That Velvet Gentle Love

The peace within the room is there

Despite the people, unaware,

Who chatter, do not sense it yet,

Don’t have the knack, or else forget

The way they felt it long ago

In childhood, in their mother’s arms,

Soothed after stress or wild alarms

That velvet, gentle love that calms

Is still, pervades, yet seems to flow

From some point out of reach, obscure.

Perhaps I need it to restore

My equilibrium once more

And so I sense it and I know

The truth of all that’s said of it.

Its peach and honey warmth, sunlit,

Its strength that leads one to commit,

Accept, and yield and then to grow.

By seeking for it every day

One lives outside, beyond the fray,

Immune to fellow apes’ display

Of dominance, their wish to show

The world their violence or strength.

We measure by a different length

To ascertain the depths of things,

The depths of peace that stillness brings

The depths of love that swells and springs

To fill the void that’s left by woe.

‘A dreary tribe of high minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers, who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat’. (Orwell)

All these decades later they’re still here,

High minded, sandal wearing and sincere

In their contempt for others, like them,

Whose Anglo Saxon natures they condemn.

They still drink fruit juice, eat the vegan way,

And know the very latest things to say,

That show that they belong, are in the loop,

Are members of the dreary, bossy group,

Whose whole purpose is to sneer and annoy,

Whose ‘raison d’etre’ is to crush, and to destroy,

And pull the rugs from under people’s feet,

By claiming this is ‘progress’. Their conceit

Astonishes, they have the will

To take back freedom dearly won and fill

The void with harsh dictatorship, they think benign,

Not comprehending imposition by design

Is incompatible with what is good.

They sideline rules, condemn what’s understood,

Believe their fellow men, lumped as one mass,

Beneath the salt, beyond the pale, the working class.

"Out Of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made" Kant

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity,
No straight thing was ever made"
But more than crooked,
As we grow towards the light
We are pollard
By experience, coppiced, pruned,
So an irregularity
Mottles us right through with burls,
And colours us in patches of a deeper shade,
So were we sliced or sawn,
Plain, rift, quartered,
Or used as fine veneers,
Civilisation thin,
And polished, beeswax bright,
You'd see the unique beauty of our whirls,
Chatoyant gold, our swirls
Of individuality,
Marked from the day we were born,
By choices and restrictions,
And growing yet more dappled every day
And would not seek for artificial clarity,
Would see there was nothing to gain
In reducing our beliefs and our ideas
To measurable units, would not weigh
Our contradictions,
Nor work against the grain.

This Government's Position

As Deputy Prime Minister,
Let me spell out our position:
Things will be truly dreadful,
A disaster, one big mess,
Things will be awful and chaotic,
And therefore let me stress
My own incompetence,
Without inhibition.
We cannot govern easily,
Because we're not exotic:
Only suave, drunk, scheming, foreign chaps know how to rule,
You see, I might be a Minister, but I'm also a fool.
So let me emphasize the failure of our administration,
And let me cause the public more and more distress,
Let me advertise our weaknesses
Our laziness, our uselessness,
Let’s inflate the great frustration,
That is felt throughout the nation,
Let me talk the country down.
As Deputy Prime Minister
Let me tell you our position,
Things will be truly dreadful,
Disastrous, one big mess,
I might have sworn allegience to the Crown,
But I'll show no contrition,
For I hate this thing ‘the nation’
Though I demand your admiration,
While plainly admitting I'm a moron and a clown.

New Year’s Day 2018

The bedroom carpet has a coat of hair,

Nice hair, quite thick, that’s mostly bombshell blonde,

And stands out well against the Turkey red,

Where it lies deepest underneath the chair

For all domestic guilt seemed to abscond

Last year, towards the end of May.  The bed

Is hairy too and looks poor, sleazy

But I can look on it and feel quite easy.

The strong desire I once possessed, to clean,

Has gone the way of other lifetime habits

Like persevering to the bitter end

Of books which do not interest me at all.

The sun shines in upon the ironing:

A pile of damask, crumpled table cloths,

Easy to ignore,

And on a heap of clothes I need to mend,

And makes a rather nice interior scene.

And I think back to the days of children, small,

And umpteen cats, a dog and indoor rabbits,

And their endless currants on the kitchen floor,

When having more to do meant doing more.

Not Here

Between the point of laying down my book

And waking, later, lying on my back,

An eternity of nothingness, obscure,

Unlike so many other times before,

Where mere sleep has intervened and I

Have known the place in which I’ve been,

The parameters of mind, behind the eyes,

The places I have visited in dreams,

Surreal worlds just dull familiar scenes,

But here’s a vacuum, how much time has passed?

It may have been no time at all, and yet

It made the greatest difference there could be,

Because on re-emerging, I came back,

And knew that I’d come back to being me.

I set about to quite recall myself,

But started with remembered colour, blue.

I felt its calm familiarity, at first without its noun

And then the word arose, or did it land?

It seemed to come from outer space at first.

But knowing it began a chain reaction in my head,

And I recalled my mother, ten years dead,
And then my father, living still, alone,
And time slowed down and then seemed to expand
And I saw my elder sister, aged just three,

Upon a tricycle, on rough, flagged, pale grey floor,

And recognised the wrinkles of the stone,

At Swinsty in the entrance corridor.

And then my younger sister reappeared,

And seconds later she too had a name,

And then a little while must have elapsed,

And time seemed stopped, suspended once again

Until the shock of recollection of a spouse

Four children of my own, a lovely house.

And here I was, beside the dog, in my old bed,

The light still on, my novel on the chair,

At peace with a contentment which felt earned,
As if I'd passed a test, had won a game,

Alive and well, reborn, and quite returned

From emptiness and vacancy and black.

Huddersfield

Up on the moors,

Among the bog cotton and heather, 

Millstone grit boulders,

Bilberries, bracken,

Lie a lad and lass together.

One is pale and shaken, 

Wretched, weak and broken.

It’s not Cathy and Heathcliffe,

Out in wind and weather,

For all he’s swarthy, black eyed, ‘other’,

It’s Mohammed and Chloe,

And she’s also had his brother,

And his best mate, Rashid, or someone or other. 

And peaty water is soaking through her jeans,

And she’s cold and shaking,

And she knows what he means 

When he promises he’ll see her tomorrow.

He’s going to leave her here,

Up on the moors,

Among the bog grass and the heather,

Under empty grey sky,

With just the lonely curlew’s cry

To remind her she’s alone,

Miles away from her mother.