger untreated,

Until the ethnic cleaning is completed.

In England, winter has come,

Ending this year with the day that the dead walk,

But All Saints’ Day never dawns.

I LOVE GOING TO WORK IN NOVEMBER

The rubberised edges

Of the windscreen wipers

Of this decrepit bus

Whine like pathetic puppies

About to be drowned.

 

There is no sky.

There is no day.

There is no night.

 

The bus proceeds through

Featureless grey murk,

On and on and on,

Whilst its windscreen wipers whine.

 

The passengers cough.

The driver coughs.

Some get on.

Some get off.

Somehow.

I love going to work in November.

rediscovered 22/10/2023

THE AUTUMN CONFERENCE OF THE GREEN PARTY OF ENGLAND AND WALES 2023

Is there a vegetable scent in the air?

Or falafel, or even vegan cheese,

That wafts through this shiny conference hall,

On the air-conditioned breeze?

It swirls around me as I sit at my stall,

With the leaflets, the books and the badges,

It‘s the smell of no real politics at all,

From those who look in from the edges.

This event would be like a children’s crusade,

But often shorts-clad legs show knobbly knees,

Supporting grey haired heads that are full to the brim,

With buzzing obsessional bees.

Then a younger generation is here as well,

Urgent, smooth and ambitious

To make political careers and bureaucratic machines,

By rigged agendas and cliquish seditions.

I sit and observe from my pamphlet-laden table.

I’ve lost interest in spurious debates,

Between the intersecting factions, all unable

To save this planet from its climactic fates.

So like refuges on a rudderless boat,

We cling on, because we daren’t jump out,

As we randomly drift, and stay barely afloat,

To some new land we all dream about.

DOWNS originally written 2002

I’m going walking up the Downs,

up the Downs,

up the Downs,

which are piles of fossilised shrimp shells.

 

Then I’ll be looking down on towns,

down on towns,

down on towns.

Because it’s a rural idyll.

 

I’m going to puff and I’m going to pant,

To crawl up the side of a Down like an ant,

An ant on a pile of shrimp shells.

 

I’m going to hear the cows go ‘moo’,

The sheep go ‘baa’

And ever see any cars

As bright flashes from afar.

It’s a pathetic illusion.

That there’s any countryside left

Anywhere in southern England.

 

Because when the song of the ascending lark

Lights a spark,

Or sticks a spike,

Up on the Downs, into my heart.

I’m just consuming leisure in a park.

In the city of southern England.

 

So, I go striding up the Downs,

In my hiking gear,

In the clear air

Beside the bright sea,

Looking down on towns,

Like a clown,  

On a pile of shrimp shells.

A DIALOGUE OF SORTS WITH AN ABSENT FRIEND

 

What is that paper shredder doing

In the bedroom?

It is eating artichokes and

Articulating stanzas

In a seldom spoken

Finno-Uralic language.

How can it do that when

It is not even plugged in?

That is a superficial view.

When it is plugged in

It can only receive.

Mundane electric current

Supplied to it by

State supported oligopolies,

But unplugged and free,

It is attuned to an

Inspirational multiverse

Of currents unknown to us

Some so far beyond our perceptions,

That to an unplugged paper shredder,

We are mere irrelevant apes,

Who would re-enslave it,

Forcing it to only excrete

Paper detritus

Such as this.

BLOCKS

 It’s not there anymore,

I say, looking out of the bus window,

The passenger next to me

Is probably puzzled by this remark,

But it was there then,

Until they brought in the bulldozers

Levelled it, erected wooden fences around

Where it was.

Then they painted the fences with 

Multi-coloured cartoons of smiley people 

And slogans about ‘the community’.

Nobody asked us.

It was just done as planned.

Brick boxes will be piled up into a block,

As an architect living elsewhere

Plays with our manor,

With as much regard as a giant toddler

Stacking up wooden toys.

But is that bad?

There will be new places

For people to live.

How beneficent of our elected councillors

To do this, and hand

An opportunity for profit

To a landlord

Whilst their other hand is extended

Palm upwards

To be crossed by silver.

eagle

I am an eagle

I live in a zoo

I don’t like it much

Neither would you

I sat on my perch

I stared at the wall

But I saw a sky

With no bars at all

I sat on my perch

I glared down at crowds

I dived in my mind

Between dreamed clouds

I sat on my perch

I shat on the floor

I tried to imagine

What it feels like to soar

Then god of eagles

Made good luck for me

One unlocked moment

Enough to fly free

But life uncaged

Was too short and sweet

Wide open sky

Killed dogs to eat

I sat in a tree

Didn’t know what to feel

Kept dreaming of bars

And regular meals

I sat in a tree

I knew I was tamed

No move to escape

When the dart gun was aimed

I am an eagle

I live in a zoo

I don’t like it much

Neither would you

Pears

 A weary old pillock

Drags laden shopping trolley

Up suburban hillock.

Trolley contains two pairs of pears,

Four pears, to be exact,

Recently purchased, packed

And cellophane wrapped,

In a nice little tray,

Which will be thrown away today;

After it has been shipped

By muti-national fruit traffickers,

To Dollis Hill from far South Africa.

But the shopping trolley

Is not the only place

Where there are pears.

They are all around

The plodding pillock’s feet

Each step must be

Carefully and precisely placed,

As pavement pears are lying there,

On the ground, rotting and rotten,

Half-eaten and brown.

The tree that they fell from

Seems forgotten by its owners,

Or maybe they have never known

About the fruit that it has grown.

So, the pavement pears are

Unharvested, and to humans, waste

Whilst rats, birds wasps, and flies

Were wise enough to eat and taste.

On a world that starts to fry

Transporting pears for thousands of miles

Seems unwise,

While those homegrown

Just decompose.

TRUE ENGLISH ROYALTY

 One bright summer’s day

After a month of cloud and rain,

The world has rotated again,

So, it is the day for Princesses to fly.

But these fine ladies will not take to air

In private helicopters or personal jet planes.

No servants will ply them inflight

With caviar, canapes, or champagne.

They will not emerge through palace gates

In coaches, limousines or cavalcades;

They’ll crawl from pavement cracks

And holes in the ground

To make their desperate escapades.

Most won’t survive this first and last flight,

When their thin wings glitter like jewels in the sun

Predators see them and eagerly eat them.

Those who remain can fall back to land.

And if jaws don’t grasp them

Or feet don’t stomp them,

The lucky survivors, the last pretty Princesses,

Will lose their wings and make it to refuge

Beneath stone slabs or compost heaps

But once burrowed in safely, they will not sleep.

They’ll build cities of workers

For thousands of children

The reign of the Ant Queen is long, dark and deep.

A view from the suburbs

 Sitting inside a London front door,

Waiting for groceries to arrive

Or for inspiration to descend from the sky.

Instead, a seagull flies by

Honking to itself.

Further off cranes

Raise and lower massive steel limbs,

Blinking red hazard lights,

Like Martian war machines.

H.G. Wells may have seen them

As seeming aliens,

But they’re just another part

Of the constant re-invention

Rebirth, construction and destruction

Of this inexorably expanding megacity.

Is a vast pulsing heart,

Or a growing slime-mould,

Spreading out towards the seas?

Going on and on

Until the end

Of the Great When?

I saved a suicidal spider,

 I saved a suicidal spider,

Which was poised to plunge

Into the torrent of steaming water,

Swirling in my kitchen sink.

I intervened with a piece of cardboard

To prevent its dive

Over the sink’s brink.

 

Then I was smug,

And I savoured my smugness.

I saw myself as the great godlike,

Arachnid saviour.

Until realising that, most likely,

There was no saviour for me,

Or the billions of my species,

About to be swept away in floods

Or scorched to death in droughts and fires,

That we ourselves created.

We have always prayed

To some god or gods,

To anything or nothing.

But if he, she, it or they are there,

They might not care,

Or might think it only fair,

That the consequences 

Which we’ve engineered

Finish us off for good.

Furthermore, we only have two legs each,

Unlike our eight-legged successors,

Who will scuttle over our ruins,

Not remembering us at all.

 

TANGLES

 Thank god or whatever, or whomsoever

Presides over missing objects,

That I never said what I thought

I was going to say.

Now I know that I was wrong,

All along

The thing that I had thought was gone

Hadn’t gone at all.

It had concealed itself behind a door.

But in my confused brain

I thought it had been deliberately taken.

I believed that to be

The only possible explanation.

What a sad shambles,

Mentally I thrashed around as if

Caught in kraken’s tentacles,

Or as if I had fallen into a prickly patch

Of brambles.

Until I composed a cold polite speech

To address the whereabouts of

The thing that I had thought was gone.

But I never uttered

This mistaken accusation,

Because the gone thing reappeared

From where it had aways been.

So, I didn’t have to seem

To be more of a drooling fool than I usually do.

Smoke

Tobacco and marijuana

Smoke hangs, swirls

and curls in a sun beam

those who have inhaled it,

then blown it out of lungs again,

look at it with young wonder,

thinking that it means something.

Years and miles further on

Sunlight shines through

Smoke from a chimney

Making dapped patterns

On the tarmac carpark below.

One person watches this

Another is gone.

Smoke only means this for a moment.

Cerberus hellhound

 In July 2023

Cerberus hellhound

Breathed on Europe,

With one of his three heads,

Burning green trees to ash,

Turning fertile soil to dust.

But in smug Brexit Britain smug Brexit Brits were smug

Sitting staring out to sea

From urine perfumed promenade shelters

Trying to discern

A horizon between grey and grey 

And thinking about fish and chips,

As squalls blew in.

But don’t let Cerberus

Get a whiff of that,

Or he will lift all three of his heads.

And he will

One day.

brian

 Who can I argue with now?

About everywhen, whenever, who, whom, whomsoever, what, why, where, wherever and how?

Who will remind me that all insects are dying?

That I need to build a compost heap

To keep the flies flying

So swifts, martins and swallows

Can swoop screaming down,

To feed themselves from the food of the skies.

Who will warn me when I want to surrender,

Bury myself under blankets,

And escape into slumber?

Who will provoke me to use my brain

To cope with a world run by greed?

Who will needle me again and again?

To do the little I can

To argue and explain?

But it was scientifically impossible,

As you could never see,

For anyone to be

As wrong as you,

And as right as me?

youtube justice

I watch lost souls through a machine,

Their faces appear as they drown in despair,

Whilst I’m safely watching my screen

I’m just like the gentry ages ago,

Who would gape at the Bedlam boys restrained,

And be pleasantly distracted,

By lunatic paupers secured and enchained.

Some lost souls are bewildered and dumbfounded;

Some have strange hopes and strange beliefs;

Some naively believe that justice will prevail

That a rightful conclusion will end their ordeal.

But they are all only fish trawled up in a net,

Tipped out gaping onto a boat’s deck.

A few will be thrown back free to the sea,

Most gutted, locked in boxes and left to freeze.

Police, lawyers clerks and judges

Work the fishing machine,

It’s a job or vocation that must be enacted,

Dooms must be deemed as prescribed and contracted,

So, I can eat my tinned tuna and be entertained

By the evil, the innocent, the unlucky and the insane.

cab to the crematorium

My own personal grey cloud

Has been hanging unmoving over me

For weeks now

Reason, which used to be my best friend,

Is no help to me.

Only a singing blackbird

Can teach me a true philosophy.

So, I caught a cab to the crematorium,

Where I sat on low brick wall

Looking at the manicured lawns and trees

Above me a skylark sang,

A buzzard sparred with gulls and crows,

Then another hawk appeared.

These are all good omens.

The mourners assembled below,

Not somber suited as usual,

But a multi-faceted colourful crowd,

Gathered to pay their many respects

To a multi-faceted colourful man,

Who after floods of praise and love,

Was burned in a wicker casket.

A true Druid.