New Group.

I was listening to the Radio one day and the DJ said - "Here is a song by a new group called The Beatles" and he played this song.

Impassioned impatience.

Moriarty.

You are a Bastard
and I've decided to kill you
I've thought of many different ways
and from these I've chosen - Time
I'm going to kill you with time
and then you will be dead
as dead as Marlene Dietrich.

Impassioned impatience
is not my style, I'm a patient man
patient enough to kill you with time
and get off scot-free.
I can wait, I can while away the hours
sit out the days endure the years
until the last day, last hour, last second.

Until your time and my time
until the Reichenbach Falls
and there will be an end
an end to this life lived in this world
an end to all this life's reasons
for you being a Bastard
and for me killing you.

Beloved.

Beloved.

It's strange after all these years
to find myself thinking about you
It began about a month before I met you
in the Hotel lounge after the funeral

We stood in the middle of the room
making polite small talk
and the whole world receding around us

It was in your eyes
it was written all over your face
the spark the chemistry the attraction
whatever it is named
or indefinable without a name
that makes a man and a woman
want each other

It was you all along
it was you I've been drifting from
you were the one
My Dearly Beloved
and I never knew until this moment of clarity
thirty seconds watching thirty years
go down the Swanee

If I could go back
I would not walk across that bridge
I would not leave you standing there
so distraught and so alone
But I can't go back
and we can't go forward
there is nothing for us
there can be nothing between us
we met too soon and now too late
it's all perfectly fucked up

Only this mutual comprehension
of what could have been
can perhaps be counted as something
And all I'm left feeling
is that I'm walking
away from you again.

Appointment.

At the Doctor's

I'm afraid you have
a very difficult to pronounce illness
complicated by the fact
it is also very difficult to spell.
Because of this all I can do
is prescribe a medication
which is equally
difficult to pronounce and spell.
This may or may not
alleviate your symptoms.
We'll see how it goes.
I appreciate your confidence in my ability
to pronounce and spell these unfamiliar words.
And for your convenience
Medical knowledge of your condition
has been abbreviated to N.I.L.
and the name of your medication
has been abbreviated to C.R.A.P.

Osbourne.

Paranoid lyrics.

Finished with my woman
cause she couldn't help me with my mind
People think I'm insane
because I am frowning all the time

All day long I think of things
but nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind
if I don't find something to pacify

Can you help me, occupy my brain?
I need someone to show me
the things in life that I can't find
I can't see the things that make true happiness,
I must be blind

Make a joke and I will sigh
and you will laugh and I will cry
Happiness I cannot feel
and love to me is so unreal

And so as you hear these words
telling you now of my state
I tell you to enjoy life
I wish I could but it's too late.

BBC News.

Yesterday on the News.

A BBC reporter interviewed four students seated outside a bistro in Sheffield Hallam Nick Clegg's constituency. They were all asked the same question - What was their opinion of the Coalition austerity measures. The four of them in turn agreed that something had to be done to pay back the deficit and that they were in agreement with the public spending cutbacks.
I found this reassured me that these cutbacks are in fact a good thing.

Today on the News.

A BBC News story regarding Dr David Kelly has reported that someone found blood in the wood where he died. This is evidence that he did take his own life.
This report coupled with two short videos of Dr Kelly looking unhappy have convinced me that this must be the case.

So I commend the BBC for the integrity their impartial investigative journalism.

The Maze.

The Maze.

Too many variables to be very sure
Too many Doctors to find a cure

Too many Politicians mouthin' sound bites
Too many human beings denied human rights

Too many Millionaires applauding austerity
cheering the deepening entrenchment of poverty

Too many sociologists narrowing the gap
trammel through the maze into the mouse trap

Too many Priests going through the motions
reciting liturgical unfelt devotions

Too many Poets who have never been read
lost like pearls from a broken thread

Too many blind to worth - wanting to be rich
Masters of Life in designer kitsch

Too many deaf standing on the shore
there's a hurricane coming and they can't hear the roar

Too many refugees to calculate the cost
country and home and dignity lost

Too many smug regarding their future
counting the cost of a food voucher

Too many young men eager to be brave
learning to fight while learning to shave

Too many being taught in segregation
denied an interactive rounded education

Too many claiming the authority of God
twisting youthful ideals into innocent blood

Too many children cut down while they play
Too many hearts broken like clay

Too many fragments of shattered dreams
caught in the vortex of a Mother's screams

Too many standing in numbed disbelief
surveying the altered landscape of grief

Too many stumbling attempting to regain
a foothold in unfamiliar terrain

Too many walking the desolation
of their social isolation

Too many waiting for things to get better
until it finally doesn't matter

Too many on the outside looking in
on Churches barbed by subtle sin.

W. H.

I wrote this ages ago, this is what I remember of it.
I wrote it after reading a particularly flowery poem of Auden that had nothing to say, just an exercise in words that nobody speaks.

Bad poem on a Bad poem.

I'll never be aw dun wae Auden
I admit it's probably my fault
this image of walking through a desert
carrying a bottle of salt

I've accosted you in sobriety
I've even plied you with vino
at the last you have helped me with Shakespeare
because you make him read like the Beano

My dictionary is dog-eared
teasing out revised brocade
only to find the woven gold
serves to disguise the nothing said

Old Oxonian verbiage
with an empty page to fill
composed of so many darlings
you could not bring yourself to kill

I hold you in my work worn hands
and want to know you very much
but find I am a common man
and you don't have the common touch.

This poem by Auden has more to say.

NIGHT MAIL
by W H Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Thro' sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver's eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman's restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro' southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

One Flew Over.

Bad Egg.

I don't want to hate you
it would be too easy
and if it wasn't you
it would be someone else

There is always someone
a Cuckoo of hatred
laying it's egg
in someone else's heart

Hatching and thriving
demanding and greedy
evicting nobler emotions
from their birthplace

I don't want to hate you
it would be too easy
and that is why
it's so difficult not to.

Stevie Smith.