UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men.

‘Ripple’: Jerome J. Garcia / Robert C. Hunter

Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash

If you open your heart to the misery

Of those who live without hope

If you learn to walk in another’s steps

And learn not to avert your gaze.

 

If you give all that you have to give

If you can possibly see with the eyes of a child

You will learn to not count your money, my friend,

Its value comes and goes. It is not your friend,

 

Instead, count your hours and count your days

Your minutes, your seconds, your breaths, your ways.

And please do all that you can do

For that is the currency of love, my friend.

 

And that is all that remains of us:

As time flashes by, my friend,

A glint in the sky,

Angels passing on high.

WHIMSY

I took ol’ snail upon a trip

Upon the live-long sea

Ol’ snail she is so silent,

More silent, still, than me.

 

We wander forward on the tides,

And wander back in time,

But all upon a Tuesday- drear

Ol’snail she speaks in rhyme.

 

With metaphors a-plenty,

Right on the cusp of time,

Ol’ snail becomes ye old March Hare

And leaves us all behind.

 

 

THE END

And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. Revelations 20:4 

All across the Nineveh plain the lights are going out
Crosses driven into the hearts of the last of Mesopotamia’s
Christians. These Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language
Of Christ, have been loyal throughout the long centuries
Of subjection to the burning wind that came out of Arabia.
Now in Christian villages there are no girls left. Alll taken
For the earth and the heavens have fled with the Americans.,
And this is now the time of the second death.
No weasel words here, no turning of the cheek,
No meek, no mild, no gut-wrenchingly weak.
“Maaloula is the wound of Christ,” the mourners chant
In the last Christian stronghold in Syria.  Jihadist al-Nusra Front
Stormed this city: destroying statues of the mother of Christ,
Taking delight in defecating in the churches. Stripping monks
Raping nuns. Decapitating some. Crucifying others.
Whilst we, in the richly apathetic west, look on:
Cowardly, counting coin, afraid to face the sun
Like the Roman Empire, we don’t deserve to survive.

 

Lines

Photo by Zuriela Benitez on Unsplash

Look at these lines — fishing for compliments –
Hooked, they drag us back.
Leave us squirming on the dry bank:
Palpitating, bruised from the fight.

Removing the pin from the mouth
It’s a painful business. But worthwhile.
Who’ll throw us back in to sink or swim?

Alone, we wriggle to the edge then flop
The shock of contact leaves us breathless.

It’s hostile here. But we feel. We float
Freer here. No lines grab at us.

We just stay afloat, alive, and drifting.

1992

GENERATION 27

Frederico Lorca

Lorca’s blood wedding
Bleeding vaginas
Into lemon-tree-soil
Reminds me of nothing more than the toil, toil, toil
Of life in Al-Andalus.
Priests chanting their rosary
Like it was El Maleh Rachamim
Or the Mourner’s Kaddish (which it probably was, if the priest
Was a Jewish Converso, who changed his religion
To save his life or, maybe, the life of his children). The Moriscos (ex-Muslim Moors), as usual, prayed louder,
Than did the Goths (Christian Spanish), They never coughed,
But Moriscos touched the head-covering they did not wear.
What they did on Fridays was only the business
Of the Inquisition.
Many Moriscos fled to Morocco, Lebanon.
To the centres of the Islamic world: Damascus, Baghdad.
Now nobody wants anything
To do with these ‘torturers
Of children and women-folk‘.
But nearly 450 years after the surrender on January 2, 1492
Of the Emirate of Granada to the Christian Castillian army
Franco’s Moroccan units committed numerous atrocities
In many Spanish cities, including Toledo
Murdering men, women and children
So helping to defeat the Spanish, Socialist Republic,
Allying with Italian Fascists and German Nazis.
Well, I just like a drink now and again:
Wine, brandy, what you will,
I wonder what the people in the future
Will think of all this?

Amadeus

Antonio Salieri, a man of less than monkish virtue, and of very little talent,

Falsely promised the deliverance of Jerusalem from infidel rule,

This was a lie. All his music was packed full of lies and thefts.

At the age of 35 Amadeus Mozart fell ill. Mozart was prodigious producing:

Opera buffa such as Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte

Opera seria such as Idomeneo and Die Zauberflote

Mozart’s  final illness was spent writing his Requiem: his meditation upon death.

He was nursed by his wife, Constanze. Was he poisoned by Salieri?

Who knows? Salieri was proud. The sin of pride is the sin of sins.

It was this sin which transformed Lucifer, an anointed cherub of God,

The very seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty,

Into Satan, the devil, the father of lies, the one for whom Hell itself was created.

Mozart was interred in a common grave, a pauper’s grave at Sankt Marxer Friedhof

Salieri, Süssmayr, van Swieteand and two other musicians were present.

They were assured of his death and breathed more easily as a consequence.

The tale of a storm and snow on his burial day is false;

The day was calm and mild, for all of the absent mourners.

Such eloquent Graffiti

It was an ordinary, wet north Manchester night

Of solid rain, unremittingly wet and cold.

When, suddenly, all the rivers, in all the world, stopped flowing

And all the summer colours leached away and never returned

And the wind it got so cold and stings like hell

And then the sky descends into the air…..

And you’re not there.

……

The blackness is deep, deep and remains everywhere

and still today it is every….fucking….where.

Then the doctor

Tells us, as if  incidentally,

There is no function, he is dead.

……..

I carry him into the mortuary,

Past the lucky Pakistani family,

With their sick, alive child

Who look worriedly at us

As if they feared the contagion of death.

Which they do.

……

I feel like shouting

‘It aint infectious you fuckers

And anyway what’s your fucking

God gonna do about it?’

……..

Except fucking cause it. Huh?

 

THE MAGNIFICENT MOORS

Photo by Austin Gardner on Unsplash

Catholic priest crucified

On Good Friday in Mosul,

Children blown to bits

In Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens,

A piece of pink Heaven on this bloodyearth.

Built by the Mughals to celebrate God

In marbled, mosaic mosques:

It celebrated the Hindus and the Buddhists,

The Sufi saints who’d moved into the future

Keeping their close hold onto the past.

It celebrated the Christians and the Jews

Who were joined to the Muslims, as brothers,

As the peoples of the book.

……

Now, instead of scholarship, the Islamic world is defamed

By these devils of savagery, mass graves, beheadings, blasphemy

All the narrow cruelties of Salafist Wahhabis

Who believe that heaven is only to be found by those who murder in the name of G-d, between the pages of a closed book.

Come, come, instead and look at the Calat Alhambra

Described by the Moorish poets as a pearl set in emeralds

Built whilst, we, in Northern Europe still laboured to turn a sod.

The Alameda de la Alhambra, so full of wild flowers,

Roses, oranges and myrtle. Filled with the songs

Of nightingales, the music of streams and cascades;

A very heaven built by these majestic Muslim Moors.

i.m Pte Jack Prince

As the wind blows ever faster,

And the temperature drops,

– I am recalled

To my dialogue with the dead.

My grandfather, Jack, had his

Last pint of bitter in this pub

I am sitting in before

Embarking for France in 1914,

And his first one back in November 1918.

2020 Jack – alive in my heart – always loved, never seen –

Not a line of his writing have I, not a wisp of his hair;

Now be-suited businessmen and women sit there

Endlessly playing with their phones, endlessly twiddling,.

They wouldn’t know a pint of best bitter

If you threw one in their well-manicured

Faces.  Sometimes, I am possessed by

Jack’s spirit: his anger at injustice and his ability

To see through glib hypocrisy and gob-shitery. Fuckery

Of all sorts and conditions, by all sorts and conditions;

When the day fades into night

And I’m free of pain, at last

I see into the past

With Jack’s clear-sighted eye.

 

A charming death

 

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

I do not drink,
But I am living under this mountain
That might crush the life out of me
Any time, any day,
So, I drink anyway.

……

Too much grandiosity
Dims the soul
Makes us old.

…….

I hear the wise ones pleading, pleading when on fire,
So much screaming, as the flames they get higher:
Hebane, belladonna, mandrake, datura
All of these, like mescaline, can see right through yer.
A broom, a pitchfork, a basket, or a snake
The old religion of love,
For love’s own sake.

…….

The beautiful Cathars
Heard the rumble far below
Looked at the surface,
Saw nothing, only snow.

…….

Hares’ prints lead me on,
Lead me to this folly
Red berries on it,
The christmas holly.

……

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych
And meickle, meckle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay, while I go then I come home again.

……..

Sometimes phantasma
Strip my wits away,
Sometimes for a minute,
Often for a day.
Glad to be rid of them
Pfff they are gone:
My wits for a minute
My wits for a song.