i was born without asking
to the country i grew up to love
as a britain which deserved the adjective
of great
because it strove to do
good
across the political spectrum
for every citizen
and so i felt proud of being british i did
but now the tawdry and brexit-ridden
have renamed my nation-state
and i can no longer call myself
the nationality
i was born to:
for i am now officially uk-ish
but what prideful claim can that deliver
when -ish becomes a "sort of"
instead of a proclamation
of historical courage
and grit
and of the terrible determinations
forged
in times of awful warfare
where everyone of us cared
for everyone of us
and no one was ever less
for owning less
for this is the patriot's lament:
how the savagely thoughtless
political class
we now have upon us
brutally operate on us
as they do
from the boardrooms
of foul directorships
and sailing-ships
run with the dirty monies
of foreign largesse
embedded and encrusted
in a society of the most debilitated
and as it witnesses
the illegitimate invasions
of not-so-distant lands
we must remember
that whilst hitler and that other russia
(being the same russia
after all)
were enemies easy to espy
and define as such
today's dictators of equally abusive bent
wear suits of the nicest
and tread stages of the finest
and rub shoulders
with the tech monsters
of the cruellest
and so as the patriot i am
does lament the falling away
of what it once was to be british
and proud of the fact
with tact too
that in a hard world
being such was a foundation stone
of democracy
still as that patriot of kindly encouragement
i hold out hope that there may resurge
good forces in the land
i refuse to rename the uk
because myself i never will be uk-ish
in that ambiguity
of reclusive criminality
that i now bear witness to
because being british born
and british bred
my head tells me i shall always remain
conscious of the FOUR nations
that SHOULD make up freely our federation
of beautiful
and collective
future-present wisdoms
where the past may no longer need
to hang heavily
over what we show to the rest of the world
and our own heads all
may equally be held higher
than the recent past
allows
for what has been
and what we've seen
can just as easily be
a manual of instructions of what NOT to do
as it currently serves those
who serve themselves abusively
of the rest of us
in respect of how better
to constrict our aspirations
to do good
in a world which desperately needs our would:
being where we find again
the bravery that being british once meant ...
... before the patriot's lament
rang out deeply
and profoundly
riven as it now is
with the gravity and sadness
of lives disposed of cheaply
and carelessly
by business and political leaders both
who continue to choose
the roads of personal enrichment
over public service
and so it is
and so it may be
that all of us
being you and me
and we together
might find that retribution for evil deeds
need NOT contain the vengeance
of the gods of old
for we could remember
that british bred
and british born
and having once been
the mother of all parliaments
and so fine with this aspiration
as we furthered a step-by-step process
of moving slowly but utterly sure
we may return once again
to being ...
this GREAT BRITAIN!
Category: aside
Chester was a place that gave a lot to me and took a lot from me.
It allowed me to grow into adulthood, with an epilepsy that struck me at ten years old, and was medicated with barbiturates until a better solution was duly found six years or so later.
In the 1970s it was a place of little attraction for young people, at least people like me … though now it has vibrant sociocultural institutions, and a small-town vibe that works for very many people.
But small-town vibe cuts both ways. It can lead to the beauty of the gentle and the unsuspected: of people who reach out to you and want to be reached out to, equally. Or it can lead to the embracing of criminal and mafia-like behaviours. Where who you know is much more important than what you describe and experience, even when you communicate it with absolute accuracy.
Today I saw in this very same town of Chester its very best side and its very worst. In its remembrance of the sacrifices of two world wars, and more before and since, it was exemplary and compassionate.
In its defence of mindsets I myself recall from my childhood — for example, things that happened at school to me and my classmates, which today would lead to criminal prosecutions — it also showed such evil people are still alive and literally kicking.
Earlier today, I was walking into the Tesco in the centre of town and a woman cut closely into my path with a suitcase trailing behind her. I had to stop. I bided my time. I then headed away from her into the shop itself, and lo and behold, she drove her suitcase, now in front of her, into the back of my left leg.
I turned round and she asked me if I was all right, with a beaming smile. I answered I was, and asked her pointedly if she was.
She said nothing. We went our separate ways. But the mindset she had didn’t. It planes over this city of two curious parts. One part, beautiful and scenic, in the physical, emotional and intellectual, and with the cultural organisation it never had in my childhood and now, obviously deservedly, manifests to the max for all who wish to value it properly:
But there’s another part, a quite different layer of society in Chester. It’s a layer which mainly chooses to defend its own very restricting, manipulative turf at the expense of the innovation and invention the first half not only treasures as it always attempted to, but is now capable of formulating wisely and assertively.
The layer which looks to defend its always-has-been looks to the past as a justification of all current behaviours: the woman with the suitcase and her mates videoing the scene are just a silly example of how the past can be (wrongly) used to justify a #gaslighting present.
The other layer, the one of cultural vision and fabulous statements where every human being has value, meantime, looks to Chester’s past not as a justification of the nowadays and the cruelties these others are continuing to deliver, but as a way of intelligently informing a collective future-present of the most wondrous: a world where all of us fit in, strive and eventually not just live but thrive.
This is Chester UK, then: the marvellously creative, wise, generous, gentle and compassionate on the one hand. And on the very beastly other, what I experienced in Tesco in the town centre not long ago: a group of people who have nothing better to do than track, using mobile phone tech and related, the simple movements of people, like myself, who will not stop telling inconvenient truths.
It’s Brexit Britain right down the line too, is the Chester I experienced today: so many good people who just want the best for the world, on the left of politics and in the decent centre both, whilst on the extreme right the monsters who, in truth, have become one-bit mobsters.
I spent most of my youth in Chester. I’m proud of the sociocultural environment its good people have managed to fight into being in the past few years from practically nothing previous.
Today’s incidents, on the back of other things I didn’t report on other days, because even sillier, have made up my mind, a mind that was unsure, for sure.
My decision after the Chester #gaslighters of this afternoon? I now intend to work here too, to join the better half.
Why?
After being unduly incarcerated back in 2003 by the outliers and institutions of this city, you’d maybe wonder why indeed. I’ll tell you, then. Now I shall. The good people who’ve stuck it out, and made this place so much better, deserve other good people to join the fight.
The bad, the one-bit mobsters I mean, don’t deserve anything any more. They certainly don’t deserve that the good abandon them to their victory.
In fact, they don’t even deserve our disapprobation.
Just to be ignored, is what they deserve. Just to be ignored.
I do join, then. The movement of the best. Not a city of #gaslighters. Not a city of beautiful #roman even.
No. Rather, a city which has begun to learn to fight a layered criminality with ALL the tools to hand. Something which in my childhood never seemed conceivable.
All the tools. Absolutely all. And even with the written word, I say.
My contribution.
The pen wins.
As does Chester.
it's funny because the word resolution has multiple meanings
and one of our glories as human beings is precisely this
where our capacity to understand what was meant
outdoes by far what was apparently sent
but sometimes it's not so hot
and sometimes it hurts a lot
when knowing well what was really intended
undermines the secrecy with which one meant to convey
the essence of the signs to hand:
for perhaps this is la la land not happy happy hollywood
and the resolution wherein we understand ending
is final in the sense of something more akin
to a legal compliance of cold and shrugging shoulders
and a terminology of delivering soldiers of life
as further cannon fodder
not the pleasures of neverending love
and so as i begin to sense you didn't choose me
i hold no resentments or hatreds at all
because above all it is truer than true these days:
i love you now and more than when i could've in yesteryear
and as i said in previous words
this choice of years no longer hurts
because although i'll never live again
with other woman as future kin
it'll free me for sure
if i survive my instincts for self-immolation
in the 62nd year i have in common
with earnest ernest himself
to concentrate on my work:
a work i cannot judge more important than you
but that in your absence
will become all-consuming for me
and so dear c and so be it:
your final resolution not mine at all
goes clickety-clack and snappety-snip
as horse and trap down dublin streets
and so just i guess one more thing to rhyme:
because although this ain't ever
the case in my life
and plenty more in time i'll surely write
about the muse and beautiful person
who made me man and this is true
where so many lifetimes lost with two other women
at such a terrible and awful cost
had served only to dismantle my desire all told
to show the world what's what about mil
i'd like instead to make my resolution true
but not to show you how much i might do
but rather to demonstrate
never remonstrate
how gentle i really can be:
for whilst i only wanted the best for you
never the people around you or me it's true
it wasn't out of a desire to break anything or anyone
nor tumble any fragile house of cards
but simply because when one discovers the truth
in what's what about someone (both another and oneself)
it's like a prospector panning for a gold suddenly filtered
where it's impossible any longer
to see life in different way
and so that's what it was and that's how it's been
because with you dearest c
i've climbed the highest summit any man in love has ever seen
and stood at the very top as foothills all around proclaimed
showing as they did that in climbing back down
to where mortals do reside in cities and towns
and villages of kindly compassions
and expectations of mindful passions
it just makes it easier for me to prove
that all i have now for you (and for yours it's also true)
is a deep and abiding respect and affection
where love may triumph and trump all
circumspection
and only this remains as clear statement of fact:
i love your strong and clever sinews
like only tradition is capable of renewing
and hope one day all our paths might cross again
because if there's something true i've learnt from your countrypeople
and then again from others this year
it's that only sensibilities can solve our problems
and only by including everyone who acts in good faith
can faith become
a force of good again
for this human race
we all run uncertainly
and so just as much
in public and society's
i'd like to also assure you
in our most private realms
that i'm sorry to all of us i hurt as i have
just sorry i say and just this i mean too:
just all those beautiful words like this
i begin now to feel
never tolling like funerals
but only ringing out like weddings of joy
no longer sensing hatred of the other
no longer wanting to fight sister or brother
no longer caring
what my father did to me
nor how your mother destroyed
deliberately
my joie de vivre and ability to see
that womanhood didn't have to be cruel after all
and that now after everything that flooded my soul
what's left behind is that geology of me (at least)
where the tectonics of all of us do slide along
each other's shelves and plates
and rocky granite outcrops
as if in massive intercontinental shifts
and then together as humans of the rest
we lift the entire race to mountains of the best
as we really do find it in ourselves to forgive
before the coffins of each of us should bid the quiet farewell
just love then just love my love
just seeing how it might be forever
for it's the unending story of this i see:
the love of this man for the woman of his dreams
this is a short poem describing my arrival at a series of conclusions about life’s real nature.
i’m going to dublin ireland, month-end: it was always where i said it was the place i wanted to die — but therefore, naturally, live first too.
things have changed since those affirmations: i visited sweden and saw a much better way than anywhere i’ve ever been to of organising society: for the first time in my life, for example, i felt it cool to be old. i felt able to enjoy being old, i mean.
i don’t now know what my life holds for me. tbh, this is the truth. i have seen reasons for what has happened to me and others in the world since i was born, and i have been ignored consistently at best and prevented brutally from acting at worst.
i sense there’s nothing more i can do to share better and more productively my perceptions of what we are all collectively doing wrong these decades; and so i ultimately find it impossible to comprehend any chance of my utility arising before i die.
i therefore sense also it’s better i die sooner than later.
the pain is become too much: to know why and be both aggressed for it and, minimum, ignored for it and simply passed over always … well … it has become just too much.
i hope you appreciate, at least, right now, for the minute, the technical skill of the poem that follows. but for me, right now, at 61 it’s not a technical act of putting digital pen to paper, at all. (nor, frankly, has it ever been.)
i hope this you also may find it in yourselves to understand.
see you all in dublin … yeah?
“when it’s time to give up on placating loss”
no longer a love poem by mil williams
you loved him because of his words
and the words were finer than you ever could
but it wasn't just the surfaces
it was the undercurrents too
and the grace under pressure
and the pressure under the mace
that life is becoming
now
and even then was already
and he did the right thing that day he did
at that wondrous age of 61
and so it's when you knew you should too
it was just finding the way
the right way to do the thing you'd wanted to do
for so long and long ago
because whilst the violent ones hurt your so
and continue to violate your intimacy to this day
all you can see now for sure is no one else cares
and as he at his 61
realises the world doesn't care for him
enough to see why he's right
and they're quite wrong in all their cruel uncertainties
he sees it's time to leave the world to suffer alone
because there's nothing to be done any more
because the people in charge are whores
to the totem that is the pursuit of money
at the expense of humanity
he curls his digit around the figure
that is the trigger
and fingers it
like no woman ever cared to embrace him
because grace under pressure
is what that's all about:
doing what's right not doing what's pleasant
never hesitating as the pain beckons
and the abuse reminds him
that justice is criminal
never natural
and so that's been his life
and behind him beautiful books and words
and things heard that were untrue
and others that really weren't
and so that's the nature of the east
as it grinds democracy to pieces
which i no longer want to put together
so i admire and feel inspired
by my man of 61 all those years ago
and by the things he found it in him
that he was able to get out
to better a world he knew
was awful enough
to have to escape one day
in mode of personal obliteration
because in my case i don't know if in his
only five people of my closest family
save themselves in my memory
as it stands before i act
and no friends at all
have ever been more than hidden fiends in ruth:
enemies as the swedish say in their tongue
of the truths i have possessed
but will never be able to hand on now
because now is much too late to placate the loss
which i feel deep inside the soul
that lays beneath my every step
as they have made of ALL my life
something i have wept so fully
as dully i come to the final conclusion
that nothing out there
has ever understood
a single thought
i ever had
just remaining that act i too must pursue
at the age of 61 that currently possesses me
at month-end when in the country
i knew i would cease ultimately to be:
when my life WILL wend its way
to exposure of necessary closure
and where with one last text and webspace
i will try and communicate
all the things you all should have done
which really you didn't
and possibly deliberately didn't
and which have led directly
to the funding streams
and mafia-like revenue pots
that enabled 9/11
and putin's russia
and hamas's terrifying abuse
of both israeli people and its own so-called "own":
because i ask you i really do
why no one dares today to describe hamas
as availing itself these horrifying weeks
of a million or more human shields
caring little
for their integrity
and zero appreciation
for their sovereignty
as blood and flesh in fragility ...
and so yes ... it's true too
that these are the things
i have seen every day from birth
and all i have ever received in exchange
is to be treated by an extended family
and their friends and work partners
as a piece of facile inconvenience
to be disposed of like human kleenex
regularly
wherever i attempt to go that is
and be the human i needed to be that is
and so that's why now
i conclude he was right my man of 61
when he determined there was one place he could go
where none of them could follow him ever
and just one place to be safe
and one place to find peace
and one place where the good people
no longer had to pretend
they couldn't see what the violent ones did to me ...
this i why i consider therefore
the number 61 to be so beautiful:
clearly NOT because of karen williams's birth
nor for the horrors she has visited
on so many men over the years
just as my own pain
was never allowed to subside
by her buddies
and confidantes
(people exactly like
my brother tugomir too
having been her lover
before and after my own idiocies)
nor die down humanly
and reach some degree
of resolution and proper forgetting ...
so NOT because the day she arrived
the world would become a better place
because it clearly didn't
no it didn't
and then again
neither because
where turned upside down
it's the year 91 of her daughter's birth too
being that claire brett
of such violent cruelties and instincts
and so obsessively ridden
(via her techie mates
mark kelly & co) ...
so neither for mother and daughter
nor for daughter and mother
but simply because
i'm also 61 too this year do you hear
and this time of life confers many truths it does
and it's time to do and NOT write any more
as i realise the wisdoms of the ages
cannot be denied:
for the world is a wonderful place
despite what it is
and not because ...
Good morning all.
Yesterday I posted the below on LinkedIn:
I’ve just had a conversation with my mother. It’s redrawn my sense of my whole life. And therefore of myself.
Nine months after I was born — my birthday being the 16th of June 1962 — I was placed in a secure facility in Warneford Hospital in Oxford. I was there for a month: so not, in the end, the only occasion I was placed behind closed doors, after all.
My mum was suffering at the time from acute post-natal depression. I knew already that in 1968 she had received electro-shock treatment. What I didn’t know till today — because I had never been told — was that at the age of nine months I stayed with her in the aforementioned hospital, whilst she underwent a course of eight separate electro-shock events.
However, the seventh one went really badly wrong: she had such a painful headache as a result that she passed out. They tried to explain; but faffed, tbh. Her words, not mine.
So she refused the eighth, and after a month in Warneford, we left.
She’d married my father in 1961, but couldn’t recognise him during those weeks in 1963. I wonder now if at the time she was able to recognise me … or perhaps not at all.
Or not clearly enough for it to make any difference.
And then if not, when actually it was that she finally became able to remember and know me — her son — again.
Yes. It’s important to speak to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. And others, even close others, might never know what maybe you did need to have known, but didn’t get the chance to comprehend ever.
Because history is important, and people who tell it well are dangerous. Telling history right is a subversive act, too.
In this case, though, maybe a healing act more than anything else.
I am closer to my mother now than I was half an hour ago. And half an hour ago we had already been as close as … well … thieves. Thieves not of trinkets or jewellery or gold: thieves, rather, of our truths.
Because I see I was broken for the rest of my life because I see she was broken on becoming a wife. And no one of any decent mind can attribute any blame to the broken for breaking another. And here, though it’s still hard for me to admit, I really must include my father as well.
And so I am at peace.
And I know today … so is she.
I’d suggest you went to the original post, too. The comments are some of the most valuable ones I’ve ever had.
Anyways.
Today, just this last half an hour or so, I’ve been thinking now: reflecting on fallen veils.
‘Had the night to do so. ‘Reasons to do.
I once worked with a beautiful mind whose job was one-to-one in a local prison. Their goal, their unique and only goal, was via a personalised conversation over a period of sometimes lengthy time to help a prisoner find their core: what had driven them in their life to do good and what had driven them in their life to do not so good at all.
I’ve had a lot of therapy in my life, tbh. Fits and starts: either ameliorative which is an excuse for not addressing a clearly systemic challenge at the same time; or attempting to find core whilst never being able to.
Along the journey this has taken me I have wondered whether a lot of people, who manifestly chose to hurt me, were the cause of my melancholia or the result of it; that is, that their behaviours were the result of my own and the blame was better located in me, or instead that their acts served primarily to deepen my core — at that point, for me, still undiscovered — and therefore meaning the blame for all the pain still present in my daily life, even today, lying equally deeply with them.
And so after yesterday’s conversation with my mum, I realise this morning on awakening just three things:
1. This thing that was revealed yesterday in conversation with her is my core. A nine-month-old baby suddenly not recognised by his mother. And living for a month with this very same mother I continued to recognise for sure, even as she could not see herself to consistently providing the flicker of reciprocation, that in its presence makes a life and in its absence breaks a young heart. This is my core: why rejection is impossible for me to survive, never mind thrive after. Rejection of any kind in any area of human endeavour: rejection by all in the smallest of ways, too, wherever.
2. If you cannot work out how to thrive after rejection, everything anyone does to you will be interpreted sooner or later as being such. And the people who have most broken me since … well … most of them I still believe did it deliberately. Businesspeople who chased me in bad faith whilst manifesting a superficial good; a lover who knew only how to shame and ridicule and pursue and condemn and gaslight me over decades, and who never ever let me be free — not even to this day; and then again, half of a family that knows only button-pressing and knife-twisting, yet is capable of calling it “simple advice”; and still more re a security state — that of my homeland — which decided early on I needed neutralising, and when I didn’t kill myself, realised reputational disgrace was the next best thing; and finally, maybe worst of all, all those people who stood by all those decades, so many of them on all parts of political and sociocultural spectrums, in full knowledge of what and who was doing what to whom … in full knowledge of the pain being deliberately delivered.
3. And yet my final insight is this: spending a month in the same room as my breaking mother, with the hospital-smelling, former lunatic asylum breathing down our necks all that time, isn’t a matter of assigning blame. My mother broke me that month for the rest of my life; but she was broken by my father the year before; and he was broken by a bullying upbringing that had failed to treasure what in hindsight should’ve been a beautiful gender- and neurodiversity. And so it reaches back … so it reaches back.
And so this, then, is where I am: where I find myself this morning. All the people who hate me now, and have actioned so much deliberated ill on me all my life, maybe since birth too, will find plenty of reasons for them to continue kowtowing to their hatred: still profoundly embedding in their deepest places.
I, meantime, realise equally now that what I need to do is accepting that this thing we call rejection is my core — because for a month all I experienced was the deepest kind: that of a mother blanking her baby — my future job must then be to find some way of acquiring a different skin: but not a thicker one … no.
Rather, an osmotic one that leads me to manifest much more finely and grandly and enthusiastically that better capacity to love everything human, which our humanity today so sorely, so surely, needs.
when you see the world as it is
you prefer to see the #whirled as it ain't
and then it's like a super-injunction
'cos it's not just you tell people
there's something you can't say
but 'cos honestly you can't even say you can't
i learnt how the world worked a long time ago
when i was born or maybe when reborn
not as a child
but rather a man
who for a period of time
got sand kicked in his eyes
by other men mainly
but a few women too
who chose to do ill
'cos that's what some of us choose to do
and in those days this man before you
didn't wear glasses at all
except perhaps when the sun would shine
like no one's business might run
and so in those days
when ray bans were the thing
and prohibition of any activity
didn't seem to be
what the uk wanted to be about
he just sipped sooo gladly on his wine glass
fine and shiny
and then slipped madly
on his dad-ass of rhymes imploding
and yet still managing in some way or other
to conserve
and to preserve
a sense you kinda saw
of that occasional semblance of dignity
all humans should access occasionally
but what mainly he mostly learnt on rebirth
when all was said and done and hurt
was that people who know they do what's right
and people who doubt all the time their might
are not the same at all at all
oh not the same at all
'cos it's the latter
who when they think they're bad
are really the best of humans by far
whilst it's the former
who demanding allegiance to their had
are the people you'd never ever
want to meet or see
even at rally or show in full public view
never mind that alley of ancient dark review
so if i had to say one thing just one
about the world i now ignore
it's that whatever happens next to me
i know i was the latter
yes i do i do
and although it seems a rank contradiction
of humility's dreadful absence
there are times in your life
when you know you did wrong
and even so equally
other times more blessed
when by golly you know you did right
and right as rain
and rain and rain
and right as any rain at all
and so straight upfront
and straight in place
i wish right now
that if we all had some other chance
to make a #whirled of brand new utter
from this tawdry world we have instead
a world we have so me and you
and maybe sadly so at that
i'd be first in line to do some things
and the two things i'd do
'cos two it would be
would be these two cool things
which surely could change
all the bad there is
into the good of this one
and the fab of that other
and that number one would be really dead easy
where first we simply tipped our hats
even when we had no hats at all
out of respect and deference
but not to hierarchy
nor a desire to avoid all creative anarchy
but simply because in front of us we saw
a human like ourselves and nothing more
and yet again and yet again
whilst nothing more and nothing more
nothing less than anyone else
we'd ever get to greet
and so that would be the first thing out there
i'd try to inculcate quite differently
being a respect for the other
based on equality not position
and so not on how much wealth you had to show
or didn't care to manifest or even just to know
but simply the fact that nothing was hidden
and no one had power over any other person
as a result of a violence of stealthy kinds
and abusively speaking and never one's mind
being committed again and again and again
and so nothing of this sort would i enable
at all in my #whirled ...
of just so round tables
and so arthurite haul
and kiplingesque too ...
and then all wrapt up proudly
in one beautiful zoo
and so what then my dear
would the second thing be?
what next would i do to remedy the world?
what next ... in my #whirled
i'd imagine oh yes ...
being this mad thing of grand ...
could i attempt to right rightfully one good day
standing as i stood and prayed?
simple really and simple as simple
'cos i think all i'd do
is be a man who lived his own life
on islands quite deserted
and absent of human strife
because if one thing i've learnt all these years
it's a sad reality
but a truth all the same
and this is what it is i have to say
and this is what it's come to weigh on me too
like stone of anchorage
or baggage of love's futility
when we realise eventually
that no one is to be trusted
when push comes to shove
and here
not even love
for the only two ways
in the world today
we can trust another fully
is either by blindly joining a tribe
in which case nothing is real inside
or alternatively never meeting
another person out there ever
or at least not more than once in your life
and no more than that
not even to doff that hat
for where they only know
how to deliver
like carrier pigeon of conflicted nations
a message of war unjustly conducted
what's the point of trying again ever?
really what is the point oh lord oh lord ...
yes oh lord ...
i mean of trying once more?
"i'd love to dm you"
"and i'd love to dm you too
but you told me not to a long time ago
on pain of being reported
or taught a lesson
which a boyfriend of yesterday
remains to this day
desiring to deliver me
like a patchy amazon white-van driver
although now they're a kinda charcoal colour
but can we really say grey-van driver
after all these years of white
as it's been?
can we, my dear?
can we? well ... maybe so ...
maybe we can
even so
"and i'd love to dm you now this minute
but the minutemen
are getting ready to weep again
though to be honest
and sure
and certain
they never stopped crying
since they heard those terrified voice messages
falling like big stone
hurtling to the ground
like a terrifyingly soundless lament
of wounded heroes
amongst those zeros of binary digital
which has led the most horribly creative of criminals
to activate with evil beyond understanding
or comprehension by any ordinary soul
the goals of hate and cruel latitude
as my heart beats in terror
and my head finds itself unable
to feel safe any more
in a world where these things happen at all
"and so my dear
in the personal
which i hope we may be able to feel again soon
i'd so love us to go forwards to the past
never back to the future
because for me you're a picture of the best
and always have been
and where friendship could now be a thing
for us to enjoy fully
and with ourselves together as we should
being just you and me forever now
as we might sing ordinary tales
of quiet firesides
and wintery sales ...
"because it's absolutely true
that as human beings of common interest
none of us
absolutely none of us at all
deserved that 9/11
not of famous sporty car
nor of emergency calls from fire or ambulance
usually able to offer the succour and support
that make one want to trust more
our common humanity
and goodness and truth
and then again
perhaps some sort of reality of the sincere
and frank
and fine and grand and honest
and all the things that look to love
and that which doesn't bite to the core
and doesn't gnaw like rotting teeth
at empty bone
or a traumatised loneliness
which drags down
like plummeting gannet
all human alone ...
"and so yes i say
and yes i weep
like the minutemen
who failed without fault or blame
to defend in necessary measure
the land of the free
from the curse
of the unseen horror
that still stalks this gomorrah
of latterday paintings
that draped the walls
that tumbled down in biting minutes
and that found their bloodied end
as the skies rendered that day
the warning of the shepherds
who refused to stay
"the 9/11 not of all that other
but rather of this
and that
and no tipping of gentlemanly hat
and of fateful and awful roll call
in the thousands and more
of fallen bodies and souls
who will never receive a dm again
because that kind of message
is one of life
and life is what we all should treasure
now beyond any measure
or remaining capacity
to resist out of solitudes
the embracing of enemies
who may (one never knows)
lead to a reconciliation
without blows or rancour
nor deepening canker
of human letter
and actions that lead to despicable act
instead of words that lead
to rightful fact ...
"and so to all the good who cried that day
and to all the good
who became unable to cry
out of shock maybe
or out of clock lately
or out of broken body
and splintered tones
and then again without rhyme
to make any sense
of that time
all i can say
is i am alive still
and yet still your absence touches me
and hurts me
and has me sad
and maybe behaving badly
but even so
even so
even so
the day the towers fell
and although so far away
something inside me turned as cold as hell
and since then i have never quite trusted
any human again
except that dublin day i met you
on the beautiful liffey
being that day of my 54th
and that's when i saw a good person
for the first time
since the planes rammed the concrete
over and over
with aviation fuel splashing the humanity
like napalm to our aftershaven chins
as the skin begins to peel
and the horror is fully revealed
"and so yes it's true
and it's always been you
and that's what's saved me
from my 9/11 in the end
for the goodness
(even where the love just ain't poss
and this i know full well)
of a woman who knew me
better than i ever would
is what's made the difference
between me following the napalm that day
and since
and staying alive as one may instead
in order to be here to fight another day
as brave as one can
in defence of one's land
minútemen and women and genders-all
to the very end ...
"love you my dear ... i really do
xxx"
i asked today
what more was needed
what more i needed to do
and i realised it’s the wrong question
quite the wrong one
because when all is done and said
and everyone seems now
to be scratching their heads
in fact what they wanted all along
was never to sing but be sung
there’s nothing more i want of here
and everything i want of there
and still i can
and still i shall
attempt to make a bit of a mancunian well
where pebbles may fall
and sounding not at all
for ages and ages
even so make a final splash
and allow me to give something back
to the country and people
who are so savagely bullying
that it’s hardly surprising their grand legacy
is called brexit
but even when i recognise this fact
and even when it’s all said and done
and even when in the uk
fun is just about
as prevalent as the sun
in parts of the world
where when they hate your guts
even garters ain’t yours to have
without them sticking their fingers in your eyes
so the bridge of sighs
becomes the abusive bridge of signs
in a place where mafias are invisible
only because nothing ain’t some kind of mafia …
didn’t yer know
and so that’s all i need to say:
my experiences on both sides of that sea
have been for me quite enough
and quite the same
involving and invoking
cruel and stupid men
who could’ve been people to be publicly proud of
and instead are people who privately sound off
without ever taking ownership
for the gaslighting they commit
hiding as they do
in the tribe that means
if you’re in you’re a lout everyone treasures
and if you out you’re the only brave one
they will ever see in their lifetimes
and this is when
i asked once more
and this is when
what i asked i saw
before the lazy slob
who considers himself so cool
actually in slovenly manner
befitting his kind of gruel
and coming from that old school
so very redolent of the fallen wounded
you’d think they’d express compassion
like a mother with a child and their milk
when instead the value of woman
for them never existed
because the women they live with
are not to be treasured
but beaten so awful
as if carpets trod regularly underfoot
and only sometimes taken and shaken
in order to deliver some sooty craven
because for this sort of man
the only thing he knows
is how to enforce his will
as if it’s good and always goes
when in truth this man and his pals
know only how to live in hell
and perpetuate it
for the object of their ire
and aspire only to the dirty dirty
of auden’s novelist
where hatred bursts out
like an explosion of pus-ridden lust
and so ultimately for me
this is my homeland
and ultimately for me
this is why i may no longer work here
and ultimately i tell you
what’s really what i missed all this time
was the opportunity
to rhyme something good
about the men who should make up bravely
and fine
this thing we call brotherhood
and fatherhood
and cousinhood
and all
and all
and all and all and all …
and so you do see what i mean
and so of course you do you do you do
and so when in fact the only thing
in gross reality
they’re capable of making up
without equally gross finality
are the lies and rank dishonesties
of their tiny little crimes
which their tiny little minds
do so enjoin our neighbourhoods
to participate falsely in
it’s cool yer know
to know them so:
these men of tribe
and winsome smile
who grin out of hatred
and depose out of love
for the beginning
and the end
that is the fallacy of brutes:
the brutes of britain
who will never win the day
because all they can ever say is:
“hello luv … give us a kiss”
as they miss the whole goddamn point
because when they do
and when they presume
and when they assume
it’s right to demand
all i can say
is i’m ashamed on two counts:
to be a man brought up
like so many others in the uk today
and to be a wider brit of smallest silly mind
which is all i can now think
is all i must now get away from
why my place is no longer here
and so wherever it might one day become
at least i won’t be sitting on my backside
in some parochial park
where only the idiots line up their beamers
as finally and totally
their sociopathic easing
repeats and repeats
unceasingly their fleecing
of all sensible community and true life lived
as they prefer to beat the wife
before night reaches another fleeting glimmer
of what it could all have been
if only the purposeful had even just once
reigned in the british isles
of foolish signals and trivial spies
in death life does sometimes emerge
and when people you loved
hate you back
and hurt you in fact
over years and years
and all you heard was
your week
of weaknesses unbound
and unleashed
like the tease of the cruellest universe
and the poetry of decaying stanza
then nothing seems as sound
as a knife to the throat of the words
you wish someone heard in time
all those rhymes ago
but in truth
personal revelation of this sort
comes from the expectations
you cede to the past
and once you can do this
and once you learn how to do this
and once you yearn to do this
nothing can stop you ever again
because nothing is able to hurt your soul
and because no part of you plays a bigger role
in the human you are becoming:
the transformations are complete
and the neatest of neat
meets up with your generation
you were neither good nor bad
just madly had
as they coveted your thoughts
as the mad frequently do
and as men of alpha range
plainly play like tigers with helpless woman
of beautiful nature:
because although i am ugly as hell on the outside
inside my brain and thoughts
and my ought and my would
and maybe my could too
are the marilyns of undesirable monetisation
and so all these alpha idiots have been able to do
all my goddamn life
is covet these gorgeous wisdoms of mine
(which should have been thine
so long ago)
in order to stop the world knowing them too
because when a wisdom wails silently
anyone however resistant to evil
is easily bedevilled
by the need to screw you royally
as they toy awfully with the plain truth:
they are utterly wrong in their manly hatreds
and we in our kindly compassion
know the passions of our side of the fence
and just where the rest of humanity
needs to be
with you at my side my dear my dear my dear …
because in death life does sometimes emerge
and when people you loved
love you back
and like you in fact
over years and years
and all you heard was
your week
of strengths unbound
and unleashed
like the reasons of the most gentle universe
and the poetry of inspiring stanza
then nothing seems as sound
as a wife to the throat of the words
you now know someone heard in time
all these rhymes you PROCLAIM today
out of the deepest love
for people who are
and people who’ve been
and people who’ve seen what you have seen
and then again
and once more said
the people who grin and smile and laugh and make it out loud a thing of a fab head:
so proud and true
of their emotions and their course
and their beautiful beautiful thinking
and their utter utter lack of unwrought haughtinesses
but instead just the happiness joyfully experienced
of human beings everywhere IN LOVE
when stuff doesn’t stuff it’s something for sure
and maybe all life can offer
is to get by after all:
maybe greatness was never our thing
and maybe it shouldn’t ring out
and maybe from the first day we should give in
because in the end being hurt
is what life’s about
and the rerouting of a social re-engineering
is a quimera of meaning’s total absence
because why should anyone want to be purposeful:
why should anyone have any right
to expect a better shirt
than the one a man loses
when he lies in the gutter and fails to see the stars
as things of beauty
but rather sees them blinking furiously
like rabbits in the presence of horrifying headlight
whilst these encroaching tears fall
no longer tall and proud
from person with straight back
and some kind of ability to tack brave sails
which navigate something of use
and then neither burgeoning out loud
those emotions fine
that truly redeem
in an instant of grandiose compassion
absolutely every ill
that precedes still
and now even so
all these humiliations
this INhumanity dares to impose on itself
yes it’s true:
love is all you need
but it needs equally to exist not attacked
by petri dish of incessant and illogical
bacteriological warfare
where every kiss imagined
only serves to sustain the unreal
and in an existence
where true love is mainly non-existent
every kiss imagined is mainly unreal:
each becoming something
just about wholly falsified
and hardly enjoyed
and usually reprimanding
and generally rejecting
of the other person
who strives even then
to pen a love note
or speak a kind word
or have their truth somehow heard
for in its requesting and ultimate denial
the kiss is lost to the ether
and either it never had a right to exist
or it never had a right to be thought up
in the first place
where one idiot considered a space existed
whilst a savvier soul knew it didn’t
because mainly that’s what it’s all about:
love’s natural state should be one
where kindness is communicated
and passion only rides
when permission becomes a deep embrace
as a taste of freedom
is enjoyed by the parties concerned
as if with no concerns
and if mostly love
is a matter of unrequited fates
and this is its natural state
still we should not believe such a situation
or this sort of location
damns us inevitably to an experience
of poverty-stricken absences
because it’s also quite true
that the real absence of love in our lives
truly makes us value our memories more
than otherwise
we might have been able to
and so it’s clear
that whether love is real
or love is a mirage of painful fool
when the old adages tell us
it’s the only thing worth fighting for
in the life of any human being
they are absolutely right:
because if we can survive and stay alive
in the utter incompleteness
of a messy and unsustainable trajectory without love
just imagine what its presence might move
were this thing we call stuff
not stuffing us at all
mil's page 