I’ll let you guess who this is about.
Roy
Household dissenter,
Absconder and antagonist;
Army runaway
And asylum breakouter;
Prison inmate,
Jazz marathon poet
And convention flouter.
Travelling busker,
Songwriter;
Dauber on the city walls.
Gig talker,
Hitch-hiker,
Singer with the biggest balls.
Awkward and acerbic,
Sweet and melodic,
Laughing madly in the gale.
A stormcock,
A harper,
Creator of the epic rail.
Opher 21.6.2016
I encountered Howl when I was seventeen years old – back in the heady days of 1967. Back then I was a rebellious youth full of angst and disillusionment. I did not like the society I was part of. I did not want the career directions being laid out before me. I saw it all as shallow, hypocritical and pointless. I wanted something with more meaning but I did not know what it was. I wanted a life that had some depth and purpose. I rejected the whole stupidity of comfort, status and ‘fitting in’ to a society that I considered unfair, unjust and with the wrong priorities. I was on a quest to find something better.
Back then my life was all about Rock Music, friends and girls. I was into freewheelin’ and living in the moment. I wanted excitement and adventure. I wanted to live life to the full.
Poetry had been ruined for me at school. I had been made to learn and recite reams of Tennyson and Wordsworth. It did not relate to me at all. I could not connect.
I rediscovered poetry through the lyrics of the fabulous music I was listening too. Things like the Beatles – ‘Here There and Everywhere’ or the Kinks – ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ and ‘Well Respected Man’ or Dylan – ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Ramona’, ‘Pawn in the Game’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m only Bleeding’. They spoke to me. I was in to lyrics and words. I was on the cusp. Little did I know that I was shortly to be knocked out by the likes of Captain Beefheart, Country Joe and the Fish and Roy Harper. Rock Music provided my poetry and opened my mind to real social issues, mystical thought and philosophy. It gave me insight into the meaning I was seeking and a different way of living a life full of passion, love, tolerance and fairness.
Then I rediscovered poetry. I had been reading Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, which transported me into a world that made much more sense to me. I wanted a life that was unleashed. On the cover of Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’ was a photo of the mighty Allen Ginsberg. I found a copy of Ginsberg’s City Lights pocket book – ‘Howl’
The first moment I read those opening lines that Ginsberg had written way back in 1954 I was smitten. It spoke directly to me. I could relate to it. I interpreted it into my own life. I was being destroyed by the madness of my greed-ridden, war-mongering, wealth-obsessed society. I wanted out. I saw myself as that angel-headed hipster searching for that mystical connection to the universe. I was burning for it. I would rather be hungry and naked and real, rather that bloated and living in luxury in meaningless greed.
Suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore. There were other people who thought like me. I had discovered poetry.
These were the words that opened my mind:
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,’
Secondary Sex Characteristics
Sexuality mainly operates on the subconscious level. Dimorphism has evolved to create attraction. Females have evolved physically to attract males. Their body shape and movements, appealing faces and sexual chemicals are deployed to entice males.
They act like lanterns.
They attract males who flounder around hopelessly in their wake like puppy dogs.
They then select a mate; a male who has the status, survival characteristics and genes they wish to entrust with their own genes; someone worthy of carrying their chromosomes into the next gene pool. Women respond to status, strength, survival characteristics and healthiness. They have few eggs to put in the basket of life. Men respond to fertility. They are not limited by number. Their seed is plentiful. They can go for quantity.
Females place a lot of their resources into attracting males. Breasts and large buttocks, weaker muscles, and smaller size are hindrances in surviving against predators. Their sexuality exudes fertility and health. Their ploy is to allure. Males can go for size, strength and power. Their purpose is that of provider.
Over the years women have learnt to enhance their charms to create bigger breasts, larger eyes and lips and even bigger bums. Bras, bustles, lipstick and mascara are weapons
A whole industry has sprung up to assist women in exaggerating their secondary sex characteristics. With paints, smells, sways, high-heels and implants they set their traps.
We know it but we still fall in.
Secondary Sex Characteristics
I watch you walk down the street
As your slim body flows and your hips sway;
Dimorphism has made you that way.
The curves of your breasts, bum and tum
Catch my eye
So pronounced as you walk by.
I adore the deposition of your fat
Deployed in all the right places
To create this and that.
You have the small face
And big eyes of a child
With big red lips
Evolved to drive me wild.
Your secondary sex characteristics are so alluring
I’m certain I’d find your primary ones equally stirring.
Up close I touch the softness of your skin,
Armpit and groin I’m breathing in.
The air is full of your pheromones
A heady attraction perfected down aeons.
Your sexual chemistry set
Is fully deployed like a butterfly net.
Like a helpless moth drawn to the light,
A bee to a flower
I am attracted
I lack the power
To resist the promise of delight.
Opher 4.6.2016
Mighty Coil
I was lying in bed this morning on my birthday thinking about age, life and the future. Time passes.
The grandchildren are on their way with my daughter. They will be here shortly to help me celebrate. They are the future as I move into the past.
The real celebration is the fact that they share my DNA – we all do. Resounding down through the ages, from the very first cell, and on into the distant future.
Humans might not last long but DNA is shared with all life; we are all family.
Those four bases spell out a code that contains our whole history, eloquently recorded for a long time to come.
No life is more evolved than any other. We come from the same cell. We have lived the same length.
I tried to capture the convolutions of the DNA molecule with its rungs like a ladder and four base code that contains a wealth of information. Our whole past is written there. I used the word base in both meaning. We are a base species. But we are not the culmination. More is to come. Maybe the future forms of life will evolve to be something greater than we have managed. We are a disappointment – we promised so much.
I do not pretend to understand how DNA originated or incorporated into that first mother cell. Life is mystery. But humans are inquisitive and great at problem solving. Maybe one day we will know (if we survive long enough).
So on this birthday I celebrate life in all its forms and will drink a toast to the wonders of DNA – the wonder chemical that has given us all we are.
Here’s to you DNA and all your twists and turns! The story isn’t over yet!
Mighty Coil
Little coil of chemistry
That conducts my life,
Convoluting through the ages
Conjugating man and wife.
Rungs upon a ladder
Of our family tree,
Mutating and growing
Into great complexity.
You tell the whole story
Of life under this sky;
Within your base structure
Is the tale of you and I.
I wish I could understand
How you came to be.
Perhaps time will unravel
You great mystery.
A simple code of four
Spells out your majesty;
So eloquently spelt –
What was, is and will be.
Opher 30.5.2016
Nothing to say
I was talking to Lazy Lester a few years back and he kept telling me that he knew someone who had nowhere to go and nothing to do when he got there. He thought it was highly amusing and said it a number of times. I liked it too.
I kind of feel the same way about most of what I see in the society I’m part of.
In the midst of huge dilemmas, issues and decisions most of us are content to drift along being entertained and pretending the big issues are not of their concern.
Why is that?
Do we feel so disempowered that we are impotent in the face of politics and the big corporations?
Yet even the most powerful individuals in the world are human beings just like us – not super-beings. Their intelligence, understanding and mental processes are no different to our own. They started life as helpless babies. They are people pretending to be important.
The internet is full of trivia, celebrity nonsense and crap. TV is a mess of shallow rubbish.
I believe it is like that because that is how we want it.
Time to change.
If we have nothing to say then perhaps we should stay out of the way of the people who have?
Why clutter up the attic with superficial nonsense?
Are we living or just filling in time?
Nothing to say
If you’ve got nothing to say
Why bother saying it?
If you have nowhere to go,
And nothing to do when you get there,
Why bother going?
Just filling in time.
Opher 29.5.2016
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Poems and Peons
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I’m trying to think of a title for my next book of poetry. Something that fits in with the six I already have. They are:
Vice and Verse
Rhymes and Reasons
Stanzas and Stances
Codas Cadence and Clues
Poems and Peons
Prose Cons and Poetry
Any suggestions?
I write to make a difference – hopefully a positive difference.
If perchance you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so from any Amazon site. The links are below:
In the UK:
My author pages:
Vice and Verse
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My Author Pages:
Vice and Verse:
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This is the forward I wrote:
Foreword
This is my second anthology of poems. I do not claim to be a poet. I have no pretensions in that direction. I just like writing. Sometimes ideas and feelings come out as what I describe as poems and sometimes they come out as my version of novels. For me it is all about communication and playing with words.
Words are slippery things, like eels. Their meanings are nuanced. When you put them together they are tinged with other sheen. They wriggle into other forms.
A word is amazing. It is a symbol, sometimes for a very tenuous concept, that we are able to use to touch each other with. We assume that each word we select has exactly the same baggage for everyone else. I doubt it does.
These are not my words. They are borrowed.
The arrangements are mine though.
I have organised them to have a flow, a rhythm and to interact with purpose. Perhaps this will be obvious, but perhaps not.
Some have humour and some are imbued with fury.
I occasionally use my words like ballistic missiles. They deliver a warhead.
I hope you appreciate them. I have attached my other words in the form of extensions to illuminate, exaggerate and confuscate.
Even confuscation can be good.
I write to make a difference – hopefully a positive difference.
If perchance you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so from any Amazon site. The links are below:
In the UK:
My author pages:
Vice and Verse
Kindle Edition
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In the USA:
My Author Pages:
Vice and Verse:
I am presently writing my seventh book of poetry and beginning to think about a title. That’s quite a lot of poems.
Now I know that poetry does not appeal to many people. My poetry books hardly sell. Though strangely it is my poems that tend to be the most popular of my posts on my blog.
I am not a poet like the greats – Ginsberg, Shelley, or Frost.
I am a poet who feels a rhythm in my head that I put my words to – sometimes they come out as novels, sometimes short stories, sometimes posts on my blog and sometimes they are poems. I don’t judge them.
These books are not poetry books like other poetry books. They are a means for me to explore my ideas, feelings and whatever is preying on my mind at the time. Some are full of love and some are full of fury. It is a peek into my mind. In these books you get a page of prose and the poem that goes with it. I explore.
How about exploring with me?
If perchance you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so from any Amazon site. The links are below:
In the UK:
My author pages:
Vice and Verse
Kindle Edition
£0.00 Subscribers read for £0.00 £1.99 to buy
In the USA:
My Author Pages:
Vice and Verse:
Kindle
$2.99 Read with Our Free App
You and Me can Do It!!!
Nothing makes me more frustrated and angry than the rapid destruction of the wilderness and slaughter of nature.
In my own lifetime I have witnessed the rapid degradation of our environment. The world population has doubled and we are swamping nature. The extinction rate has gone through the roof and even creatures that were common in my youth are now threatened.
We are a disaster.
Yet we should not be. It is our stupidity and greed, our national pride and cruel, violent natures that is causing the problem.
If the G7 put their mind to it they could solve all the problems.
Problem solved.
You and Me can Do It!!!
They used to rid themselves of nuclear waste
By dumping it at sea.
They’d still be doing it now
If not for you and me.
Sadly they’re still chopping down
The forests with impunity,
And strip mining in the wilderness
Where the wild-life used to be.
They are spraying all the crops
And killing pest and bee.
Soon they’ll be nothing left
Of elephant or chimpanzee.
We’ll be living in a concrete desert
Without a single tree;
Billion upon billion of us
Swamping nature by degree.
It’s time they reigned in the greed
I’m sure you’ll all agree.
SO LET’S PUT A STOP TO IT!!
BECAUSE IT’S SURE KILLING ME!!
Opher 18.5.2016
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In Britain:
Our Layer in the Rocks
For some strange reason we always think that things will go on the way they are; against all the odds. Things always change.
We get caught out every time. The unexpected always knocks us for six.
We seem to think we can do what we like with impunity and there will be no repercussions. That is madness. There are repercussions to everything.
As we go around trashing the planet for fun or greed we assume that we will be able to carry one forever. Who needs the plants and bees? Who needs the wilderness? So what is there are no chimpanzees?
Yet we are part of the web.
We are busy laying down the foundations of our own demise. As with all the other fossils we will end up as a layer in the rocks. How thick and how important will be determined by what we do in the near future.
If we are intelligent we will look after our life-support system.
This poem is a little pessimistic but I wrote it in hopes that we will wake up and deal with the mess we are creating before the mess deals with us. I don’t want to be in that layer just yet and I’d like it to be much thicker.
Our Layer in the Rocks
I like our layer in the rocks
With all my kith and kin.
I’d have liked to see it thicker
But we chose to make it thin.
It resembles a museum
Of all we could achieve.
But no sooner had we started
Than it was time for us to leave.
Opher 18.5.2016
My poetry books are not like ordinary poetry books – they are works of diatribe and prose that explain my thoughts and ideas. The poetry is only a part.
If you would like to purchase one of my poetry books you can do so from Amazon: