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The land bridges
were always handy
if not at hand
each time of asking
of hoping
we walked across water
swam over land
I walked with you
you walked with me
from Iberia to Hibernia
from Arcadia to Armorica
from Camelot to California
from Cantref Gwaelod to Catterick
from Stonehenge to Stenhousemuir
from Doggerland to Sunderland
and from Tir na n0g to Tintagel
with a lioness from Lyonesse
all over the place
we have been practically
all over the place
so walk with me
please carry on
walking with me
View all history
the voices tell me
sing to me
member or not
the murder of St. Valentine
the lie of neoliberalism
not my kind of people
barely humanitarian
nominally human
buying clearance items
in rancid opera intervals
what brought us here?
need a new gun amnesty
the dafties
the smokies
the medicinal use of whisky
prescribed medication
prescribed loneliness
planned isolation
disassociation
aniseed:any seed
the self-inflicted wounds
of the second half of the 20th century
health care and diet conflict
scribble
scratch out the words
see what they reveal
what they see
bad weather is coming
anxieties about planned journeys
if we don’t get there
we don’t get there
wait for the snow
wait for the snow to fall
wait for snow to fall on plans
wait for water to freeze
wait for water
water for the wait
water the waiting
await the watering
hold things up to the sun
in winter to dry them
always wanting something to evaporate
I fought with monsters
I fought with my teeth
I fought with uncertainty
I fought with time
all the time
in Guadalajara
Rizla Deutsch
Stone Tony and the others
the hot air balloons
of my way of thinking
where is spring?
show us your spring
notes for a future
the future of notes
the life and aftermath
of gift wrapping
does it boil down to this?
no
lung versus kidney
cancer versus everything else
pricking oneself lightly
with a French knife
versus not trying
Joseph of Arimathea
earth tremors
encouraged by the nearing end
but the scaffolding is still up
the rock and roll dream
the technology dream
the medical dream
a mental illness epidemic
the pills bonanza
in the streams of unconsciousness
it’s not touching me
anti-freeze
anti-climb
anti-heroic
anti-Nazi
a postcard from a lost village
to some Swedes with axes
wish you were here
in these isles
that have become aisles
the great retail swindle
buy your way out of unhappiness
bondage and not belonging
the places I used to work
used to work
never go back
keep facing forward
for fire
forever
a country music funeral
the air always there
always air
hope they don’t tax it
that air
promote sanctity
promote scarcity
promote something special
please
see the ink run out in a pen
no loyalty anymore
wait like an animal waits
wish I could
de rigeur or an actor
out of context
out of time
wear a head
always wear a head
to bed
wake up with it
modern jazz wolverines
creatures that eat other creatures
passwords for heaven
fall out of love with plastic
something to do before I die
He came from a lost village
he couldn’t remember which one
or how it came to be missing
as it was so long ago
perhaps it had been a frowned
drowned sort of place
or a bulldozed overdosed one
somewhere that wouldn’t be missed
he had been wet behind the ears
but soon fitted in with
the new strangers
although they spoke differently
and seemed disinterested
in anything that was other
his parents never talked about
their origins
and stayed that way until the end
those nights when he could sleep
deep in the cosy burrow of forgetting
he dreamt of a place
that smiled
that worked
that knew its history
what he couldn’t know
was that everyone else
was dreaming
of returning to somewhere
they had never been
he got over it
there had been many villages
lost for various reasons
that’s the way it was
people becoming unwitting
pieces on a giant chess board
that used to be their country
The wealth of our princes
in swords bent
and thrown into meres
in the feared wildernesses of their time
when they were deposed by invaders
their leaderless subjects
lived similarly fettered
until liberated by learning
the alchemy of the word
the occasional brilliance of finance
like sunlight in a forest
I break the legs of my poems
to prevent them escaping from me
in my hobbled search for
my private Excalibur
The hunters came from afar
to the vacuum of
scraped and scratched mountains
and scourged and scoured valleys
uninformed but brave
confident and hardy
they would stay
finding something that contented them
where the land ran out
in the north west of the continent
they had crossed as ice mass melted
their skins black against white
the waters gushing
through territories re-emerging
after their long concealment
they built homes
started families
harnessed ploughs
husbanded beasts
worked together
to engineer and erect
monumental structures
sailed the coasts
exploring
and sharing products
and ideas
they used whale bone
flint and tusk
to fashion tools and weapons
hunting some creatures to extinction
their shamen helped them
to know how to revere
and commune with their ancestors
the stars
the sun and the moon
thunder and lightning
and the munificence of the fauna
of the ocean without end
in time that sea rose around them
cutting them off from their wider family
leaving them stranded
and forgetful of who they were
where they had come from
prefering to tell a new myth of island isolation
those mothers and fathers of ours
What lies beneath the surface
below the wake of cheerful pleasure craft
and the hopeful lures of anglers
this privileged day of summer?
the old village now lies silenced
its windowless buildings
have wide open doors
that permit brown trout
to enter and leave
this street of skulls
forgotten in the march of progress
stepped over by big money
eels coil around the rusted railings
that contain the cemetery
the dead sleeping
the disturbed sleep
of new surroundings
the chapel
eyeless
wordless
the new wildlife in its pews
that does not understand
it had gasped its last hosannas
in bubbles of oxygen
that escaped its ancient walls
on the day it succumbed to deluge
the final ministration of loss
pike skulk in the classrooms
of the primary school
silt is forming over the white lines
of its playground
the lilt of lullabies
the echo of children’s boisterous songs
stifled by millions of litres
of industrialised water
the shop had been run by
a man surnamed “Shop”
on its shelves
Great Pond Snails colonise
large glass jars
that used to dispense
sherbet fountains
Parma violets
and pink and white mice
the pigeon holes at the post office
have become the domain
of smooth newts and gudgeon
managing as efficiently in their way
as had the former postmistress
who was nicknamed “Post”
the practical and descriptive
naming conventions of a people
who had loved to describe
in an inaccessible corner of the lake side
a sheep wool-snagged
barbed wire-topped fence
disappears into the depths
still taut
still connecting the abandoned homes
to the life that persists on the hillside
...
All The Smart Televisions in The World Line Up and Broadcast The Same Transmission That We Watch Like Transfixed Scared Children
By Paul Steffan Jones AKA, 2018-02-08
Hellish London
melting tower block
melting faces
plummeting bodies
front seat atrocity
death on live TV
as firefighters attempt to tackle
the emboldened blaze
with depleted numbers
low water pressure
and delayed equipment
the bravery and dedication
of the “ordinary” citizens of a state
without courageous and honest leadership
the so-called Blitz spirit trundling on
unaware that a kind of war
is still being fought
in every home
in every workplace
in every school
in every hospital
it’s now OK to feign amnesia
about vulnerable people
especially if they’re “foreign”
and deregulation and austerity
don’t admit to their hand
in the production
of the corpses
from among this disposable section
of the population
the invisible and expendable
who don’t qualify for adequate
health and safety
whose voices cannot be heard
who can’t even be enumerated
or identified quickly enough
among the shambles jumble
that used to be their homes
in one of the richest corners
of the unearthly omnishambles
that is their country
meanwhile the Secretary of State for Health
gets a £44,000 bathroom
and nurses pay furtive visits
to food banks
it’s time to make our country our own
our rulers don’t need us
and we don’t need their misrule
...
My father once received
from his father
a semi-automatic pistol
that could have been
a German-made Sauer M1938H
my grandfather in turn
had been given this weapon
by his brother
when he had made up his mind
to take his family
to the other side of the world
never to return home again
I have an imprecise recollection of it
as it was surrendered
in a gun amnesty
before I got to be familiar with it
before it could become a favourite toy
but I recall that it fascinated
my cowboy and Indian-obsessed mind
the solid cold construction
the weight and size too much
for my interested infant fingers
and my childish wonder
at the exotic places it had been
the exciting events
in which it was carried
the people who had been in its sights
the shots it may have fired
the sidearm was likely to have been
a trophy won by my relative
from the loot “liberated”
from dejected and defeated
Afrika Korps prisoners of war
far from the heat
and blood spill of the North African desert
and the battalions of twisted metal
burning under multitudes of stars
about the only verifiable information
available to us about this object
was that my great uncle
had caused some damage with it
to his parents’ proud new outside toilet
mistaking live ammunition for blanks
maybe the last inadvertent yippee ki-yay of his demob
maybe the final mark he made on
the country that had sent him to war
...
