Monsters There are monsters awake in the fields changing the way we do farming, increasing, it's said, underyields, which many folk find most alarming. Changing the way we do farming by tinkering with the genetics, which many folk find most alarming, is driving some into frenetics. By tinkering with the genetics of food we regarded as stable, is driving some into frenetics producing hysterical fables. Food we regarded as stable, it's in danger of being transmuted, producing hysterical fables. The science must be refuted! It's in danger of being transmuted, increasing, it's said, underyields. The science must be refuted! There are monsters awake in the fields.
For Ruth, 1925-2016
For Ruth, 1925-2016
You lived and loved and held your love intact,
undemonstrative, pure, focused on the fact
of your determination to succeed
in bringing light, in satisfying need.
As much your need as you thought it ours;
tending seeds, cultivating flowers
that blossomed here, ripened overseas,
unceasingly returning to the tree
you planted once, a solitary copper beech,
standing still but now beyond your reach
and signifying all those roaming years
you were constantly torn between the hemispheres.
You're gone from us now and love is what remains
with us here. There's no breaking of those chains
that bind us heart to heart in unison.
Your life was wholly yours but now our song.
Love
Love
The zero in a tennis match,
the singer who married Kurt Cobain,
a virus that we often catch
and people fall in, time again.
Of which, poets are devout,
the thing that many songs describe,
a feeling that can bring such pain,
is often dangled as a bribe.
Has driven many quite insane
yet rescued others, there's no doubt.
From the carnal version monks refrain,
the spiritual they chant about.
But that which cannot be reviled,
is the mother tending to her child.
In Weather
In Weather
This gravel country lane leads to a sea
we walk to on those countless, rainfilled days,
with you a stride ahead and leading me
through fields, across the morning's lifting haze.
And when you've named the flowers, all the ways
they pollinate by insect, bird and bee,
you lift your head, speak with a look that says
this gravel country lane leads to a sea.
Your free flung hair is blowing constantly
As on you pace with a vigour that portrays
the strength you gather from the liberty
we walk to on those countless rainfilled days.
When pitching storms fragment the shore with sprays
enfolding cliff and field and fallen tree,
we force along the lane where cattle graze
with you a stride ahead and leading me.
On other days the sun is rising, free
to split its light, refract its warming rays,
flighting sparrows, a tumbling parody
through fields, across the morning's lifting haze.
In time, when memory fades and energy
deserts our weary limbs, will we appraise
how weather drew us out, would remedy
with rain these fields, occasional byways,
this gravel country lane?
12.01115
12.01115
"...carbon is the key element of living substance:
but it's promotion, it's entry into the living world
is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path..."
(Primo Levy)
A thousand million years
are not enough to tell
how vertical grass becomes
a crab and then a bee
or honey that it makes
before it's grass again.
And in between, regular
excursions starward,
looking home with eyes
it one day will become
or, water bound,
riding plankton waves.
Which atom in this hand
once lay bound in limestone,
hacked by a pick,
shovelled to a kiln
till the molecules broke down
and issued gas blew windward
to settle on a leaf and liquefy?
Pinned there by a photoflash
of sun, became green food,
fortified an oak,
bark where woodworm drilled,
where the moth morphosed
and flew on in it's wing
until the predator's snap;
then again a gas
and then an artichoke
my mother ate.
In carbon, incarnation curls,
reminds us this thin crust
brims with it's atomic weight,
facing, once again unfurled,
the black cess,
nothingness.
A Dead Dove at Swanwick Station
A Dead Dove at Swanwick Station
It seemed frozen in flight
as if negotiating
a soft landing or a tight
right hand turn and tried to fling
it's wings out wide to interrupt
a sudden stall, it's landing gear
unworkable, or an abrupt
and unseen source of fleeting fear.
It was perfect and unmarked,
crouched, head between it's knees.
A few white feathers charted
the spot it lay beneath the trees.
It's hooded eyes and ungainly
posture pointed to something wrong;
it's life forced out, profanely
emptied of any sound or song.
Pandemical Polemical
Pandemical Polemical
Boris Johnson is PM,
not representing Us, just Them,
the Few that would deny a penny
to the poor deserving Many.
Let's hope we can undo this schism
unmasked by an algorithm,
undermined by a disease
that mutates like a passing breeze.
Yet the monstrous mutant, hale and hearty,
to be rid of, is the Tory Party
along with all it's City mates,
financial backers, initiates
in the ways of exploitation,
greed and mutual masturbation,
wankering each other off
with their snouts deep in the trough.
There's a plumby job for a girl or boy
who's dedicated to destroy
any whiff of Socialism.
"Let's build another algorithm
to wipe out any tiny chance
that people become free to dance
the dance of vibrant Liberty
around the trunk of Freedom's tree."
Yes, Boris Johnson as PM
has writ these words and posted them,
a subtext of his vile wit;
surely we're fed up with it.
Surely we can build a fight
to rid us of this cancerous blight.
Let's populate each local street,
encouragingly entreat
a revolution of we proles
to lift our hearts, light up our souls;
to urge us proletariat
to start a fiery samizdat,
a clandestine publication
promoting urgent liberation
from these feckless, bloated twisters.
So what we need are stout resisters
organising every place
where there is a human face,
a mouth to feed, a child to tend,
the lonely one who wants a friend,
the needy sick, the unemployed,
the desperate and the near destroyed.
Let's rise together and follow the call,
see these exploiters head for a fall
from the grace they, in error, think that they merit.
Let's do it! There's only a World to Inherit!
At the Railway Station, Upwey.
At the Railway Station, Upwey You would not recognise it now, surrounded as it is with neat homes, a net curtained wilderness winding to the Ridgeway. Yet as the wind wanes and Sunday men look up from washed cars, the air reveals notes played in a high register: unmistakably, a violin.
Can’t do more
Can't do more I'm pretty sure I can't do more than sit in silence with the night. Because if I tried I'd be denied these instances of second sight. But not the kind you'd likely find among the mystics of the land. More of the sort that's sold and bought like articles, second hand. There's no quality you'd find in me more mystical than entropy.
Immigrants
Immigrants
Outside the windows of our London flat
the city's waking to the cry of gulls,
escapees from the terrors of the sea,
converts to the urban thermals found
arising from the concrete and the glass.
They've made their way inland by using maps
etched on the liquid compasses embedded
in the secret places of their brains.
The river Thames acts as their certain road
from sea to city, as these migrants flock
to soar above the streets in crying crowds
mirroring the screeching crowds below.
Despite the curving beauty of their wings
as they hang in London's fetid air,
we want to persecute, to send them back
to dangerous seas they will encounter there.
Poems, Polemicks and Licks 