My Poetry: A Black Rose And This Poem

I gave back your smile,

Stolen by a man

With grief tattooed across his heart,

As the clocks hands clapped midnight.

Sacrificing your inked flesh

Raw and soft as silk

To me in a tender moment,

You laid down

The weight of your convoluted pain.

Clutching my hand like a child

My heart became an alter,

Do you remember?

How we preyed at each others feet,

Made each other weak

Sharing our bodies in violent fun;

Your eyes blue as your heart

Pale as summer after thunder subsides.

But, storm clouds gathered

In the crook of your elbow,

Our death came as your smile returned.

My Poetry: Turn Back Into A Ghost

Turn Back Into a Ghost

Today I turned back
Into a ghost.
Not even the checkout woman
Noticed me as I slid a tenner

Across the checkout till

For two plastic bags,
One half full of processed food
Another full of comfort.

I take a slurp of foreign brew
Hear the decadent poor
Pass my concrete coffin

Heading back from the boozer.

Chained to ideals of glory
With broken hearted saints
From desolate council estates
Left bleak by the can factory closure.

It’s days such as this
I do not notice the weather,
When my desires are simple
Make me feel,
Make me feel,
Make me feel, nothing.
Days when I sacrifice wealth
And love for being numb.

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

My Poetry: Bus Ride into Town

A woman with a pram,

High street bags by her feet

Watches her daughter sleeping.

An old man sways, hanging off a rail

Each bump drawing a grimace

On his wizened face.

A blonde with red lipstick

Flashes a cheap diamond finger

From the latest unsuitable suitor.

A fella with a swan nesting

On manual labour hands

Sits so I can smell his lifestyle.

A hipster beanie, embarks

He's taking his moustache on a date,

To a trend bar full of clones.

A couple sit in silence

They shall be loyal untill death

Robs the other of a friend.

I skinhead, with Wu Tang tattoo,

Waits to get off with teen girl,

Her smile suggests he's not the first.

A woman in jeggings sits

Her frozen fast food belly

Hanging over her crutch.

A grey frizzy bob sits

Tapping a phone, either texting

Reading or surfing Tinder, I suppose.

I notice a black bow in electric blue hair

I want to know her name

And what her pin badge means.

But then there's a ring,

"The next stop is Churchill Square"

And i leave my daydreaming behind.

My Poetry: Their Names Will Not Erode With Time

This is a poem about war. 
Inspired after reading a biography of Winston Churchill: so it starts in World War 1 

Time will not erode the names
Of ordinary men, who died
So brothers and mothers
Left on mourning beaches
Could live ordinary lives.
Bravery sparked in the pits 
Of their starving bellies
Meeting hate with defiance,
Till puncture wounds
Bloomed like poppies on soiled kit. 
Rivers of blood running 
From bodies of fathers and sons
Like veins through the mud.
Death trenches lit-up like beacons
But lessons learnt by the many
Were soon forgotten by the few.

Their Carved granite names
Will not erode with time,
Just as the saltwater, long dried,
On unmarked graves
Never diluted their memory.
Lest we forget 
How sovereign fingers put to sword
Hateful doctrine of corrupt regime;
Lest we forget
Our boys who fought fire and brimstone 
With fists forged from fear;
Lest we forget
Sacrifices made for mankind
Are made by the meek,
Forced into bravery by battles
Waged by masters of war.

Their names will not erode with time
But how they must turn
In crumbling graves
To see a country’s finest hour
Destroyed by the next.
To see Eton criminals sipping port
In green leather war rooms
Sacrificing lives to feed egotism
Like pawns on a chequers board.
Nothing learnt, no hushing
Of gunfire or death's lonely peal,
The metronomic rhythm of mortality
Still rings like funeral bells,
Feeding fatcats thirst for more
Land, more money, more power
But they pay no heed or toll 
Greed not tempered
By their sons blood spilled
By foreign hands… 
Their names left to erode with time.