All Blog Posts (298)

Posted originally at www.lifescape.org.uk, 25.9.2011

On one level this feels like a very ordinary time. The early Autumn weather in Pembrokeshire is brisk and damp but still balmy – the seas still warm. The summer walks on the beach and the headlands have embedded me here – helping me take root in this place I have chosen to live. We drive over the hills to the gym and the sea unfolds as we approach Fishguard. We shop when we…

In the Sahara

one grain of sand is alive:

find it, treasure us.

Spin on, crazy world:

you're drunk with power, and your

soul has cirrhosis.

So long, gorillas,

your time is up:  you're wasting

valuable jungle.

We want jam today,  

and tomorrow, jam today:

every day, more jam.

Roast chicken, roast beef,

roasted peanuts, roasted Earth:

find the odd one out.

Regret city gone.

Wrong type of bomb used - nuclear.

Culprit has been fired.

In books, a house built

on sand:  but our world's built on

melting permafrost.

when I wake

the weight of this

whole fractured earth

comes and drums on my chest –



this pain that is

mine, and yours, everyone's –



and yet and yet

too there is nothing

more beautiful than this fragile…

The grim figure of continuing economic collapse curls a hand around Europe: Greece, Italy, and the UK, shudder in its embrace.  With its other limb, it reaches overseas to deliver a bony high-five to the maelstrom of destructive hyper capitalism let loose in the US; this is a narrative of…

... and will you sing to God:

"Anything You can do we can do better,"

as you package a piece of the sun

and carefully place it in Pandora's little box

to threaten your enemies with?

And your enemies will shudder and think:

"We too must have a magic box

full of the sun's enriching power."

And when the last ant crawls across the…

Hark, I hear the herald monsters ping.

They're all rushing to join a gadget machine,

it tells them who they are, sometimes,

or not, as the case may be.

But it's good fun and everyone is doing it.

Except me.…

... trapped in a rotten civilization

well past its sell-by date,

adding endless glitzy gadgets to disguise the stench.

"Hey Mars is next,

we just need to upgrade

the weapons of mass destruction first."

But I see your face, Mr Death,…

North of the wild coast, you turn left towards the fire,

wait for the morning, head for the horizon

take twenty five steps and dig for treasure.

Descend the waiting well of the world,

fire up in the magma, accelerate beyond earth

drift beyond gravity in the slipstream of angels.

Follow their deception to an empty heartbeat

– two, three, four - inviting love, insufficient

to sustain life without survival needs being…

To wander the ruins of a civilization, walk along avenues invented by the imagination of the archeologist - for invention it surely is, far more than a faithful reconstruction - is to take part in an elaborate masque.  A brick wall raised here, a fresco placed there where it might be most picturesque…

Just came across William Morris' News From Nowhere ... then the next day it's referenced in Penny Red's blog (who had a cracking piece on the London riots) in her blog post here:

News from Nowhere

Bow Creek and Charleycombe wood

~ tide retreating unhurried, mouse-bit blewitts, earthstars, chanterelles, first wild autumn cyclamen, oak king ageing but the new hard green nodules of acorns for the new gods standing clear of their cups, shiny new conkers irresistible to the palm to the tongue, woodpeckers, holly berries red, a raucousness of duck and the gulls' flurry, mudflats slack, trees on the cusp (green…

A few years back I wrote this and its become a bit of manifesto for me. Seems relevant to some of our discussions.

I want, I want

a sparse, clean life;

a small, stone house, 

whitewashed inside.

Around it the wind will

swirl and boom,

yet stir no emotion.

I do not wish to be buffeted,

or soaked to the skin by

spiking hill rain,

I want to sit cosily with

despair,…