Mad in the UK
I contributed a poem to this orgnaisaiton who advocate for a holistic approach to mental illness - follow this link to check it out
Ice Floe Press
Two of my poems have been included on the interesting website/project icefloepress
Proost
''Learning to Love' and 'Reaching for Mercy' are Proost Poetry Collections. Each anthology was curated by Chris Goan (and others). There are many powerful poems included in the pages of both.
Learning to Love includes themes such as faith, doubt, becoming, losing, beauty and wilderness.
Reaching for Mercy focuses on hope, post truth, lament, ordinary-sacred, wild, everyone is welcome, whole, and resisting.
You can buy them by following https://proost.co.uk/books/
Below you can read four of several poems by me that were selected for the books.
Where Has January Gone?
Time is blurred and stringy like my thoughts about outer space
I can't get a hold of anything.
This grief has replaced Gravity, and I am floating
Swimming in a heaviness
Lost in the heavens, heaving
Cleaving,
Myself to anything that whacks by
Meaning is stuck
Grabbing at lifeless rock, longing for a graft
some soulful spacecraft
A home base
Yet I am here at sea without a trace
Tracing the fraught dream lines of the Earths
surface
Song longing for an impossible horizon
Nothing is real like I want it to be
Nothing lasts like I want it to.
This fortress I have been dwelling in is the ocean
suddenly swelling inside me, dissolving
sinking into its eternal, infernal calm
Crashing angry forever.
Waters of change dost hurt me
I am not the only one, I tell my loneliness
No sound travels in the hubris of the cosmos
echo's do not resound
Hymns are limp on their ground
Yet
The truth of love can still be found
Why? I cry.
Collapse
Cry against the towering walls, cheap and pioneering
Chomp hard and split your lips.
Shout at your own echoes
We are all subdued by stone
This is city madness, our concrete sadness.
Yes, sad is the city
Buildings mad and sharp shadow passers-by
Leaning heavy and uniform
They are effigies to our Moai
The long dead, they would not live in them
These Ahu dark grey as the last
Our own Easter slabs risen again
We are subjects kept fed and doe eyed
We sweat and toil after affordable status statues.
Kept to haul hard on rope
Break backs and bleed.
Curse her spinning eyes, the illusion and colour of a Pukao
They the modern Matato
They trying to outdo
one another and keep us in toe with their erections
Another monument
A proud Paro promises to topple
Kicking up dust and fire, giving us the taste of freedom deep in our
throats
Till we choke waiting,
with baited breath for our Babel
Blind as a Bat
If only you would see these woods through my senses.
The thick blooded trees leer and jostle,
blurred in my eyes
Spectres smudged and fascinated
Stand accusing
You would strain to see
through my eyes
Unable to relinquish your definition of vision
You are shackled to the bloodshot stare
It is burned into your retina
Free your thoughts to see and make the incision
in your ears, like me
My eyes maybe blind but I see this wood
Like you never could
I caress the vibrations of the elegant bark
Audible gifts to me, as I soar unbridled
and spiral
into the darkness where I find my home
A champagne and lobster brunch
Hooded eyes, lids low
Scampering through the throng.
A mass of the elegant, the beautiful people
press patchwork onto my hunched frame
for here among them I am lame.
I wriggle limp upon my back,
Slipping and slapping in a shiver of wetness and light,
powerless against their beautiful dreams.
Their aspirations smell sweetly,
So lovely, they flinch.
Yet work all the harder.
Scurrying at the sand to bury their heads
So as to see the golden dawn rising.
They furnish themselves against doubt and disaster.
They boldly defy earthquakes.
The horror of the answerless void has no place here.
I break through the moist fleshy mob.
The heady perfume, lovely
Like the cocktail of car fumes and,
mint fresh breath
Here from my hooded underpass
Low down and out of sight
Friend only to the night
I wonder about my own dreams.
The percolating hopes of inner parts,
Steam bathed swirling pictures of light
Are my dreams.
Still they are not beautiful.
The elegant dreams of the navel gazer bore me.
If only I had let out a shout when I was at sea
I would have said to them,
I watch your battle as an alien,
Crystal fighters of the silent dawn
I die and live with you.
But I could not, I was hooked
So here, among them I am left lame.
Learning to Love includes themes such as faith, doubt, becoming, losing, beauty and wilderness.
Reaching for Mercy focuses on hope, post truth, lament, ordinary-sacred, wild, everyone is welcome, whole, and resisting.
You can buy them by following https://proost.co.uk/books/
Below you can read four of several poems by me that were selected for the books.
Where Has January Gone?
Time is blurred and stringy like my thoughts about outer space
I can't get a hold of anything.
This grief has replaced Gravity, and I am floating
Swimming in a heaviness
Lost in the heavens, heaving
Cleaving,
Myself to anything that whacks by
Meaning is stuck
Grabbing at lifeless rock, longing for a graft
some soulful spacecraft
A home base
Yet I am here at sea without a trace
Tracing the fraught dream lines of the Earths
surface
Song longing for an impossible horizon
Nothing is real like I want it to be
Nothing lasts like I want it to.
This fortress I have been dwelling in is the ocean
suddenly swelling inside me, dissolving
sinking into its eternal, infernal calm
Crashing angry forever.
Waters of change dost hurt me
I am not the only one, I tell my loneliness
No sound travels in the hubris of the cosmos
echo's do not resound
Hymns are limp on their ground
Yet
The truth of love can still be found
Why? I cry.
Collapse
Cry against the towering walls, cheap and pioneering
Chomp hard and split your lips.
Shout at your own echoes
We are all subdued by stone
This is city madness, our concrete sadness.
Yes, sad is the city
Buildings mad and sharp shadow passers-by
Leaning heavy and uniform
They are effigies to our Moai
The long dead, they would not live in them
These Ahu dark grey as the last
Our own Easter slabs risen again
We are subjects kept fed and doe eyed
We sweat and toil after affordable status statues.
Kept to haul hard on rope
Break backs and bleed.
Curse her spinning eyes, the illusion and colour of a Pukao
They the modern Matato
They trying to outdo
one another and keep us in toe with their erections
Another monument
A proud Paro promises to topple
Kicking up dust and fire, giving us the taste of freedom deep in our
throats
Till we choke waiting,
with baited breath for our Babel
Blind as a Bat
If only you would see these woods through my senses.
The thick blooded trees leer and jostle,
blurred in my eyes
Spectres smudged and fascinated
Stand accusing
You would strain to see
through my eyes
Unable to relinquish your definition of vision
You are shackled to the bloodshot stare
It is burned into your retina
Free your thoughts to see and make the incision
in your ears, like me
My eyes maybe blind but I see this wood
Like you never could
I caress the vibrations of the elegant bark
Audible gifts to me, as I soar unbridled
and spiral
into the darkness where I find my home
A champagne and lobster brunch
Hooded eyes, lids low
Scampering through the throng.
A mass of the elegant, the beautiful people
press patchwork onto my hunched frame
for here among them I am lame.
I wriggle limp upon my back,
Slipping and slapping in a shiver of wetness and light,
powerless against their beautiful dreams.
Their aspirations smell sweetly,
So lovely, they flinch.
Yet work all the harder.
Scurrying at the sand to bury their heads
So as to see the golden dawn rising.
They furnish themselves against doubt and disaster.
They boldly defy earthquakes.
The horror of the answerless void has no place here.
I break through the moist fleshy mob.
The heady perfume, lovely
Like the cocktail of car fumes and,
mint fresh breath
Here from my hooded underpass
Low down and out of sight
Friend only to the night
I wonder about my own dreams.
The percolating hopes of inner parts,
Steam bathed swirling pictures of light
Are my dreams.
Still they are not beautiful.
The elegant dreams of the navel gazer bore me.
If only I had let out a shout when I was at sea
I would have said to them,
I watch your battle as an alien,
Crystal fighters of the silent dawn
I die and live with you.
But I could not, I was hooked
So here, among them I am left lame.
Lyrically Justified
I am proud to be included in the latest edition of Lyrically Justified V2. Two of my poems feature in this distinctive anthology.
'UK based urban writers from different Artistic backgrounds come together as a show of unity while maintaining their distinct perspectives and styles.'
For more on the book go to https://www.lyricallyjustified.co.uk/. You can buy a copy by following this Link
Here is one of the two poems included in the collection.
A sense of the broken places presses upon me
Compresses my mind
As my sickly fortune balloons into oblivion
Guilt mixes with bile
I am full of the urgency to love
Oppressed by friends and strangers, all scattered
Slashed at by life's sharp edge
The block stop wedge
A bleak point, without purpose
Pain’s hammer, relentless
The inevitable terminus,
Relief?
And me with a sense of hope
A bubble not yet burst
Borrowed eyes still seeing
Recognising life in the presence of its shadow
Oh thick black shape!
I pray that something good billows in your depths
I try to imagine some end to life that is bigger than its parts
Fingers press for blood
The wish a rusty-eyed red scream
It is one
Precious in pain, illusively here
It is not me, why is that so?
I am here, something not
I do not know how to interpret the vague impulses of this
formless monster
So I drift in an absurd world
Love seems my only cause of action
Off runs fear, melancholy drains
Guilt remains
What of those who cannot get hold of anything to navigate by?
Who have dismantled every story yet cannot tell another
Or the simply tired,
Named or not, those that suffer terribly
Do so quietly
I cannot think for them
Lying sleepless, still breathing
As foolish as when I first entered this world
The thought lingers like a bird with no nest
I was born
The terrifying thrill of it rises in my chest
BORN!
'UK based urban writers from different Artistic backgrounds come together as a show of unity while maintaining their distinct perspectives and styles.'
For more on the book go to https://www.lyricallyjustified.co.uk/. You can buy a copy by following this Link
Here is one of the two poems included in the collection.
The Universe Is As Big As My Heart
A sense of the broken places presses upon me
Compresses my mind
As my sickly fortune balloons into oblivion
Guilt mixes with bile
I am full of the urgency to love
Oppressed by friends and strangers, all scattered
Slashed at by life's sharp edge
The block stop wedge
A bleak point, without purpose
Pain’s hammer, relentless
The inevitable terminus,
Relief?
And me with a sense of hope
A bubble not yet burst
Borrowed eyes still seeing
Recognising life in the presence of its shadow
Oh thick black shape!
I pray that something good billows in your depths
I try to imagine some end to life that is bigger than its parts
Fingers press for blood
The wish a rusty-eyed red scream
It is one
Precious in pain, illusively here
It is not me, why is that so?
I am here, something not
I do not know how to interpret the vague impulses of this
formless monster
So I drift in an absurd world
Love seems my only cause of action
Off runs fear, melancholy drains
Guilt remains
What of those who cannot get hold of anything to navigate by?
Who have dismantled every story yet cannot tell another
Or the simply tired,
Named or not, those that suffer terribly
Do so quietly
I cannot think for them
Lying sleepless, still breathing
As foolish as when I first entered this world
The thought lingers like a bird with no nest
I was born
The terrifying thrill of it rises in my chest
BORN!
