“We Let People Die Alone”

We did it for the greater good,

We shut you up and shut you out,

For we knew best, we understood,

Hard heartedness was all about

An abstract theory borne of reason,

Put to use in Covid season,

Made to instil in-group thinking,

To put the self aside.

Tough love required your shrinking

Fear, slinking back to isolation,

Left to sob in lone frustration,

Sans compassion, consolation.

We did our best, we tried,

But your old woman died,

We were not cruel, 

Broke no rule,

Just left you racked with grief outside,

Loud, uncouth, undignified. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/14/we-let-people-die-alone/

See also my poem ‘The Enforcing Sadist’ (2020)

Where?

I dream of some grey Georgian town,

Not blackened by industrial years,

But grey within its very bone.

One can perhaps dream new ideas,

But not invent false places

Built of granite stone.

The sea lies to the right of it,

But leaves few traces

Upon the old homes’ faces,

Symmetrical and open

Honest, neutral, not unkind.

And at the sight of it

I’m full of hope and know I’m back,

To somewhere real in my mind,

And wander up dead grassy track,

Bleached stalks turned pink in early dawn,

Are bending slightly in the breeze,

Where the Georgian houses stop

And Gothic villas peter out,

The residential edge, no shop,

Or pub to let it down,

No children here to shout,

No one at all about,

Except the corvids,

Assessing the suitability

Of a coppice of wind gnarled trees,

For nesting?

Calling each other, ‘Jack!’

Beside the old, dead farm

Adjoining its burned out barn,

Its roof long gone

Exposing a fragility

Of rotting beams and holed floors

Empty windows, sagging doors,

And ivy covered to the top,

Square and solid, empty charm,

Steeped in deep tranquillity.

On Bullshit

 On Bullsh*t

Someone wrote the essay,

So I shall write the verse,

Lying's really awful,

But bullshit's so much worse,

To lie one must at first concede

That truth must fit its place.

To lie is always to mislead,

To hide the truth so no faint trace

In evidence is left behind

To aid the honest, open mind,

Which questions falsehoods when they jar,

Against the facts as known so far.

Yet 'tangled webs' that liars 'weave'

'When first they practise to decieve'

Are evidence that their intent

Is some small part acknowledgement

That truth somewhere exists.

Bullshit brazenly persists,

No sense of how it might compare

To truth, its smirking face is bare,

It neither hides, nor turns, nor twists

Just flings itself upon the air

Audaciously and doesn't care,

And yet is proud and self aware.

Blue Flowers (rondeau)

 The flowers of my dreams are blue

And seem to be the ones that grew

In childhood’s garden, long ago,

Which when abandoned, left to grow,

Produced an even deeper hue

And stained with sadness all I knew

And changed the light that filtered through,

So strange notes are the ones I know,

The flowers of my dreams.

And harmony is odd, though true,

Contrived, made up in lieu

Of what is lost, yet still must show

That beauty’s blooms are tinged with woe,

Such linseed acres, not a few,

The flowers of my dreams.

On Two Quotes From William Hazlitt

To see the hypocrite repent,

Engenders great embarrassment,

The fat head's really far too dim, Believes we think him quite sincere, Don't know he clings to one idea, That rules he dreams up and enforces Keeping fellows to strict courses Do not apply to him. Believes perhaps we don't recall, How he cared naught for how they jarred, Used discipline and came down hard, Stood firm and would not once relent And lied and lied And claimed he fought on freedom's side, Was petty minded, brutal, small Would not forgive his brothers, Not knowing loving liberty is the love of others. But comes at last the reckoning hour, We've breached the curtain wall the tower, And stands before us now a creature Weak and squirming, smug of feature, Who loving but himself, Loves power.