My Poetry: The Circle Continues

The circle continues

Terror rips through streets

Dust clouds from exploded bricks

Debris chokes those left

Who can breath

Innocent lives violently ended

Collateral damage

A euphemism for murder

And we wonder why

Farmers pick up arms

Radicalized youths seek

The oxygen of publicity

Retaliating tooth for tooth

In Western streets

Why is a bomb different

When dropped from military planes?

Why is the death of innocents

More bloodthirsty

In a white postcode?

The circle continues

How do you fight

An ideology?

How do you kill an idea?

How do you cut the head off

A headless beast?

Good men don’t win

To win you have to kill

And killing makes you bad

Murder leads to murder

An eye for an eye

Soon we will all be blind

Where do we stop?

The circle continues.

Killing to stop more killing

Is not an alibi.

If thou shall not kill

Becomes thou shouldn’t kill

Then alpha becomes beta.

Long ago

A fist became a rock

Became a knife

Became a bullet

Became a warhead

Became THE bomb.

The circle continues

We elect leaders

Who spend millions,

Employing the greatest modern minds

To engineer death.

Hey, ho, let’s go to war

Peace don’t pay the mortage

On million pound yachts

And Christmas is coming up,

So lets drop the BOMB,

And send your kids to war

So the puppeteers of war

Can put another naught

In big business accounts.

The circle continues

Have you ever wondered

Why suicide bombers

Are always young?

Why political elite

Arrive at the scene

With practiced homilies

Then sign treaties of war?

The circle continues.

My Poetry: Or Just When I Know

Or Just When I know

They return

to where, I cannot tell,

For the door to that dank dungeon
Is closed, to the sober side of me.
But they are there, like goblins,
Haunting me when I’m meditating
On something else.

To know they are there,
Is scant reward, I’m sure,
Just be assured they are.
Chained to the dark, frigid walls of my soul
Prisoners,
Of my selfish frailty,
But they shall be free one day, I hope,
To escape from my throat
Where they stick,
When I want them the most.

They shall escape once again,
When you smile, or cry
Or just when
We connect over trivial things
After a bellyful of gin,
because those simple words
Are tired of being dormant
Whenever you are near.

My Poetry: God is a Mirror of Man’s Soul

God is a mirror of man’s soul

The title is about why there are so many different translations/ observation/ interpretations of a single piece of text. Less cynical than Lennon's 'God is a concept' lyric, but from the same hymn sheet

God gave us creativity

So we repay him with mimicry

Of text translated by people

With different interpretations of the truth.

Choose the sect 

Which mirrors your personality,

Then the bespoke holy house preaching it

My son, and prey you chose wisely.

Symbolic text taken literally

Becomes more powerful than words

In the hands of businessmen

Disguised as religious men

Tricking believers into paying

For heavenly absolution

at Friday prayer or Sunday worship

Or the collections plates of spurious

TV Evangelists.

GOD’s doctrines re-writ by human hands

Echo like a slow clap

Through the corridors of time,

A hundred different churches

All kneeling before the same cross 

Created by men who cherry pick

Passages to justify bad life choices:

Men who wage war under a red-cross

Stone wives in the name of the prophet

Or prefer Sunday’s repentance,

Rather than give up sin.

Theological interpretations

Intended as moral guidance

Based on revised revisions

Handed down, like two thousand years

Of Chinese whispers, by learned few,

With secret tongues 

Translating foreign alphabets

Into gilded sacred tomes

While ignoring lessons from

A thousand generations:

From pagan’s celebrating the moon

To harvests where the sun

Was man’s time-piece,

Where coin or temporal shackles,

Were just tools of hegmonic rule,

Yet to be invented.

But there is no profit in freedom;

HE kicked out the money-lenders

Now the Church hoards

And the Vatican sits on billions

While millions starve and suffer disease

Because… because… because,

Well only their God knows why.

Men in frocks ban gay marriage

Because love is sinful

When pointed in the wrong direction,

Ban woman from bearing the cloth

As if what’s beneath a cassock

Hastens the unlocking of heaven’s gate,

But it is man who slay their brother

Kill a city’s first born

Invent ancesteral sin – from the rib

Of an Old Testament psalm?

God gave us creativity

So we repay him with mimicry

Of books written by people

With different takes on reality.

So choose the sect

Which mirrors your soul.

And prey you chose right, my son