WHAT IS TIME?

Lines Och nan Och

Och nan och leughadh tu
You fell in the ditch, bruised You.

The sea is still bristling hair wave
Shocked by the wind, stand, beach at Irvine.

Salt Lowlands stung my eyes bitter blow
More I cannot, cussed by time, you lost.

Kintail peaks, still high. the sky touching
Eagles dare too as otters swim below

Kinloch Rannoch and fairy child
Schiehallion would I have clambered

Or below catch the gaping salmon a ring to mouth
True love worn, oh Seumas MhicSheumais.

The Lowlands rattled you, you fell
Never a knell so dark at gloaming

The proud mare brought you down
A woman proud overbearing had you.

And I, psalter lost, no more praise to bring
To the Lowland sands at Irvine.

Och nan och leugadh tu
In the ditch, bruised you.

Still grieve the cruel horse that kicked you dead
Loves you, the fallen, till no more breath

Och nan och leughad tu
You did perish and I did too

Sonnet to Jimmy

Then go my love and I shall not act against you.
Defence is no reason that I should in deference turn
And aching still upon what thoughts I had, wish return
To that which I held as a shining jewel glistening true.

The sun that casts its dark rays upon the lochan here
Hints a newer Highland summer in the change of change
Where all held dear surfeits, clogs, and does rearrange
The heart held portrait I had of you in the other vale of tears.

Bitter I shall not be against this tidal flow that weeps
Though moments might find me consumed by past thought
But I shall live beyond that impediment and I have been taught
Of the strength beyond fear and alarm and oh loss of sleep!

Love lasts forever as did Our Champion Bard no man better loved
In the gravel I walk yet the diamonds still ring the wounded dove

Prose Poem(For Jimmy)

Don't stare at me with my beard unshaved. Shamelessly the swans glide, wings on a formless lake.

Don't say you love me,let's not do it as birds do it, bees do it, the fleas are uneducated as they buzz above the water's edge.

Turn and love me if you say you will, as medicine haunts the bottle when it is empty, love hurts,never goes away, while we write prescriptions,antidotes for a better world and day.

Do I love you? Swivel, man, pivot yourself in your own darling as new,as if you had never cared. That question's absurd. If I'd have forecast doom on your diagnosis oh pal you'd certainly have heard. Swans mate for life at the water's edge.

With thanks or apologies even to Cole Porter.

Love songs to Strangers
(The Commitment Phobe?)

Just tell me what is it
The bridge into you? Strange
Fascinations of the unapproachable
Move mellifluously to eager
Encounter. What history,
What mystique, movement., moment
To why I am doing this
Under the lack lustre light?

You are your own woman, delicate
As interlaced icicles
Turning to the sun. Your fiddle
Tunes they ran-dan a merry dance
The stars silly,
The nude notion of nothing ventured
Nothing gained.

You turn the page
Of an ancient book, some spells to cast
Author authenticity
Against commitment phobia. This is.
We rescue each other from fear
Of our bodies, of impossibility
To say that if love means forever
It is but formed in the now.
This moment should be sweeter
Not dolly mixtures
Or prescribed fixtures
Of contact.

Love here means retention
Of memory. God I’ve a lot to learn
If love means forever and that against the stain
Of not falling. Nothing required
But the moment
Nothing expected.
If love returns a blossom then I’ve
A whole new life time in which to learn….

The attraction of the body
Is that no one owns it
Though we may long for it.

Cinderella in the English West Midlands

The ode fowk uv got their tales
Ay they? They spottle em like rain
To the window but yo’m blarting little wench
Yo’m code like yer fairther oo just
Cum in by the dewer and ee sed dae ee
Ee was perished, sed giz a light chap,
A little bit and do’ mither tew lung-
That ull be bostin.
Everthin’s orl right after yow uv blackgraited
The fire plaice over theer.

But little wench yo do’ know it doo yer?
Con yow ’eer me well-yo’m mithered
By a central question and cor tell if the chap
Luvs yow if at all. But do’ fall-
The lad wuz dear to yow and yow had chapped
Ands from scrubbin’ tew lung with the dolly
Gooing up and down. Do’ frown
-yo’m off to the ball and the pumpkin’s fat
For yower trip in the charabanc.
Yow’ve got a prins somewheer for yow
And them ugly sisters of yowers push do’ they, well
Let em,they ay right in the yed.
Yow doo yowers.
But yower dear chap flew dae ee? And youw think
Yow shor goo theer again
Except by sum cemetery wall
Where unce yow ad yower ’and in ’issun

Little wench do’ do it
Yo’m surely fixed fer the ball and cum fower
O’clock and the dawn
Yo’m dancing and all the swopsons want to tek
Yower pritty ’and so do’ wurry.
The prins ’as already landed
And his boat is ready.

Ain't no millionaire babe
but could be if I had the cash,
little verses don't come
cannot even make you laugh
at my distant song. You could
tell all your friends of the man
who proves your loyal fan
make you smile beneath satin sheets:
your TV screen lulls you into half
sleep and the man of your dreams
sails on a boat away.
I miss you nights-whisky for the day
when you were close to me
all so simple and so free;
I miss you, I do, near me, but poems
and prayers do nothing, the thoughts
that come burning bridges and us,apart.
Tell me did I break your heart?
Not my intention to do that,never wanted
that, the ongoing smart of no sweetheart.
Yet I hope you got lots of friends,new as
the dew to bide the while
and as you smile think on me
kindly if not endlessly
for all that I didn't do.
I miss you darling,I really do...

On reading an interview with Neil Young

He looks decidedly old as he sits in his hotel armchair and says it is necessary to hang on in there, swim against the tide, and what tides he has known: a pernicious aneurysm and a dialogue with heroin addiction.

This is Neil Young, Canadian, of the same mettle as Joni Mitchell. He talks of his life work to a camera eye, says the past is a forgotten country to which he’ll not return. He points however to his initial play sets in folk clubs when he chose to write his own songs. Listening to Dylan, whom he thought could not sing- a voice like sandpaper and glue as Bowie describes it in one of his songs- Young rationalised intent. ‘If Dylan can do it, so can I’. It is not pretty voices that make a man…it is ambition, which he hoped would not topple for him.

It didn’t. He’s still around and moving into retrospective. His audiobiography- what a word!- is to be released soon, a DVD set charting his musical flow. Take a deep breath, he’s still here, but older. ‘Archives’ is the name of the retrospective.

Blessings pour out from memory.

After the Goldrush has a strange apocalyptic feel to it, something that my youth cherished, a slow fading of the early Seventies. Its imagery spoke to a schoolboy who also doubted if he had any talent. But ‘If Dylan can do it why not try? ’

I shall certainly view his retrospective. To be young was very heaven but we are older now. Neil Young sits in his hotel room , jowls, a jaw modified by age. ‘ Well I saw the knights in armour coming’. Well they did but it no longer a rush for the Gold but rather a relishing of it.
Thank you Neil. You made a school lad happy then! Keep singing, keep writing.

Leonard Cohen- music to commit suicide by?

Well yes and no. The drone of his voice can suggest world weariness and his voice is certainly not pleasant except by rough standards. There are better cover versions it is true.
So what is for me so compelling? His lyricism. I think the song ‘take this Longing’ a good example. The woman in the song does not love him, at least in his mind. He makes himself sound like one in a production line
‘many men have loved the bells
You keep them chained to the ring’

Certainly the accent is on the body and its results, a measure of love.

‘ so let me judge this love affair
By the stain on the bed on which I have slept’
He says he’ll wear laurel leaves, the poet crowned in the confusion of love, the gap between need and satisfaction.
So is it music to commit suicide by? Only if we deny the body…the body must be accommodated. Even in melancholy there is light, seeing the other side of its coin. Perhaps we should learn to rejoice in his message and all our impulses. Perhaps the poet-lyricist is there to alert us to that perception…

My death waits in the trailer park
in the debates about life's meaning in the dark
in the fear of old age not paying the gas meter
in the lusts fading into memory of things sweeter

my death lies in relinquishing all life
my children now grown, my recollect wife
and the songs we sang within the cups of youth
my death lies in his final truth

and yet not my death for some part continues
though I am gone to dust and drear previews
of eternity light and still to come
bright shining star that beckons home...

I am here on the cusp of death coming close by day
and yet truth on the handle would bid me say
what is really here too big I fear in its import?
None. Death have I known too often when life cut me short..

and so no apprehension on the final bound
death constant with me,this have I found.

The Mountain Stream

Adapted from the Welsh of Ceiriog(John Hughes)

mountain stream shining with pebbles
as it falls to the valley below
a whisper of song along the rushes reveals
if i were as the stream,oh were it so!

the mountain heather all a blossom
longing comes when I gaze on them
I want to rest on the hills again
in the heather and the breeze that comes there

the tiny birds who name the mountain
free flight in the racy air
from one side to the other and again
that I took wing like a bird!

a mountain son I find myself
far from home seeking poetry to console
where the mountains hold my heart whole
the tiny birds and the heather that peeps out...