Old animals

Old animals
Have faces filled with wonder
Their eyes
Filled-in with deep space

Do they wonder
Where they are going?

Old animals
Sing a special sad song
…and So sad a song
Man will never know

Old animals
Slip slowly into night
As if they never were

Dog walking area

There’s’ a dog walking area
Outside my flat
How did it ever
Come to that?

I never zee them
Running for sticks
In the dog walking area
There’s barely room to sit

And dog fights occur
All the time
Over who’s first
To cross the dog line

Let the day come
When dogs can run
With cars in the corral
And the streets for dogs fun

She came into

She came into
The corral with me
She the mare
Me her steed

We galloped around
And round and around
Our eyes shone brightly
With the love we found

But the fenced in feeling
Was not good enough
So we jumped the fence
And galloped off

drawing: living like kings

king neb’z wealth

the figure is from William Blake’s king Nebuchadnezzar, eating grass just like a beast of the field. I have added his big house, his car, and his luxury holiday home to the picture, using adverts.
originally my first sketch of a hairy grizzly beast but it reminded me of the William Blake picture zo I tried this as an experiment.
if I were to make a painting in oil I would use original sketch. drawn With soft pastel on a-tWo cartridge paper.

The big L

This shape has always intrigued me
a big foot or an L plate or a piece of a house

a seat in an old village pub, a Cromwellian seat
a harsh religious seat (puritan) in a harsh cruel church

where corpses sit in their body bags beaten by iron maidens with willow canes
as police dogs bark incessantly in parked car outside

a shape that’s used in old tube trains as seats
or new corporate buildings in terracotta and cream as niches

or of shapes mistakenly sat in unbalanced ways
struck dumb or flocking on the pavements like architectural pigeons
of unplanned monuments

or standing in roundabouts where a woman balances precariously on top
a she throws her baby to the crowd below

or lined up on the parade ground
or across the street where protester march towards them singing

Do you remember when?

Do you remember when You were scared Of adults
Of how threatening They seemed
Do you remember when – As an adult
Seeing them again In your dreams

Do you remember when You were scared of adults
You’d stop and run away Down another street
And the street lights Would come on And caste long shadows
And you’d look for a secret hideout To hide in

Do you remember when You were scared of adults
The mere sight of one On the way from school Would make you run
Because in those days You hardly saw anyone
And the dark nights Were trailing from moon to moon

Do you remember when You were cared of adults
Mother adults, Father adults, Both the same
No one ever spoke to you Or laughed at a joke with you
And all that adults meant to you Was pain

And do you remember when You became an adult
How you didn’t seem to fit Into your skin
And the face in the mirror Was a river
And the life you were given was a sin

I’ve only just learned about the cobras

I’ve only Just learned About The little cobras
Their parents Forget They had them
And their awful god Protects them

The little cobras In bonnets
Sliding along With walking sticks Into thickets
A dozen of them Under the tarpaulin
Singing Demonically About The ruin They do

In a year, Only a few survive: Grown now Into vipers
Dragging men Into underground Night clubs
Where the lord Of fire Condemns them
And uses their Blood as fuel

The little white kid

There is a lot Of loving To do
There is a lot Weeping Overdue
The little kid Inside me – bleats
The little white kid, Buffets and sways

The little kid Inside me
Has me by the throat
It’s a pity That I never Lived before
I ever knew Of little kids

Supermarkets Get up and run
When they see The little kids come
Oh, I had a lot of loving to do
The weeping is still Overdue

The dark side of childhood

It was on The dark side of childhood
That the little boy cried
It was on the dark side of childhood
That parents tell lies

That teachers liked to thrash them
And the police liked to grab them
And crying tigers pitied only them
And ran purring to their sides

It was on the dark side of childhood
That nightmares tried To burn them,
to make them mad
And to make them cry

With bullies in the corners and strange men in the fields
Only lonely children ever know how it feels
To be alone

the blind modes

in music a mode is the simple idea of a musical scale that begins of the next letter of the scale. here in words you have 1. blind, then 2. lindb, 3. indbl, 4. ndbli and back to 5. dblin. and then back to blind.

I have pictured them on a venetian blind . also i have tried to find/make words. what would happen if the blind opened?

Unconscious bias

Somewhere
Under there
You learn
Not to care
Not to be fair
To stare
With unconscious bias

Behind
Your eyes
Deep down
inside
You repeat the lies
Of unconscious bias

You put me
On your hit list
You grab me
In your stone fist
But when asked
You don’t know why

You take away
My identity
You demonize me
You make me pay
With your
Unconscious bias

Cancel culture

It’s become the norm
It’s a brain worm
Called cancel culture

Take your judgement seat
In the courtroom of the tweet
It’s a new kind of vulture
Called cancel culture

From neighbour in the street
To critic of the police
If you say what you feel
And your friend disagrees
You will get cancelled out
No one cares what its about
It spreads like a fire
It transmits from it holy spire
It cancel culture

A prejudice
Is easy to spread
When you use
The internet
Judge not me
But judge yourself
Care about
What comes out your mouth
That it isn’t
Cancel culture

Slow death blues

I’m living in a slow death country
That’s part of a slow death world
I’m living with a slow death woman
I’m living with the slow death blues

The rich own all the factories
The rich own all the farms
The poor survive on benefits
Listening to the slow-death alarms

It was true about billy Hogarth
It was true about billy Blake
It was true about billy turner
that the whole world is a fake

You could say that I’m not happy
You could say that I’m dissatisfied
You could say I woke up feeling bad
To a whole world full of lies

slow -death-bluezDownload

in the words of Tom Paxton “we all have to feel bad sometimes “.