The Yellow Notebook

The Yellow Notebook is from Trains of Thought a modern Rubaiyat by the British poet and translator from Russian and Turkish, Richard McKane, whose latest book is Out of the Cold Blue poems 1999 to 1967 published by Hearing Eye London.

 THE RUBAIYAT YELLOW NOTEBOOK JAN 2009 ENGL ONLY

***

‘It’s better to speak with people

than to write in the café’,

my daughter says

to me and I agree though both roles I can fulfil.

*

Brad comes and we talk

as long lost friends.

Cyprus figures, Afghanistan figures,

yet these are peaceful conversation triggers.

*

I have a soup and sausage roll from Greggs bakery in lieu

of a full meal at Il Bertorelli:

it’s good value

and fills my belly.

*

In writing one has to get one’s priorities

right. There is a need to prioritise

similarly with friendship ties,

one must take care of these.

*

Unwinding in front of the TV:

Friends, Sex in the City, Joey,

Top of the Pops 2,

and a Happy New Year to you too.

*

It’s just  New Year’s Eve.

I’m up at ten past  two.

Would you believe

all that sleep in the day is seeing me through.

*

I guess if we follow the News,

there’ll always be new tragedies.

But through it all Christmas is more than a ruse

despite the solstice’s coldest degrees.

*

There’s no need to hurry but then again there is,

but let the poet’s lines not be rushed.

Terrorism has to be crushed,

put that in your New Year’s buck’s fizz.

*

The credit crunch fucks businesses,

even threatens capitalism at the core.

So the bear market gets a sore paw,

the thorns in it may create abscesses.

*

And I am lowly but stable:

thank God I’m more than ever able

to write this Epic by day and night

without a need to get tight.

*

I went to bed before one

and climbed out again.

The beauty of  writing is that it can be  read again:

it never sets like moon or sun.

*

I wonder if  there’s grounds

for a book of Bobyshev, Nayman and Rein,

I met them all during Brodsky’s reign,

they were Akhmatova’s sounding board.

*

But when I proposed to Bobyshev

that I translate a chef’s

dozen of his poems he said:

‘half of nothing, is that what I get?’

*

I’m smoking up a storm

and in the cold night in my room I’m warm.

I’m in good spirits and I’m on my own

again, except for Cerise, the other spirits and voices have flown.

*

Perhaps it’s time to get back into bed –

it’s been a good day for body and brain.

I am not all up in my head.

I’m a friend to myself in shine and rain.

*

Here I can linger a little longer

for my fingers will not get frozen.

Yesterday night I listened to Michael Rosen

talking about place names’ origins and the radio signal was stronger.

*

These days I may walk like a lame carthorse

and my throat may be hoarse

from smoking, but my translations are more than trots,

that reviewer of Gumilyov I have not forgotten.

*

The joy of friends and family need not be confined

to this time of the year alone.

Though I will meet the New Year on my own,

I’ll spend it with midnight oil refined.

*

FOR OBAMA

Let us be the peacemakers,

let us be the pacemakers

when hearts are failing,

let us bring comfort to the ailing.

*

Harold, now I know not where

you are, but I remember

our fleeting meetings, there, there

to us both, I treasure those memories.

*

Cerise, my helpful spirit is going to show

me how to smoke my pipe for I still don’t know how.

It burns too fast so I must pack it firm.

I don’t want to jack it in.

***

I’d put my jacket in the laundry.

Today I must phone blind Audrey.

Katie Price’s book was not tawdry

though some of the scenes were bawdy.

*

I’ve just realised the hissing of my pipe is equivalent to tinnitus.

What’s in it for us

this smoking? In addition to the nicotine rush

it has the power my constant sibilance to hush.

*

My friend Victor called last night

and all was sweetness and light.

Last time I talked I was in my plight,

now my hearing eye doesn’t want him out of sight.

*

Today, the first day of the New Year,

I’ve managed to keep my table clear.

I even had a shower, bless,

and the weather is cold but showerless.

*

I’ve gone into the warmth away from the people walking,

now I have to blend in with the people talking

and at my single table cannot indulge in people watching.

On my hot chocolate I choose a cream topping.

*

New Year’s Eve I watched Chocolat with Juliette Binoche.

2008 is another notch

on my lifetime’s ladder.

Let 2009 be gladder.

*

Ray happily questioned me on my use of rhyme and craft

of which like a boat there’s a fore and an aft.

I said sometimes it’s like a miracle,

now I add it’s like the nomadic tribes’ tabernacle.

*

Whatever happened to that wonderful

poet Fotis in Russian or in my English translation.

I tackled the project with such elation

when my writing and work schedule were already full.

*

After writing this I craved a smoke break:

in my concentration there’d been a break,

but I was inside, couldn’t hear myself think

and thought of having a port to drink.

*

I’ve had a change of heart,

rather than calling this A Modern Rubaiyat,

I’m going to call it Trains of Thought: An Epic Poem,

I feel that better strikes home.

*

Perhaps I’ll need to bone up on my Homer

which I used to read in the original.

I’m not too familiar with Homer

Simpson and his epic family drama.

*

I adopt a carrot and stick approach

to writing, sticking in a reproach

here, vegaging approbation there,

but, poet, you’re more than a son of a Turkish donkey and I do care.

*

I find myself deep in reverie,

that is when I write the very

best. ‘I have a dream’,

the words are ours too it seems.

*

These days if I need to confront my demons

my guardian angels will be beside me.

I have a growing strength inside me

that my poems will demonstrate.

*

I can’t go to demonstrations

because of my two left feet:

I prefer to compose poems and translations

and that’s no mean feat.

*

Articles and essays I have not often tried,

though with certain viewpoints I collide,

nor am I a pamphleteer,

but my opinions I lay out here.

*

In the warmth I got tired

and write a different kind of poem.

Alan Sugar would say to me ‘You’re fired’,

but as a poetry apprentice I’ve long been hired.

*

When I missed The Apprentice

I’d look at it again on I-Player.

My daughter is impressed

by my computer savoir faire.

*

Sometimes I feel like an exile in reverse.

It’s not just my expat’ years in Turkey or US.

It’s that it’s taken so long to place my verse

in UK, but there’s hope – it could be worse.

*

Living in Turkey well before the advent of email

meant my friendships with many friends failed.

We somehow lost contact

but with Shiva Naipaul I took a writer’s tack.

*

He got out his 60s LPs when I went to visit

him and Jenny in round ’77.

He was going to do some reportage in Iran. Is it

true that he died of a heart attack and is now in writers’ heaven?

*

It’s too cold to write outside this evening,

so I’m skulking out for five minute

gasps of smoke. It’s ridiculous innit?

It makes me feel like I’m skiving.

***

I woke at 6,

took a paracetamol to fix

my backache. I’d been dreaming of Liza

but  I didn’t just email her.

*

I was out for the count till 1pm.

Gordon Browne is the UK PM,

though I forgot this once –

a senior moment, a lapse of memory for I’m not a dunce.

*

Can you write love poetry

without being in love?

These two lines came from above,

well, I’ll give it a try.

*

No, I don’t think I’m up to that yet,

though my friendships I’ve not let

up and they contain lots of love

and I’m certain of my father love.

***

I had one of my rare days

of not going to the café,

relaxed indoors

in my room on the first floor.

*

I’d had my first session with my new reflexologist.

I gave her my medical history’s gist,

then she laid hands on my feet.

The oriental music she’d put on was soothing and sweet.

***

I celebrate another night

without backache.

I’m doing something right

for my health’s sake.

*

So, no more sitting out in the winter’s chill,

despite the fact that it gives my writing a thrill.

I wonder if it froze the ink in Will

Shakespeare’s quill.

*

I miss the log fires of my childhood

lighting them with a nest of newspapers

and axe-split tinder

before the flames captured the bigger wood.

*

In a pub in North London

I sat by a fire with the poet Shirin Razavian

and the conversation it

glowed and our inhibitions were undone.

*

And I remember another huge log fire

in a Manor House in Wimbledon

where we read consciousness raising poetry

in an event called Baghdad London.

*

I read the poetry of an Arab poet,

whose name escapes me,

but I remember his widow

was there and his poems were an open window.

*

The big house was full of oxygen

and the log fire flared.

Were we the audience a peace loving regiment

who really cared?

*

You’ve heard of in one ear and out the other

but how about in one eye and out the other,

is that how we choose to avoid events these days

yet sill hope for hope’s rays.

*

Si ma voix n’est pas faible,

ma foi n’est pas faible.

Au dehors assis a table,

je suis comme un enfin qui dessine dans le sable.

*

Trois romans de Marc Levy j’ai lu,

c’est vraiment un breakthrough,

but in my imagination Adel

is going through Hell.

*

Despite risking backache

I’m writing on the street again.

It comes before I wake,

but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

*

Mr Muddler he sleeps in his chair

and wakes at 6 and thinks it’s morning there.

His daughter promises to buy him a 24  hour watch,

so that such confusion will not occur on her watch.

*

When he eventually

gets off to sleep

at 12, the night passes uneventfully:

up at six this diary he keeps.

*

I so want the dawn to break.

It was another night without backache

but disruption of my internal clock.

Now all my lights are on and the door on the lock.

*

I switch from Radio 2 to Radio 4.

It’s still pitch dark outside.

No sign of a global thaw

from the News I cannot long hide.

*

I look up at the black window,

then at this yellow notebook I look down.

Wake up, wake up please, little town,

wipe from my face this light frown.

*

I don’t know why I’m so desperate

to see the day. There’s something I want to express

that can only fit in this time slot,

in Gaza the Israelis and Hamas have lost the plot.

*

Inge, are you seeing the dawn in too

and is it there both black and blue?

I can’t keep up with the News:

it’s like an Epic epidemic of the Blues.

*

Does my consumption of Jaffa Cakes

mean I’m putting on weight?

Even with breakfast I take

them – that is not a healthy state.

*

Perhaps I do it because

of the serotonin buzz.

I have good news the dawn has broken

and my feelings have mended not broken.

*

Daughter is phoning at 8am to check

that my internal clock is back on track.

It’s not as though I’m at her call and beck

but we have to watch each other’s backs.

*

It’s by catching the News

regularly on the hour

that all its power

seeps into the mind.

*

I still up till recently

had misgivings about listening in,

but if it’s represented decently

it’s important to take it in.

*

The town has woken up. Cars park

in the dentist’s car park

opposite my window. The day is not as stark

as it was in the dark.

***

I’m out of my room in the semi-public area

of the café. My rent is not in arrears

since I fit

in for Housing Benefit.

*

My Russian sheepskin hat

has shrunk in the wash – I won’t be able to wear that

one again unless my shrinks shrink my head,

there’s a chance of that for at times I’ve been big-headed.

*

‘Every so often one should reread Brodsky,

just to touch base’,

I paraphrase

Pantsirev Sergey.

*

Since further translations of him are banned

one can only marvel

at how his verses scanned

and that they are much better in the original.

*

In my own verse I abandon metre

but teeter

on the edges of rhymes

and an expansion of scansion at times.

*

Translators, you may take your pick

of the quatrains from this Epic,

yes, Hamid, is not its destiny

to not be a Rubaiyat but a Destan?

***

Despite the rain on the awning

it was a satisfying smoke outside.

I have decided

to show my poem on Gaza to my daughter though I don’t think

                                                                            it’s a warning.

*

I received Aronzon’s Notebooks

and gave them a first look.

After my exercises lying on my back in bed

I couldn’t work out what moving thing I’d read.

*

Life must go on even in the times of depression,

even when the economy is in recession.

There will always be people worse off than you,

count your blessings even though they may seem few.

*

I bought a loaf of bread

and remember agreeing with Oktay Rifat

that ‘loaf’, ‘somun’ was a key word

in Turkish. If at

*

the time I eat the unconsecrated bread

I remember him it will not be blasphemy.

I take his poems as read

for others as for me.

*

We broke bread together

in Istanbul and Altinova

when we were on top of the weather

before your life was over.

*

The steam is rising from my decaff espresso,

Turkish coffee used to express so

much for me as I made it for Univ friends:

caffeine trips without bad ends.

*

There’s no one in this café restaurant apart

from me and the staff. I am in good heart:

my writing has made a new start.

Old habits die hard,

*

but I am not Blair or Obama

with the Middle East as my Panorama.

I am the playwright of my own drama,

the author of this multifaceted Epic Poema.

*

When it comes to poesy

I know a thing or two

but the art of diplomacy

I can’t display for  you.

*

Sitting on the fence

is a painful practice:

the best means of defence if offence

we were taught at Rugger practice.

*

I watch the News in fits and starts,

don’t want to let it break my heart,

at night I say the Lord’s prayer mantra

and whisper prayers for peace and friends etcetera.

*

In the massive silence of the night

I woke at four thirty without fright.

I’ll drink some orange squash

and on this notebook page some lines squash.

*

In Gaza the bombers still pound

their targets and troops on the ground

are reaching the city:

oh war’s shame and pity.

*

Oh Lord hear our silent prayers

and let our cries come unto Thee.

Let’s pray even for the perpetrators

who may be deriving some sort of wartime glee.

*

My friends are waking in the East

while those in the West

are sleeping. I could put these lines

on line but at the moment I’m keeping

*

them to myself: Moris Farhi would understand

them best and Eugene Schoulgin.

Our work has no secretes, is not underhand,

we are part of a human rights band

*

that strikes up in times of crisis.
Now I’ll break the silence with the World Service

and try to get back to sleep,

for in our tomorrows I’ll have to look before I leap.

***

Perhaps I’ll have to wait till spring to rotate

my crops of poems. Meanwhile I can rotavate

the soil by translating

which is a different kind of creating.

*

My right shoulder

aches enough to merit a painkiller.

‘Paracetamol and posture’

my GP from Iraq said after all.

*

The sun breaks through

and warms my forehead.
last night I wrote through

four to five before getting back into bed.

*

‘Stand and deliver,

my nerves were all a’quiver’

then the words depleted

and the song was never completed.

*

A couple of people enter the café.

I catch one saying:

‘Funny old world’

and I wonder what goes before and after the saying.

*

‘It’s funny ha ha, not funny peculiar’,

my father said on his death bed.

Thus there’s a lot of mirth there,

you can take that as read.

*

I forgot to put my false teeth in again,

but nothing ventured nothing gained

I ate a sausage roll and drank a soup

and settled down to writing tout a coup.

*

I cadge a light since my lighter’s

flame is low – the tobacco

glows in the bowl of my pipe.

Corinne and I are pacifist fighters.

*

No risk of catching cold today

but my shoulder gives me pain.

It seems ridiculous to complain

when from Gaza I am so far away.

*

I am the outsider, not a member

of any establishment – you have to remember

even in my own metier of poetry I am under-

published but a few friends know I am an insider.

*

I’m getting cold now, so quick into the café,

but my smoke in the fresh air

is an act of the drama

and that play is fair.

*

When I enter the café restaurant,

un peu de temps resterons

nous waves of warmth and sleepiness

come over me and I have to digress.

*

The brollies are up that means the rain’s coming down

in Essex, in Brentwood town.

Of my friends only Rhian wears a smile not a frown,

for this weather lifts her up not brings her down.

*

I wonder if Daniel has the two Vol. Vyacheslav Ivanov,

I’d lend mine to him of

course. We have to avail

ourselves of a simple email.

*

The rain’s stopped so I could make

a walk for it, but for these poems sake

I sit tight

and that I think is right.

*

You get to know a lot from Desert Island Disks

especially if the castaway takes autobiographical risks.

Last week was the poet Ruth Padel

to whom I was attracted at Oxford, truth to tell.

*

I must get down my Homer – her book of choice.

It’s a long time since I heard his blind voice

but I still think I could tackle

him in the Greek original.

***

I sent my Gaza poem to Christopher

hoping he would advise me

who to send it to on the Times

but not much joy he was able to offer.

*

So as SOAS has offered us,

Ruth and I, a reading of Oktay Rifat,

we can have a good fuss

selecting the poems for that.

***

If poetry is my wife,

she’ll understand my affairs with prose.

It’s not as though I’m going with pros,

though I have an empathy for those.

*

I read Susanna Chernobrova’s

Electronic Mail,

then switched over

to my third Marc Levy French novel – he never fails.

*

It’s such a pleasure to read something

one’s not going to translate,

as for French better late

than ever – thanks to the U3A thing.

*

The clouds are racing horizontally

as is their wont I guess.

I take on these poems full frontally,

in America about Berg’s Naked Poetry we used to jest.

*

I observe a real silver lining

to one mass of grey cloud.

It’s the heavens signing

that optimism is allowed.

*

The sun bursts out more platinum than silver.

Negar never sent me her book called Silver.

I get my medication from the nearby chemist

and its effect turns me into an alchemist.

*

I will skim off the dross

and delete the spam,

will shoulder my cross

and be who I am.

*

I have a stuffed brown envelope

full of papers for shredding.

Don’t steal my ID. I am still developing.

The Christ child’s family in AD had straw for their bedding.

*

What a good feeling engendered

by a flurry of emails with Ilja Kukui.

Lucky we remembered

to check Aronzon’s long poem – of changes there were a queue.

*

How can I be called a show off

if I don’t show off

these poems to scarce anyone?

Their weight is heavier than a ton.

*

I might wean myself off these quatrains

and start writing longer poems again.

Writing keeps me sane,

like my medication I never want to stop it again.

*

Almost two thirty. No Japanese Zeroes

are coming out of the sun’s perfect zero

and at last there seems to be a chance

of a ceasefire in Gaza – by Obama’s Presidency it will be enhanced.

*

Roy worries me with his fear of Parkinsons

rather than Parkinsonian

side effects. I hope he doesn’t stop

his pills without getting his psychiatrist to co-op.

*

In the intermission

I went to the Brentwood café

with Brad and his family,

we’re on the same mission and in similar positions.

*

Reading your Marigold,

feeling good as gold:

this mood if I can just hold it –

I see no reason to fold it.

*

Brad is due at two:

we’ll pass the world in review.

Let’s see whether

we’re both over the weather.

*

However I’ve left my mobile at home

and he normally rings before,

that means more lines for this Epic Poem,

the News in it comes from Radio 4 and Channel4.

*

But it’s only five past two

and he may show yet

for our little tete a tete

over coffee for me and you.

***

I’d forgotten how strong the sun could be at 11am.

Occasionally I cough grey gobbets of phlegm

but in general my lungs are good and clear.

Did Obama sense us praying for him here?

*

I considered becoming a US citizen

when of Princeton I was a denizen.

Our daughter has dual citizenship,

born before the failure of our relationship.

*

We played with many tender

voices – terms of endearment.

We played many characters

in our love-based firmament.

*

We revolved so much around each other

that though man and wife

we were long lost sister and brother.

It’s hard to look back on that past life.

*

Yet for years after we split

I wrote about it

in the present

to you to present.

***

The Big Issue seller’s

had another baby and her other  daughter Manuella’s

taken over her site,

a few coins extra out I  shell.

*

Anna Politkovskaya’s former

lawyer has been assassinated

and a journalist from Novaya Gazeta

who tried to apprehend the assassin.

*

That terrible news came to me

on the Rapid Action Network

of International PEN:

it means I must never give up my work.

*

If Lebedev has taken over the Evening Standard

will it reach the standard

of his other paper Novaya Gazeta,

which dealt with the Chechen issue inter alia.

*

I’m tired of condemning killings

of journalists in my special countries

Russia and Turkey.

If they continue the future is distinctly murky.

*

And I repeat it’s not just smoking

that drives me out into the cold street. It’s speaking

to the streetwise other

in me, my sisters and my brothers.

***

I feel the poetry bubbling up inside me

and it’s not just because the coffee is frothy.

Inge, and my love, we are in touch with our own validity,

we must live our good dreams vividly.

*

We have daydreams, dreams and sometimes nightmares,

no need to call them hallucinations.

Why not use the old fashioned word imagination,

and I see John Rundle rushing up the stairs to say for me he cares.

*

Not long before his death

he said with a twinkle in his eye:

‘Richard, you’re dancing with my brain!’ I

can only say his metaphor made me catch my breath.

*

Once we discussed hypnogogia:

he said it was like a tiger

leaping out at one on the verge of sleep.

Dear Dr John, my memories of you all my life I’ll keep.

*

I’ve read no sci-fi, have eschewed the occult,

never have been a member of a cult,

haven’t thrown the I-Ching yarrow

sticks, prefer to keep to the Christian strait and narrow.

*

I’m now in the full yellow glare of the revolving

electric fire. I’m involving

the working of this café not throwing

in the kitchen sink.

*

It’s not given to everyone to transfer

the thoughts and feelings

they feel and think

so swiftly onto paper.

*

After the storm, the thunder and lightning

must come the brightening

of the day. Keep warm street sleepers,

you find a friend in me and finders keepers.

*

My pencil falls on the floor

and I can’t reach it.

Then Patricia comes through the outside door

and gracefully retrieves it.

*

It’s too hot here:

it makes me feel sleepy.

These days it’s not willows alone that are weeping,

it’s more widows and children, I fear.

***

I’m ready for the cut and thrust

of writing outside but I must

not chill myself to the bone.

I’m not in the Arctic zone

*

with my snowdove inside by a fire

while outside the snow’s been turned to ice.

My cappuccino is very nice

and I’m composing more than a flier.

*

I cup my warm cup in my right hand,

then let it stand.

A West Highland

White goes by my table – I’m glad I’m in this land.

*

I fill my pipe with Clan

then strike a light as my father used to swear

in the doorway  of the café there

and it all seems so clandestine, so underhand.

*

Waiting for Lucy’s return call

I fell asleep at 10.30.

To tell the truth Oleg had hurt me

with his taunts of the Kremlin and all.

*

She never called back

and I slept on in my chair

until after two, there, there

and that’s less good for  my back.

*

I write these poems episodically.

Is it because of my Scottish ancestry

that I live frugally?

It’s Burns’ 250^th Birthday.

*

I lent my Marshak

poetry book to a Russian in the pub.

I never got it back,

of Burns Marshak in Russian is the hub.

*

It’s about time I wrote to Olga Sedakova.

I feel our friendship in poetry is not yet over.

I’ve slipped back and recovered

since each other we discovered.

*

Here I am sitting in the café that may outlive me.

If I close my eyes, go blind for a moment,

I could be anywhere in the firmament,

but no, I’m daydreaming, that word tverd’ Victoria gave me.

*

The waitresses enquire ‘Black pepper, Parmesan?’,

since this café restaurant is Italian.

I am their most regular customer,

indeed I’ve become part of the furniture.

*

‘Great dollops of loneliness’

we have to overcome,

but prayers of intercess-

ion to our aid come.

*

Back outside I shake like a leaf on an aspen tree,

all for the sake of my art, my poetry.

But that was yesterday and I’ve moved on

and now outside the café is flooded with sun.

*

Let these dreams

be printed on reams

of paper from the  computer.

Penelope, faithful to Odysseus rejected each suitor

*

and unpicked the tapestry done in the day.

As the matriarch she held sway

as Odysseus Ulysses

battled with demons and the seas.

*

A little bit of Greek weather.

Perhaps the worst metaphorical storms we’ve weathered.

If you aspire to being married to Jesus,

then I want to be one of his Best Men.

*

So as I sit up vertically writing

the prospect of lifting up my heart is exciting

and I lift it up unto the Lord

and I lift it up unto the Logos, the Word.

*

Deep meditation on the sidewalk today.

It’s so warm in my heart

I invite my friends to stay

and our enemies to have a change of heart.

*

I write away from my library

at home I’ve lost my breviary.

It’s like flying on automatic pilot

and is it ever possible to forgive Pilate?

*

I liked your image of tying up your worries in a ball

and throwing it to Jesus to catch.

Now I understand why you need dollops of cash:

to get your son over to Europe and all.

*

Ray, my retired minister friend,

is always only a phone call away.

He’s the main person I send

poems to. Our conversations challenge me at the end of the day.

*

The sun is in my eyes

and on my head, son, yet

like a footballer heading a goal, I

put these poems in the back of the net.

*

It’s good to be so alive this afternoon.

I pray into the page not swoon,

that I reserve for sleep and naps,

and refreshed I arise from all worries’ mishaps.

*

Adel is suffering: is it his eyes

or psychological condition?

I’ve only been able to give him renditions

of my voice on his answerphone system.

*

Tom Cheesman his translator said

he’d seen him ten days ago

when he was recovering from his latest bout,

let me be his poet, his Doctor Zhivago.

*

Apropos of the latter I’ve quite some work

to do on his poems. I’ve shirked

it for forty years,

only now am I beyond all fears

*

and ready to resume again

with Belinda’s protection.

We’ll get out our  Selection,

together it will cause us less pain.

*

Before I started this session

I’d had a soup and sausage

roll on a bench and watched the procession

of people going by of every age.

*

Gently smoking my pipe,

the poetry fruit are ripe to be plucked

off the tree. I’m in luck:

I have a new friendship to inspire me.

*

Seventeen quatrains on just one coffee.

That’s a negligible fee.

I wonder how beautiful voiced Fi

Glover of the BBC is doing with her baby?

*

I find waiting and expectancy

such fertile ground.

I will await our meeting with constancy,

now each other we have found.

*

I could quit while I’m ahead

but I’m not playing a hand of poker.

Although I’m a pipe smoker

I swear it doesn’t do in my head.

*

Here I can hear myself think

away from the domestic kitchen sink.

I too like a bit of drama.

We deserve a bit of good karma.

*

I am now literally the poet and translator

who’s come in from the cold,

but I’m not sure the Cold

War ever ended. We’ll have to discuss that now and later.

*

I published my English of Akhmatova’s Requiem

in 69, 20  years before it was published in Russia.

I translated it in a rush

of blood to my head for the poems I scarcely knew them.

*

Mandelstam I worked on similarly

with the Struve Filippov edition.

He’d said grimly

that it was like cutting your teeth on glass – translation.

*

Now I have to stock up on my TV dinners

as Ray calls them.

The concept that we are all sinners

I’ll have to discuss again with him.

*

God bless Juliet for finding me this billet

in this little town.

Exhausted in London town

I went as far as fearing the bullet

*

on the street – in my times of depression I couldn’t

but believe I was a target.

But a still small voice was saying get

out, concentrate on health, poetry and translation.

***

What a difference a morning shower makes

to the mentality, not an elemental

one but one that washes the dirt and aches

away but binds one with the sentimental.

*

Talat said somewhere that Turkish poetry

might stand accused of the mentality of sentimentality,

but many poems in my  view

have sentimental value.

*

Lovely day, my lovely,

as my friend Musa Farhi

would say. The sun’s playing cache cache

with the clouds and of bonheur I have a stash.

*

So I relax into my writing,

though that doesn’t mean it’s not exciting

to charter a new friendship,

hurrah, hip, hip!

..............

*

I light my reserve Falcon

pipe. Are our poems little acorns

and do we have hearts of oak?

Neither of us is an old soak.

*

I’ve brought for company

the second volume of Pasternak’s poetry.

I’ll leave off and let him take over,

his friend Akhmatova was never pronounced Akhmatóva.

*

For once the falcon can hear the falconer

and the pipe draws exceptionally well,

but soon I’ll sit in the café corner

and write my poems just as well.

*

At Obama’s Inauguration

the chamber musicians were on tape,

wary that in the cold mistakes would be broadcast to the nation

and internationally: they made their escape.

*

No risk of our sounding bored,

we’re happy to be each other’s sounding boards.

If necessary I’ll unsheathe my pacifist sword

to defend us peacefully in deed and word.

*

Il y on a plusieurs genres d’amour.

Ton amour pour elle est l’un des plus pure.

Maintenant je prends le petit dejeuner

a Brentwood dans le Café A’ Moore.

*

Cerise, my soft inner French voice,

says she’s triste that my snowdove and I can’t be together

even a little, it looks like whether

or not at the moment we don’t have the choice.

*

I almost forgot I had my injection today

and the side effects of tiredness come into play.

These poems are not laments:

I’m out here braving the elements.

*

Little blue plastic notebook.

Tall Malcolm came into the Caféteria

on crutches and leant against the wall.

Soon we were revealing our interior

worlds to each other in a heart to heart and all.

*

My name is Richard McKane and I’m a poet,

not a lot of people know it

for I am underpublished,

but what a feast they’ve got to relish.

*

So many times I could have vanished

from this earth and been banished

out of the United Kingdom

before time to the other Kingdom.

*

There’s no need for me to invite ‘guests’

into my room or my head.

That was the best

advice Vladimir gave me and I slept on it in bed.

*

I’ve half listened to quite a lot of opera

as I work on my magna opera.

My father became an aficionado,

while I still felt it was much ado

*

about nothing. But the human voice is a wonderful

instrument. All

instruments pale before it.

It calls, let’s hear the call.

***

Last night on the Verb was the poet Peter Porter.

After my coffee is drunk just a glass of water,

the empty cup, and ashtray and lighter,

my reactolite glasses and notebooks remain on the table.

*

Good sleeping these nights,

right through till eight,

bless you, something is going right

to bring about this new state.

*

Roy didn’t answer my Voice Mails,

he’s new to the technology of phobile moans.

He’d want my poems to be under full sail

to reach out to readers in unknown zones.

*

He prays for the poor he comes across

on the street. With long silences we bare

to each other our souls:

we each have our cross to bear.

*

We share pipe smoking, hence braving the elements, free.

It helps us, I think, in our mental strife.

Oh Lord grant us further longevity in this life,

but the Lord will take us when it’s meant to be.

*

You warm me with your light and its play,

you don’t just chase the dark away.

In WWII your country was battle terrain,

from where you are you’re searching for it a better way.

***

Yellow Book again

*

Chaotic table at home,

would be an archaeologist’s delight.

I write this poem

on my knee with the light of the standard light.

*

Pale grey clouds outside at the window.

The parking lot of the dental surgery below.

I’ve advanced from my status quo,

as my darling would say hmmmm ho.

*

How the Master washed His disciples’ callused feet

even Judas’s before his callous feat.

I bet He knew the tenets of reflexology

as well as those of therapy and psychology.

*

Periodically the Gospels spell

it out He had to retire from the crowds to the hills

for sometimes His soul must have been battered,

yet He knew that it was His mission on earth that mattered.

*

The Brentwood bells are pealing.

I now find their harmony appealing.

The fact that I rarely go to Church

doesn’t mean that I’ve left Christ in the lurch.

*

Four days ago as my friendship

with you deepened

my shaking got much better:

that was a sign of the times.

*

You see I can write quatrains without rhymes

when the meaning is important,

but they are so often latent

that from the subconscious to the conscious I dig them constantly.

*

In my daydream I was digging up potatoes

in a field in Glos.

I could also have been painting gloss

paint and helping my father in the glasshouse with his tomatoes.

*

I’ve had my pause, drunk most of a bottle of Lucozade.

Now’s the  time for words to come to my aid.

I’m inside for the duration –

snow is still blanketing the nation.

*

I’ve read le dernier page

of my French novel Le Petit Sauvage

by Alexandre Jardin.

I let him lead me up the path of his garden.

*

These last two days I’ve not braved

the outside. I’ve saved

some money that I would have spent on soup or coffee.

I wonder, have they missed me in the café?

*

They’re talking on Radio 4 about Schumann,

him as a composer and him as a man,

what it means  to be bipolar and intensely human

and to gift such music to listeners and musicians.

*

The second day I didn’t venture out,

not keen to have an adventure out

in the snow and ice.

The day at home was warm and nice.

*

I chatted to you, my love, online twice

and am waiting to chat again.

I microwaved my dinner of Lasagne

and boiled a portion of vegetables.

*

Now I’m writing in my notebook on my knees,

trying to squeeze

a poem out as the day ends,

having done my exercises of knees bend.

*

It’s been a gentle day,

one of confession to you.

I ‘talked’ through my ‘suicidal accident’

which happened in 1984.

*

I forgot to say that I’d talked about it before with Julie Christie,

who said blue on me was ‘bewitching’.

I wish all of us Pax Christi,

all lives need enriching.

*

I try not to stare in the screen

but rely on the technology

to alert me when you come on line.

I’ve only come to know Hermes the Messenger of the gods recently.

***

This is friendship for you.

Brad needs for his back his morphine injection,

but without a semblance of rejection,

in this icy weather he agrees to get my tobacco for me.

*

You couldn’t get to sleep,

ate a bowl of porridge,

wrote a snowcloud of a poem

for both of us and others to keep.

*

The parking lot is like the proverbial skating rink.

I prefer to stay in and use ink

and pen. I’ll wash the plates in the kitchen sink

and have all the time in the world to think.

*

My thoughts are not racing manically, franticly –

they never do when I have my pen in hand.

It is my magic wand,

now are you beginning to understand?

*

I said, let’s pray for you son today,

though I’ve never met him, he most needs our prayers

as he climbs the stairs

of manhood in India.

*

The choir is singing. I’m iced in

rather than snowed in.

They call this situation treacherous

for me, for you, for us.

*

The platinum sun is doing its best

to melt the day-old snow.

I’m not going out lest

I have a fall, not  good for this old racoon, you know.

*

So I sit and contemplate.

For these quatrains I’ve found a template.

Though lacking in plata

I’ve got enough food on my platter.

*

I’m trying to simulate going to

and being at the café at home.

Though I don’t go out of the main door

I pace the corridor.

*

I make decaff coffee,

having had one full strength in the morning time,

then I sit with my notebook on my knee

waiting for your being online sign.

*

I’ll open the window a bit,

feel the cold rush in,

for that’s how it feels on the street,

writing English poems or translating Russian.

*

My pipe smoke will disperse better.

On Messenger we’re writing one long love letter.

The other day I asked for chips n Cod without batter,

but they couldn’t arrange the latter.

*

I guess I’m a disciplined manic depressive,

self-disciplined with this writing to a massive

extent and willing to take my medication

to avoid the highs and depths of depression.

*

In my case I don’t see any zombification.

I can still write poems for your edification,

though at times I don’t like socialising at

all, the important thing is realizing that.

*

I seem to thrive on peaceful naps,

when my thinking goes off into dream-sleep.

One words covers that in Russian

and it is ‘son’.

*

How good it is this clean fresh air,

my back to the window

I sit in my swivel chair,

there’s still ice on the pavements below.

*

‘Hello love, I’m quietly writing quatrains’

I write in the text box.

You gave me a present from the children’s box

that arrived off Snow Town in the summer rains.

*

I prayed for your son

until I reached the state of Russian ‘son’.

There’s no glimpse of sun

here but behind the grey clouds it shines on.

*

I haven’t had tremors in my hands

for almost a week.

My spirit is strong not weak

for you put me in the palm of God.

*

And God is all forgiving,

all giving,

but taking

us to his breast when we are dying.

***

Martyn, a black decaff coffee please

and I’ll drink it to the lees.

I’m playing at being at the café at home,

that’s an incentive to write these poems.

*

You say you’re not a Vegan

but a Meagan.

I’ve never heard that term before

but then we’ve so much to learn from each other.

*

Martyn, I’m going to come in now.

In some parts of UK they need the snow ploughs.

Here at home I’m nestled by the radiator,

I don’t want to fight the elements like a gladiator.

*

Intuitively I felt Adel

was going through Hell.

Let him come out the other side.

When it comes to French poetry he’s my pride.

*

On that composed note

I feel it’s time to retire

to my cosmonaut chair

to shut my eyes that are tired.

***

A passer-by says ‘It’s a bit cold’

and lifts her shoulders,

but I’m in love with a woman

in the arctic circle, so I’m warm inside.

*

It’s my first time out for four days.

First there was snow,

then ice on the pavements,

but, my darling, we are not just fair weather friends.

*

Bless Yahoo Messenger for consecutive chatting.

It reminds me a bit of interpreting,

but our love is more than the sum of our words

and now my constant rhyming seems a little absurd.

*

I talk to petite Maria about her visit to Portugal

and ask after her father. ‘Is he still smoking?’

She says ‘He’s a bad boy, smoking and drinking.’

She throws up her arms and says he says: ‘One day I have to die!’

*

Her flight was delayed three days

because of the snow chaos.

She’d been gone so long

I said I’d almost  forgotten her name.

*

You drank a little port last night.

I steered some emails into your computer harbour.

How happy I am to bring you in my head and heart

to this café where so many of my poems start.

*

If tea is your hot drink then coffee is mine,

on that subject we beg to differ.

The New English Bible translates miracle as sign,

we can only marvel at our blossoming love.

*

Now is the right time to have my sausage roll

and soup from Greggs bakery...

It’s two days ago that I wrote that

so it must have disappeared from my digestive tract.

*

Oh Wombie, my darling, I’m resuming inside the café

after rereading all of The Poems of Yuri Zhivago outside.

If God wills it and with my will power I can provide

a translation which Pasternak and I can look on with pride.

*

Nolan says he too has an oscillating

halogen heater at home.

He’s gardening too much to write poems

but he’ll oscillate back from trees to poetry.

*

My darling, I’ve got to negotiate

the cream off my chocolate

into my mouth not onto my sweater.

I’m wearing your colour blue next to my skin.

*

Plop it goes like snow from a roof,

it seems as inevitable

as common at my table

but this cool cat likes his cream.

*

All around the three o’clock hubbub

of people in the restaurant.

You are at the hub

of my life, couchant in my heart.

*

Can’t get comfortable in this chair,

the ones outside seem better

and there I have my nicotine fix.

I’m glad you were thrilled by my letter.

*

I’ve got a small shop to do at Iceland,

the supermarket not the country.

These days we’re both far from bland –

we’re writing our poems of the century.

*

We thought that poetry was our life

not our living until we breathed new life

into our living moments,

so that receiving was giving.

*

A Christian woman peeled off from her partner

in the street to help me as I dithered

near home with my shopping bags,

the best formula of than q was God Bless.

*

It’s turning twilight, I’m relaxing

in my cosmonaut armchair

as though I’ve come back from space

to earth and you are here, darling, and you are there.

*

Akhmatova knew Isaiah Berlin

would outlive her,

but  he was to give her

the opposite of the Berlin Wall,

*

though she claimed their meeting

had caused the Cold War.

Isaiah assured her calmly she was wrong,

it was more the politician Pharisees’ throngs.

*

Another choir is singing: you sang hymns today,

whereas I like my Gran hear them on the radio.

When she turned 80 she used to hear them in her head,

from her that skill I’ve inherited.

*

I’m not in my second childhood

but my second youth

and by God’s truth

I love you more than Robin Hood Maid Marion.

*

Let’s form a robber band

and spring like Bruce Springsteen or the Kinks,

these days we too need some high jinks

though our kids may not quite understand.

*

But Wilding and I sang in the café

Lazing on a summer afternoon

word perfect

and that was composed before You Tube and the computer.

*

The generation gaps need not be confused.

We see in our time technology can be used

to wonderful effect,

let’s not be Luddites or stiff-necked.

*

I’m letting it get really crepuscular

before I relax the musculature

of my left wrist that wields the pen.

In Snow Town it will already be dark again.

***

As I prayed for your son this afternoon

I wondered whether he plays football

or any other games

and I hope he is free of guilt and shame.

*

Being young they’re difficult to cope with.

I see your Motherland has a 90% Christian faith,

the highest density of Christians

in India, is he a faithfilled young man?

***

Oh my great love you resurrected me

with your Sacrament poem

and I was alive not on my death bed

for we come as the contemporaries of poets living and dead.

*

We sat crammed on the St Brides pew,

John Waterlow and you

Christopher and me

as though we were in a Rugger scrum at MC.

*

You’d both come to read the lessons,

not knowing that they were spoken for

for the Writers in Prison Service,

where the Gaza BBC hostage was making the address.

*

It was Remembrance Sunday and I was sharply

breaking down again, full of tears,

but at the end I went out and smoked my pipe

and went in to sit with Harold Pinter on the bench.

*

Now I write this on my knees

in the yellow notebook Juliet gave me.

I got up early to prepare myself for the tryst

on Messenger with you then to see the psychiatrist.

*

Good news: I’ve found Magic on my FM radio,

now I can be united with millions in audio

and the music rocks my catnaps’ cradle,

darling you’d be able to recognise a lot of the songs.

*

3.30 on Tuesday afternoon 10 February

and they’re playing My Sweet Lord.

George Harrison was always my favourite Beatle,

now his sitar playing is even closer to my heart.

*

I’m in a sweet good mood

and want to share it with you

as though we’re bride and groom

at the wedding at Canaa, the scene of Jesus’s first miracle.

*

God forbid that Satan should take anyone else up the pinnacle,

with Your almighty strength You were able to withstand him

even after fasting in the wild forty days and forty nights.

You fed and watered me in my most desperate plight.

*

Julia, my favourite support worker is pregnant

and it’s beginning to show. I found it poignant

that she told me before others

though I’m too old to be her older brother.

*

Reader, can you feel how happy I am,

how close to my love with both feet on the ground

and head in the clear fresh air,

no longer as my father once jibed in cloud cuckoo land.

*

I know there are people in this town

who have homes but are homeless.

If these poems can give some hope to the hopeless,

some help to the helpless then we’ll smile not frown.

*

My baby wrote she is all in blue

today in my honour, even her bag is blue.

Now I can go downstream with the flow

and my breathing is calm and slow.

***

Little blue bk

*

For souls to touch space does not inhibit,

but I’m not going to put on the monk’s habit,

nor are we pictures at a gallery exhibition,

it’s words we share without inhibition.

*

‘Are you scared of success?’

my therapists asks,

and I answer: ‘a bit, not to excess,

but to work on that could be one of our tasks.’

*

It’s good to wake early

and have composing time.

The weather isn’t surly,

take that for a rhyme.

*

I haven’t yet said again how much I love you darling,

it’s a common refrain like that of the twittering starlings.

Fortunate are the couples who can say it face to face.

Geographically we’re between a rock and a hard place.

Yellow again

***

You are my favourite dancing

partner when it comes to dancing

with out brains,

see how the endorphins swallow up our pain.

***

Am I a strange sort of geezer?

Our poetry gushes like geysers.

I remember to render unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s.

*

On our next computer date

we’ll give each other an update.

A pity we kiss with emoticons only

for the real thing we’ll have to wait.

*

My snowdove you slide back home

on your bottom,

lucky the fresh snow that caresses your bottom.

I want to write you a poem that’s pure as the driven snow.

*

How we can communicate so strongly

with your cell phone and my landline

and our severs preserve our strong connection

and we’re in contact at the speed of light.

*

Though nothing’s amiss

in our love, our life, I miss

you intensely, something then is amiss,

geography parts us from our kisses.

*

I arrived at the dentist’s

for my one thirty appointment

only to find to my disappointment

that it was closed between one and two.

*

I must have got it wrong in my diary,

that gives the opportunity

to write a further diary entry

sitting in the nearby Costa Café.

*

How swiftly time flies

on wings of love,

except when it lies

asleep, my little snowdove.

***

I awoke or rather was aroused,

not bleary-eyed as though I'd caroused

but well kissed from you out in the snow;

before spring the pent up rivers gush and flow.

*

There's been more snow here overnight

as though it's a common theme that unites

us. Come my Valentine, come let me be your Knight

and to you these lines will take flight.

*

My darling, your name contains the East

and Easter, for me what a Feast.

Snowbound I'll be stuck inside,

it's only our secret love from others we hide.

*

It's great to write love poems to you

and each of us the other to pursue,

and our words catch, kiss and cuddle

and queue in one long than qqq.

***

Jamie, our St Bernards pedigree name

was ‘Snowbound Ace of Hearts’,

photos andmemories bring him

back so vividly into my imagination.

*

I was composing

a text in my head in the café

u r gd 4 me darling

n wondering whether to send it like a starling migrating.

*

It’s warm enough for me outside to write

to you. Can we help the world to rights.

We outlined some brave proposals by day and night,

let’s keep them in God’s sight.

*

Our cups run over like overfilled chalices,

we have to avoid the world’s malices.

We’ll never live in palaces,

but last night in the snow you found a multifaceted crystal.

*

Twice this morning I went to sleep

with Corinthians open on my knee.
it was only just before three

that I was rested enough to go to my café.

*

I got your swift reply text

finishing dollops of love.

Now I’m inside, my snowdove

for a hot choc with dollops of cream.

*

I’m working on my carriage,

my posture I mean,

trying to arrange

to walk tall the writing sessions in between.

*

I ate my Tricolore Verdi,

no leaves extra avocado.

I hope I’m not too wordy,

together we’re evoking this to do.

*

I remember reading the Faith, Hope and Charity lesson

at the Anglican Church in Istanbul.

It was a cold winter evening and I had a sheepskin on,

St Paul always talked straight, didn’t pull the wool.

*

Little Maria says: ‘You write too much,

can you sleep at night?

She also has Messenger to keep in touch.

I say now I have found my friend I sleep safe and tight.’

*

You see I’m not packing it in

as I emerge from Sainsbury’s with five big packets

of Clan pipe tobacco in an orange

bag, I suppose I could say it’s for my mates doing porridge.

*

You texted me to say,

you’re ten minutes away

from going into another church service.

and here on the sidewalk I’m on active service.

*

In the text there was the golden nugget of a poem

which I transcribed @ home

just in case the memory of my phobile moan

decides to delete it to an unknown zone.

*

Four sportsplaying children you raised,

one is dead, his game outplayed,

yet  I can stay the distance

and claim these instants.

*

Where are they all now my archaeologist friends?

Lady Margaret Wheeler is in her Catholic Heaven,

and she asked me to make amends

for saying we’d end up as withered grass.

*

Tony McNiccol has gone too who loved Afghanistan

and I have lost my rug from Baluchistan

that I bought in Shiraz for si sat panzda tuman,

but the rest my call may understand.

*

My hands are bitterly cold but forgive me

I must continue, I can’t face another casualty

casually,

no man is an island, forgive us our insularity.

My snowbird, you will have had your prayers of intercession.

I’m going to snuff out the candle of this session,

it makes no sense to pressure cook:

these poems will one day form a book.

*

I very nearly ordered a red wine

with my late lunch

but I had a hunch

that I should only drink and walk escorted.

*

My legs had almost buckled

until the Lord’s will and my will power knuckled

in and I made it to the inn

to a mug of hot tea from Donna and rest.

*

The Forces Chaplain was a Spaniard.

I never knew his name,

but he helped my hospital mate

in Afghanistan when war was not a game.

*

Jenny my best friend at home

may have had a stroke this morning.

Perhaps she spotted the warning signs early

since she comes from a nursing background.

*

Such a pure smile and hello

from a passing woman in her thirties.

I’ve showered, I’m clean not dirty

and today don’t even feel old.

*

My pipe’s out. I breathe in the fresh Essex air.

A few months ago I saw the tanned

troops fresh faced back from Afghanistan

march past and felt somehow I have to intervene in this war with the

                                                                                          Taliban.

*

I light my pipe and peacefully fight

back the tears strengthened by the Pinter play last night,

then as the tobacco and nicotine bite

I take off my reactolite

*

glasses and wipe my nose.

I texted my darling

and the question we both pose

is why this trouble and strife.

*

I forgot to take my morning dose of pills

so I took them all together

with my night time dose at 10pm.

This has happened before.

*

We’ve agreed to chat at ten,

I wish I had a brown egg laid by a speckled hen

to add to my favourite meal of Weetabix,

recent research shows that’s a healthy mix.

*

Bless this tobacco I thought to myself in Russian,

though I’m smoking alone in my room without any comrades.

At the big hotel in Lashkargah the dig team played Charades

in the peaceful days of 77 before  the aggression.

*

I had to force myself to undress

and take my boots off last night.

I was uncertain how to address

the fact that I’d taken both morning and evening dose at night.

*

I’m running out of steam but I’m not going under.

I Launch my  free spirit over the wide blue yonder

of the North Sea and the Atlantic,

with you I can’t help feeling romantic.

*

The composer Howard Goodall, whom I used to meet

at Bob Moxon Browne’s Christmas parties,

constantly has music in his head,

but surprised me in not digging Beethoven.

*

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

went to bed with their bedsocks on,

so mindful of the struggle I have to get them off and on

I too retired to bed with my socks on.

*

I struck a good match and lit up.

We strike a good match and you light me up.

But you don’t need to smoke: that’s not your scene,

but my smoking is more than a smoke screen.

*

I need to pick up my monthly trays

of medicaments and buy some more glucosamine.

My therapist asked me if I considered myself to be an old crock

and I said far from it I can still turn the key in my and your lock.

*

‘Thank you for coming’, my mind says to itself at the café

and I remember that’s what the Hungarian doctor said to me

at Schrodells Wards at Watford General Hospital.

There must have been wounded knights among the Hospitallers.

*

Just a select few know I’m writing these trains of thought

almost without interruption these days.

My snowdove we have a friendship and a great love

and to you now, darling, I aim these lays.

*

I seem to be in a constant state of recovery.

whether it’s after a short straining walk

or going to the post with a book SWALK,

or the delight in Christian texts rediscovery.

*

I heard your fave Moonlit Sonata as I was reveryinyg

in  my cosmonaut chair. I haven’t found time for French reading

these days but the texts are out there somewhere

already formulated unlike the one I’ll send you this evening.

*

First we admitted to each other

that we suffered dollops of loneliness,

then swiftly it turned into dollops of bless-

ings with out words each other caressing.

*

But since we’re apart we’ll still be lonely,

that is why we have to repeat holy, holy, holy

love to fill the emptinesses

that threaten our self expression.

*

Today I got through my letterbox

the equivalent of a successful detox,

two booklets of poetry from inside and outside collected by Jeremy Irons,

containing my Hikmet ‘Advice for someone going into prison.’

*

I wish I could have been a fly (how I’ve come

to like those creatures) on the wall

at his performance in Toronto.

Today I must get onto emailing  the publishers.

*

We are who we are, warts and all

and Jesus holds us in thrall.

‘Don’t die on my’ you  said

and give me ten or twenty years I said.

*

But now I think I may be built for longevity,

since I’ve moved into your field of gravity.

There’s so much Service left to do, so much universality,

so much evil to eschew.

*

The tallest man in the hospital,

and there were some tall

men there used to coach me

on the beginning of the Koran.

*

We talked about football

and I tried to remind him of his heading the ball

into the back of the net. He left before me

but  when his big family visited I’d managed a smile and a Marhaba.

*

Where did the pipe smokers go?

To the elephant graveyard I bet,

with their pipes their tusks,

they lived in the least ivory of towers.

*

Today I’m wearing my brown corduroy

trousers and jacket. For months I’ve been favouring

the midnight blue and black tracksuit bottoms:

will you be sliding back home in the Snow Town snow on your bottom?

*

It’s time to go inside to the warm,

my fingers are getting jiggered.

Unfortunate the men who have to pull the triggers.

The bees need millions of pounds support to swarm.

*

I immediately get tired in  the heat

and my head  feels heavy.

Time to go shopping, be strong my feet,

I’ve had my hot choc bevy.

***

Given the facts

that I have been in person to almost all the places mentioned in the Acts

as a young man, though I took no photographs,

these lines are ascending up the graph.

*

I’m back home after an orange and passion

fruit at the Spread Eagle pub.

It’s good to feel passion as well as compassion.

Than qqq for that – let me give your neck a rub.

*

I made it home from Iceland

with my two shopping bags.

These days I’m active

and you make me proactive.

*

Well-being, I like that phrase,

e’en though it’s sort of politically correct.

I’m entering a happier phase

in my life since you and I connected.

*

All’s quiet except for the traffic at the front

of the building on

Queens Road

.

Fortunately in 1984 I didn’t implode –

my feet bore the brunt.

*

Now I can exercise my selective memory

and chew on the meatiest marrow

and I’ve got a therapist whom I respect

and who respects me.

***

Instead of a rebaptising shower

I stripwashed,

while Melvyn Bragg’s programme on Jaipur

reverberated in the living room.

*

Now it’s Woman’s Hour

and I’m hearing the actress on  Thatcher

and remember my eggs she snatcha

composed in a cab by Buckingham Palace with my full power.

*

The digital radio is on full volume,

since like a woman I’m multitasking.

Many of you may be asking

whence I draw the strength to write in such volume?

*

My love, you are my female thought and feeling leader.

I don’t take aspirin so now I’m not a bleeder.

The Consultant offered to swap his arteries for mine,

best psychology, from then on my heart’s been fine.

*

Darling, you couldn’t sleep till 3,

by then I’d had three

hours. That evening you’d described to me

the Northern Lights in all  their beauty.

*

Brad’s son Bradley comes up to my table

and says ‘How are you doing Richard?’ Poor memory, I’m unable

to place him so I say: ‘Where do I know you from?’

and he says ‘I’m Brad’s son’ and I read the last quatrain to make him

                                                                                   feel at home.

*

I swear the Brentwood air is more oxygenated today.

I feel as I told you, my snowdove, ‘majestic’ and exhilarated,

clear-headed and fit for my writer’s mission,

though I realize that I alone cannot make all things possible.

*

Julia deciphered her three baby pictures from the scan.

Mother, it no longer matters that you said my first verse did not scan.

‘Richard, tu apporte le bonheur’

I will always cherish your recent words to mon coeur.

*

My snowbird, your grandfather used to consecrate

even the water he and others drank.

I am not a priest, have no military rank,

but I enter these diary entries and try to create.

*

I listen to a boy talking to his Mum about Blockbusters,

at the same  time as thinking of Anna Politkovskaya,

the one thought doesn’t bust my block

any more: part of my heart is in Russia.

*

I carry the iron rations of poetry in my heart and mind

and reflect on how kind

Arthur Cooper was to me even after his stroke,

as for Rod Wooden he wrote: ‘Women are strange blokes’.

*

It’s only the cold that makes me tremble and quake.

I seem to have recovered Deo Gracia from my back ache.

When I phoned the local Territorials from the hospital

to pledge my support it was not faking.

*

‘If it hurts, baby, reject it’ my love’s voice loud and clear

admonished me in my home on my computer.

I have no desire to refute her,

no actor I, don’t want to turn into Hamlet or King Lear.

*

It’s two o’clock, time, my routine says, to break for lunch –

my usual tomato soup and sausage roll and a lucozade

to put the sparkle back in my life,

and you my dearest are the opposite of trouble and strife.

*

The cold is not painful to the bone

and outside I have the bon-

us of being able to smoke.

I remember in Iraq a car-crashed ass and its little live moke.

*

The warmth of human kindness,

as my grandfather would say a con’,

then the firm handshake with her husband

and the promise of my book’s one day recognition.

*

I suck my pipe like crazy,

though my lips would rather be on yours.

I’ll have to take it easy,

perhaps return to home base.

*

Just give me a few more degrees,

not the academic ones,

and I’ll be more at ease.

I’m already a graduate of Oxford and a former fellow of Princeton.

*

I know writers are persecuted all over the world.

PEN’s Rapid Action Network keeps me informed,

but I react less than I should,

I’m still licking my mental wounds.

*

Just a few more lines here for I am happy,

not trigger happy,

and my snowdove we have infinitely more amo

than ammo.

*

The boys stroll past, one with a lucozade bottle.

They probably don’t realise I’m on it when I want to write full-throttle.

I heard your soft voice on my computer

and you sang me a morning song.

*

Today nothing’s wrong

and I’m feeling very strong.

I’ll buy my mike and headphones

and be tuning in to you in the Arctic Zone.

*

To all those who gave to me in my times of trial

I would like to give a while

of my quality recovered time

and let longevity for us rhyme.

*

The other Richard comes up

and I ask him how Mind is going.

His hand is warm and mine are cold.

He catches his bus and soon home I have to be going.

*

Heinz chicken soup and a sausage roll on the bench.

A few days ago I wrote some poems in French.

My pipe I unclench

and leave it by the iced water glass on the café table.

*

Café tables are always empty

as the future pages of my notebook.

A little boy plays with a yo-yo,

I haven’t seen that play for years.

*

Suddenly the yo-yo falls almost under the moving bus.

The mother doesn’t clip him one but makes a fuss,

now she’s hugging him, lips on his hooded head.

Is the yo-yo itself memory led?

*

The radio was a great boon

this morning for this Mckoon.

I want to go back to my room to doze.

I don’t need to expose any more quatrains to the sun.

*

Can you trust yourself NOW,

Richard, that the young actor with whom you were having a powwow,

who’s out of sight and earshot now

IS watching the football yards away inside the pub.

*

It would mean a lot to me, Jesus,

this realisation, for it wasn’t just tobacco outside that united us,

but the Bard who got honourable mention.

Do you see, darling, how my poetry is gaining a new dimension.

                                                                            

*

His brother taught himself Russian

and has a girlfriend in St Petersburg.

We shared our suspicion

of Putin. Blue skies. Platinum  sun; no man is an iceberg.

*

When I went in for a glass of water to take a paracetamol,

Donna said he’d gone to the Sports Bar down the hill

to watch the football.

I hope our con’ was a prequel with a sequel.

*

Here at the Spread Eagle

I have oodles

of time, space and fresh air,

it’s not surprising I strike up an air.

*

You asked me to write a poem

this morning of my running my fingers through your tufty hair.

Since meeting you again I have not been despondent

and you are my most intimate correspondent.

*

I lit up twice during our Messenger conversation

and after it was over I looked at it in rerun.

Sir Galahad is glad Lady Galahad is his,

his to love, to please, tease and kiss.

*

Today no physical aches and pains,

but the metaphysical aches and pains

of being apart while we’re both on campaign,

and I’m not sure of the adage ‘pain is gain’.

The jet’s tracer on the blueboard

of the sky. Lord, I cannot comprehend

everything on this delicate planet. Can we promise to turn swords

into ploughshares and light candles at day’s end.

*

I’ve turned with my back to the sun.

I sometimes call my daught Doug and son.

The therapy of confusion

can positively be undone.

*

I’m drinking my first coca cola, a diet

one for six months. I sip it

and it makes me want to gossip

even talk to the bar about my hero Mandelstam Osip.

*

So far I’ve had a peaceful day,

full of the ease when words flow from the pen.

The sheep have grazed

on the green grass not far from the safety of the pen.

*

There were many shepherds before the really

Good one. When I was ill I had to re-ally

myself to Christ in my time of crisis.

Hamid’s daughter came with him and told me how it is.

*

To search for humility without being humiliated,

this is for what Christianity was created,

to labour

to make it easier for one’s neighbour.

*

And now as my strength wanes

I’ll walk the 50 yards from the Inn of Happiness

and in the lift I’ll decompress

and take my late siesta to avoid any strain.

***

Small Red Notebook

The taxis are revolving with their music on

and I tune in @ home to Absolute

witing for Scoop on Radio 4 to come on

after visiting the highly recommended Fruture Mewebsite.

*

After communion at St Laurence

I was hungry and  thirsty as Lawrence

of Arabia at an oasis,

ate then had my siesta.

*

I knocked my Rod Stewart Three Classic

CDs off the computer stand onto the blue carpet

again near to my copies of the Greek Classic

tragedies. Sometimes I wish I had a cat as pet.

*

I am ready Hermes Messenger of the gods

for our fingertips to dance in unison

on our keyboards,

see even waiting for you I am far from bored.

*

This poetry on a Sunday is not really work,

it’s Friday that the Islamic Turks

go to the mosques and I didn’t shirk

from visiting  them when I was in Turkey.

*

I’ve noted before that I’ve mislaid

my Turkish Bible in my library.

I’ve never had to indulge in bribery

though my cards close to my chest I’ve sometimes played.

*

Jesus, I thought, was your sacrifice a conscious  suicide

and should we draw faith from others’.

This morning  I cannot decide,

guide me to learn too from my sisters and brothers.

*

Like an athlete in training

I try to do my stretching

exercises without straining.

I want, my snowdove, to be fit as a fiddle for our meeting.

*

I had to clear the runways,

more in the mind than on the floor,

Roy, named by you the first disciple, has books in his bathtub,

outside the rubbish collectors are clearing the bins.

*

The lorry accelerates away with gravitas,

my cycled and recycled rubbish on board too –

delicate earth I try to be gentle with you.

I’d like to be in London having mezes at Tas, daught with you.

*

You see I can be in  two places @ once

since my poems will accompany their readers.

When I ‘heard’ Brodsky saying ‘You can look through walls, Richard’,

I was in a tight corner but not a dunce.

*

On this Desert Island of mine

I have the healthy option of reading

Shakespeare, the Bible and the extra book I have yet to define

and a lot of time, my darling, to fashion you a word ring.

*

Pinter’s Words and  Music was exceptionally beautiful

especially the poem to his wife Antonia.

For me these last years he made my life a lot less stonier,

to his memory I have to be dutiful.

*

As a teenager on a family holiday in Italy,

at Rome where Alexandra Petrova

now lives, I fell asleep during Aida,

staged with animals @ the Baths of Caracalla.

*

I’m loath to take my morning shower

for I’m writing with such majestic  power

and I’m waiting for you to come on Messenger.

Mick Snee, my osteopath is coming in 3 hours.

*

After we’d cleansed our lungs

with hymn singing

I didn’t even hear

my tinnitus buzzing.

*

My recovery is a miracle

but I’m not going to brandish it about as such.

I owe so much to the Cross and Tabernacle,

and you daught and my snowbird, both of whom I love so much.

***

Yellow Notebook Again

And because my black pens have all run out

I write with a red one,

but you won’t be able to notice it when it’s printed out,

no more than Akhmatova writing her Poema on Mandelstam’s MSS.

*

I have to be my own pack horse today

and carry my victuals back myself.

Soon Nick will repair my CD DVD tray

and fix my voice connection with you.

*

I am more astute now as to people’s gait.

Lord give me entry by the wicket gate

after walking the strait and narrow.

Archery I’m not agin, but let there be no more killing with the arrow.

*

David must have practised so much with his shepherd’s sling

before that final successful pebble fling

into the forehead of Goliath,

delivered with all his nation’s wrath.

*

Last night I slept soundly with all the lights off.

I had controlled any incipient cough

by taking two puffs of my inhaler.

Thus in little big steps I get heartier and haler.

*

I’m gradually ticking the boxes

abiding by my alcohol and caffeine detoxes.

It’s true I have a couple of coffees or teas a day

but that’s in keeping  with café society.

*

I objected strongly to the Foundation Doctor

saying that he hoped I was living the life of Riley:

at that stage I was far from being content or happy,

I still think, Helen, of our Human Rights work highly.

*

I’ve left my phobile at home so I feel I should not linger

writing here. A pity, for  the first time my fingers

are not chilled to the bone. From Snow Town

you texted me there was hail in your face, weather can be such a

                                                                                  so and so.

*

Back so near to home at the Spread Eagle:

tea, three bourbon biscuits and one digestive.

I was weaned on Reader’s Digest. I’ve

outlived that now, but today I enjoyed Marie Claire in the waiting room.

*

There was an article on the matriarchal

society in Indonesia. Though ‘I am far from being a patriarch’

as Mandelstam put it I am a pater familias,

though not one who’s read the quatrains of  Nostradamus.

*

The man with a zippo lighter – I tried

to light my pipe with it – was debating

with the zealous Jane about Christianity.

I’d turned and gone back to them again. Said ‘go well’ as the man

                                                                                  abruptly left.

***

Don’t rush him or rush her

for Russia has been rushed too much in the past.

Let the feeling linger

like a poem by Larissa Miller.

*

Jesus said to me: ‘Assure me you are not going to stumble,’

then injecting a bit of humour: ‘nor that your tracksuit bottoms will fall

                                                                                                     down.

I decided to get a DVD of Charlie Chaplin

when I next walk fresh into town.

*

Now sitting in the hubbub of the Spread Eagle

even on Donna’s off day. Me eagle

eyes and ears are taking in the manly scene

for there’s only one woman here and a baker’s dozen of men.

*

I  have to listen again to Melvyn Bragg’s

In our Time for it deals with Eliot’s Wasteland.

I’ve never been an enormous fan

of the said work but I’ve already at this age begun to understand it better.

*

Small red notebook

Since I was constantly falling asleep in the Spender Seminar

I went out to smoke then into the coffee bar

and opted for the aid of Lucozade.

In the morning I’d walked to the station down the gradient.

*

I wonder if I’ll last till five

when Michael Scammel is talking about Spender and the founding

of Index. Among my peers I feel a little dumbfounded,

Spender would have comforted me if he’d been alive.

*

The wait of the Tube was interminable.

I was last coming...................

perhaps my writing is extermal,

it’s certainly beyond the walls.

*

And is the Savant still listening

and teaching in what was the smoking

room at Mascalls Park

and is he showing that even the tunnel is not dark.

*

I realise I’ve been having one long religious experience

without I hope religiosity

or verbosity

and I feel I’ll never need to go hence.

***

Richard, say not my men and women in Afghanistan,

say our men and women in Afghanistan.

Ours is to reason why.

Christ says ‘love thine enemy.’

*

FOR SEGEY PANTSIREV

I am dog tired as the church bell tolls

but I still want to come up with some brainwaves.

So I’ll relax into my cosmo armchair

and let them come to me on the fresh Brentwood air.

*

It turns out my friend Mick Snee

with the healing hands writes left handed

and plays games right handed like me.

I interpreted for him at MF and he understands me.

***

We were on a family holiday in Tuscany.

We called the cellar in the house Etruscan.

The owner we found out was a failed opera singer:

I can’t imagine a greater toska.

*

Genealogy is a form of archaeology.

Alan McKane has done wonders

tracing our DNA fingerprint,

and I imagine he too wants to see this book in print.

*

Muse on between pipe dreams, Rich,

and hope and pray that we’ll be righteously rich,

my dearest, not selfishly

but with books shelfishly.

*

That gave me a chortle, I don’t  know about you.

Laughter is the best medicine, The Reader’s Digest

proclaimed every month, while we were taught to

read, mark and inwardly digest the Classics and the Bible.

*

The one paracetamol has relieved the cloudiness

in my head. What  point is there writing through the pain of muzziness.

I desire clarity this Sunday

to make it what my friend Irina calls my wonday.

*

Still in pyjamas. You service in Snow Town

is from 2-4. I promise to beam myself in

on the wings of prayer, my snowdove,

poet priest, the two of us dressed in the vestments of love.

*

God bless us, now the me is us again,

now Jesus can take away almost any pain.

But science and medicine have made great gains,

thank you Lord for the transparency of our brains.

*

My heart literally ached for us

today but I didn’t fuss

about it for I knew the reasons why

and remembered Moris Farhi saying lovingly: ‘Rich, if you die, I’ll

                                                                                      kill you’.

*

We’re spasming with our books

as well as pregnant with them.

We shared the ‘Holy, holy, holy’ hymn.

It’s Sunday, Nazim, communion and communism.

*

Not once did he complain,

except I could have added about man’s inhumanity to man.

That’s what Saime his biographer explained to me again.

I’d  like to have piped  up with him man to man.

*

Auden was smoking 60 a day before his death

and having visions, the former fact Peter Levi

told me, the latter, Stephen Spender

and resplendent in her elegance at the Spender Seminar was his wife

                                                                              Natasha Spender.

*

I caught a glimpse of their daughter Lizzie

in the back row. We exchanged smiles – I hope she recognised me.

We never got to talk about what her father meant to me,

as I write these words I feel his poetic genius and family genes within me.

*

Tovarich Richard, you’ve had a battering

these last two years but

as you said to the beggar in the underpass

before the RFH ‘perhaps there’s light at the end of the tunnel’.

*

Then I thought the tunnels are not always dark

when our inner light alights them,

but let  that light be a holy light

a Nur as the Arabs, Persians and Turks call it.

*

There was a time, a time there was,

when Ted  Dexter played for Rothman’s Cavaliers

and Arnold Palmer smoked between golf shots

and my psychiatrist bought me a pack by the Royal Free corner shop.

*

The Consultant smoked Gold Blend in his pipe.

Gentle men they were and showed great patience,

took a deal of suffering for their patients,

in their retirement their wisdom must be ripe.

***

A slow start after my reflexology session,

my feet feel good but again my head is muzzy,

yet I am in possession

of my faculties, just right neither low nor high.

*

Frustrating with my pipe, cannot get it to draw

properly.  I clench it too hard in my jaw.

I’m like a bear with a sore paw

but our store of love is rich.

*

I have to keep my head down in the sun.

We have to keep our heads down and let time run.

On our Messenger chats we always have fun.

Let us be each other’s only not lonely one.

***

No clarion call to outcry sweet somethings’

whisperings. Instead of the fire alarm the bell  rings.

Instead of a knight’s vigil  I slept in my clothes

in my cosmo armchair reading the prose of my in Christ betrothed.

*

I woke five minutes before my cab was due

and passed an interesting dream in review

of turning in 4 Kurds in black with a 999 call,

the rest of the dream I can’t recall at all.

*

It so happened that one of my fellow students

had bought the New Testament

in French the other day from the French bookshop:

I’m going  to read it slowly and at a gallop.

*

Here I am Lord, don’t take me yet,

there’s life in this old dog yet.

Save me and my brave one from being bumped off

and the mindset that accompanies that fear.

*

Passion and compassion are side by side

in our conversations. We ride

off into the sunset, our hearts glowing inside,

and eventually with sleep, apart, subside.

*

I’ve been getting little pangs in my heart

but know that it’s well defended from attacks.

My brains needs stacks

of time off to be able to relax.

*

The other day I messengered

it was as though Christ had met us

at the wicket gate and sent us back

to heaven on earth to struggle for his Kingdom come.

*

I’ve accidentally left my phobile at home,

but I can hear your voice calling me ‘baby’.

Maybe I was crazy

but now I’m crazy about you and that’s allowed.

*

No more Latin but a lot more French

and frequent sitting on the old men’s bench.

I long to be a renaissance man and poet

and on that you can me quote.

*

The weather is so mild,

it looks fair on this 61 year old child

whose eyes open and close

and who doesn’t want a moment to lose.

*

Plenty of baccy like Daniel Andreyev

on his country strolls. More vegetarian

times would have

suited him. After freedom his heart pegged out.

*

Songul comes up with her baby in a pram,

Monty Python did a sketch on that with poem.

We exchange a few words in Turkish

before it’s down again to my ‘ish’*

‘ish:* work in Turkish

*

Performing or writing on a full bladder makes no sense:

‘Never miss an opportunity’, my father

used to say Winston Churchill said

now I’ve a feeling he’s seldom read.

*

After I go out for a relieving piss,

the sun comes out for a moment, what bliss!

From the ridiculous to the sublime

I feel I am in my prime time.

*

It seems wherever I am these

days I am making poetic diary entries.

After your proofreading,

I hope, my darling, you are resting.

*

That gave me my biggest heart pang

when I wrote my darling.

Our emails play ping pong.

We established you are a migrating starling.

*

No pomposity,

no verbosity,

every word poised

@ the equipoise.

*

Each word with its own specific gravity,

delivered with a poet priest’s gravitas.

Peter Levi was a light spirit with considerable levity.

My dearest healing with words’ touch is our task.

*

We all show our nerves in different ways

and our stigmata are on the inside.

I can be composed and dignified on the stage,

though at the dying of the light I  rage, rage.

*

Sonia, the other café mother, shows me her baby in her pram.

‘He was sick but he’s Ok now,’ she reports

and I include them in this Epic Poem

for they are the future havens and ports.

*

For Gillian Ballance

I

The dreams and nightmares we have in Freudian sleep,

are they the tip of the iceberg of our subconscious?

And does Jung keep us young to make a Freudian slip:

of everything and everyone we can’t be conscious.

*

II

So our actions as well as memory are selective

especially when we’re retired or tired.

It may be we’re never going to be so proactive

again, but our brains for wisdom are wired.

*

III

And you’re not soldiering or officering on,

though almost eighty is a  great age.

The military metaphors go out of the window

though you’ve seen men and women who display great courage.

*

IV

Gillian, all my ailments, Deo Gracia, are healed,

except my right hip sometimes gives me gip.

It’s time to say Hurrrah hip hip

for our lives will be sealed in longevity’s grip.

*

V

Even at the end of the day as they say

I don’t see death really coming into play.

When we on this earth are parted

by birth others’ lives will have started.

*

VI

We both grew up with a Christian upbringing

then for years at MF the words God and Jesus were not ringing

in our ears. Now I cleave more to God and cling

to the friendship and love of a new relationship.

***

Poetry is a form of prayer

especially when released into the night or day air.

You’re now North but from your Mother land in the East,

this morning you gave my ears a feast.

*

I’ve scarcely got up and had a smoke with a coffee

when you were talking with me on Messenger with no fee.

I marvel at the miracle of technology,

would like to sing it a little doxology.

*

‘Unhand me now’ you say before signing out,

our praises to God sung out with a shout

to the whisper of sweet somethings

as though we’d already exchanged rings.

*

How close we’ve got in the last few weeks,

supported each other through the strong and weak

periods. Now you’re giving your house a premature

spring clean and I must remain childlike but wise and mature.

*

So how good it is to sit in the half sun,

watching the clouds with their silver linings,

in the knowledge that we’ll have depths of fun

together as well as share our writings.

*

And lo, the sun comes out then swiftly dips in.

In the Zhivago poems Mary Magdalene asks Christ

what is the nature of sin?

Is it like hooking a client in?

*

We know who we are, beloved,

and that Jesus is proposing a plan for us.

We must heed His Master plan

and be not nonplussed but trust.

***

It was one of those stages

when it seemed as if I hadn’t composed for ages.

They lay empty the pages

not that I was frustrated or in a rage.

*

Admittedly I have had a nose cold for two days

and shouldn’t be sitting outside at all.

Bundle your worries up and throw them like a ball

to Christ, that’s what you say.

*

I go inside for a hot choc,

perhaps that will be a good shock

to the system then I’ll have to tidy my room,

for yesterday I didn’t react to Sherlayne’s knock.

***

Back drinking a milky coffee

in the milky sun.

When the computer wizard is done for a fee,

we’ll have voice and audio fun.

*

I ponder on the things we share in our hearts.

I wonder when our real meetings will start.

Our vocabulary we know by heart,

gracify I came up with for a start.

*

Surely there’s nothing wrong being out in the fresh air.

Apart from tobacco to the Customs

I’ve got nothing to declare,

to drinking I’ve become unaccustomed.

*

Your book will launch in Norway

on the 19^th of March.

Unfortunately there’s no way

I can be there now or for at the end of the month your Big Birthday.

*

Forgive me my lack of mobility

and my comparative pennilessness,

you have done more than anyone to motivate me

but I still treat you as a knight a maiden in distress.

*

So I sit here, pen in hand,

as though it’s a wizard’s white magic wand.

Believe me, my word is my bond,

given other circumstances I’d  be with you in a bound.

*

I see the first fly of the season

and am curious why it chose my table.

I have no reason

to swat it. I’ll let it crawl and fly where it is able.

*

Waiting on the computer repair man

seems to be a long time span,

though he’s less than half an hour late,

but I have poems to write and translate.

***

Like the helmsman helms the ship,

Lord be the guide of our relationship.

Sometimes we are like lost sheep,

find us again in waking or sleep.

*

I strive to be strong for you, for us.

The vestiges of my illness

will not come back to haunt us.

You are my healing purple of the Northern Lights.

*

I’m outside braving the elements:

just over a year ago I was mentally ill,

now it’s you who reminds me constantly to take my pills,

all the words we say to each other are meant well.

*

I loved my life before

but these last two months I’ve loved it more.

Jesus himself has confirmed us and ordained us

as poet priests, me from the West and you from the East.

*

Oh my darling, who reins

me in here outside the café I’m on familiar terrain,

silently my pen writes

but the microphone unites.

*

I make so bold

that I have shaken off this cold.

The Good Shepherd has got me back to His fold,

the flock is once more whole.

***

First I drink my coffee while it’s hot,

then I watch the pigeons pecking,

it’s only then that I can start penning

these words that hit the spot.

*

I revert to type

and smoke my pipe.

Shouldn’t I excise the custom

that has become so customary?

*

It is exciting to be in voice contact,

more freedom for the free.

It’s deepening our contract

and it is mixed with glee.

*

If I could clamber without myself

and look into myself within,

the same books would be on the shelf

and I ask forgiveness of omitted and committed sin.

*

I leave you to write the poem on the heaving

hephalumps of Tibet in the mating

season, when a holiday is declared

for reasons that are quite clear.

*

There was a time when I wrote this diary

as a monologue though I intended to publish it,

now with you it has become a dialogue

and  I know you cherish me and it.

*

Whenever I have time not to kill

but give life to, I settle

with the New Testament of the Bible

in English and French – and I’m not gullible.

*

I cannot blazon my faith in a Crusader’s battle,

these days believers have to be more subtle,

but not as the serpent or the snake,

though once I thought Lucifer could be made to acknowledge his mistake.

***

My left ear is profoundly deafer

than my right one.

I remember when they burned newspaper

in the ear of a lying down heifer calf on the way to market in Turkey.

*

Perhaps it’s just my cold that’s blocked

my Eustachian tube.

I know my TVs up the tube,

and they say You Tube music is going to be blocked.

*

I get my current events

off the radio in any event.

Now my room is silent

but the birds outside, thank God, don’t relent.

*

A snatch of an old pop song

comes into my head and I embrace it, don’t chase it away:

‘I loved you in the morning,

our kisses soft and warming...’

*

I walked sure-footedly through the graveyard

to the Spread Еаgle Pub today

whereas yesterday

when I went the other way it had been hard,

*

I prayed to Jesus lest I should stumble,

a prayer not proud but humble

and sitting at home I plan a visit

to the barbers tomorrow to take care of my underchin stubble.

*

The clock is striking five,

often I start my siesta then

but today I prefer to write poems live

to you my darling dearest.

*

Despite the great distance we are somehow united,

I am your chevalier and we are not benighted.

Christ is our constant light in the dark,

to each other’s voices we hark.

*

Now I sleep with the lights off –

no fear of the dark,

have no need to conjure up voices off,

you and I can be serious and have a lark.

*

Just then I had a big flashback

to when the police took me in at Gidea Park,

the memory was so stark

it took me aback.

*

So there’s lots of work to do with my therapist,

though  I have made rapid progress.

Oh Lord, protect the vulnerable

especially when they’re also venerable.

*

Once I wrote: ‘Today I feel 100 years old,

lying on the sofa with our white dog’,

though I was only 32 years old,

you looked after me Mallie, you God and our white dog.

*

But now it’s a totally different scenario.

I’m older than then and wiser, oh,

as we embark on the ship

of a steady relationship.

***

*

Now as the dawn of a new life breaks

and my back no longer aches

we set out on our adventure together

and let our horses go heaven for leather.

*

In the quiet of the morn

I hear the pigeon’s coo borne

on the cool fresh air

and today I have love to spare.

*

A jet plane roars to Stansted –

you’re not on it, instead

you’re launching your book these days

in Snow Town in the north out of the way.

*

Coo your heart out little pigeon

and I won’t yet turn on a smidgen

of music. My hearing has recovered,

I see, and I’ve got our last night’s vows covered.

*

I ask the Lord, where would I be

without the reflective power

of writing and reading poetry –

as without my strength’s tower.

***

The Turk from the Brentwood Café

comes by and says: ‘Tell me honestly

what country you’re from,

you’re like an Izmir refugee!’

*

Oh Lord, gracify us with your countless blessings

so that the meditations in our hearts may ring

worthy, strong and true,

and all this for the glory not of us but You.

*

I left my false teeth out again,

toothless one I sing the same refrain.

The sausage roll and soup should no challenge prove,

at least I’ve not strayed from my writer’s groove.

***

A little black-bodied fly with transparent

wings is crawling over my wrist.

I will not force it to desist.

Is it relevant that I was a gently parent?

*

It was unfortunate that Blair’s

push for the café society was declared

at the height of binge drinking.

Is society to the latter sinking?

*

I am the pillar of café society in the community,

being the author of Coffeehouse Poems,

that book had a unity

though written from three different homes.

*

I let out a sigh of genuine relief –

I am more relaxed these days.

Our con’s make me feel like I’ve seen several good plays

and spring is coming, the trees will soon be in leaf.

*

I emailed our friend Eugene Schoulgin,

he had been in at the beginning

when I said we were corresponding,

for him only I let the genie out of the bottle.

*

I had a Turkey Dinner at home

and I’m digesting it with these poems.

I wrote to Alexandra in Rome,

hoping that with spring guiding the tourists will pay her bills at home.

*

If one day pigs can fly

and the oligarchs will eat humble pie,

the world would be more just, more equal

and the 21^st century would have a better sequel.

*

My early start means now I’m feeling weary,

but my vision is not bleary

and I can see the words I write,

it’s only 3.30 and naturally there’s daylight.

*

At long last I’m able

to light up my pipe myself

after waiting for the nearby table

to light up a roll up themselves.

*

I gently smoke it not ferociously

as Andrew used to draw on his,

and gently not voraciously

I blow you a 4,000 kilometre kiss.

*

You’ll have preached on Ephesians

to adults and kids at Sunday School at Church,

and I remember the white marble road at Ephesus

and the theatre where Paul addressed the threatening throng.

*

I travelled in the footsteps of St Paul

in Turkey and the Middle East blinded for years to all

I had learned from Marlborough and Oxford,

but there is hope for all Sauls to become Pauls.

*

I pray for reconciliation with the past and present

to pave the way for our future

that victim and perpetrator

my make together the sublime ascent

*

into heaven on earth

to share with God his kingdom,

as Jesus taught us in His prayer

that I sang to our daughter at her birth.

*

I feel sanctified today,

we’re filled with the holy spirit

not just of Jesus but the angels and saints,

that once on this earth were fellow spirits.

*

The work days

of the week are not enough to express my praise,

so I’ve taken some time out of Sunday.

I’m not a zealot but have zeal to be healed and heal.

*

So why not come to this place

which is for me holy?

Here we’ll find solace,

together we’ll not feel lonely.

*

I’m out on the pavement at Il Berotrell,

where I rule the roost.

I’ve eaten my Turkey roast

and there’s no  rooster crowing thrice to turn my feet to jelly.

*

At Eastertime as Susanna Chernobrova

tells in her book Electronic Mail,

the psychiatric clinics in Jerusalem are over-

filled with young males

*

with Christlike symptoms. Poor lambs.

He wanted to make His sacrifice once and for all for all mankind,

and for other Good Shepherds to look after his flock,

such as Peter whom he called His rock.

*

Every so often when I think of us between

the lines I get a teen-

y pang in my breast,

but I think that’s very human and all for the best.

*

I hold back from strolling to the loo

for I want to hold on to this moment with you.

My voices are all under my control now.

No more fighting the current, I’ll go with the holy flow now.

*

I want to attain a new simplicity,

get the knack of the mature Pasternak,

go further than the fireworks of complexity

to a sacred candle reflecting its light back.

*

I’m in this for the long haul

like the fish I love cannot avoid being trawled,

but I’m also a disciple

on the shore with multiple others puling in the nets.

*

How often when interpreting I saw

‘clients’ save the best for last

as though they wanted to saw off a sore

branch and see it off fast.

*

I witnessed great bravery of spirit and mind

and now I have more time on my hands to find

the words to recompense them in the English language.

I was indeed lucky to retire at an early age.

*

God knows I almost burned out

before my daughter fished me out

three times from the slough of despond –

one can drown in quite a shallow pond.

*

I don’t want to dwell on the depressed part of me today,

reader, you’ve by now noted how much it came into play.

The devil take those voices and paranoias

that are sent to more than annoy us.

*

So tired, but jubilant,

like a fisherman returning with his catch for supper

I make my way back to my silent

room, to my pipe and non-existent slippers.

*

The reflexology put me in reflective mood

and I was able to serenely brood

on  the last weeks of our togetherness

on our humility and highness.

*

I seem to be in a permanent state of waiting,

for coffees, for cabs

but the biggest state of waiting
is waiting for our next meeting.

***

These days I’ve been weak as a kitten,

perhaps both of us by some bug have been smitten.

I wish you well with your book launch and interview

as the sun climbs and brings the day into view.

*

The white-haired man lights up a cigar

and I say in Greek to my psyche: ‘siga siga,’

be calm, be calm

for we are each other’s balm.

*

The couple are discussing moving house,

whereas I am as poor as a church mouse,

but we fight from home for a just cause

and our writing  gets justified applause.

*

We both have coughs,

but I’m shaking mine off.

Last night I slept from eleven to nine

and my dreams were nothing if not benign.

*

I was touched that you emailed me

as to what to wear at your interview,

though you wouldn’t come into my view,

we both decided on your new blue sweater, didn’t we?

*

Now outside the café it’s quite warm

and I’m writing up a perfect storm.

About the article you should have no qualms,

I trust you will handle it with grace and charm.

*

As for each other we will always be

in the palm of God you and me.

To each other we came late

our cups run over like a river in gentle spate

*

waters the green water meadows

that are so lush for  the cows.

One day perhaps together we’ll walk

and talk the Oxford Christ Church meadows.

***

Just to hear your soft voice

makes my heart rejoice

and I reply with a  Psalmist’s shout

of praise: that’s what loving you is all about.

*

Thank you, Lord, that You bless  us

and overcome the Devil that may curse us

for in my book Devil rhymes with evil

and is against God’s will.

*

Courage my brave ones, lift up your hearts,

for this life may only be the start

of our great adventure,

something gained if something ventured.

*

My two editors were an hour late

for our appointments

and it was hard to avoid disappointment

in our conversation, sad to relate.

*

Simon suggested a miniscule print run

of one hundred, whereas my mind had run

to a thousand. I must not let my hopes founder,

one day the zeros will  get rounder.

*

My snowbird, you quoted back at me my words:

‘Poetry is my life not my living’

but I want to see my books out while I’m still living,

still in the land of the living.

*

Today I am a stranger on the sidewalk shore,

that my poems will be recognised I am unsure.

The passers-by pass by and don’t see these poems’ motion,

or what this poet is writing them for.

*

There are loads of school kids but I’m not on their syllabus,

I’ve managed to miss that bus.

Sometimes outside with a rare smoker a conversation starts up

and talk about poetry picks me up.

*

A cat springs from a carrier,

I’m acquainted with its owner,

who catches it by the café door

and I know he’s sick and poor.

*

No, I was mistaken, it was not a cat

but either a kitten, rabbit or rat.

He’s showing it off now to a little boy,

and I’m wondering  whether he’ll come tomorrow, Roy.

***

Roy came and we had breakfast,

we were together in the recent past.

I read him selected quatrains,

from that I didn’t need to refrain.

*

I’m smoking a bowl of his baccy.

After you my first critic,

he’d have said if any of the poems were tacky,

but they are what makes me tick.

*

I’m not budging from here, basking in the sun.

From your house you wanted to run.

Poet priest you don’t have to be a nun

and I love you a ton, a ton.

*

Juliet said: ‘Be careful not to scare her off’

and that warning was enough

for me to relay it to you.

Have I been overwhelming you?

*

Sweet Jesus, rein us in if we’ve been impetuous,

like you calmed the tempestuous

sea. And under blue sky it would be blue

and a mill pond for me for you.

*

If I am a fountain let me never run dry.

Let me be powered by water energy,

gracified as I am by you poet priest,

by your prayer and poetry.

I 'listened again' to the play

about the Poet Priest R.S. Thomas

and realised how many poems he'd amassed

and that for him the Welsh language was not a ploy.

***

You must give but not give in.

You must learn to take and take in.

You must forgive and allow yourself to be forgiven.

Even though you ache you are not forsaken.

*

It’s not that I’ve stopped writing quatrains,

but now I’m picking  them off one by one,

they’ll still have their day in the sun:

they’ve had a terrific, prolific run.

*

So comfy at the café

though it’s a damp, grey day.

I worked on the order of Aronzon:

he died now young enough to be my son,

*

though chronologically he was seven years my senior,

I’d like to have been his father figure

to have stayed his finger

on that shotgun trigger.

*

For him I must feel no survivor guilt,

that would only be an impediment for our book,

to dam the stream with a load of silt

when it needs to be fresh as a brook.

***

In this café I’m away from the World Wide Web,

in the fresh air I can blow the cobwebs

away from my mind and writing. Still a disciple

I can instil on my verse a little discipline.

*

When it comes to the spider and the fly,

I’m on  the side of the fly.

When it comes to the dogs,

I’m on the side of the underdog.

*

When it comes to Wombie and McCoon

I find both of them a boon.

How swiftly we write when  the spirit moves us,

you chapters, I reams of verses.

*

I’m glad my matches are a fire bearing ziggurat

to light the woman at the neighbouring table’s two cigarettes.

And my new cleaner admits to smoking

and more importantly into the Russian language she’s been poking.

*

I’ve missed not teasing myself and you

with my versicles:

now my heart is operating on all ventricles

and it is ruled by me, by you.

*

Our humour doesn’t allow us to dive too deep too long,

even underwater like whales we can sing our songs.

After talking last night Leonard Cohen lent me his lungs

and with AlexandraLeaving I sang along.

*

Now I’ve dived inside the dive

for a hot chocolate but I’m not on a skive –

see my poetry is still alive,

outside and inside I strive.

*

I’ve got a commission to fulfil:

a wedding ode for my niece,

but it just won’t come at will

like Jesus’ wine at Cana I can’t create the miracle.

*

*

You would have liked the two bunches of daffodills

in the incongruous green plastic bag on the café table.

(Blind) Audrey had bought them

as her sort of Wedding Anniversary anthem.

*

When the inspiration is constantly gifted,

let it still not be taken for granted.

Though by good spirits we are haunted,

we still have to pray to the Lord for our burdens to be lifted.

*

Don’t climb a performance’s ladder

on a full bladder,

but a full stomach,

now that I can stomach.

*

ENGLISH CONVERSATION

‘Bit dull now’, Colin says.

‘But it’s a small cloud

so the sun will be out soon

and up and down the country people are playing the same tune.

*

Your international call was not an interruption,

perhaps you’d realised in your wisdom my eyes had been

crying tears of sadness and joy,

and only hours apart we had been.

*

I have suffered enough

to know the stuff

of which suffering is made.

Now my CD of Bach has relieved me and played.

*

Silence in my room,

just a few cars zoom

down

Queens Road

,

their noise penetrating my abode.

*

You were reading a book on Iran,

a land now dominated by the Koran.

I knew it in the Shah of Persia’s time,

but never revisited it since that time.

***

My love for you it augments

even though it was cut  down to 5 minute segments

on our computers. Then I talked to a young millionaire

outside at the café and we agreed to meet again there.

*

The conversation was wide ranging. He expressed

that Midnight Express

had kyboshed is thoughts of going to Turkey

and I told him it was more for  the left wingers that country was murky.

*

I'm free to travel from line to line,

to change my trains of thought,

that Cerise's voice in my head has gone is a good sign

and I can get on with life with you as I ought;

*

beyond delusions

and illusions,

to act

in the reality of fact.

*

I've been up and about since seven

but here on the sidewalk writing to you I'm in seventh heaven.

Oh Lord, grant me long  years of writing skills

until You take me when it is Your will.

***

The Egyptians worshipped Ra the god of sun

and we Christians worship God the Father and the Son

and God the Holy Spirit,

second fiddle to Jesus – I’m basking in it.

*

And He will guide us and our books that are not banned

and I’m just happy to be in His band

and approach cautiously our wedding banns:

we love each other and He understands.

*

The Good Shepherd could have got married

if he’d been gracified not crucified.

After he’d risen again he gave His flock to Peter

and ascended with His soul a little quieter.

*

He was not a lone wolf

that most threatens the sheep.

His words from the cross bridge the gulf

and are ours for us to keep.

*

Shine on me, round face

of the sun where I have a place.

Revolve slowly, hands on the clockface,

I’m on poetry’s case.

*

Colin announces to me then Patricia

that his father died aged 91

the day before yesterday in the night.

He was his only son.

*

The Big Issue seller wheels her pram past

with her baby Gabriel and her magazines in it.

I give her a fistful of coins from my right pocket              

and hope that she can make them last.

*

I touch my chin and feel the stubble

that you say you would dig.

These poems I cobble

together and none of the characters are infradig.

*

I wave at Sonia and her husband.

From here it looks like their baby is behind

a white towel. I understand

for her delicate skin could burn.

*

I’m due for a peebreak, I silently announce to myself.

It’s easier for me to imagine my books on their shelves

now my mind is working clearer

and to you I have devoted myself.

*

My breathing clears up in the day,

as soon as I get up to the sun’s rays.

I’m going on a visit to my friend Ray

to whom I can these quatrains display.

*

I’ve been out in the sun just long enough

and written enough of my stuff.

Peter Levi used to sniff snuff

and made brilliant remarks off the cuff.

*

Since the sun is off my head I can linger.

Neither of us is under the other’s thumb

and we’re always ready for the other

to lift more than a finger.

***

It’s Sunday. Three days in a row

have been full of sun. Oh

let it ‘continue, continue, continue’

as Isaiah Berlin said of my work when I was a member of  his retinue.

*

Audrey, my blind friend

senses people after their end

in a different way from most

and perhaps she sees the invisible Holy Ghost.

*

O, how we whisper each other’s names

together and apart, almost shout

them in praise out

aloud wildly without guilt or shame.

*

We belong to each other

as my grandmother

in her wisdom would have put it,

but it still makes sense from all the world and his wife to hide it.

*

It’s rare to see a son and mother arm in arm

especially when the son is wearing a Brentwood FC sweat shirt.

Most boys run a mile from their mothers’ skirts,

but these two, I observe, were walking proud, tall and calm.

*

I came here with a muzzy head

on the verge of taking a paracetamol.

But perhaps because I didn’t smoke  yet,

the fresh air my symptoms it ate ‘em all.

*

I use my cleverness as a lever,

now I have found my snowdove I’ll never leave her.

I want to cleave to her physically

though we are parted geophysically.

*

I don’t know whether I coined it

the word platinum sun

but others may one

day purloin it.

*

A child is pushed by in a buggy

holding a pigeon quill in his tiny

hand. I am not a blogger

but a poet observer.

*

Instead of a peebreak

I light up my pipe. It’s round dawn

I get backache.

It goes when I get up in the morn.

*

My pipe I don’t gasp

lest my throat it rasp.

Oh I’d rather be grasped

physically by you than by this habit to be grasped.

*

There was not light in the loo.

After various people had tried, enter Nunu

who fixed the bulb and left it swaying

so I could find my way in.

*

I fill this diary poem with little and big thins,

the people and things  that make me tick.

I make sweet somethings out of nothings,

making hay come rain or shine for the hayrick.

*

It was sweet of Juliet to ask:

‘Did you send flowers

for her birthday?’ Not knowing

that I’d wished you a happy one with all  my writing and voice powers.

*

Bang on time, for I’m getting hungry

I order a micropizza to eat outside.

My Turkish students often muddled ‘angry’ with ‘hungry’,

thus giving me this facile rhyme.

*

An ice cream would come in handy –

I have enough cash. If you can understand me

I want to push the boat out a bit today

for Ephesians says I should look after you as I do my own body.

*

Now we live in our own worlds

and can’t be talked of as living

alone in our world

in the singular: we are more receiving and giving.

***

Still waking up at the café,

had my soup and sausage roll from the baker,

pausing to thank the maker and the Maker

I sup at my cappuccino coffee.

*

I woke too early then went back to sleep

right through to my Tannoy call.

The amount of hours I keep

are normal given that in the afternoon into sleep I fall.

*

I feel hungover though I drank no wine,

but have no need of a paracet – I’ll be fine.

For your shoulder I’m more concerned

and last night in bed you tossed and turned.

*

‘Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of purity’,

perhaps misquoted the first line of the hymn

played in my brain and it is my solemn duty

to take in its refrain.

*

The sun peeps out from a passing cloud,

yesterday for an hour I prayed in a whisper out loud.

Lord, may these poems too be like prayers,
I climb them to you as up a mansion’s stairs.

*

Lord, guide me on the

Middle Way

,

yea thought the road is strait and narrow,

let my flight be straight as an arrow

that is fired not in war but play.

*

Oh Lord, bless my simple fare

and this tap water free as air

and may the tobacco I don’t inhale

also keep my mind hearty and hale.

*

The fifth day in a run

I’ve been sitting outside in the sun.

It does wonders the weather

to keeping my writing together.

*

‘You really are devoted to me’, you said in affirmation,

and I try daily to show it in the act of creation.

Last night I performed HR poems at the Medical Foundation

at Gillian’s 80^th Birthday celebration.

*

The labourers are back with their barrows and brooms

and an infernal tamping machine.

Highway Maintenance gives my poetry a sheen,

it works out as a surprising boon.

*

They tamp the tar down

then water it and it looks like black caviar,

but this is not Moscow Town

and I’ve not opened my present of Caspian ikra.

*

Two of the labourers are on mobile  phones,

the other smokes a cigarette before  shovelling.

But the technology is not in an unknown zone,

roads had been built here since before the Romans.

*

It’s good that I’m wearing a coat,

I haven’t woken the sun like the psalmist,

though each others lips we’d kissed

with the words we spoke and wrote.

***

Approaching the end

of this yellow leather notebook – my friend

it’s been and companion

since January.

*

The Russians use the same word for heaven as for sky

and their word for dream is the same as for sleep.

I advise you to keep

on these a weather eye.

*

It’s my turn for my shoulder to ache,

last night sleep did not placate it,

before eight I was awake

and decided to get up not further frustrate it.

*

And now the weather is damp and cold.

What a compensatory fight my old

body puts up with its fit young mind.

When it comes to sitting and writing I’m fine.

*

The stages of holiness we reach

can only touch and teach us.

We are not fire and brimstone preachers

but aspire to be poet priests.

*

I was feeling weak this morning.

Roy couldn’t make it because of repairs on the track.

But here I am solo  under the café awning,

writing my poems for you, looking forward not back.

*

Looking forward to our meeting,

however fleeting,

it will stand us both in good stead

and Juliet has offered to pick you up from Stansted.

*

Keep up the writing routine I exhort

us both as we taught

ourselves for so many years,

the most sure way of conquering all our fears.

*

In the days when I could drink Johnnie Walker

and the microphone was imbibed by Scott Walker

with ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’

you were not much old than six or four.

*

Long ago I sowed my wild oats,

now it’s an effort not to go to seed,

but I haven’t missed this friendship’s boat,

companionship is what I most need.

*

My thinking was set

on not taking a paracet

but my muzzy head needs clearing

for clouds in it are leering.

*

Fresh air, a coffee, iced water and pipe tobacco,

my darling’s distant and close company,

soon I’ll be staying with Ray, my copanero,

we’ll shout out psalms accompanied by the tympany.

*

Free as air, for air is free

and you and me are set fair

for a lifetime of liberty,

and you said ‘shall we go to Scarborough Fair’

*

I’m still courting you,

trying to catch you with words.

Though I’m in love with you

I never want to cage you, my snowbird.

*

The man in the wheelchair’s head is set back.

He must be in his seventies

but his upper posture is like a man’s back

in his twenties;

*

whereas I stoop my frame

as I write on my knee.

I now think I could deal with the fame

a successful book of poetry could bring me.

*

I don’t want to overindulge

my survivorhood,

rather to indulge

cultivating again my manhood.

*

I like it when we’re both calm

and wholly holy,

and each to the other giving balm,

thinking of each other solely.

*

For our intense love for each other

will spill over for our readers,

our children, sisters and brothers

and we’ll become magically less needier.

*

Day by day we’ll work at our lines,

trying to extract the spines

that exist in both our societies

giving them with needles a tease.

*

THE STARTING POINT

What if, Lord, we do not love ourselves,

how can we love our neighbour as our self?

Into the New Testament more deep than ever I’ve recently delved

and found a new responsibility these questions to ask myself.

*

Last night in my nightmare I saw Gillian dead,

lying in the shopping arcade

and I couldn’t dial 999 on my phobile moan

to summon any aid.

*

I know if we’d been working together,

the two of us could have unravelled that dream,

going heaven for leather.

It was my cri de coeur, my silent scream.

*

I gave myself the pouvoir pour voire

your floating up from my subconscious

and now I’m writing it our consciously,

your interpreter on his own proceeding cautiously.

*

I’ve done my time outside for today

though I’m still an outsider

and it’s warm inside the café

as I wait for my micropizza order.

*

My head is still a little muzzy

though these lines are coming out far from fuzzy.

I like it when we’re busy

writing at the same time individually.

*

I’m hungry as a hunter gatherer

searching the undergrowth for a plethora

of berries to pluck and nibble

before taking them back to the crude wooden table.

*

I’ve devoured my pizzaretta

and I’m going to compose on yet a

while. Buoyed up by the fact

that I’ve achieved so much I create therefore I act.

*

I’ve written well today but I’ve yet to call

it. The disciples knew how with nets to trawl.

When they were battening down all hatches

Jesus calmed the waters, the winds dispatched.

*

I am n sore need of visual input of  Christian art,

it’s years since I visited a gallery.

I guess I could find a website and that would be a start,

or order some coffee table books to go with my coffee.

*

You are at your puter at home

and I am working away

at Il Bertorelli’s café.

Time to rendezvous  with you at home.

*

Just three pages to go and this notebook will be finished

but  my powers in the next one will not be diminished.

We both want to return to sanctification,

in that lies out ultimate satisfaction.

*

My pen hovers like a kestrel

in front of me at the trestle

pub table. I’ve shown I’m emotionally capable

of looking after you, then why on Sunday was I dressed so casually?

*

A little bit of laziness, a little bit of sloth,

I took the easy way out and did not wash my clothes.

I let out a little boy yelp

for I was temporarily  without a home help.

***

‘The sun will move or I’ll move the sun’

I said and our therapy session was begun

by nature solipsistic

sad but optimistic.

*

We discussed Jesus going to Jerusalem

as being ‘tantamount to suicide’

but they had already decided their fratricide,

as a troublemaker he was already identified.

*

Throughout the latter part of the session

they hymn refrain

played in my brain:

‘Ride on, ride on in majesty’.

*

Love you so much I’ll burst

like a fountain of purest

water for those who hunger and thirst

but above all for you first.

***

A sentiment

of disgruntlement.

My writing’s not going well –

well  I must just draw deep from my well.

*

So I lower my bucket

after all I’ve not kicked it.

No peace for  the wicked

till you enter heaven by  the wicket gate.

*

I’ve put my finger on my disgruntledness:

it’s that I did not want to risk my translator’s prowess

on working from Russian on hyper political poetry –

I did not want to let it try me.

*

I have enough on my platter

without getting involved with the latter.

The cash machine’s clatter

doesn’t give my  heart even a flutter.

*

The woman from  the next door table

who is patently disabled

opens the door of car and scream loud as she is able:

‘Jackie!’ as the car speeds away to return another circuit later.

*

The tallest man in town

walks by and I note him down,

his hair in a pony tail

and his goatee beard orange brown.

*

Thank God I’ve written the bad feeling

I had out of my system. Healing

oneself is also a healthy option

especially when special people’s prayers are coopted.

*

The big blind man with his white stick

exits the café on the arm of his partner.

Can you pardon me, reader,

for these last pages to stick

*

to the mise en scene I know best,

the café sidewalk at Il Bertorelli’s

by which for several years I’ve been blest

to fill my poetical belly.

*

One page to go of valediction.

Beloved, you could read me the dictionary

or the phone book in those dulcet tones

of yours into your Yahoo Messenger microphone.

*

Let us count the many blessings

with which we’ve been blest

which make our hearts sing

and our writing which we do best.

*

Don’t go now, I’m calling you,

let my words not stumble to a halt.

I’ve never found in you a fault,

my snowbird, snowdove, angel, darling you.