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My head is reeling
What a feeling
Bass line pounding through my brain
Skull is cracking
Quite nerve racking
I need something to help dull the pain

Images horrific
Pressure is terrific
Listening to what the station plays
Eyes are burning
The world is turning
It's like it is the end of days

I need to spend some time relaxing
Getting my music back into my head
Listening to ABBA oldies
followed by David Gates and Bread
An afterword or two by Chapin
With The  Carpenters along as well
Will help me clear my mind of what's there
And take away the images of hell

KHEL, hour of power
The station of the hour
Killing my braincells by the day
Hard Rock bottom feeders
Rotten Singers, silly bleeders
I don't know why I stay

Thrash and Metal
Brain won't settle
My head is almost set to burst
Glass and Glitter
Makes me twitter
I no longer think disco was the worst

I need to spend some time relaxing
Getting my music back into my head
Listening to ABBA oldies
followed by David Gates and Bread
An afterword or two by Chapin
With The  Carpenters along as well
Will help me clear my mind of what's there
And take away the images of hell

Hey There DJ
That's what the kids say
I do it just to help to pay the bills
Super sonic
I need a tonic
To help me swallow down the pain pills

Every morning
Without warning
The pain begins in my head
Metal grating
Music hating
I guess I'll feel alright when I'm dead

I need to spend some time relaxing
Getting my music back into my head
Listening to ABBA oldies
followed by David Gates and Bread
An afterword or two by Chapin
With The  Carpenters along as well
Will help me clear my mind of what's there
And take away the images of hell
Random thoughts of a morning dj at a heavy metal, thrash, radio station...by a dj who likes Neil Sedaka, The Carpenters, Bread, ABBA and other groups of that ilk.
Nigel Morgan Jul 2013
It was their first time, their first time ever. Of course neither would admit to it, and neither knew, about the other that is, that they had never done this before. Life had sheltered them, and they had sheltered from life.

Their biographies put them in their sixties. Never mind the Guardian magazine proclaiming sixty to be the new fifty. Albert and Sally were resolutely sixty – ish. To be fair, neither looked their age, but then they had led such sheltered lives, hadn’t they. He had a mother, she had a father, and that pretty much wrapped it up. They had spent respective lives being their parents’ companions, then carers, and now, suddenly this. This intimacy, and it being their first time.

When their contemporaries were befriending and marrying and procreating, and home-making and care-giving and child-minding, and developing their first career, being forced to start a second, overseeing teenagers and suddenly being parents again, but grandparents this time – with evenings and some weekends allowed – Albert and Sally had spent their time writing. They wrote poetry in their respective spaces, at respective tables, in almost solitude, Sally against the onslaught of TV noise as her father became deaf. Albert had the refuge of his childhood bedroom and the table he’d studied at – O levels, A levels, a degree and a further degree, and a little later on that PhD. Poetry had been his friend, his constant companion, rarely fickle, always there when needed. If Albert met a nice-looking woman in the library and lost his heart to her, he would write verse to quench not so much desire of a physical nature, but a desire to meet and to know and to love, and to live the dream of being a published poet.

Oh Sally, such a treasure; a kind heart, a sweet nature, a lovely disposition. Confused at just seventeen when suddenly she seemed to mature, properly, when school friends had been through all that at thirteen. She was passed over, and then suddenly, her body became something she could hardly deal with, and shyness enveloped her because her mother would say such things . . . but, but she had her bookshelf, her grandfather’s, and his books (Keats and Wordsworth saved from the skip) and then her books. Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (oh to have been Kaitlin, so wild and free and uninhibited and whose mother didn’t care), Stevie Smith, U.E. Fanthorpe, and then, having taken her OU degree, the lure of the small presses and the feminist canon, the subversive and the down-right weird.

Albert and Sally knew the comfort of settling ageing parents for the night and opening (and firmly closing) the respective doors of their own rooms, in Albert’s case his bedroom, with Sally, a box room in which her mother had once kept her sewing machine. Sally resolutely did not sew, nor did she knit. She wrote, constantly, in notebook after notebook, in old diaries, on discarded paper from the office of the charity she worked for. Always in conversation with herself as she moulded the poem, draft after draft after draft. And then? She went once to writers’ workshop at the local library, but never again. Who were these strange people who wrote only about themselves? Confessional poets. And she? Did she never write about herself? Well, occasionally, out of frustration sometimes, to remind herself she was a woman, who had not married, had not borne children, had only her father’s friends (who tried to force their unmarried sons on her). She did write a long sequence of poems (in bouts-rimés) about the man she imagined she would meet one day and how life might be, and of course would never be. No, Sally, mostly wrote about things, the mystery and beauty and wonder of things you could touch, see or hear, not imagine or feel for. She wrote about poppies in a field, penguins in a painting (Birmingham Art Gallery), the seashore (one glorious week in North Norfolk twenty years ago – and she could still close her eyes and be there on Holkham beach).  Publication? Her first collection went the rounds and was returned, or not, as is the wont of publishers. There was one comment: keep writing. She had kept writing.

Tide Marks

The sea had given its all to the land
and retreated to a far distant curve.
I stand where the waves once broke.

Only the marks remain of its coming,
its going. The underlying sand at my feet
is a desert of dunes seen from the air.

Beyond the wet strand lies, a vast mirror
to a sky laundered full of haze, full of blue,
rinsed distances and shining clouds.


When Albert entered his bedroom he drew the curtains, even on a summer’s evening when still light. He turned on his CD player choosing Mozart, or Bach, sometimes Debussy. Those three masters of the piano were his favoured companions in the act of writing. He would and did listen to other music, but he had to listen with attention, not have music ‘on’ as a background. That Mozart Rondo in A minor K511, usually the first piece he would listen to, was a recording of Andras Schiff from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. You could hear the atmosphere of a capacity audience, such a quietness that the music seemed to feed and enter and then surround and become wondrous.

He’d had a history teacher in his VI form years who allowed him the run of his LP collection. It had been revelation after revelation, and that had been when the poetry began. They had listened to Tristan & Isolde into the early hours. It was late June, A levels over, a small celebration with Wagner, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of cherries. As the final disc ended they had sat in silence for – he could not remember how long, only from his deeply comfortable chair he had watched the sky turn and turn lighter over the tall pine trees outside. And then, his dear teacher, his one true friend, a young man only a few years out of Cambridge, rose and went to his record collection and chose The Third Symphony by Vaughan-Williams, his Pastoral Symphony, his farewell to those fallen in the Great War  – so many friends and music-makers. As the second movement began Albert wept, and left abruptly, without the thanks his teacher deserved. He went home, to the fury of his father who imagined Albert had been propositioned and assaulted by his kind teacher – and would personally see to it that he would never teach again. Albert was so shocked at this declaration he barely ever spoke to his father again. By eight o’clock that June morning he was a poet.

For Ralph

A sea voyage in the arms of Iseult
and now the bowl of cherries
is empty and the Perrier Jouet
just a stain on the glass.

Dawn is a mottled sky
resting above the dark pines.
Late June and roses glimmer
in a deep sea of green.

In the still near darkness,
and with the volume low,
we listen to an afterword:
a Pastoral Symphony for the fallen.

From its opening I know I belong
to this music and it belongs to me.
Wholly. It whelms me over
and my face is wet with tears.


There is so much to a name, Sally thought, Albert, a name from the Victorian era. In the 1950s whoever named their first born Albert? Now Sally, that was very fifties, comfortably post-war. It was a bright and breezy, summer holiday kind of name. Saying it made you smile (try it). But Light-foot (with a hyphen) she could do without, and had hoped to be without it one day. She was not light-footed despite being slim and well proportioned. Her feet were too big and she did not move gracefully. Clothes had always been such a nuisance; an indicator of uncertainty, of indecision. Clothes said who you were, and she was? a tallish woman who hid her still firm shape and good legs in loose tops and not quite right linen trousers (from M & S). Hair? Still a colour, not yet grey, she was a shale blond with grey eyes. She had felt Albert’s ‘look’ when they met in The Barton, when they had been gathered together like show dogs by the wonderful, bubbly (I know exactly what to wear – and say) Annabel. They had arrived at Totnes by the same train and had not given each other a second glance on the platform. Too apprehensive, scared really, of what was to come. But now, like show dogs, they looked each other over.

‘This is an experiment for us,’ said the festival director, ‘New voices, but from a generation so seldom represented here as ‘emerging’, don’t you think?’

You mean, thought Albert, it’s all a bit quaint this being published and winning prizes for the first time – in your sixties. Sally was somewhere else altogether, wondering if she really could bring off the vocal character of a Palestinian woman she was to give voice to in her poem about Ramallah.

Incredibly, Albert or Sally had never read their poems to an audience, and here they were, about to enter Dartington’s Great Hall, with its banners and vast fireplace, to read their work to ‘a capacity audience’ (according to Annabel – all the tickets went weeks ago). What were Carcanet thinking about asking them to be ‘visible’ at this seriously serious event? Annabel parroted on and on about who’d stood on this stage before them in previous years, and there was such interest in their work, both winning prizes The Forward and The Eliot. Yet these fledgling authors had remained stoically silent as approaches from literary journalists took them almost daily by surprise. Wanting to know their backstory. Why so long a wait for recognition? Neither had sought it. Neither had wanted it. Or rather they’d stopped hoping for it until . . . well that was a story all of its own, and not to be told here.

Curiosity had beckoned both of them to read each other’s work. Sally remembered Taking Heart arriving in its Amazon envelope. She brought it to her writing desk and carefully opened it.  On the back cover it said Albert Loosestrife is a lecturer in History at the University of Northumberland. Inside, there was a life, and Sally had learnt to read between the lines. Albert had seen Sally’s slim volume Surface and Depth in Blackwell’s. It seemed so slight, the poems so short, but when he got on the Metro to Whitesands Bay and opened the bag he read and became mesmerised.  Instead of going home he had walked down to the front, to his favourite bench with the lighthouse on his left and read it through, twice.

Standing in the dark hallway ready to be summoned to read Albert took out his running order from his jacket pocket, flawlessly typed on his Elite portable typewriter (a 21st birthday present from his mother). He saw the titles and wondered if his voice could give voice to these intensely personal poems: the horror of his mother’s illness and demise, his loneliness, his fear of being gay, the nastiness and bullying experienced in his minor university post, his observations of acquaintances and complete strangers, train rides to distant cities to ‘gather’ material, visit to galleries and museums, homages to authors, artists and composers he loved. His voice echoed in his head. Could he manage the microphone? Would the after-reading discussion be bearable? He looked at Sally thinking for a moment he could not be in better company. Her very name cheered him. Somehow names could do that. He imagined her walking on a beach with him, in conversation. Yes, he’d like that, and right now. He reckoned they might have much to share with each other, after they’d discussed poetry of course. He felt a warm glow and smiled his best smile as she in astonishing synchronicity smiled at him. The door opened and applause beckoned.
Ellis Reyes  Oct 2018
Afterword
Ellis Reyes Oct 2018
I hope
That in the end
I've made your life better
Connor Jul 2018
Eternity is closed !
- come back another day with
flower smears for eyes and sincere
passion on your
palms          (weathered)

I need another Russian Doll -
Princess to frequent curtains
fashioned from fire & lead
equaling out to crimson folds
which mysteriously call to
the mystical hierarchies of
imagination

Silent requirements signal beneath the steps
which welcome
one (a stranger/
an Ibis-Beak cane & dark coat
stamped with August rain)

They arrive unexpectedly, as if to play the game
of cliches, they carry promises fashioned in foreign ports
tapping my knee
instead of my shoulder
having only known or recognized
entombment
                               (there is no hyperbole which lacks within
                                Nature's haunted heavens)

My strange visitor leaves / glass umbrella
in hand / to privacy / our brief interaction begins & ends with simple eager undertakings implemented
in the afterword  

What is in another's contemplation of me?
whiling in manifest Theosophy -

- Thought form -
Primal child-rage / whisp of violet smoke &
inksplotches abolished, mutually panting.
Our decorated
four-legged hunter
has arisen and impatiently
craves for the Earth to partner at last with
the Sun

..The Sun a blazing dime
I can smell crispness
in the air
Kyle Kulseth Apr 2013
Write these words on empty stomach
          unasked, I spilled my guts.
You said, "My life's a joke
                  and every choice a punchline."
You just wrote my prologue and the afterword
           is dangling off my lips, now;
            on the tips of tongues.
Steel night skies thrum and echo
                  when the bells are struck.
Goose Creek pays tribute to the wide Missouri.
              I can't offer much--
           clenched hands and mouth clamped shut.

Fling some words at empty wall space
          from corners, room warms up
My reddened face obscured
           behind two frost-fogged lenses
Guess I penned the punchline. Now my line-worn face
                 is crinkled up and frozen didn't get the joke
Tried to make a map out of the
              words we spoke.
These streams pay tribute to a sea of memories
              Now you don't say much
             "Good luck," and "Stay in touch."

        Clenched hands and mouth clamped shut.
-- Aug 2018
sometimes i remember what i think i wanted to say,
what i was trying to say the entire time.

i go to write it down,
it disappears.

i don’t remember what poems i showed you,
but i remember hating myself afterword.

wanting to know how or why i felt all these things,
and you took photos of empty spaces.

you were all big words,
our relationship was your bed and me naked in it,
trying to take up less space
and i guess i succeeded in that-
i've disappeared altogether now.

you hated my unfiltered words
because they made me sound broken,
waiting to be fixed.
you were always trying to put me back together
and i was always trying to be
less than ten thousand pieces-
or at least enough to fill you with.
K Apr 2013
There once was a man with a bowtie

And a little redhead girl

I'm gonna tell you the truth now

She loved him and he loved her.

They sat around the table

With fish fingers and custard, ice cream

They talked about his big blue box

And her family

In the middle of their midnight snack

An alarm rang from TARDIS, blue

He told her he would be back

In just a minute, or two

He accidentally missed his mark

Twelve years had gone by

But he just sauntered out

Waving and saying "Amelia, hi!"

Twas the first time they saved the world

When Amelia was just nineteen

Two years later he picked her up

On the eve of her wedding

But then the cracks in the universe

And all of space and time

Consumed the Doctor, all of him

But that's not the ending rhyme

The night she and Rory wed

Amy jumped out of her chair

"I remember you!" She shouted

And the Doctor appeared there

And so the Raggedy man came back

No more in the crack in the wall

Amy's imaginary friend

Bowtie, suspenders, and all

Later came an astronaut

Her name was River Song

She lifted her hand and against her will

Killed the Doctor, gone.

But, hooray!

The Doctor wasn't dead

It was wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

Stuff messing with their heads

And Amy had a daughter

Name? Melody Pond.

But the only water in the forest is rivers,

So she was really River Song.

Subtract love,

Add hate

Daleks scream

Exterminate!

Angels, Angels everywhere

Take a little blink

In the ground and in the air

And then they took Rory

"Come along Pond, please!"

He said with a cry

She turned to him and said

"Raggedy man, goodbye!"

"No!" He shouts in despair

"It can't be true!"

He stands over their grave

Oh Ponds, he loved you

He sits on the steps

Letting River fly

Too grief stricken to hurt

Or even to cry

Dreams are broken

Time stands still

The Doctor runs up

A small rocky hill

Afterword, it reads

By Amelia Pond

We love you Doctor

And we're sorry we're gone

There's a girl waiting in a garden

She'll be waiting for a while

So go to her

She needs a smile.

Tell her she's a fairytale

Known by many, loved by more

Not best in the universe,

But most important in the world.

She went with him and took his hand

He showed her the stars and distant lands

Together they ran, their spirits high

Until they day came when they said goodbye

Goodbye, Ponds.
mark john junor Dec 2014
she has stars for eyebrows
her phonetic smile says so much more
tightly wrapped in the grey gaunt gauze of daylight
eyes still closed
i wait arms breadth away for her...
to breath
to open
while mind touches upon her journey
while pieces parts of her epiphany are spoon fed
like chocolate grace into my feasting and willing heart
i am the succulent afterword
to her speech now uttered in its completion
...with its grand street ballroom
upon which we
all in our time of giddy laughter
need to dance like royalty or fools
...with its back alley rainwater
that washes away all those terrible yesterdays
i am the sweat mongerer who waits
for her sleeping to be roused...
transcendental she sleeps
with a soft drink
while i nourish
in the folds of her slumbering dreams
Jane Smith Apr 2021
Strange, there is a shadow cross the graveyard,
And they gaze wistfully back to me.
In their hands a sparkling poem,
Bleeder of flesh and life alike.
He rounds the headstone draped in sable,
His pace matched by the lines I sowed,
Kneels among the dirt and mourners,
Leans forward embracing me, melancholy.
Whispers sweet nothings and forlorn promises,
Buried together under the Earth.
Her kiss so lone, condemned her tears.
And she departs, hastily as the blood fell.
Slowly as the dark became null.
Robyn  Dec 2014
afterword
Robyn Dec 2014
But through everything I do
I often think of you
You're everything to me
There's little else I need

I promise to love
If you promise to live
When I promise my hand
That's all I've to give
Charlotte Dec 2017
There are things,
we write about
because
we don’t have the strength
to speak them.

Unpublished,
sitting in secret journals
or folders on phones,
harsh enough to bring
tears to every mans eye.

Times of attempts,
death, troubled loves,
childhoods too traumatic to share —
we see no resolutions.

I wonder,
if that’s why
occasionally a poets
most emotional works
are not found until
their death.
I feel like this poem is a good explanation of why I write and why I want to share my writing with more people
Omar Ibn Elkhatab went to visit the blessing land
Where his successor was there

He was honest of this nation
This was the calling by the prophet

Ibn Elgrah was the little men
Who believed in the prophet

The prophet evaluated him
He was so strongest at his thought
He believed in God

He believed that he the only
Who control the all creatures
Who created everything
Who could hurt or get useful
Who made the sun rose

He believed that the prophet will get victory
And beat other opinion
He believed that infidels be at undermost

The believers who were hurt
Asked Mohamad to pray to his God
To get these atheists

They worshipped another god
They worshipped some statues
The begin of statues were from that person
Amro ibn lohie was the first Arabian who worshipped these statues
Who was so ranked an important person
All Arab heard and obeyed
They looked to him as a persuade

As he was so pious
He saw the humans at elsham land
"the blessing land"
Included Syria, Jordon and palatine

He saw them worshipped these statues
He asked,” Why?
They said,' as we asked them to down the rains
They rained "
He asked to give one of them
They gave "Hobal"
Hobal was the first statue
Was put at Mecca
The honor men were irresolute
They final worshipped

Afterword the statue increased
Mecca was filled with statues
Equal to the year's days
Two of them were famous

They called " Ellat and Elozza"
They were woman and man
They loved each other
Their love was so strong
They went to Kaaba
The holy home of the God
They take a chance when the mosque was empty

They entered Kaaba
They did the sin

The anger had prevailed
They converted into statues
Naked as they were born
For the ancient Arab's foolishness
They put one of them at elasafa
The mount where the umrah and hajj Muslims
Walked to it
And Marwa they walked to it
Doing as hager did

Hager was the wife of Abraham
The grandfather of the prophets
He married her
When she had pregnant
And got a child
, his old wife got jealous
So he was ordered to immigrate
He immigrated to the holy land
Mecca

She was so empty
The dessert was so the queen
When his family established
He leaved them
Hager called at
" where do you go?"
She was an old Egyptian princess
Of the elmenia governor
When hexoses occupied Egypt
They took her as a slave
She took a snake as a pet
No one could rap
She was so honorable
And the king of Egypt admired
So he gave her as a gift
Her wife loved her

So they became friends
The respected family had good character
They deal her as free as an honest
Sarah the old wife of Abraham
Advised him to marry
To get his dream child and get his happy
He married and got the child

Hager called at
" where do you go?"
She repeated three times
There were no answers
She asked, "Does your god order?"
He answered with yes
She said," so he will not lose us!"
He went

The food and water was finished
She went to the mount
She had to get food
She looked at right
And ran towards the mountain
It called "Elsafa"
She got over it
She looked towards the valley
Where did the holy home of God exist
She must still believe in God
That upper power prevents every worst
That gives goodness, luxury, blessing,
She learned everything from the prophet
He cultivated the faith in her heart
She gazed at her son
She ran towards him
As he cried a lot
She carried him and rocked
He became so calm
But after some silent
He cried again as the hungry bit him
She stood and ran towards the another amount
It is called
"elmarawa"
She got over it
Looked at the wide valley of the land
To find any one carrying food
Or even carrying water for the drink

She looked again towards the place of the holy home
And looked towards her son
Her heart called her
To get some aid to get him calm
She stood again
As her child cried
She ran towards the mount
Who is called
"Elsafa"
She did it seven times begins with mount
Elsafa
Ended with mount
Elmarwa
She prayed to her God
Every drop of her blood
Every atom, every part
Let the rain of happiness covering the world
Let the seed of love growing so full
And get green and good fruits

Let the day covering every seed
To make the feast appeared
Let the hearts praying one word
Thanks our God

She got up over the mount
Elmarwa
After she looked at the wide valley
After she found no help
After the mind of human thought
That he would fell in destroying
She looked towards the blessing point
Even the devils lied eggs of failure
After the crows got off every pigeons
After the injustice was the announcement of the world
The hope must overflow
She found her son got calm
She thought worst thing had come

Her heart flew her up
She moved with a blink at his leg
The great angel downed
He dug that land
The water flew up

She was so happy
Her kinder got calm
The angel must deal him with happy
She faired that the overflow of water
May destroy every point
No hager, your God is the highness
No Hager, no
Your God knows the fare
She said,"Zam, Zam"
It became zam zam
Muslims when do vesting the holy home
When they do Umrah or hajj
They walked between tow mounts
Elsafa and Marwa , as they get known
They also drank from zam zam
Blessing water


to be continued
inside the pains, inside the hopeless, there will be a hole of light. God will get every happy
believe in it

— The End —