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1.6.14

Three poems


 STARLIT NIGHT

One starlit night our love-song slipped
Out an open window [that
I had forgotten to make tight]

Slipped out to frolic beneath the moon
And danced all wild till dawn slipped jewels
Like wedding rings on fronds of grass

And back she came-a homing bird
A swallow cross a mighty sea
Back home safe and secret-safe


Clothed in glittering memories


THE SONGS IN MEN’S HEARTS

These are the songs that live in the hearts of men:
First there is the song of WAR that rises,
Boils, and gurgles in the pumping blood.
Sing O warriors cross the dusty plains
Of Troy a shout of joy-To kill!  To kill!
Such glorious joy the blood to spill.
To read the fear in enemies eyes
As entrails spill like treasure in the trench.

Sing the songs of bloody ecstasy.
Those razored words will cut the hardest steel.
Let the axe sing in the morning bright
And swords ring out like bells against  the shields.
The words are hacked into the hearts of youth:
It is a fine day on which to die,
And anyway who wants to live forever?
Ride her hard: Remember to die young!
Go see the world, and blow the fucker up!

Fear is for the others:  Fear is bad!
Hear them screaming for their mother’s arms,
And take joy in the tears of cursed foes.
We are over here, and they are over
There.  C’mon boys let’s do the bastards!
Rape as an act of war is not so bad,
And bashing out those babies brains was good!
Now we rain down arrows from the moon;
We have contracted Death himself to our clan,
Though it must be said he’s mercenary;
He’ll do both sides business for a song.

And deep within the caverns underground
Or in the stars of death, spinning in space;
War is woven in the dreams of hollow men.
Iliads spill out of crooked looms.
Assassins seek the sons of Omeros
Who sing of warriors as idiots and fools.
Their fearful verses drown their battle-crys.
Make burning pyres of all their vacant flags,
And tear their uniforms to tumbling rags.

Then, there is the quiet song of EARTH;
Almost the steady beating of a drum.
A song that drives men home-an odyssey.
A song that sings of warmth and nourishment;
Whispers in the ripples on the rivers,
Echoes in the shimmer of the leaves.
The poetry of forest’s boundless trees;
The murmur of the worker bees;
The stop and chuckle of the bouncing streams
Decanting into endless seas.
The stopped-up silence of ice-age valleys;
The stacked-up mossy grooves of silent peaks
Riven with sheep-tracks and booted trails.
Fuller’s spaceship-earth hanging like a blue
Eye in the immensity of space.
The breathing land-the earth beneath;
The dark and fecund soil that rustles
With the promise of new life.
The patient song that drove Odysseus home
To Ithaki.
To slaughter the suitors of Penelope
And then sit down to home-made cakes and tea.
We climb into her caves to be renewed.
We cross her seven seas to be revealed.
We climb her sacred mountains to be healed.

Then the song that rides men all their lives
When they have reached the right weight of years.
The song of WORK springs into their bright souls
To punch the broken clock of all their days.
To labour for some bastard in a tower
Who leaks their light with every passing hour.
Those corporate donkeys snuffling in their trough
Are fearful of that thing that sets men free.
The endless driving of the gritted wheel
Grinds the gilded amber of their dreams
And hollows out their core.  Their souls
Are frozen like some fearful glacier;
Or river silted with limitless greed,
Grabbing in its gaping maw all
that is wild and mad and on the budding
Spur.  Those that love their work are few,
Perhaps one or two, while millions slave
Like cattle, herded to an early grave.
They work; they save; they work; they save; they work.

Of all the songs held in the hearts of men,
There’s one that goes down deeper than the rest.
The song that fills their mouths and ears.  Oh how
They stumble with its harmonies and chords!
Mischievous boys cavorting in the choir.
Men follow its tunes like stubborn, burdened mules
Led by the halter to the sacred pools
Where flow the words that form the song of LOVE-
The horn-call of the all-encircling feminine.
First taught them by their mother’s long ago-
Clamped like limpets on her milky breasts
Man and boy have sucked from those sacred jugs
All the dark and bright they’ll ever know.

Now a different woman blows his horn.
And tempts him with a bud of sweet red fruit,
Wrapped within her naked turning curve.
She grunts him in his pits and he minds
To mischief in her gently yielding zawns .
White horses crash and the dragon-fires blaze.
Kaleidoscopes of light; cock-thundered.
His fire is  stirred to waking, roaring riot!
The blinding need to scatter-scatter seed!
Then a fork of lightning splits the sky!
A shout spins out! Then turns into a sigh.
Her head lies in the hollow of his hand-
he gently lets her fall into the night.
Out in the rain, his steel has turned to rust.
His eyes weave webs out of the dust for
As we know and trust: all men philo-
Sophise in the embers of their glutted lust!


Now he dreams that it will be just right
And she dreams she’s found her one true mate.
As if they’re stamped with some magnetic charge
That calls each to each across an ocean.
But the world holds all within its halls.
The world is full of hollow men and girls
Who love their toys and bags more than their mate.
From what cold milky flows did they
imbibe such greed? What withered claw planted
Such vain seeds in sterile fields? (As if
Narcissus took up farming for a joke!-
though now he writes the daily news and runs
The BBC!)

ASIDE TO READER: SHIT!  SHIT!  SHIT! I’LL JUST GIVE IN!
THE POET HURLS HIS QUILL DOWN TO THE FLOOR.
LOVE SIMPLY CANNOT BE DEFINED IN WORDS!
THE MELODY IS TOO COMPLEX AND STRANGE.
I’M TRYING TO PULL DOWN ULTIMATE MYSTERIES!
TRYING TO RING SOME ‘MANY-SPLENDOURED’ BELL!
TRYING TO READ THE CODED CLUES, LOCKED
WITHIN THE KERNEL OF A RIDDLES SEED!
BUT COME! LETS ALL TAKE A BREATH AND CARRY ON.


The warriors of love are the singers of this song
And so we gift them this:  A wedding vow:

I stand here in your fire and in your ice.
Treat equally as gifts; your pain and joy.
Witness here the weaving of my word and will
That, in our very essence we’re conjoined.
In the centre of our Selves, we’re One.

As you see:
The song of love sucks in all the rest.
The fact is:  It’s the one men love the best.
Even if the one, that wounds them most.
Fact is:  It’s the song that makes men blessed.


WHO KNOWS HOW LOVES NETS ARE CAST UPON THE SHAPE-SHIFTING SEA? 

Love has garrotted me-
Crept into my room
and, sleeping, slipped the wire
round my neck and pulled,
until my eyes ballooned.
Love is a mafia assassin!

Love slaps my arse;
gives me pointy ears and
a shrill, shrieking bray.
Has he bid Ariel
anoint my sleeping eyes?
Love is that devious Oberon!

Love is a game with balls;
A game of win and lose-
But this is a threadbare ball:
A pig’s wind-charged bladder
Is bejewelled against the sun.
Love is that penalty shoot-out!

Love seems to be my mission
behind the enemy lines.
Special forces or special needs?
These dark mountainous regions
magnetise the needle.
Love is a broken compass!

Who knows what love is all about?
Who knows how deep her nets go down?
Or who casts them out
On the shape-shifting sea?





26.5.14

Response to Professor Ray Jones article on Michael Gove's proposed privatisation agenda for Children's Social Work Services

Ok firstly Professor Jones is to be thanked for putting his thoughts on this issue with such clarity. He clearly does not labour under any illusions that private capital is anything but bad…well not even bad but…EVIL!
Capitalism, he considers is characterised by ‘venture capital’ and practically best illustrated by the usual suspects-Serco, Atos and G4S.
However I will propose that such an analysis, though passionately expressed, is far from accurate, not only in its characterisation of ‘Capital’ as corrupting and incompetent, using only such examples as will prove his own point, but that he has ignored completely any of the recent developments in social entrepeneurialism including radical and local not for profit initiatives that are changing the landscape of big, soulless, corporations running essential services in social care and health.
‘Capital’ is not inherently evil, in fact it is not inherently anything other than energy. It is how capital’s energy is directed that takes it into the landscapes of morality.
The fact is that Local Authority Children’s Services tend to mirror the very worst examples of organisations that the professor cites. They are hierarchical, top-down, command and control structures that operate on the basis of targets and performance. Staff are disempowered and overwhelmed with myriad requirements to fulfill the needs of higher management. Complaints are endemic among users. The human resource environment is oppressive and uncaring with process driven solutions to emotion based issues.
In addition the work itself is hugely demanding both emotionally and intellectually and physically.
I have always thought of social workers as heroes, finding solutions and transforming children’s life chances despite their organisations rather than because of them. Subversive heroes rather than rule-followers. Spanners in the works rather than cogs in the machine!
I strongly feel after many years as practitioner and leader in frontline services that Children’s Social Work is well overdue for a change and that may well be found in a diverse private sector subject to the disciplines of the market but inspired by up to date organisational and entrepeneurial thinking.
Think about the Integral models inspired by Ken Wilber and an Integral Social Work Practice that embraces real world models of social and human functioning celebrating that diversity and complexity. Think about visionary leaders and entrepeneurs creating new businesses and organisations that not only deliver outstanding services but are joyful places to work. Think about a business where integrity precedes profit but where profit is accounted for. Read ‘Reinventing Organizations’ by Frederic Laloux (20140) and see the examples of companies like the Patagonia Clothing Company and our own Ecotricity that are applying new models of business that privilidge and support human growth and potential.
I am not suggesting that privatisation is some great good and I share the concerns about incompetence arising from greed or plain stupidity in the examples noted. But for the future’s sake can we not get out of this constant spiral of negativity and blame that has infected Social Work for the past half century and start to embrace new models of delivering services that, in their core nature are at the root of what it is to struggle with the very nature of being human.
It was Einstein, I think who said, we cannot solve the problems of the future with the same mindset that created them.
Apologies for going on so but I guess that shows how useful your article has been Ray! I like the cat being put among the pigeons!
Best wishes,
Tony.

16.2.14

MAN IS BORN FREE BUT IS EVERYWHERE IN TRAINS

Man is born free but is everywhere in trains.

I commute from a gentile little Sussex village into London daily, courtesy of Southern Trains.  I thus am a regular customer of this strange, benighted organisation.  Well the descriptive noun 'customer' indicates a degree of voluntary transaction, a choice.  In fact I am probably more of a serf in thrall to a psychopathic and ruthless Overlord, forced to pay an extortionate tax in order to go about my business. An organisation that would better befit the pages of a James Bond novel filling the role of a 'Smersh' of the rails, instead of spies it would be-'death to commuters'.


I am now firmly of the view, after some years, that the incompetence displayed by Southern is no mere display of a fumbling, incoherent direction that places short term gains to shareholders over any long term investment in customer experience.  Not the necessary outcome of the vile John Major's last big giveaway of the country's wealth to the Daily Mail and Financial Times readership in the shape of the country's track and rolling stock.  Not a shambling example to the works of the creative mismanagement with which the private sector handles often handles public services.
 No, gentle reader, the truth is far far worse than that.

 Southern Trains is merely the mask behind a fiendishly contrived plot to drive the commuting traveller mad.  Raddled with job insecurity due to missed appointments.  Financially insecure due to rapacious increases in fares.  Give them hope, particularly at times of holidays that they will rest that cold evening safe in the bosom of their family before the crackling fire then steal the hope away at the last minute.
The sophisticated psychological knowledge displayed by Southern is evidenced by the merciless attack on all the emotional centers of the benighted traveller.

The commuters of southern trains share the experiences of many innocent peanuts in that they are continually assaulted. 

How shall we defend against this monstrosity.?  How strike a blow for freedom?  The answer?  We shall not!  We shall huddle like sheep in a storm dripping in the narrow central isle ( standing room only of course).  And shall we storm the first class carriages half full with plump faced marketing executives and vacant bankers and cadaverous psychotherapists?  No we shall not.  We shall suffer either in silence or with a good humoured quip at the Eastern European person pushing the trolley of overpriced light refreshments up and down the train.


Southerns explanations for delay are as fiendishly plotted as a Ben Marcus novel.  Suicides in Putney.  Strange inexplicable fires in rail cuttings.  Signal malfunction everywhere.  And in one case I experienced-swans on the line!
But reality will out and after thousands of torturous commuting miles I am firmly of the view that Southern Trains is part of a vast and secret experiment to study how much abuse an ordinary human being can take without cracking.
Who is Southern Trains?  Let us, in the immortal lines of Seamus Heaney's first successful poem do some 'digging'.

Southern Trains is owned by a Company called Govia (sounding like a city named by Michael Gove!) Formed from two lesser companies Go-Ahead (I'm not kidding!) and Kelsio which is a French transport company.  The nefarious entity was spawned in order to take part in the pillage and rapine of the rail network privatisation in 1996 birthed out of the grey murk of the John Major administration which you may recall was in the process of being decisively ejected by the electorate and the privatisation was seen in many quarters as a cynical nod to the rapacious hedge-funds and commercial interests waiting in line to rip off the country's rolling stock and rail network.  The cynics were proven right by history and rail privatisation is generally seen as a disaster for the railways and for the traveling public.  Excuses for chronic delays such as 'leaves on the line' or 'the wrong kind of snow' have now become part of folklore and the rail companies themselves some of the most hated providers of services in the country.


The other thing about trains is how there exists the opposite size effect from clothing shops.  I walk into a clothes shop now and it appears that the sizes are made for a race of giants.  I look like a child wearing its fathers clothes, my hands and feet buried in mounds of material.  On a train however the design template seems to be for a midget.  The seats fit neither your nether regions nor your torso.  One is held in a Foetal type curl unable to stretch out.  The seat in front is inches away from your head.  The train wobbles just enough to make writing impossible.  Any uncapped drinks will spill.
And the design?  I understand that one is confined by the tube structure but do they really have to be so very ugly?  Plasticky?  With such vile coloured schemes?  The South Eastern fast link appears to have achieved a degree of comfort that makes first class redundant.  Why can't the other train companies do the same?

Coffee?-don't touch it!  Overpriced and poor quality.  Drink anyone? You can't afford them! £5.00 for a small gin and tonic!
And when did it become part of the contract between train companies and traveller that a seat, far from being guaranteed as a minimum became a lottery with the consequence that a standing journey of an hour or more became commonplace, even on the Virgin line between London and Manchester?  It rather grates therefore to see Branson's smirking face plastered all over the tele advertising more of his scams when you see entire families crouched in the aisle of his trains for more than an hour.
Why is it so impossible to think of a train interior as being beautiful and ergonomic and facilitative?  Why is a train arriving on time such a relief?
Why did we allow our commute to be hijacked by these bandits? 
Let's break the bonds of our chains!

Let us take back our trains!

19.1.14

The Art of BALANCE

THE ART OF BALANCE IN 2014

One thing’s for sure:  Finding balance in a wildly tilting world ain’t easy.
Shall Balance shall be our discipline of awareness?  Or the mysteries of the quantum?  Or the still points of meditation?  Or the physical sculpting of Tai Chi?  The beauty of poetry and art?  The joy of singletrack?  Cooking food for our loved ones with micro-attention?  Breathing into the mountain before us?  Working with our minds honed to razor sharpness and our hearts wide open?  Working with Joy?  Like basking sharks sucking in the plankton of life in all it’s myriad, mad, beautiful, wild variety.  Shall we swim through the world open to it all?  Grounded, loving, true to our being, joyful or sad as we feel.  Let this be our first goal/paradigm/aspiration:

The Art of Balance should be the business of an enlightened mind.

Grounding:  Knowing who you are is a vital component to Balance.  What are your true motivations, fears and impulses?  What is the nature of your shadow?  Oooo…er, yes the inner daemon that lurks behind the veil.  Your very own personal Choronzon.
How can we become the grizzly bear balancing on a pole while juggling fireballs and holding one hairy leg gracefully aloft while unpacking the mysteries of the universe with our razor mind and open heart or spinning a jokey myth before a group of awestruck kids?
A reality surgeon.  A cosmic jestor.

THIS AIN’T NO MARKET AND IT’S CERTAINLY NOT FREE!

The masqueraded world wants you to be many things and what masquerades as the world wants you to aspire to be the kind of person that it wishes to sell stuff to.
Most of the people who are running the world want to sell you stuff.  It might be physical stuff like cars, washing machines, houses, cosmetic products, stylish clothes, particular types of music, handbags, a whole variety of fancy electronic toys to make your life more er…organised or whatever.  Then there’s a whole crew who want to sell you a load more stuff but this time it isn’t physical, this time it’s ideas.  Ideas about what constitutes meaning in the good and successful life.  And yes, you guessed it, most of the ideas depend on you buying the physical stuff from the first crew, who are often the very same people.  These ideas are often about the creation of dissatisfaction with the state of things as they are in your life right now.  They are relentless about how ugly you are without that skin cream, about how short/uncool/dumb/repulsive/unplugged-in/and just plain awful you are, as you are right now.  But there’s a solution, and all it takes is just a little money and you can be up there with the beautiful people, with the cool people, with the people that everybody wants to hang out with, just so that some magic and stardust might rub off on them but get this-YOU CAN BE ONE OF THE MAGIC PEOPLE!  All you have to do is give them some money and you will be re-made, but this time in the likeness of a GOD!

It is almost unbelievable that anyone takes this bullshit at face value, but it infests the deepest channels of the subconscious with it’s insidious messages because it is everywhere and always.  Nowhere is free from it.  There is no space of privileged silence.  Because far from being a king or queen, the consumer is a slave, and the foundation of modern capitalism rests on promoting dissatisfaction with the self in order to sell you stuff that you will only buy if you think it carries that certain cachet that will set you apart from all the other slaves.
And so the illusion is maintained, and standing outside this paradigm takes the most enormous courage and self-trust.  To see the emperor’s clothes for what they are requires x-ray vision.  To believe entirely in the impoverishments of low grade current market capitalism is to wear blinkers that exclude the true and the beautiful.  It’s not the visionaries who reject the blandishments of fear-based capitalism that are weird.  It’s the society that founds itself on these incredibly stupid illusions, most primarily that stuff creates meaning!
The great advantage of these free marketeers (and maybe we need to read some of their stuff over the next few weeks) is that as with much of the world’s intellectual bullshit, there’s an element of significant truth in it all.

I don’t think any intelligent person is going to reject the modern world out of hand.  Beware those who propose a return to the cave!  Public health especially fresh water and free medical care at the point of need are, for those countries who have them, one of the defining points of civilisation.  I also like video games and access to lots of different foods, a huge range of literature and movies, the internet and computers generally.  I like campervans and small sailing yachts and and electronic music and barbecues and beer and amazon and all-day opening and mountain bikes.  I love it!  But I also love the hill and the heath, the wind over the empty moor, the mountainside camped on alone at night, the summoning by the rockpool.  The silence, the stillness, the intensity.  The otherness.  

Therefore we must seek ontological banditry of the robin hood style to refashion meaning for the brothers and sisters.  Remake the paradigm in the image of a child.  Sculpt out a new capitalism that works for the world and does not require slaves.  We have the means, we carry it in our wallets, we spend it every day.  It is a very silly and easily obtainable (with a little effort) source of energy.  We must direct it with our minds and hearts and for Pan’s sake-we have to wake up!

One thing’s for sure:  Finding Balance in a wildly tilting world ain’t easy.  But…bring it on!

23.11.13

Lost in Broadstairs Folk Week.

I am in Broadstairs with Jim-one of my best mates and we are looking forward to a unusual and passionate celebration of radical cutting edge folk.

And by the way-what exactly is the term 'Folk' if not a vague descriptive noun for 'music of the people'?

But here in the heart of Folk week an aural nightmare begins to unfold with the relentless plinkety plonkety happy clapping bell ringing morris dancing bearded folky set with their weird looking ancient instruments and their tarrum tarra refrains and their pewter mugs hanging from their rucksacks.  This cacophony of ancient musical shite.  Oh Lord of the Sounds deliver us from 'Folk'.  Even now the restless deebeedeebedu plucking mandolins and the weeweeweeweewo violins tear at me having heaved in through the unsafe orifices of my unguarded ears like audio burglars smashing up the china shop of my so carefully collected internal rhythms.  Why is no one walking around wearing headphones-noise cancelling ones?  'Why are you here?' I wish to scream at groups of scantily clad 17 year old Italian girls with their glossy hair and the big brown eyes of gently ruminating cows and their language college rucksacks and their long long brown legs.  Why???

Then we stop along the prom and see three young lads soundchecking with mobile gear and he sings and we suddenly have some passion and originality and a voice with some beautiful stretching emotion hauled out of a guitar, a bass and a tiny drum set.  This is music!  This is what it's about!  Relief floods over me-all is not lost.

But they have to pack their gear away to yet more empire building folkies with their tarrum tarra again and their fucking whining violins and their Ewan McColl dirty old town renditions-awful! Soundtracking our over-salted, over cooked and over priced cod in 'Posillipos' Italian where sour looking Italian waiters ejaculate black pepper over our gruel-food.
Then Jim quite literally has this amazing lightbulb moment!
'Let's get back to the flat' says Jim,
'too right mate' I assent, 'any more violation of the eardrums in this manner and I am prone to murderous intent upon a possible innocent party.  Indeed let us repair to the safe haven of my flat.'


On the road up my friend nearly steps in a mound of vomit on which mould is growing.  I internally gag and day 1 is, thank Saturn's round rings, finally over.

I sleep badly having a sea kayaking dream about my kayak being smashed just before a Scottish Island expedition.  I wake at 4am feeling nauseous like a parrot has crapped in my throat.  But out at sea earlier in the day I saw a beautiful lugger blowing to windward.  Her bowsprit almost her length again holding full sail like a vision of what-might-one-day-be.
And in the morning the sea shimmers like a silver curtain-beautiful as we walk past Bleak House.  Fucking Dickens I muse internally.  He's like a rash in Broadstairs, and I will deliberately never read Bleak bleeding House!  Anyway I saw the TV series, and I liked it muchly.  I have started writing again-where will it all end?



8.11.13

I AM BACK FOLKS!

After a significant hiatus I am back blogging-more posts to follow very soon!

6.5.13

Norwich Cathedral

Norwich Cathedral



The Gothic cathedrals-the idea of 'God' in the medieval mind, transmuted into stone.

IMG_0222.jpg

16.4.13

Thatcher Free Zone



THATCHER- FREE ZONE

Can you hear me Mrs Thatcher,
will you listen to my words?
Cos if you don't go pretty soon
 it's gonna get much worse.

The city streets they're burning,
the youth ain't got no work,
your plastic bullet policies-
you know they just don't work!

And in your nuclear paradise
time doesn't fly, it dies-
I see it in the poverty
and, in the people's eyes.

Well they murdered Prosser
in Winson Green
He let out a few yells-
the shouts of the cops and
the screams of a man must have 
rung round those prison cells.

How can you love justice
if you are so unmoved
at the rights of an ordinary man
being so flagrantly abused.

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone,
a thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone.

The old folks they're freezin'
after all that they've seen
while bankers drive around in 
chauffered limousines

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone,
a thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone.


RIP MARGARET THATCHER 1927-20013



8.4.13

Margaret Thatcher dies aged 87

Well it will set the chattering classes off as we are regaled with the various paeons to the New World she ushered in.  However my own feelings about Thatcher are somewhat different-I consider her vile government and her pernicious impact to be one of the great disasters for British and European society in the twentieth century.  But I also consider her to have been a lame duck and incompetent politician saved by a momentous concatenation of events mostly reliant on two factors provided by two different very stupid men, both of whom suffered from tremendous hubris allied to an astonishing lack of strategic insight.  The first was Arthur Scargill, an egotistical communist with an agenda so hopelessly out of place that to see him lead the brave miners who so faithfully followed this strutting martinet was heartbreaking.  The other was the gold braided thug General Galtieri who invaded the Malvinas Islands as a means of stoking up his political capital at home which was ebbing as a result of his almost complete political ineptitude.
The result was that the lame duck was transformed into 'The Iron Lady', and a fantastical Catherine The Great type character was manufactured by the Media and the myth was born of the Lady who was not for turning.
The asset stripping of the country's natural wealth and housing stock from public ownership into private hands at knock down prices remains one of the great grand thefts of history.
The death of manufacturing to be replaced with parasitic financial service industries remains a huge social and national disaster whose grim effects continue.
The narrative that transfigured the great socialist objective of equality into a lie about laziness, and the 'ill man of Europe' continues as a myth underpinning greed, selfishness and the chronic cult of the individual at the expense of all else.
The legacy of Thatcher is the mentality of greed and selfish individualism over collective responsibility.
To call it Thatcherism lends it an intellectual coherence it never actually had as a set of ideas based on gut feelings much like a political system founded on the letters page of The Daily Mail.
Yet there is one thing that can be said for Thatcher as she performed in the House surrounded by her yes men-there was no doubt who was wearing the trousers!

7.4.13

Easter Sunday 2002 - Pontins

EASTER SUNDAY 2002 Pontins



The past? It's a frozen, foreign land.
A labyrinth of tourmaline-a dream
of black horses flowing out to sea.

Breaking the chains of memory
that tie us to the static of the land

The past? It is a strange and twisted tongue.
I cannot bend these chords to utter it!
Cannot find the rhythm in the line.

While fools found gold in crystal streams,
I rooted, ankle deep in mud, braying:
Who are you? Why are you here?

The past? That coldly-calculated joke.
Those idiots fell about the place side-splitted,
While I looked for help, for meaning, for a sign.

It was not that I didn’t understand.
It was that I would never understand.
Because... I seemed to be a stranger there.

The past? It is shapeless, blind, mute.
No road maps or strangers passing with news.
The very idea seems cruel!

And is it not cruel, this vile thing
set loose around the houses? This abusive
heart-skewering fear.

Nightsounds are lonely in the vale.
Smoke-rings of obliterated joy.
Oh these losings of familiar things!

These losings of familiar things.
These tales of the three rings.

And the first...shall be:

Of Despair.

Next:

Of Spirit and Healing.

Then:

Of Transformation!




31.3.13

Words for Steph

 
Words for Steph
 
from the Dougans
 
Well Steph, we’re going to miss you not least because you’re just about the best babysitter in the World, and you do it all for a Chicken Korma from Marks’s!  Ben says any other babysitters would just be ‘pants’ and Jack says ‘Stefna’s the best!’
Seriously though we are all sad to see you go but happy for you too.  You have been a good friend and we will miss you.  We all wish you every happiness in the world and we’ll keep in touch through e-mail.  Hopefully too we’ll come and see you next year by which time you will no doubt be talking in a languorous southern drawl and referring to the rest of the population as ‘them damned yankees!
Meanwhile yippety dang and howdyeedoodee, keep a weather eye out for rustlers and liquored up commanches and watch out for Evil Eye McNeevil one of the wickedest meanest outlaws in the whole South.  And if, while wandering around the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains you should come across a small boy shouting ‘Shane!  Shane!’  Please strike him several times about the head.
Lots of love,
Tony, Ben and Jack.

We never saw her again!

The Kitchen-The Soul of the house!

kitchen.JPG