Poetry — If all the days of all the years were made of wine and gold I’d roll them up into the light of intelligence in this one dog’s eyes This friendship across species — a Buddhist mantra – Rocks me like my good old boy, befriends me like the wind. Be with me when the gates fly open — love will enter in. Seek out the Majesty, the shaman-spirit that will be: Come with me to the Paiut Wovoka ghost dance Drive away every morsel of this dirty money-grabbing Respectable massacre of everything that be wild, wilful, wondrous. Artfulness creates resistance to the age of the machine To the algorithms that manipulate us behind the scenes in this stinking world of the machine There is no worth in this two-dimensional world Resurrect the unseen perspicacity and prescience that was once the common currency Of the most illiterate, boorish Saxon.

His headstone verses were writ in wine

Wind cuts through this January night Slices like a knife through my meagre clothes. Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog The cry of the wind is all in vain Nothing is the same. I kiss you across this black hole in time. In the old be-jewelled spider-webbed…

Melancholy’s lack of zest written all over his palimpsest: to die at twenty-five to some will hardly seem to have been alive, but for Johnny Keats and the footloose Cavaliers poetry, music, art, tears were eternal. They eschewed self-pity, untold fears. They tried their best to stay alive In a world…

Poetry — Let’s away to the mountains to the music of loss when elegy-tossed the sun above us burns mists away as we walk back to the Valley of Youth. Today, I walk the blue mountains of forgetting, just above the far horizons of sight, no closer after five days of tramping the fields; I keep going and…

in silent wails —

Poetry — A deluge of rain slides off the Pennines soaks me through as I look at you in the tower block estates and in the few battered terraces left in this dirty old town. I am reminded of women in floral pinnies, with hair nets on, as they scrub at their front…

a hot, still July afternoon silence unbroken. through a cordon of dusty nettles you plunge into a rank glade, wicked with the scent of elder and warm, ripe grass heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable it is high summer, just on the turn as the last red campion falls…

— Like the morning sun you come And like… —