Grandfathers

Grandfathers wear hats, different kinds of hats,

many, of nations and teams, and rank and file

and class and table and I think of one of mine,

Oapa, always sitting at the head of, in an office, 

on the road, in his castle, by the rooftop turrets 

in The Blitz; tin hat, radio, siren, waiting

and listening out for the engines, the bombs to hit,

the sound of his erstwhile countrymen, or back

interned, sitting and listening in a hut on the Isle 

of Man for the next boat coming in. Waiting

and listening, back to the songs of Berlin

turning to goosesteps, turning to

ashes of musical score, books and birds

on a wire, war, his Morse code crystal nights

stargazing, waiting and listening for just a word.

Top hat, tails, marriages, contracts – in the level-headed

whisper of baldness and sunspots, stories in hats,

cellars full of suitcases, in ledgers and transactions,

stories there, wanting that we should live.

Robin's earstwhile, poem
Last time I checked, poem

Oapa

Grandmothers

Grandmothers are on the radio

remembering

the times they had already made into cakes,

when they had darned socks, married, had kids

against the curtained backdrops of what they

wrote about. The world around them

weaving through them was

what they became known for,

their wisdom dispensed in sherry glass

sizes – mothball asides back then, dusty;

musty nowadays when our legends live with

living legends, not all dead white men. 

And now, who would not thank these weavers

of lost voices that bring us to the village of

living elders, taking tea on the radio?

Who would not thank them, except

the dead or lost boys not grown up yet

who back then wouldn’t have payed attention to how

she cross-stitched or did anything much anyway,

as they would never have wanted to know her

like we do. These same ones by the radio listening

for their mothers and grandmothers, crying

for a bedtime story of their histories when she may

have told them already, only hers. It’s then we

remember bicycles and broken shells, spaces

we could claim have always been - fields of white, 

purple, gold and green.

Allusions to a Purple sonnet - by A. Clam

This is no purple patch where I will seed
The spicy words of love up on a wire.
There is no ancient Tyrian poem here
That will speak of old Phoenicia to
Compare thee to a summers day, in Tyre!
This is no purple heart amphetamine
Explosion of a speeding love poem
A pink peach and triangle beating fast -
You know I am porphura, a mollusc
And I shall not spray my crimsony dyes
In the shape of a yielding scarlet heart.
You accuse me of wearing the purple:
The sonnetto judgement I'm keeping true
Is reserved, for when I am again with
you.

Don't remove the green from the village

On the ^ belt
In your ^ house
Near the village ^
Your unripe ^ gage
Is attracting ^ flies.

You will not need ^ fingers
For this ^ revolution.
You are young, unseasoned,
A new ^ horn
Given the ^ light
By the ^ eyed ladies living close by.

(It is the ^ grocer you should watch for
He is a bigger ^ eyed monster
Who says there is enough ^ 'Ery'
Here already.)

Welcome to this ^ market town
Where you may make,
And spend your ^ pound.

Latina

Latina
At whatever hour, whenever
there is Latin music,
she is Zorro
or a beautiful woman with a waist.
The colour red appears
either on a skirt, the white of a shawl
or the pink of a flower on the earth
and she dances a while
in a courtyard,
through the ceramic of low doorways,
over moonbacked teracotta tiles.

The air is garlic and magnolia.
The shadows may smoke a cigar.
Whether it is beans and rice,
a kitchen or a fire; gherkin,
goulash, paprika,
chili, tapas or tortilla,
she salsas.

In any gypsy recipe
the night is ripe with lips;
the spirit of revolution always,
in the revolution of her hips.

Another Chardonnay

And you – my passion – breeze through

These orange curtains like you own the place,
Pad along the cool ceramic floor with fiery strides
To the bar, heating the marble, raiding cupboards,
Growling; and I’m here watching you pace;
Find the bottle, put it to your lips, and drink
Like it’s a long cold winter’s night,
Wipe your mouth, sigh through your teeth,
While here I am, smiling – fisherman’s trousers tied
Around my hips, sun blazing down on the sarong,
Skin listening to those warm sea breezes,
Listening - to a lusty blond called Chardonnay
Tell me my troubles over the rim of her glass eye.
You take another swig; slam the bottle on the bar,
Yawn, stretch like a bear, step onto the porch,
I hear you say - What a perfect name…
Strike a match on the doorframe,
Light a cigar; pick Tequila from the larder…
Chardonnay wants another spiked Pina Colada –
What a perfect name…“And you?”
I reach for the bottle, put it to my lips, and drink
Like it’s a long cold winter’s night, “Whatever
You’re having, Babe - I’ll have the same.”

Petra Ichor's oil slick haiku

shit fan fan shit *duck*

water flows under the bridge

petrichor's oil slick

https://theconversation.com/the-smell-of-rain-how-csiro-invented-a-new-word-39231#:~:text=The%20word%20is%20%E2%80%9Cpetrichor%E2%80%9D%2C,before%20rain%20begins%20to%20fall.

Door in a Field

It’s not so dramatic, of course - the door was in a field,

the middle of a huge field, just there in its frame, slightly
ajar; and so unwelcome guests would leave quickly,
the broom tucked in the groove left for hinges
to feel their weight; creak, loosen,
and sense some movement in the breeze,
because there was a breeze in this particular field,
and I knew it was a field because it was green,
not black and white like in the dreams people have,
not in colour either, or there would have been sky, some trees,
- and cows would have appeared chewing the cud,
- and although this now has already happened,
- and other things too, people running around
from tree to cow, building things, having revolutions,
I left the door right there slightly ajar, and watched
from a wicker chair like Van Gogh's, upset
with how the field is so easily cluttered with trees,
cows, and people running round in circles
when I thought what I wanted was a clean frame
to imagine irises like he painted
by walking backwards away from canvas,
or seeing you walking through the door, looking just fine,
carrying some shopping bags from your favourite place
somewhere in the green field that I was on the very edge of,
wondering where the door had gone, and why I was
sitting by the banks of the same river watching the litter pass,
scuffing trainers on the brickwork, waiting for the ferryman,
trying to cats-cradle beams of light.

2008

longtime no see

poem

Sensitive

We always hear the gunshots

And then the jackboots

Striding over goose steps.

And the goosesteps across my heart

And goosebumps in my throat.

And the goose fat in the pan.

And the goose.

Just stop. Watch.

Close your eyes. These goose 

steps are not dance moves.




6/2020
BoomBoom Betty and PotShot Pointer
2007

Seasonal Adjustment Disorder

The air is warm, the cool breeze
chills, the sea swells. Surf's up -
tide's high enough for the crash of waves; low though, so the roll
and drag conundrums the beach. Sea's coming in, stones polished,
shells broken; mountains become sand - gangs of parrots
shell pine-cones, a flock of gulls caw and a herd
of speckled beach towels don't budge an inch.



2007

edit
Motion
#BLM Movement 05/2020
Lockdown

(Unnecessary) Divisions of Labour

Father
Love is...
a simile - like
the NHS

Mother
Love is...
a verb

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own

One stone in your pocket must have been for Vita,
the one you dance through a century of leaves,
falling for her, waiting in the mud-grass of home.
Did someone call you a Pointillist writer, each ball
of light weighed in mass? I am afraid they painted
impressions of you, pointless really, flecks left out;
Mrs Dalloway without Sackville-West, too much
amber filter on the banks of the river, too little red.

The Bees of Belmontet

Lavandin du Quercy - A Lavender farm in Quercy, Belmontet, France


It is that time of year when provisions come in
from the mini-bar window sill, the heater
one-bar for vapour, from Lavandin
du Quercy - Belmontet.

The glass bottle leaks twenty-five years on
from fields of ultra violet stretching out
fresh playgrounds for honey bees,
no expiry date,

on a girl playing Pinball. Handheld,
hysterical, ‘There is no Wizard!
It’s jammed. I hate this game!’
throwing it to the ground, stamping,
screaming to one of the ball bearings, ‘Don’t panic!
Don’t worry! I’m coming in to get you!’

And falling right there,

for some such girl, in turned-up jeans
in the hand-me-down-years of denim, cotton,
checked, chequered capers -
becoming lighter and softer somehow
against sunflowers and corn husks,
tearaway days of wet riverbanks and bridges,
most things green, wood or stone, until moss
leaf and hemp wound its way
through everything. She is still there -

hair wet from the rope swing over, hands sticky
with honeycomb, sat on the wall scuffing the brickwork
shoeing away the bees of Belmontet.



2013

Crumbs

Crumbs

Sometimes, when I go to slice

a lunchtime sandwich,

I remember the square of our bed,

how I always played at swapping sides

just to see you better,

how you turned your back

as I cut the diagonal,

how corners appeared

and then disappeared,

how this feast of mine

gets smaller.

Feast

The square of our bed

A bag of squirrels jigsaw

Sunday morning extra syllables

Adaptive prayers

Famine

Blank page and the dot

A clean sheet Haiku sandwich

Before dust to mote

5/2020

Hope in the Time of Coronavirus

The sun was high in the sky,
the mechanics were welding,
the binmen were clattering,
my landlord was chopping wood
when I woke up,
head hammering with brittle futures,
with crumbling economies,
with Bill Gates and conspiracies,
with visions of commands
in microchips
in humanity
in chains
(whoever you vote for,
the corporations always get in),
with the two-decade-long
ambulance siren of loneliness
in my stomach
reaching its deafening, debt-enslaved,
workless, publess, conversationless,
polythene-gloved, mask-gagged,
laptop-hypnotised,
auto-ejaculating
howling crescendo
as I shuffled across my cage
of unwashed plates, unfiled documents,
unswept clumps of self-cut hair,
unread books,
to the unscrubbed toilet within a
sky-scraping, turtle-choking, radiation-beaming,
forest-gobbling virus-ridden
toilet.

I’d first caught sight of your
nurse-impersonating, cloth-ensconced face
on a nearly-empty bus,
“Are you the girl from the Internet?”
and now I’m homing in on you,
over the newly-budding,
deer-trampled, stork-pecked fields. A breeze
tickles the warming springtime air,
the kites and footballs are returning,
step by step the masks and cares are slipping off
and I can see the church
in a straight line ahead of me. Somewhere
inside that still-towering,
still-singing, still-hoping hallmark of Europe
there’s a Father Gombrowicz,
Zbigniew to his uncle and auntie,
yanking on a bell-rope,
flooding the air with brass and god,
Zbiggi the Ropeman to his mates,
spinner of biblical and home-made yarns.
He hurled grenades in Afghanistan
for Communism or Capitalism,
I forget which one,
but now he huddles in a confession booth,
half-priest, half-psychotherapist,
unravelling the ropes of
the beaten housewife
the cheated butcher
the alcoholic maths teacher
the closet-homosexual policeman
the bankrupt hairdresser
the sick doctor
and stopping them
from hanging themselves.

Through the up-thrusting grass
and buttercups and dandelions,
hacked out of a wall of wheat and bulrushes, weaves
the shortcut I found last month after
hours of head-scratching squinting scrutiny,
seven tree-branches
with seven drilled-on steps,
a wooden stretcher across the stream,
fourteen seconds and I’m in town.

There you fizz and bubble,
a curvaceous bottle of nationalist elixir
in a warehouse of liberal poisons.

Beside the windsurfer-swabbed,
fisherman-stitched lake
hares and weasels and puppies are scampering,
chaffinches are chirruping,
frogs and lizards leap,
wild boar snuffle around.
The Polish for boar is jeeky, you tell me,
same as the word for wild.
So “wild boar” is “jeeky jeeky”.

Down on the daisy-dotted grass
in a haze of honeysuckle,
nature finds its way,
our fingers
then our lips
find each other.

The lake-blue eyes
in your maskless face
beautiful as a valley of European barley
beam into me
as torrents of sweet hot
medicinal kisses
drench my parched core
melting
two decades
of coughing, sneezing, shivering
winter.

Wiara

Teraźniejszość, przeszłość i przyszłość
zawsze wciera sól
i pieprz w cięcie.
Lecz jeśli płacisz czynsz, czyścisz ściany
i czcisz krzyż,
odziedziczysz szczęście.

Brave New World

Welcome to our brave new world,
like Nineteen Eighty-Four but a few years later,
a safe space reserved for Feminists, terrorists,
vicarious intellects, beta-males, no haters.
We, we, we decide the rules,
you must learn them ad verbatim.
You’ll be safe and sound if you obey them:

Enjoying your own culture
is racist.
Enjoying a different culture
is racist.
Employing a British soldier
is racist.
Singing “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa”
is racist.
Calling Burkina Faso “Upper Volta”
is racist.
Trying to cure a stomach ulcer
is racist.
Looking at a Chinese rubber sculpture
is racist.
Wanting to become a pole-vaulter
is racist.

Dressing as a panther or a puma
is racist.
Preferring tangerines to satsumas
is racist.
Listening to David Icke’s rumours
is racist.
Having a sense of humour
is racist.
Explaining that some Muslims keep slaves
is racist.
Complaining that your muslin briefs chafe
is racist.
Borders blocking immigrant waves
are racist.
Wanting your children to be safe
is racist.

Welcome to our brave new world,
like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with an airbase more genders,
a safe space reserved for gormless conformists,
puppets and pawns for corporate agendas.
We, we, we decide the rules,
you must learn them ad verbatim.
You’ll come to no harm if you obey them:

Pointing out George Soros’s wealth
is racist.
Lamenting your nation’s poor health
is racist.
Being hopeful it recuperates
is racist.
Opposing globalist superstates
is racist.
Allowing working-class people to vote
is racist.
Differentiating a sheep from a goat
is racist.
Greeting Indians with a slight grin
is racist.
Having been born with white skin
is racist.

The pigs, the filth of Babylon and ting,
are racist.
Stop-and-searching black men swamped in bling
is racist.
Ignoring all those gangs of Scottish grannies
is racist,
and Catholic terrorists who plot in Spanish.
How racist!
The media, with its Christian-kosher news,
is racist.
Reporting when a Muslim blows a fuse
is racist.
Dominating as a culture in your country
is racist,
but only if you’re white, you privileged, cunty
racist!

Preventing crime and saving lives
is racist.
Stopping jihadists waving knives
is racist.
Statistics, facts, free speech and democracy
are racist.
Refusing to spout PC hypocrisy
is racist.

Fuck the Liberal Left

I used to think that you were there
to lift the working classes,
but now I see your heads jammed up
your own self-serving arses.
You see the world in black and white,
through dogma-curtained glasses,
so certain what the past is,
puking moral catharsis.

You believe in nothing but the rightness
of your own opinions
(the ones you sucked from globalist media’s
brainwash-droning minions
and share with Brussels bigwigs’
censorship-condoning millions):
Let’s home a billion Syrians
whether they’re killers or civilians!

Fuck the liberal left and their new Spanish Inquisition
as they famish inquisition, make it vanish out of malnutrition.
Fuck the liberal left, as they banish free expression,
establishing oppression while calling it progression.

You think you fight the system
and its ordered inequalities,
it’s just coincidence
your open-border migrant policies
reflect the world elite’s, Frau Merkel’s,
George “the Giant” Soros’s.
That’s the strident hypothesis
of the vibrant metropolis.

George Soros, he who claimed he’s just
a dollar-faced alchemist
ignoring social consequence,
wow, what a philanthropist!
What next? Will you proclaim George Bush
a hollering anarchist
if he offers the tiniest
assistance to your whining fest?

Fuck the liberal left! (’cause shouting “Racist!” ain’t an argument.)
Fuck the liberal left! (it’s just a child’s verbal armament.)
Waiting for some logic from a doctrine-mangled wrongun
is like waiting for a lap-dance and a hand-job from Kim Jongun.

How does it help the working class
to flood their cities with jihad
or brand them privileged racist filth
in need of political rehab
or tell them their concerns don’t count
’cause they couldn’t outwit a used teabag?
Mind you don’t end up kneecapped
or strung up from a streetlamp!

Just fuck off. This is Europe, it’s
the white man’s hard-saved homeland.
Would you harass Mongolians
if they preferred their own brand?
“Check your yellow privilege, Genghis!
Your empire, years ago, spanned
near half the world, so don’t stand
up when you piss, you understand?”

Fuck the liberal left, who tell you England’s Nazi Germany
and sermonise while foreign rape-gangs colonise your family!
Shoot down the Leftwaffe, that genetic anomaly
that waffles lofty homilies and tribe-deserting perjury!

The Ensemble of Simpletons

Below the belt, below my level,
blathering free,
the ensemble of simpletons
are slandering me
with wild accusations they
plucked from the air.
To say them in person they
never would dare.

For logical arguments
they have no use.
Instead they can conjure up
empty abuse.
Not listening or responding to
a word that I say,
the ensemble of simpletons.
Common are they.

With minuscule arrows they
fire at my shins,
they boast of their huge
intellectual wins.
Above their heads, above their lives,
I stroll through their town.
The losers of Lilliput
can’t tie me down.

Christmas in Auschwitz

Christmas in Auschwitz.
By the barn, on my glove, fall
snowstars of David.