It is spring, soulless day in the heaving city, airless and capitalist black, the concrete streets noisy and shit-thick as the punters limp invisible down to the sloeblack, slow black, crow black, rubbish filled, polluted and oil-filled shops.

But where’s the hope in that?

How to start a blog?

I could begin with political rage – capitalism growling like a new God. The new age of consumerism selling sorrow to the masses like sherbet dib dabs. Greed personified to remind us who’s boss- its open mouth drooling. Where plastic kids watch plastic screens in plastic chairs until they shit plastic. Until we are all wrapped in clingfilm and moving down the production line -waiting to drop into a plastic basket filled with plastic dreams. The Great Church of Plastic.

But where’s the hope in that?

I could talk of feminism – the new wave.

‘Patriarchy’ a word I’ve used a lot in my great wash of expensive, interest accumulated learning.

I could quote a thousand woman in a thousand cages waiting for a room of one’s own-and I probably will! The woman who’ve saved me again and again- the Oliver’s and Angelou’s of this timeless turning world.

But I sniff out the Grand Old Duke with his thousand men, Fathers and Son’s, the lovers and the loved, buried by the bullet and the trenches. It’s the trauma in our ancestry. Yet we sometimes talk of war like it set woman free? Whilst the Gypsies, Jews, Homos and Disabled, of both genders, wore striped pyjamas and choked. Conflict is gender free. Still is!

But where’s the hope in that?

Do you know the story of Icarus- the winged boy who flew to close to the sun? I imagine him bent with the weight of it like Atlas, all goose-bumped and shaking at the knees, back-bone cracking- Bukowski’s ‘Blue Bird’ drumming through his mind as he let’s go, ‘opening his throat to sing’. But a bird is only a bird when its wings understand how to love. He was too young. Sorrow bought him tumbling to the sea bed- not sunshine! He needed his dad to do it!

But ‘hope is a thing with feather’s’ surely?

I imagine a Merman circling the seafloor, drifting in a pool of light. Hit by a sun beam as sharp as a razor’s edge that slits deep through the salty surface- his waxed wings burning as he falls- sinking faster, deeper to the ocean’s bed, spinning and turning his wings to a fish tail of golden scales, sparkling like stars as the heat slows.

When water glints I can hear him singing Dylan songs, his “Calypso singers laughing whilst fisherman hold flowers”. We all knew Narcissus was deaf as well as stupid!

Starting this blog is like putting my truth on a hook in the hope to catch a Mer -maid/man. But why is it a maid or a man? a merwoman should never be a maid- and a good man knows that.

When I write, in whatever form, it can be dark, evocative and raw- evoked by a place of both love and damage at once, of hatred and redemption. It may also be, to put it simply-‘A big bag a’ shite!’ But putting it out there is like letting the bluebird fly- and where it goes doesn’t really matter I guess…

‘there is a bluebird in my heart who wants to get out”

So here are a few poems -both old and new:

 Rumour

 It’s always touch and go
 to say love.
 Most of the time
 it’s only a song beneath the eyes
 a lone white feather
 waiting to lift across a breeze…
 waiting...

 If ever we could touch
 a place with the scent of it
 then we could learn to know
 taunt it with the finger-tips
 before grasping the root
 of a story

 taking to the air
 on the slip of a whisper…

 ..rising

 For Arthur Fesel  

 Today, when the sun rose
 I thought of you
 Rain trawling the windows
 and the swell of laughter

 Inside it’s 'Grand-National' day
 Aunt Debbie eating Spam  
 and shouting at the TV
 and us, getting away with everything
 because you were happy

 I was 7
 I remember...  

Our cuckoo clock dancing
and  prancing from the porch bars
whilst you bent beneath the evening
 feeding next door’s dog

 I remember the fog
 on the Welsh sea
 just you and me

 and the slide at the park

 and Mark...

 I remember things then
 Because I was ten
 And my cousin was smaller
 And no-one was sadder than Granddad

 I tickled your feet
and wondered whether hope even existed
 Dreaming of the time we 
 shared chocolate from your lorry
 Where you once sat with your great big hands-
 And all the world’s answers

 And tonight, as I watch the sun slip
 into the after-glow of memory
 these fragments
 where your presence drifts
 are selfless and knowing

 like a wise owl.... awaiting
 the sudden slowing of the storms

 A blueness

 The slip of it
 how want drugs the gut
 and my heart swims like a cello

 The dawn yawns  
 and stretches behind me
 the hours unravelled like  
 a distant city  
 drifting down the fall  
 of her fingertips

always her eyes

like a blue dream swimming in sunshine

 Lighting the shadows  
 of my darkest rooms
 

She-Wolf

You sell sane as a half empty glass in a grief stricken window
like you sell stories
whilst quaffing prosecco in a sunlit garden

Language is  like currency 
where you buy and sell the most beautiful words

 but sit behind them
 Corporate and    Detached.

never connecting the energy inside you

Better to say less and dream more
whilst the day bends you back to 
your body by midnight....

Your full moon frowning like one sad eye that stares
through the glass like a madman

On the other side reality mocks
mouth wide open- laughing -
its big sharp teeth grinding, like Othello
wanting to penetrate the whole damn house
into something beautiful

Wanting to swallow you whole
the window, the glass

and the ugly fucking wife

LIKE THE BIG BAD WOLF

But your neither little or red

For Jane Griffiths

 It bothers me
 What gives a namer his right?

 It bothers me too
 we all lose our grip
 from time to time
 at the fall of the hour
 is the coming of the hounds
 and the echo of hooves
 speak distance and warning

 Unhooking our fishtails
 we move down stream
 but they’ve damned up the bays
 and fenced out pathways
 saying:

 ‘Stick to the designated route
  this is dry land
 this is not a mooring’

 Whilst somewhere up stream
 Big Ben flexes his hands
 Opens his mouth
 and yawns inside the day

 the city un-sprung
 spat from the cog
 like a live-wire  

 the eyes unfolding
 the echo rolling over the city and out
 across the Thames
 blown down stream like a billow of morning cloth
 shaking people out like crumb
 into clock-work numb

 back here we await the wave
 start counting the minutes  
 as we hunt for dry ground
 then the final count
 and a rattle
 like a dredger 

about to go down

 The garden

 In youth
 I spat out a landscape
 where rugged men
 threw hooks
 from distant shores
 pulling soft fingered woman
 through the ripples of a circle

 Now I know this..
 there’s no Eden
  in the thick of me
 Just a brambled fence
 dense in the prick of me

 As the mornings grow old
 I wake hard and rise early
 the serpent slipping
 across my tits and biting
 on the stiff of me

 There’s no Eden
  in the thick of me
 just a brambled fence
 dense in the prick of me

 Eve left hard and floating nowhere
 
 

Let them call it grief

I travel in light speed
through a tiny space in your racing eyes
caught in the dazzles
 floating through an eyebrowed distance we could not contain
completely unable to disconnect the fuse to a rational setting

Your radio dial picks up a signal
yet 'touch comes when the white mind sleeps'
and so we touched
letting  fear drip away in the wetness
splashing through our aching everything

your life blood
falling into the hot pool of my eye
as you came into me
your roaring mouth
opening
a cloud burst of reasons to love something

Now I search 
through the baggage of nothingness
pulled by a string of broken landscapes
sending me everywhere
to be laughed upon
in some twisted comedy 
where I look for you in sleep
and see your eyes in a stranger I cannot touch

Your face lies in puddles
the drops in my windows a distant smile

and so I lick the wounds 
in the error of my ways
lost in a craze

yearning

for the rains to throw you back at me

Menai

Think a warm blue,
the afternoon breaking into
the language of the quiet tide;
here I watch you,
picking out dirt like dust
from the painting you never drew;
broken bottles, plastic bags and half-eaten
picnics,
pulled from the rocks as a measure
of solitude,
as though presence exists to be
channelled by the still
and by this
you could save something…
..save yourself

I imagine you naked
your breasts dripping with salt
as I listen to the air
dropping pebbles through
the thin blue skin of the shoreline,
and I watch how the sun
reflecting light on the water
is somehow lonely,
a solitude…
as sorry as your driftwood eyes…

 Deconstruction

 I can never remember  
 how we came to this place
 there was no kind of arrival  
 no absence on waking
 no bundling the family heirlooms and making trail

 it was always as we left it
 no room
 even to swing a cat
 wafts of black pudding, tobacco and Savalon
 rag-time music dropping
 from the windows…

 …they caught wind of it
 came with their letter-heads
 and leather scented cartoon-smiles
 the grey eyed bureaucrats
 whispering in the underpass

 rumour had it
 they’d turn the place over
 but it was always as we left it
 except an emptiness hung upon the air
 and the place hummed like a tuning fork
 words seeping
 crying out through the walls

 so layer by layer
 we brought the house down
 stripped the place bare
 pulling out brick with heavy hands
 laying a pathway out of the Island

 we didn’t stray far
 gave way to the wind

 but with distance enough
 to afford the room  
 to move
 
 

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton