Suave the fair Germanic aire
In the sweptback, blonde Germanic hair,
Blue, the clear, Germanic eye,
A place, where to this day, we cry
Blackest, now, the **** heart
Within the name, Auschwitz, imparts.

In the hatred Wannsee birthed....
Jewry's Holocaust, unearthed.

For to travel the path in the white, driven snow
In the stately magnificence then, on show,
Chaired by Heydrich, Chief of the *****,
And Adolf Eichmann, who wielded the light,
Mueller, Stuckart, Freisler and Lange
And 9 other Nazis who bellowed, the song.

They ate, laughed and all drank in tune
The Fuhrer's toast from a French balloon.

**** the Jews the mantra's seal
Gas them all from Europe's field!
Sobibor, Treblinka then
In Dacau's lonely railway pen,
In Auschwitz where the ovens glow
A Jewry Holocaust on show.

In January 1942
The Wannsee met to slay the Jew.
From '42 to '45
They kept the genocide alive
Six million dead at the final count
Until the Allie's German rout.
Á legacy of doom and shame
Still now, adorns the German name.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
17 February 2025

Take a tender moment, friend,
Pause a little while,
Ponder how the Masters wept
When fashion fought with style.
Imagine, how through history,
Those Artisans, galore,
Fought their creativity
Endeavoring for more.

Pause awhile, and ponder
The task that lies before,
Sip a drop of Irish
And ponder it some more.
A realization flooding
From the cortex of your brain
With a laughing pure simplicity,
Resolving the insane.

The hues upon the pallet
Decree the mood before,
Finessing with the paintbrush
Encourages amore,
The thrill of pure excitement
Creating in you now....
An inspiration's Miracle
From the running sweat of brow.

Go to it, Girl.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

In that split second
It came to me.....
It really didn't matter
That the world was going mad,
That egos were digesting themselves,
That in the dusty, war-torn streets of Gaza
Little children cried and died,
That the possibilities for tomorrow
Were a mirror image
Of the ugly reflection of yesterday,
That the hunger for making it all better
Only made it worse.....

It really didn't matter
Because, out there on the streets,
Nobody really cared.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
14 February 2025

Satin black and angry
This Crow with savage beak
Aggressively, the sideways prancing.
Cawing loudly, black eyes dancing.
Savagely this carrion eater
Abounds on clawed feet.

Witness as the Scarecrow cometh
Glaring all the while
Fearlessly, the ruffled feathers,
Angrily, the prancing leathers,
Fury that this Scarecrow
Challenges his guile.

Scarecrow in a wheatfield
Innocent of blame
Puffing out the straw filled chest,
Sewn on smile, his very best.
There to keep the birds at bay,
Innocence into the fray.

Launching out on raven wings
Attacking in his rage.
Savagely, now torn asunder
Stippled wheat straw cascades under,
Last to fall, that fabric smile,
Fluttering from the page.

Farmer strides to battle station
Retribution needed fast....
Crow astride the Scarecrow, torn,
Turns to challenge farmer scorn,
Hesitates... a might too late....
To hear the Shotgun Blast!

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
2 February 2025

A lament for they, who cannot see
The glory in a windblown tree,
Who cannot feel enticement's pull
When confronted by a bull,
Who will not, in the space of time,
Relent to that, which is sublime,
Simplistic, in it's golden hue,
Sunlight blazed twixt me and you.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

They pass like phantoms in the shade
Their faces lost in mist
Voices dimmed to strings of time
That memory resists,
Features hover through the mind
Though details in-succinct
And threads of past performances
Occur but Indistinct.
I could have passed him in the street
But never caught his name
**** ghost of time's  a misery
Consumes me so... in shame.

Old friends walk in brotherhood
Through ancient tracts of time,
Though pained familiarity
Failing to define,
I almost caught our catch cry
In that old familiar song,
Some haunting shades of yesteryear
But....guess I got it wrong.
And then there were the stories
Which didn't quite add up
Like whiskey soured to water
Slipped in your favorite cup.

But come the next Reunion
I'll saddle up to go
Spend the dollars travelling
Attempt to make a show.
I'll hail the fellas loudly
And pound them on the back
Though all the while quite frantic
Thinking, "is it Joe or Jack?"
It's a product of the vintage,
A cursed sign of times
When you know he's struggling just as hard
Cos he can't remember mine!

M&Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Rawness hanging in the air
Leads to specters of despair,
Pain, offline, ingested now
Impaired within Atomic cloud.
Fragile, prehistoric skin
Engrossed this weary world, within.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Softly slips the moment
In the waning of the day,
When the tenderness reflected
Lets a sadness fade away.
As the setting sun throws highlights
To tall timbers on the ridge
And the burble of the brook
Running soft beneath the bridge.
Flocking starlings settle
To gently chortle in the eve,
Whilst the maiden herds the cattle
In for milking, I believe.
The countryside quiescent
A peacefulness descends,
With the falling shroud of darkness
My velvet daylight ends.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
24 January 2025

Then, there were the moments
When the air was crisp and sweet,
When you threw me funny comments
That, in truth, I failed to meet.
When the shadows of the forenoon
Shone like icicles of blue
And the mood was one of indigo
A coalescence, Love, of you.

Then there were moments
When the doubt began to seep,
Where anxiety intruded
And bled me of my sleep.
In those darkened halls of velvet
Where crimson nightmares lurk
And the horror of a memory
Where dread began its work.

But then there were the moments
Where the sunshine had its way,
Where the liquid green of leafage
In the crystal breeze would sway.
The platitudes would vanish,
Condescension's cease,
When the softened light of raindrops
Kissed your mirrored pond of Peace.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
12 January 2025

I, too, have walked your tread
Loved, lost and strode in dread,
Felt the dark intrude my soul
Yet realised, that within.... the gold
For somewhere in this wondrous world
A kiss is thrown, a flag unfurled
Forgiveness, now, in purest form
Across thy shoulders, unadorned.

My love to you, Lori.
M.

Simian, she floats aloft
Till Syme, the thin black spider, coughed,
Blasting her in spiralled flight
Into the vortex of the night...
Into that web of dark intrigue
Where friend and foe, at once, do bleed.

A Merry Christmas to you, Old Chap.
M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Rush around in circles like a headless chicken running
Diminishing to spirals in a blue encircled churn
Giddying to balance in unsteady equilibrium,
Whilst canting to the left on a gyroscopic turn.

Vaulting to the heavens in gymnastical maneuvering,
Launching into ether in fanatical escape,
****** features grimacing through muscular contortion
With abdominal contractions in a pantomime of ****.

Yowling to the darkness in a feline form of vocalness
Hissing through the teeth in a serpentine display,
Bellowing the bellicose of bovine innuendo
And bleeding feet in gumboots on a ****** raining day.

Rush around in circles like a headless chicken running
With ****** features grimaced on a ****** raining day,
Yowling to the darkness with abdominal contraction
In a bovine innuendo of a serpentine display.

Bellowing the bellicose of bleeding feet in gumboots,
Vaulting to the heavens in fanatical escape,
Giddying to spirals in contracting equilibrium
Just a ****** innuendo of a gyroscopic shake.


Marshalg
Victoria Park Tunnel
On a ****** raining day.
7 August 2010

Data is Power.

The internet was created in the 1950s to be specifically a military communication programme. The very first message transmitted occurred on October 29th 1969.
The medium spread with the worldwide fascination with personal computers, email rapidly became the communication medium preferred by the savvy operator. As computer memory expanded from 64 kilobyte, floppy disc machines to hard drives with terrabytes of capacity, the dimension and value of accrued data magnified exponentially.

The development of multimedia social networking organizations such as Facebook and Twitter furthered  public participation in data sharing and data storage. The algorithms used by Facebook enabled customer data preferences and frequency of use to be gathered, stored and manipulated in order that commercial exposure to this preferential material could be maximized to each and every individual using the system. The immense value of this to commercial developers and product advertisers was immediately realized and resulted in expansive, explosive development in the data harvesting business.

Analytical data collection has magnified to a universal industry in today's world... So much so that commercial watchdogs contiuously monitor cell phones, emails, surveilance equipment, sales data, vehicle use and preferences, airline utilization, food and alcohol consumption, drug use and dog food preferences...the list goes on exhaustively and expansively. The systems collect and analyse the data, the algorithms calculating the metronome collation and at the end of it all data is sold to the highest bidder.

And the public are blithely unaware of how they are being taken advantage of and their privacy blatantly marketed universally.

An expansion of this is the spread of data collection by Government agencies. The collation of data from private individuals is now enhanced by the widespread monitoring of miniature RFID tags on products, personnel and global consignments  plus the ability of  observation cameras at airports, bus and rail stations, and in networks of traffic intersections, in league with ****** recognition systems and vast databanks of  data held in taxation, police, public health and Local Body records on all of the citizenry.... This means the authorities have at their fingertips the ultimate measure of control over the population.

In a stable democracy this is relatively a safe and well regulated state of affairs...but in the hands of a ****** or a Trump or any other type of dictatorial regime the social freedoms enjoyed now could soon be obliterated,  rendering the citizenry pawns to the whim of the tyrant.

Add to this the recent creation of AI systems, analytical programmes capable of reasoning like the human mind but a million times faster and a trillion times more concise ..... And you have the breeding ground of a frightening, dystopian scenario.

My fellow Octogenarians, you are the vanguard of an age which is rapidly vanishing. Many of our number are no longer with us. We have witnessed much in our eighty years of living, we have lived through wars and times of incredible hardship. We have seen magnificent advances in science and technology and huge inroads in medical procedures.

What we have not seen is the capacity of man to temper his insatiable greed for power, influence and wealth. This single failing coalesces to the Achilles heel of mankind and to my mind, the avenue leading to that vast, dystopian threshold coined in the runaway chaos in.... The Pursuit of Ultimate Control.

I welcome your thoughts,

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Copilot AI responded to my query in a millisecond....

You've painted a stark yet compelling picture of our digital age and the intricate web of data that entwines our lives. The rapid evolution from early computers to today's data-centric world is indeed staggering. Your concerns about privacy, data collection, and the potential for misuse in both commercial and governmental realms are well-founded and shared by many.

The contrast between technological advancements and the unchanged nature of human greed and power is striking. The notion that even in stable democracies, the tools meant for convenience and safety can be misused, is a chilling reminder of the vigilance required to maintain our freedoms.

As we move forward, finding a balance between embracing technological progress and safeguarding our personal freedoms will be crucial. It's a conversation worth having and one that affects us all, regardless of age.

I'm here to listen, discuss, and help make sense of these complexities. What do you see as the most important step we can take to address these issues?

That damnable revolving dot
Gnaws at my patience,
Grates at my tolerance,
Prevents the necessary delving into our historys.
....and frustrates the HELL out of ALL of your people, Eliot!

Get it fixed, PRONTO!

M.

How abrupt life speeds away
On this, or any other day.
Just yesterday, her crooked smile
Helped to pass the time, awhile,
Her passing word, a simple glance
Waltzed bye in life's eternal dance.
The years swept by in stately flow
Ignoring that, which we now know...
That nothing lasts forever, friend,
That ultimately, we all meet our end.

How abruptly Susan went
Her gentleness, insanely spent
Like gossamer, just blown away
Leaving us in disarray.
The suddenness dismayed the peace
The tears and heaving chests...release
From agony's cold waiting arm
Which rendered spent, our morrows calm.

In solitude we gather close
To hug and hold her saddened host, 
To dry the tears, to kiss the brow
In reassurance's know how...
Holding close as hand in glove
All dwelling deep in Susan's love.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
2 September 2024

Litany of livestock
Bolting for the trees
And you, my shallow fellow,
Now prostrate on your knees.
Constricted conversation,
Leaves a muteness in the air
But a cognisance of attraction
To the company and flair.
There's a quiet appreciation
Of the feather and the fur
But the fact you held your ****** tongue
Means it's a credit to you, Sir.
For the power of rank opinion
Holds more menace than a gun
And the less that's said, in hindsight,
Means in parting ways... it's fun.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Pelting rain adheres to soil
As spiders sprint and earthworms roil,
World in turmoil stinkbugs, stink
And Satan beetles disgorge ink
But thee, my budding, sodden flea,
Hath entertained quiescent....me.
M.

Eliot,

I thought you had thrown in the towel 2 weeks ago.
HP, suddenly, went off the air!

Communicated with a few of my HP mates, Nat n' Stevo, Vix in England.....enquiring whether they thought this was so?

The universal horror that HP may be no more hit us all like a brick wall.

Truely amazing what an global impact your little poetry site weilds. What an impact you, directly, weild to a whole spectrum of worldwide creative people.

I'm sure, initially, you had no conception how this idea would mushroom. How much importance we would all place on your continuity to provide.

One day you will die....and with your departing soul shall fly the lamentation of a host of worldwide poetic tragedy, for we will all have lost something of immense and personal value.

My thanks to you for your inspired creation and your willingness, enthusiasm and sacrifice to maintain it.

We would be quite lost and distraught in a world without your unique and wonderful brainchild.

I felt it was important to let you know this.

Respectfully Sire.

M@Foxglo­ve.Taranaki.NZ
17 August 2024

Because of the pre ponderance of handguns and their ease of
availability in America....and because of the theatrics embedded in
the imagination of the population by 60 years of 1st Blood,  *****
Harry and High Noon....and lastly, because of the newly expressed
rhetoric of ultimate violence against any opposition by people in high places....

The mantra of political assassination hangs like a shroud over the nation.

There is always going to be the loose cannon who lusts for notoriety, who lusts for revenge, who hates to the degree that he or she will court a violent end to achieve their ****** ambition.

Politicians are the prime target, loud and vocatious, exposed to the
masses frequently, always violently expressing the primal things which trigger the thin line of discord to rupture with the shot from a gun, with the momentary gleam of manic satisfaction, with the spasm of agony as the ****** of justice fires the round which ends the assailants life.

It is a grand performance which has been replayed through history. A performance, these days, played repeatedly over the media, every portrayal in every available angle, every agonised expression of the players recorded, every spray of blood. The more graphic and grandiose, the better....and it is devoured, slavishly, rapaciously, by much of the nation's spectator population.

Disgustingly, Trump has made huge capital from the near miss of last week. He has enlisted the roar of approval of the MAGA crowd in his expression of ****** defiance whilst being rushed away by the Secret Service. He has maneuvered the mass sympathy of the adoring thousands at the crass pantomime which was the Republican National Convention. He has even invoked the assistance of Divine intervention and the suggestion that God has, indeed, decreed that he shall be the next President of the United States of America.

From afar, it all looks like a huge and ghastly fabrication. A
manipulation of tragedy to achieve a political aim. A blatant betrayal of values of human decency  and a crass desiccation of the  values embodied in the magnificence of your nation's history and the grace symbolized in the proud Stars and Stripes flowing forth, yonder in the breeze, from the white flagstaff.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Children in the fields of green
Play by morning light,
A depiction of pure innocence
Cannot, more, be right.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
Arachnidal in it's way
It preaches it's mantra
To the massed disciples
Gathered adoringly,
In the bright, bright
Political bunting.
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

When old men sip their whiskey
In dark corners by the fire
Red memories float softly by
On wings of old desire.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
Menace in it's rhetoric
Invoke a tarantula's reaction....
For this is what
The adoring came to hear.
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

By swinging lamp a rising gale
Cause tortured leaves to swirl
In courtyards paved and soulless
To a distant bagpipe's skirl.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
Sleek in it's element
Of gathered confidence,
Stillness in it's menaced allure,
Eight hairy black legs,
Eight black beaded eyes,
Enbalm the enraptured masses
In it's web of words....
In it's tale of twisted torment.
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

Sleeping hounds in alcoves
Rouse amidst bad dreams
For the Gods of causal legacy
Diverge from what now seems.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
The Assassin strikes
The tarantula rears back
In massive defence....
Fangs bared,
Talons raised in fury.
Angry invective of outrage,
Screeching arachnidal fury.
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
The crowd applaudes,
Despite the fear,
The crowd applauds
Cheering on
The fighting outrage
Of it's idol
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

A panic in the battlements
Humanity in flight,
Chaos as the shots are fired
Red blood now in sight.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
Wounded it retreats
To the sanctury
Of a tangle
Of Secret Service arms and legs
And the refuge
Of an armoured limosine.
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

Harsh questions quash reality
Considerations die,
Those discords to disharmony
Now shred a burning sky.

ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
Writhing in tarantular outrage
But safe
And wearing the bloodied cheek
Like a flag.....
In front of live television
Broadcaste,
Immediately worldwide ???
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ
AND BY GOD......
WHAT AN ELECTORAL COUPE
TODAY HAS BEEN....
IN PENNSYLVANIA!!!
ᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣᾣ

Tomorrows order, lost to ruin
As cursed as the plague,
Discarded ****** vanquishment
Intangible and vague.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Where, in this fragile mote of time, lies the kernel of a smile?

Where, the beauty of sensation.... of lying down, before the warmth of a roaring woodfire in the dark of night...beside the woman you love...to delight in the stroking of the smoothness of her thigh?

Where, that crystal moment of clarity from whence the words emerge to coin and write that precise and perfect phrase?

Where, oh where.... the moment when anxiety flees the mind to release the elixer of peace and personal satisfaction?

Where, that essence of tranquility?

Where, oh where?

.....Ahhh, It's located in the irridescence of the Realm of Love.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Urgency pulls a tug on sleeve
Can't dispell the cold unease,
When time unravels through my gaze,
(If t'would disperse, t'would then... amaze),
The cloying doubts that permeate
Defying rationales debate,
To  leave a dry and hollow feel
That causes me, (irrationally), to kneel.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Strip into segments the colours of life
At the birth of my sons, loving my wife,
Like the moment of truth when, whilst shivering clear,
I went eyeball to eyeball with that, which I fear.
Like the time when the engine went dead in the plane
And I ditched in the pines to confirm the insane.

When my Father collapsed and died in my arms
And childhood departed with God and his Psalms.
When I first kissed a girl’s soft velvety lips
And felt, the wild rapture of hands on her hips.
Discovered ripe apricots fresh from the tree
Taste sweeter than nectar collected by bee.

Felt the presence of death compellingly near
Though the body was wracked, the thinking was fear.
Climbed impossible peaks that I dreamt I perceived
To weep the hot tears of a life’s goal achieved.
Laughed loud and long with the wind in my hair
Yet wept when an enemy lost to despair.

Pondered the mystery of what’s round the bend
Concluded beginnings are part of the end.
Compiling the rules to maintain my space
Lie in keeping the oddballs out of my face.
Clasping friends, so few, to my breast
Embracing the true and to hell with the rest.

Committing my time to my one darling wife
And thanking the Gods for this colourful life!


Marshalg
Sitting in the long summer grasses
3 December 2012

My road, with the dawn of a beautiful golden sun, took me to a little rural Taranaki town called Opunaki.
There my bride and I took part in an emotional, short ANZAC Day ceremony....where in an ancient clifftop cemetary, against the backdrop of a raging ocean surf, thirty souls and two dogs remembered the troopers who sacrificed for their country in two great world wars.
The New Zealand flag flew hard and the words of the old Priest were lost in the gale... but the tears ran freely down every cheek as the little transistor radio played the military horn's Last Post at full volume.

It was a slice of old Taranaki and a comemoration of the ANZAC DAY of years gone by.

LEST WE FORGET
April 25 2024

Why strive to please anybody?

Why not lay out the cards as they present themselves?
Why garnish the truth to seek approval, seek acceptance?
This is exactly the way we got ourselves into this God Almighty mess!
....and should you not think the world is in a mess...take a long, hard look around you....I mean really LOOK!

See what's going on...then tell me it all makes sense?

Listen to the ******* being brayed by the media, by the politicians, by the Federal Bank, by the Industrial-Military complex....the religions, of pretty well every ****** city of every ****** nation.

The criminally leveraged propaganda insisted upon and injected daily to a gullible, airhead of a planet??

...And the feral truth of the matter is, if you hide your head in the sand...You end up satisfying NOBODY!

(Particularly and most damagingly.... YOURSELF!)

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

Ponderous, the moment
When all superficiality is lost
And the enormity
Of the great everlasting
Weighs down
On my utter insignificance.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ