A walking question mark,
eyes set on a dead Jerusalem,
his right hand pumping
some terrible piston,
up the lane, past the stagnant pond,
into the Norman wood.

We called him Ajax,
and no one knew why.
We ran away in a mockery of fear, 
dared to catch his diamond eye.

Long, thick coat in summertime,
toy sheriff’s badge twinkling,
the bearded nut loped along
the lanes and bridleways,
down through the seventies
into obscurity’s tuneless song.

Some thought he stuck his willy
through the letterbox of a bungalow
containing Scottish children.
The dads of the close
hunted the pervert
in their office shirts, 
found only rumour.

He was pointlessly free,
with a child’s small-change freedom.
Only locked into lonely.
Love: a sex-itch unscratched.

I see him old now,
blanched in a bedsit in hell,
drug-shocked and shaking a fist
at the endless Sunday smell.

TASCAM DR-05

inventing the other

I cut it off while he slept,
and went out with it into the Camden rain.
The head dripped on kerbs and takeaway boxes,
it dripped on yesterday’s news.

The suits in All Bar One notice my missing forearm.
The face in my lap does not seem to disquiet them.
On the screen they show another slaughter
aboard a crowded Greyhound bus – a man decapitated.

The General’s beard nestles between my thighs.
I’ll use his mouth till it begins to smell.
I peel back his eyelid and there is no me in his eye.
He dreams of Babylon and dates.

There is a marbling on my skin
that was not there last night.

* * *

Painting:  Judith Beheading Holofernes Artemisia Gentileschi 
                (Rome 1593 - Naples 1652/53)

Judith gets stoned

yesterday (lennon and mccartney) ~ cover

Nurse Lucy Letby is innocent, and will be exonerated.

innocent

QUINQUIREME of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Cargoes - by John Masefield

The Armada (1996)

Long, long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child's armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines -
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond's cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I'm touching;
for as on a pond a child's paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart burns as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.

The Armada - by Brian Patten

The Road Not Taken 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 
And sorry I could not travel both 
And be one traveler, long I stood 
And looked down one as far as I could 
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other, as just as fair, 
And having perhaps the better claim, 
Because it was grassy and wanted wear; 
Though as for that the passing there 
Had worn them really about the same, 

And both that morning equally lay 
In leaves no step had trodden black. 
Oh, I kept the first for another day! 
Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 
I doubted if I should ever come back. 

I shall be telling this with a sigh 
Somewhere ages and ages hence: 
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— 
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference. 

-Excerpt from Mountain Interval (1916)

The Road not Taken - by Robert Frost

first cut is the deepest (a bit of)  #cover

For people who have nowhere to go in the afternoons,
For people who the evening banishes to small rooms,
For good people, people huge as the world.
For people who give themselves away forgetting
What it is they are giving,
And who are never reminded.
For people who cannot help being kind
To the hand bunched in pain against them.
For inarticulate people,
People who invent their own ugliness,
Who invent pain, terrified of blankness;
For people who stand forever at the same junction
Waiting for the chances that have passed.
And for those who lie in ambush for themselves,
Who invent toughness as a kind of disguise,
Who, lost in self-defeating worlds,
Carry remorse inside them like a plague;
And for the self-seeking self lost among them
I hazard a poem.

If You Had To Hazard A Guess Who Would You Say Your Poetry Is For? - by Brian Patten

suzanne - leonard cohen (cover) first verse

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

If - by Rudyard Kipling

blues run the game (cover)  by jackson c frank  (first three verses)

Nobody heard him, the dead man,   
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   
(Still the dead one lay moaning)   
I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.


not waving but drowning - by stevie smith

silver coin (cover) - hunter muskett (first two verses)

hey dads

I do not know what brought me here
Away from where I’ve hardly ever been and now
Am never likely to go again.

Faces are lost, and places passed
At which I could have stopped,
And stopping, been glad enough.

Some faces left a mark,
And I on them might have wrought
Some kind of charm or spell
To make their futures work,

But it’s hard to guess
How one person on another
Works an influence.
We pass, and lit briefly by one another’s light
Hope the way we go is right.

carnelian red

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