PROMISE

What does a man need to be a man?
So simple, so complex when you add it down,
If you haven’t a word you have nothing
My father said, before we put him in the ground.
How can you ride the crest of a wave
And never get wet?
How can you choose to take a side?
And say you never bet.

The Spanish and French played invasion games
Promised the Indian nations,
They butchered the buffalo, stole the gold
To build gasoline stations.
The natives protested, tried to resist,
The Cherokee, Sioux and Chippewa Cree,
Crazy Horse knew they were crazy
So they buried his heart at Wounded Knee.

Americans looked to the Oval Office
For a promise to end the slump,
They were dealt a heartless hand of cards,
With clubs and spades, no diamond, no trump.
Life lived with pleasure or life with pain
Hardly matters a whit,
Tongue in a molten mouth
Welcomes any spit.

Hard to play hard to get
If you’re not hard to get for a start,
That promise you made and forgot
Doesn’t matter; you have no heart.
The promise of great romance, out of control,
Going nowhere like a runaway train,
The thought is still father to the deed,
We all promise to start over again

INDIFFERENCE

To be weary of the journey before you set out
Is a cross and a curse.
Accept the gift of complete indifference,
Just another washer in your purse.
Black stirring in the trees; crows revolting,
Rising and falling of black wings,
Cold stones of hail on winter face
The ending here begins.

Time; patient builder of impregnable walls,
Diviner and destroyer of each wish,
When petulant promise no promises keeps
How tastes the hook to the fish?
All dogs are wiser than their masters,
Grateful for a handful of sun,
Piss in the valley of virtue
Just for fun.

What use an inside without the outside?
Little is lost on the well-worn path,
I wished that I was there with you
Or still here beside you sat.
How little a thing it takes
To drown in sorrows or float on joys
Thoughts are real, words only garments,
Stars make no noise.

I'm inclined to head off to the west
Small houses, thatch and Kerr's Pink,
To sketch on vacant page of the mind
To see, not to look, reflect not to think.
The echo of the sky on the flat of the bay,
No natural order corrupted by reason
Where summer and winter are bound by the fall
And Spring is a permanent season.

BEYOND THE PALE

Secrets are revealed to no one
Onever, not ever oneself,
Perhaps the ghosts who gaze through the dark
or the eavesdropping elf.
What you're not to know is important
even if its not now, or never,
We are each of us all alone
since umbilical sever.

No need for you to cry yourself,
Borrow, as an actor, the tears and smiles of others,
The world is full of curious peepers,
Fathers and priests, sisters and mothers.
Spotlight of the mind can shine
on the face of past buried lies,
Love was never about love or
feelings, hellos, halos or goodbyes.

Secrets never bind us together,
The certainty of death cannot deceive,
Haters of clarity have nothing to say,
For ourselves alone we grieve.
Old clothes patched with older clothes
Breezes lost in the gale,
Knowledge does not lead to knowing
what lies beyond the pale.

UKRAINE REVISITED

What’s what in this land of Cyrillic colours

And shapes of capes on Cossack and charger?
What colour are tears from eyes in this place?
The pale of the pure, the golden of grain,
Or the crimson on bloody lace.
I know the milestones of history here
Like all other places; just dates of wars.
Slaughter campaigns, sanitised names,
Skeletons driving burnt out cars.
Advances, retreats on land and Black Sea
Victors and victims like you and me
And Geronimo.
The past filled with Ottomans, Lithuanians, Poles
Where are the sanctuaries, holiday homes?
A gulag is no place to go.
Life is not linear but instant; now.
Great paintings of peace depict only death.
Where hide all the peace correspondents?
And bandits with plans for each vacant berth.
Do lovers still bask under alabaster moon?
Or rejoice with the sun when the clock strikes noon
In Saint Michael’s square in Kiev.
Does the bread taste the same, the milk and the game?
The honey from Ternopil’s flowers
On the banks of the Seret River above.
The leaders; great warriors or mice with money
The people defiant and strong
Must the question be asked “Is this my home?
Is this where I truly belong?"
Who can withstand the three sided pressure
Of the gravitational field of power
Not shadows in a material world
Where seconds are splinters of every glass hour.
Ireland never knew the wrath of invader
Just dark strangers who claimed us as one of their own.
Told us the rules; where to live, where to die,
For their sins, we still must atone.
Another UK without the sweet Raine
A kingdom still ruled by a queen,
They have blackened our name, reddened our soil,
Yet each spring our grass still grows green.
Can you tell a black man he ought to be white?
Or a Muslim to change to a Jew,
Only one rule for a man of his homeland,
To thine own self always be true.

Happy New Year to all Ukrainians.

(The Dnieper and the Shannon still run free)

A TALE OF TWO PEOPLE

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
Green threads stitching our dreams about us,

They who need others are forever shackled

Strange how life goes on without us.
We thought we knew about each other,
Like all before us and those behind
We hadn’t even begun to explore
The shallowest compartments of the mind.

Sometimes love comes softly
Like a feather in soft breeze awoken,
But you can’t see into another’s heart
Can’t listen to what’s beyond the spoken.
Life is an untidy playwright
Loose ends hanging everywhere

Hard to bottle a wish or hope,

Melody preserved by tongue and ear.

Where everlasting ends and eternal begins

Time would tell who was leaning on who,
Those without clocks can feel time
Running out, myopia of long view.
We lived in the neighbourhood of guilt
In humble cottage of clay and straw,
Your truth liberated me from me,
Brought me to the now I never saw.

No sin is original, all has happened before,

Lies are just echoes in the mind,
Happy the addiction to the holy breeze of now
All images of you left behind.
Sympathy is short-lived in the room where I sit
With splinter, shell and stone,
Happy in the know that loneliness fades
In the being of being alone.

(happy new year and era Smokey, you were everything).