Faiths

Faiths

Faiths

When I grew up there as only on religion available-

choices are better now- Christianity. We had bible

classes every week and I found it entertaining, 

but I never got the message, I simply lacked

the gene that makes people believes in the impossible.

There was a time when I was around sixteen when

 met a Christian girl and went with to meeting, sang

and prayed, while preying on her, but it never got

more than holding a damp hand. I went to the movies

instead Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman now

that is a reality for you. I`m old now and set in my ways

I now I shall die, but an abstract god play no role in

the drama of my death, that role is reserved for me.

the lunch

the lunch

The Lunch

Today I ate the worst meal for years, dry fried liver

and burnt onions with a salad that tested of fish because

the cook had used a fish knife to cut the lettuce.

I didn`t like to make a fuzz but left no tips and on the day

sun was too hot and I felt miserable.

There was a time in 1946 when poverty washed the cold

shores of my country that I would be happy for a meal like this

it was a time of mass migration and I remember a mother

and child I think they were Slavic dressed in rags,

there was no work and had to go newspaper rounds to make

a little money, yet she did the couple a few coins

Europe was awash with migrants, there had been a war but

people were protesting they had little food and didn`t want

to share any of it yet there was no open hatred.

Is it not odd to think that my country that is rich now and its

people are full of hatred against migrants

and a right wing party shares power with a fascist one, yes

it is sad when we lose the ability to be human and show no

sympathy for those who flee wars in the Middle East and Africa.  

forgotten sex | Write Out Loud

forgotten sex | Write Out Loud

Forgotten sex

As we were eating an omelette with tomatoes

I asked my wife if we ever had sex because I had

difficulties in remembering it or rather picture it.

She said yes and said I was quite good at it which

was flattering like being a good driver, I was once

offered a job as taxi-driver but said no too boring.

Then slowly I remembered something I had to

do late at night when I would rather read a book

as there was no TV back then.

I remember it as a sweaty embrace, the fumbling

and the ridiculous positions and then to be careful

pumping along till she was ready and at ease.

She wanted to sleep close to me her hair in my face

and I was thinking if lucky it will take a week before

I had to do something with her peculiar needs.

The Marshland

The Marshland

 The Marshland

In the middle of the fen where the soil is full of rotting
foliage,

roots of tree from the time the land was a forest,

a dam where ducks swim and as is the way of ducks noisy in

their chatter with each other, social bird with no
musicality

I mean have you ever heard of an opus titled:

“When the ducks sing in Covent garden.”

Yet they like it here and can spot a Cheney miles away and

thus avoid getting water-boarded. We used to go there

the farmer and we dug into wet soil square sized turfs

which dried in the sun and in the fall we had carts full and

primordial roots that burned bright when snow fell out
side  

magazines

Magazines

I used to read Readers Digest

it was like the Fox channel

 before internet

and we believed yet thought

 something was wrong,

Israel was great in a sea of hatred

 and the magazine never said

a thing about Palestine whose land

 was stolen.

Arabs want to kill Israeli

Bastards we thought forgetting about

holocaust   which happened in our

back- yard. But then we grew and

read books

giving us a different view, yet we

sensed that being successful we should

keep our innocence of mind

we had when reading

“Readers Digests” and its odd sense

 of humour which we were asked

to be serious about

a farming couple

 The Farming couple

The farmer and his wife

is harvesting almond

 a net around the tree and

a long stick

she picks up the nuts and puts

them in a bag.

She is not wearing gloves and

her hands is that of

an old salt.

they  go home for lunch

home- made bread and cheese

she does the washing up

while he snooze a little 

in the autumnal sun.

Lemon tree very pretty...

Lemon tree very pretty...

Lemon tree very pretty

it was a summer night many years ago

woke, thought I heard the whimpering

of a baby, thought it was a dream,

Woke up again my wife was not there

by my side but in the garden where she

had made a hole under a lemon tree

 She put what looked like
a shoebox in

the hole filled it in and placed stones

on top of her buried secret. Next day she

didn`t get up stayed in bed for days and

I looked after her but said nothing.

When she got up she looked slimmer

and took up jogging to stay slim.

The lemon tree grew too I got a man to

chop it down but left its root, she got

upset loved this tree and when unseen

wept. I used to long for her to tell me her

secret, but not now with the tree gone

 I do not care to know.

a slum outside Paris

A slum outside Paris

A cardboard city thrives a place where no one has

to pay the rent and electricity are purloined.

is it impossible for middle -class folk to understand

but the Roma thrive despite living by a city dump

where you dump your trash wash your hand and are

happy to live in a block of flats and house the rules.

Now they want to get rid of this illegal city that cost

nothing to run and need not tramlines. But they are

not like us do not share our values, no they are not

like us the do not deplete the world`s resources and

when the last car has stopped the Gypsies will as they

always have done crossing the landscape with their children

women and dogs carried pulled donkeys on ancient carts.

And the man with a wristwatch and finery will offer

them riches for a lift to better times. 

street cleaner

street cleaner

The Street Cleaner

He is not a lucky man, but he is happy but one day he won on
a lottery ticket,

not a not a big sum of money but enough to by wheelbarrow
got permission

from the local council to keep the town`s streets
clean.  Happy, telling himself

 he was self- employed
and could sleep till nine in the morn  if
he wanted to.

A busy bee a busy bee he was till he collided with Mercedes
was taken to court

and his wheelbarrow was confiscated to pay for the damage.
He had a bike and

got a local garage to put a two- wheel contraption to fasten
to his bike, the town

got rid of its trash again until an officious policeman
asked him if he had a licence

for this he didn`t and it was confiscated. Now he had a jute
sack slung on his proud

shoulders and a walking stick with a nail attached, a weapon
a police officer said

  he was carrying a
weapon in public and he was prosecuted. 
He didn`t show up

to the hearing and when the law came around, he hung from a
rafter sometimes

 even serious
optimists give up and with no cleaner the town sank into misery,

plagued by vermin the population fled, a town given into paper
napkins pizza boxes

and burger wrappers and the poor who had nowhere to go. And
if this reflects

the life of a typical inner city of our English speaking
world it is purely incidental.

   

love not spoken of

love not spoken of

The love not spoken of

Newcastle and it was summer I had been paid off

from my ship and sat a the train station waiting for

a train to take me to Liverpool when a young man

came and sat near me. He was beautiful the nearest

I have been to human perfection and we spoke

about life, we were going to a cabin somewhere in

 a Scottish hill but
he didn`t like to be alone and his

large brown eyes looked mournful and I was ready

to join him, but said nothing because he if I followed

the boy would turn out to be human and demanding

a type of attention I could not give without corruption  

His train left before mine I waved and that was that,

when I arrived a Lime street station I was drunk and

spent a night with a prostitute and she killed a beautiful

man sitting alone in a cabin in some god- forsaken dale.

spooked

Spooked

Driving along on my scooter seeing the familiar

landscape there was a time disturbance

the landscape was the same but the trees small

and there were fewer ploughed fields.

mystical shadows and a murmur of voices sounded

as an echo and I felt spooked.

I stopped and waited perhaps I had a funny turn

slowly the warp panned out and I was back at

my own time, yet I sensed an unease I should not

come back to this place that had layers of old time

that had yet to melt into the clarity of a white water

that has no story to tell.

the sin

the sin

The Sin

It must be a tragedy to be a man and a paedophile what

treatment is there for an unspeakable lust the forbidding

feeling, the dreams, the church which is a wrong place to

confess a priest is not viable he has to cure himself of this

ugly vice. Is it a vice for a child liker for him this is

the sexuality he was given it was not asked for a burden of

always hiding yet goes to places where children assemble

and from their young bodies oozes a newness like a scent

that threaten his social standing should it be known and

should he succumb he will be cast out loose his employment

the sneering people goading him and he will join  the people

of the night. 

Senryu and Tanka

Senryu and Tanka

Senryu

A lie is

A poetic way of telling 

The truth

Tanka

There are many truths

Fanatics think they have a monopoly  

Their version is right

There are many religions too

Each on the keepers of the truth  

vita contemplativa | Write Out Loud

vita contemplativa | Write Out Loud

Vita Contemplativa

We do not live our lives in the now but remember

it as a passed and what we did not do when the past

 was now and disappeared as an ant`s breath   

as there is only one beginning- birth- we are shackled

to the past we didn`t choose but was pushed on us as

we had no ability to anything in the now

senryu

senryu

Senryu

A poet adores love

Not the practical one

Dinner at five

The moment caught

A memory to remember

A face in the crowd

The killer of love

Is the despair of loneliness

turned into disgust  

Phobic conditon

Phobic condition

I woke up it was afternoon and I had made

guest appearance  in my dream.

it was winter I stayed on the sunny side

of the road watching you struggling with your emotions.

I shook my head and told the swans flying to Africa,

on the way he never gets past sixteen and his wings

are not properly developed.

Stop making excuses we have seen him fly, at night

he lacks the courage to make it in public

if you leave him alone and stop worrying he just might

make it to the podium  and speak his poetry

a new love

a new love

A New Love Story

I had stopped at the rural cafe for a coffee it was a day
when I was

not feeling a day over seventy she was around fifty and
incredible

young her waste was that of a waif at the beginning of life.

She was so beautiful and she smiled inviting me to sit by
her table

 and I was only
drinking coffee. I told her amusing stories of my life,

mostly lies- and she laughed, not a bored mirth while
looking at

the time thinking of the right moment to slip away the
clutches of

my unwanted attention. Good time has me has a limit, so much
and

not more, her husband came in he had been to the garage, had
the car

fixed and he told me all about it down to the smallest dreary
details

A nice man with oil on his hands and I hated him, but I
could not kill him

and claims his wife as mine, the thought faintly amused me,

and they drove off. I loved her immensely and she reminded
me of

my wife`s niece I love her too, perhaps it was her but I was
too old to see

as handsome faces take on a mask of a smiling Janus

the bus trip

The Bus Trip

We are driving to Cascais on Sunday my wife wants to take

the bus she thinks we are too old to drive 300 miles.

On the bus, you might risk sitting by someone who can`t afford

water or soap that is a low grade working person on his way to

use a spade and whatever to build a trench that keeps the water

away when it is raining

I`m  a tonic water socialist and read the Guardian, crystal glasses

and a sneaky fag on the loo. To meet a proper working class person

would shatter my illusion and bring back a memory of my father last time

I saw him it was on a bus and he was drunk.

I will drive- anyway- not long from now I will not be able to they are

putting up obstacles to stop us old ones driving 

a none writing day

a none writing day

 A none Writing Day

The freedom of not writing anything is an illusion

today I will just sit there and listen to the news

Turkey is having problem and it has nothing to do

with me although a poet friend of mine Erken may

be upset several police officers killed perhaps one

of them was her son and I can`t send flowers in

case it is not so. I only like Portugal in the winter

when it is cold enough to put an extra jumper on

when sitting indoors....that were the days.

What do I know? Perhaps Erken is a Russian spy

who speaks five languages perfectly  without fluffing

neither a line nor breaking the wind when talking to the pope.

Knows the sewers of Istanbul like the street going home

 and analyzes the shit falling from the American embassy

When it is discovered that the US envoy suffer from

diabetes she will be promoted by Putin.

end of democracy | Write Out Loud

end of democracy | Write Out Loud

End of democracy

I think we are witnessing a historic shift

the page has turned and our ideas about

democracy is regarded with suspicion

because it is in inclusive and give too much

freedom to the individual. This idea that

a person could have his own faith instead

of a faith that included all and those who

cannot conform must die.

This philosophy flies in the face of us who

has fought for this goal, only to find this is

not what the people want and you cannot

fight the future. For me this will be a bleak time

murderous and peaceful, but it will not last

the conservative forces will not prevail.  

Murder he wrote

Murder he wrote

Elderliness and murder

I`m at the age when you can do anything

when can kill someone

and the state will feed me

because I`m too old for punishment

and live long enough

to see my defence lawyer die

and the state prosecutor dies of cancer

at hundred and five they will let me out

by I will tell them

I will kill again

this morning they are serving a tomato

 omelette my wife
never got it right

so I killed her. My defence said had I had been

a faithful husband which it true

I have not had an erection for fifty years. 

Come home

Come  Home!

I dislike Israel but accepted her as a historic

happening and a place where Jewish culture

can flourish undisturbed foreign culture, and

thus can sink into navel gazing.

But it cannot be so Europe without Jews and

the Jews without Europe`s culture is a script

of disaster that is not yet written.

We in Europe need the Jews as scientist and in

the arts , but the Arab World does not need

 resentful Jews who brought an iron heel to people

for crimes they have not committed, but  guilt that

lives in the culpable images of the Abraham’s people.

Benefit Street

Benefit Street

Forgotten lives.

Happiness is an odd thing I have been watching

a program called “Benefit Street” where poor people

try to make a living out of poverty and chaos

Roma, English, Irish and Polish people live there trying

to make a living out of old iron.

There are laughter and smile and occasionally anger

but they survive and now we want their dignity by

reducing any help by those who keep the nation

falling into utter despair.

Because one day soon they will come knocking on

your door throws you out and move in. You can treat poor

people badly a long time, but not all the time

 they will back and  crush you and your privileges like

a smeared paper napkins flying in the wind