KNOWING, AND 

NOT KNOWING 

I was there at White Sands 

wearing sunglasses to watch 

the detonation at the end of the world, 

I was free-falling with Little Boy 

through the skies above Hiroshima, 

I was checking through comic-books on the 

newsstand outside the Dallas Book Depository 

when I heard the shots that took away our future, 

I watch the 9:11 towers fall over and over, 

on a million TV-screen repeat, 

I hung around the Dakota Building 

as John Lennon signed his final autograph, 

something outside me takes the words away, 

evil passes me blind on the sidewalk, 

if this is a phase I’m going through, 

when does it end and move 

smoothly into the next phase? 

is there a chart you can consult, 

a graph that indicates you’re here, 

moving up this sharp incline 

towards that point there, 

after which you move through 

into the next phase where all this 

mixed-up confusion resolves, 

if this is a learning process, 

when does the knowing set in? 

because the more I’m seeing 

the less I understand… 

Featured online at: 

‘IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES’ (17 January 2018) 

http://internationaltimes.it/knowing-and-not-knowing/ 

Collected into: 

‘TWEAK VISION: THE WORD-PLAY 

SOLUTION TO MODERN-ANGST CONFUSION’ 

Alien Buddha Press (USA – March 2018)

 

‘THE ACCEPTED CONVENTIONS 

 OF SPACE, TIME & REALITY’ 

(with thanks to Ian Lee) 

the scatter-winds of February 

redistribute last week’s garbage 

from there to here in a cascade 

of a hundred yesterdays, until 

I no longer know if JF Kennedy, Buddy Holly 

and Monica Lewinsky are history or myth, 

there are reality shows where Thai girls endure 

 cosmetic surgery to become Shakira, or Barbi dolls, 

there are political theorists to explain how Watergate 

was perpetrated by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, 

ethical issues have become a Freeview gameshow with 

trick questions to catch out the unwary, such as whether 

HG Wells made the first moon landing or if it was a CBS 

telecast, contestants get a five second countdown to decide, 

Martin Amis puts characters called Martin Amis 

in his novels, but swears they’re not him, 

I no longer know if Jupiter is really the size we 

see it in data from the James Webb Space Telescope 

or if fortune is simply a poem by another name

 

Featured online at: 

‘IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES’ (12 March 2022) 

https://internationaltimes.it/the-accepted-conventions-of-space-time-reality/

Poem: 'A Whispering Silence'

 

A WHISPERING SILENCE 

(Chalkidiki September 2006) 

arriving 

somewhere… 

but not here 

Poseidon’s green trident 

of peninsula’s thrust in 

bird-scattered Aegean, 

a vibrant cluster 

of villages set beneath 

the forested hills, with 

black scorched-earth scars 

wreaked by summer flame 

only the turtles survive, 

sculling safe beneath 

the deep-water surface 

of their hidden lake 

life grows progressively 

stranger, the longer I’m here, 

a deepening need to firm 

onto structures, as you 

change my world by leaving it 

there’s fossil-life beneath 

the surface of stone, 

yet for all associations 

with timelessness 

this place is ghosted 

with impermanence, 

old silences beneath 

deep-water surfaces 

your absence 

demands reorientation, 

a repositioning in 

altered topography 

I can’t escape 

sensing body-warmth 

in the touch of sun, 

your breath in the silent 

scars of old arguments, 

with words as events enough 

in themselves to define 

things that fray, but 

never quite separate, 

things that words are 

never equal to, until 

I can write poems to 

prove they are… 

in the slow drawing-in 

of dreams we share your 

wait for anticipated 

menstrual flow, as 

you arrive somewhere… 

but not here 

there’s no place 

like alone

 

Published in: 

‘PURPLE PATCH no.116’ 

(UK – February 2007) 

Featured online at: 

‘GYPSY ART SHOW’ 

(24 April 2019) 

Poem: 'Death Is An Important Number'

 

DEATH IS AN IMPORTANT NUMBER/ 

LAST OF THE SHADOW MEN

 

in the romance of theft 

I steal for you what you need, 

we are transient bones 

with skulls behind our eyes, 

we are echoes in the deathhouse, 

yet while we live this despair 

I feed you as I can, 

drugs, burgers, pizza, medication, 

is this the sound of tomorrow 

or just sound? 

if they play this at Glastonbury 

would they dance? 

when I have nothing to give 

I will give you sad poems 

and abstract art made up of 

indelicate syllables, 

in light as chill as the moon, 

I want to gift you wonders 

yet I feed you trash 

bruise-fresh in frozen ripeness

Poem: 'All I Ever Wanted To Do'

 

ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO 

(From an idea suggested by Bruce Hodder)

 

All I ever wanted to do was walk along the beach and rescue stranded driftwood, carve it into the form of real mermaids, and release them back into the sea...

 

All I ever wanted to do was walk on the surface of Callisto and look up at the psychedelic storms swirling across the face of Jupiter...

 

All I ever wanted to do was take acid with Captain Trips and jam 148 verses of ‘Dark Star’ at Stonehenge during a total eclipse...

 

All I ever wanted to do was live a hermit’s life in a cave beside a stream on the Yorkshire Moors, learn the language of dragonflies and moles, write poems on pieces of bread and feed them to the birds so that every time they crap on the city street or on someone’s car, it will be puréed verse…

 

All I ever wanted to do was own an emporium that sells time, in neat parcels of minutes or hours, to barter a weekend in 1961, a month in 1482, or a chance to say ‘I understand’ to a long-dead mother…

All I ever wanted to do was lie about nude in the sand, drawing pictures of mountains that look like bumps, as in Grace’s ‘Lather’…

 

All I ever wanted to do was put Debbie Harry’s panties through the liquidiser and drink them down straight, no chaser... 

Featured online at: 

‘IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES’ 

(31 July 2021) 

http://internationaltimes.it/all-i-ever-wanted-to-do/

Poem: 'Who'll Be The Next In Line?'

 

WHO’LL BE THE NEXT IN LINE? 

Is this the end of the queue? 

Is this where we wait? It is? Thank you. 

I can’t even see the head of the queue. 

Can you? No. Me neither. 

Seem to spend our lives queuing. 

We pretend to be patient, don’t we? 

We try to endure the inconvenience. 

But it is annoying. In fact, it’s maddening. 

Did we move then? One pace forward? 

No…? Just wishful thinking. HaHa! 

It’s getting late. How long has it been now? 

There’s more people joining up behind us. 

An endless queue, one that goes on forever. 

Maybe I’ll sit down, take the weight off. 

Text-message home… oh, no wifi here. 

Time passes. Slips by, and we’re still here, 

an hour later, a day, a week, a month…? 

Don’t want to move in case I lose my place. 

Are you sure we’re in the correct queue? 

It’d be terrible to find we’re in the wrong line! 

Hungry, thirsty, tired… and I need the toilet. 

Strange, how all these patient people, 

barely shuffle forward, heads bowed. 

Does this queue even have an end? 

Are we here for eternity? HaHa! 

I just got this crazy unsettling thought… 

what if we’re all dead, and this is 

some kind of bureaucratic afterlife? 

Wait, did we move then, one pace forward, 

No…? Just wishful thinking… 

Published in: 

‘ALIEN BUDDHA PRESS: ANTHOLOGY Vol.2’ 

(USA – March 2018) ISBN 978-1986-907484 

Collected into: 

‘TWEAK VISION: THE WORD-PLAY 

SOLUTION TO MODERN-ANGST CONFUSION’ 

Alien Buddha Press (USA – March 2018)

Poem: Low Walls

 

LOW WALLS 

why do low walls fascinate? 

why do they always seduce your attention 

and lure you with their teasing challenge? 

but they always do, and always have, 

when I see a low wall, I just have to 

climb up and walk along it, 

there’s simply no other option, 

I’m helpless against its invitation, 

so you climb and you teeter along its length, extending 

your arms at either side like an agile tightrope-walker, 

pretending it’s scary, pretending you’re about to fall 

and plummet to some terrible mangling doom, 

even though its barely knee-high from the street, 

the tops of some low walls, like the ornamental 

walls around municipal flowerbeds, are raised into a 

central ridge which makes them even more precarious, 

and hence more of a challenge to your nimble skills, 

some have hazardous mossy patches or even ivy 

growing across them which you must carefully navigate... 

until you finally reach the end of the wall, and 

have to descend down to dull pavement-level again, 

until the next wall... 

Published in: 

‘GARGOYLE no.74’ 

(Paycock Press, Richard Peabody) 

(USA – December 2021)

Poem: 'A GROOVY APOCALYPSE'

 

A GROOVY APOCALYPSE/ 

THE TRANSFINITE CHOICE 

time freezes 

this brush of memory chills me, 

lavender fire outflows from ice 

a gateway through glaciers into 

the wall of nameless mountains, 

your name is the soft sigh I exhale, 

we shunt upwards into cloud 

halfway as high as Iapetus 

dancing in serpents of blue light, 

a mesa of methane storms, 

we sleep a thousand years, 

butterfly skeletons are 

snowflakes in terrible winds, 

nineteen rivers flow into 

a black sea too vast to envisage 

through a forest rimed with icicles, 

frozen music melts into shrill mornings 

as ice-flowers unfurl amid blue frost, 

time freezes, yet this brush of 

memory still chills me...

Poem: FROM TAMSIN'S SUGGESTION

 

FROM TAMSIN’S SUGGESTION 

birds dream of trees 

fish dream of tides 

toads dream of moist shady places 

ice-moons feel secure in the 

gravity-embrace of gas giants 

virus multiply in a 

nurturing bloodstream 

stars swarm in the coil 

of the galactic spiral arm 

earthworms slither in cool soil 

parasites feed deep within 

warm pulsating gut 

ants dissolve into the horde 

amoeba divide into 

the completeness of new wholes 

molecules cluster into 

ever-complexifying structures 

sperm and ovum conspire to ignite life 

phantoms convene in moonlight 

seeking the comfort of the crypt 

and I yearn 

for your touch…

from my book:

'Tweak Vision: The Word-Play

Solution To Modern-Angst Confusion'

(Alien Buddha Press, USA, 2018)

Poem: 'THAT'S ALL FOLKS!'

 

THAT’S ALL FOLKS! 

George A Romero’s zombies eat your brains, 

don’t that just gross you out? 

the Walking Dead with dead eyes and 

undead fingers chomp on your entrails, 

Saw and the Chainsaw Massacres 

scare the living shit outta me, 

and Chucky, I hate that evil little guy, 

I’ve watched Alien face-huggers 

bust outta your chest in sprays of gut, 

Predators and Terminators that just won’t stop, 

Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi 

and all those other creepy old guys still bite 

on you in that Twilight Zone of terrors… 

but I’ll tell you… 

the worst horror of them all 

is that one day you’re gonna wake up 

and find yourself in a 

Care Home that just don’t care, 

dripping and dribbling incontinent 

into your colostomy bag, 

and you’ve forgotten your kid’s names 

and your grandchildren, 

you look into the mirror 

and you don’t even recognize the 

old guy drooling back at you, 

that’s the real horror…

From my book:

'TWEAK VISION: THE WORD-PLAY SOLUTION 

TO MODERN ANGST CONFUSION'

(Alien Buddha Press, USA, March 2018)

Poem: "You Upset The Grace Of Living"

YOU UPSET THE GRACE 

OF LIVING WHEN YOU LIE: 

LETTERS THE DEAD DISPATCH 

‘the singing of the song 

sustained an echo of the life…’ 

 (Tim Hardin 1940 – 1980)

 

you say 

you hear voices 

in your head, 

and that 

one of them, is mine… 

but if poems 

encrypt the lives 

of the poet 

& we write to 

retrieve and revise 

 our self-deceptions 

of the past… 

if memory, 

and the things that 

memory retains, 

are the way we 

make sense of love 

it seems 

this poem I’m writing 

is all about the you 

I hear in my head, 

a poem of that past, 

and the promises 

we failed to keep 

perhaps 

if we listen together, 

the voices we hear 

might help us invent 

new futures

Poem: 'DANCE-BAND AT THE EDGE OF INFINITY'

 

DANCE-BAND AT 

THE EDGE OF INFINITY 

I recall how Michael used to come around 

and say ‘Andy, show me some dance moves’ 

and I throw stylish shapes that I later see 

him use when the video debuts on MTV, 

how just once, when I idly scratch my balls 

he goes ‘yeah man, that’s so fine-superfine’ 

in that sweet melodic falsetto of his, 

and despite my protestations he’s there 

crotch-grabbing on that next hit vid of his, 

sometimes I miss that little Jackson guy… 

and I remember how this scruffy little Folkie 

comes pestering ‘Andy, help me write hits’ 

but I’m busy sequencing Little Mix tracks 

and he’s such an obvious no-hoper 

I tell him to sod off, I still feel a tad guilty, 

about whatever happened to that Ed Sheeran…

Poem: DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU

 

DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU 

when you went away
I declared war on owls,
bereavement needs a target,
they happen to be here,
this indefinable sense of ‘but’
that burns like a galleon
on a different ocean…
my history is being edited,
pieces are chipped away
and flare into extinction,
I don’t like these spaces,
this silence is scary,
people who are part of me
are no longer here,
David, Gwen, Denis,
I become slimmer, more tenuous
by the fact of their leaving,
since you went away
I argue with my reflection,
pick fights with my shadow,
the one certainty in this
uncertain cosmos is
this slow bleeding
of the self…
yet this morning there are
new buds on the willow,
for each life lost
there is new life

Poem: I WENT TO THE SEA, BUT THERE WERE NO GULLS

 

I WENT TO THE SEA, 
BUT THERE WERE NO GULLS/ 
FROM A LINE BY KEITH ROBERTS 

I will be the magic that has gone away, 

I will be the shapes that swim in oceans 

where all the fish have vanished, 

the shrub on the common land 

that is a charcoal sketch at dawning, 

the night bird that screeches when 

all owls are driven from their hollows, 

the leafy branch that scratches the window 

when they’ve cut down all the forests, 

I will be the whisper of the bees 

on the sunshine breeze, the eye of newt, 

the dream of ladybirds on sunflowers 

the fire of toxic particles to light the sky 

the ghost of wolves to howl at dark moons 

the lost voice of worms, beetles and spiders 

the echo of the fox in the phantom farmyard 

the long silence of a world 

where magic has gone away

 

Featured online at: 

‘IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES’ (19 December 2020) 

http://internationaltimes.it/i-went-to-the-sea-but-there-were-no-gulls/

Poem: THE LADY OF HAVENOT AND THE SEVEN WHISPERS

 

THE LADY OF HAVENOT 

AND THE SEVEN WHISPERS

Published in print and online at: 

‘UTOPIA SCIENCE FICTION Vol.1 Issue 2 (October)’ 

(USA – October 2020) 

www.utopiasciencefiction.com

Poem: 'SCORPION WIND'

 

SCORPION WIND  

the scorpion wind is past, 

sand drifts street corners in insect sleep, 

the horizon is fly-crawled with smoke, 

but no-one admits to starting the fires 

or hazards reasons for their igniting, 

light from beyond my window is threatening, 

there will be a storm before the day is out 

but inside there’s the same breath-stilled calm, 

I can see a café table in the boulevard where 

two old men and a youth shout at each other dumbly 

over glasses of cheap local wine, smoke gathers 

like birds over the blackened balustrades 

of imploded villas, destroyed buildings that 

conceal scorpions, all else is tactile-calm, 

I watch the youth draw a pistol from his jacket, 

the gun-barrel catches and fragments in the light, 

he threatens the air with vague gestures, 

he is afraid too

Published in:

'OMNIUMGATHUM ANTHOLOGY'

(USA - February 1977)

and my collection:

'WHY-FRONTS'
(Kawabata Press, UK - August 1978)

Poem: WHY A TRUMP-VOTER IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD

 

WHY A TRUMP-VOTER 
IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD 

I don’t see the 

point of a flightless bird, 

birds are made for 

the freedom of flight 

soaring to the 

limits of the sky, 

there’s just no point 

to a flightless bird, 

it’s like a 

thoughtless human, 

humans are designed 

for the freedom of thought, 

there’s just no point 

to neglectful misuse 

of the mind, 

I don’t see the point 

of a Trump-voter

Poem: WILL THERE STILL BE WEDNESDAY’S AFTER THE VIRUS?

WILL THERE STILL 

BE WEDNESDAY’S 

AFTER THE VIRUS? 

I don’t want to see this movie,
this is the house where the stairs go all the way to the moon
where to step from bedroom to kitchen is to leap continents
where dimensional gateways open into realms beyond time,
and for Vincent Van Blacklight, there are always more doors,
a spiral of firefly nebulae hang above the lampshade
the trees in the garden have teeth, they mutter conspiracies,
Amethyst Moonflower spins dark matter out of nothingness
with all her confused paper structures lost in the ozone
while Daubaway Weirdsley plants moonseeds
in the basement which grow into a fruit
of Phobos, Titan, Oberon and Callisto,
the old gods are rising from the windowbox,
we are about to become immortal,
a gastric tube feeds Medusa Fannypack
a diet of ripped hobgoblin dreams,
last night I watched myself sleeping,
I know this is how it begins,
no, I don’t want to see this movie…


Featured online at:
‘MEDUSA’S KITCHEN’ (28 June 2020)
http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/

Poem: 'UNLOCKING HER EIGHT-HUNDREDTH LIFE

UNLOCKING HER 

EIGHT-HUNDREDTH LIFE 

death whispers along the shoreline
so close you can reach out and touch it,
old Mother Carey lives in a shingled house
on a strand of rocks that points into the tide,
children say she is older than time
children say she is more ancient than sky,
she sits in a wicker chair on the wet stones
that glisten with the wash of kelp and crabs,
she feeds the silver fish orange pips, plum stones,
pomegranate seeds, tomato and apple seeds,
then waits and watches along the shoreline
as they bloom into bright green shoots of orange
and plum, pomegranate, tomato and apples,
death whispers along the shoreline
so close she can reach out and touch it,
old Mother Carey sits on the strand of wet stones
she eats orange pips, plum stones, tomato,
pomegranate and apple seeds,
feels them germinate inside her,
and then she waits…

Poem: 'Side-Stepping The Ghouls'

SIDE-STEPPING 

THE GHOULS 

gravity is a friendly force 

that draws me down 

towards home, 

the rope is a loving chord 

that arrests my fall 

with a ligature 

around my neck, 

the air is a tender gas 

that vacates my lungs 

to flood in the darkness, 

the mob are a caring people 

who applaud and jeer me 

as I’m released from this life 

into the next, 

beneath the mushroom forest shade 

where once I was spore-keeper 

and warden of insects 

in the fog of aromas 

both disturbing and narcotic, 

my knife was the merciful blade 

that excised them of life 

in deeds for which 

I’m being justly celebrated, 

I know this vicious love 

with due gratitude…

Published in:
'BIG HAMMER no.21’ which is an amazing anthology
of incandescent words with cut-&-slash images
from Dave Roskos at: iniquitypress(at)hotmail.com
It’s wonderful to be a part of this
celebration of art-creativity