Portraiture of previous lives lie beneath my feet
And forward spans a future that I know must stay discreet
For I’ve learnt through harsh experience to take care for what I quest
That *** of gold at rainbows end I’ve found…a mixed bequest.
As mythical to contemplate as money grown on trees
In truth the carnage gaining it has near brought me to my knees.
Millions brought security, offshore banking locked within
But also brought suspicion born relationships, now languishing.
The billions are a burden and a loneliness is born
For new friendships are hollow and old ones now forlorn,
The parasites surrounding you, all bicker to compete
And empathy flows out the door where values are replete.
Vicissitudes grow day by day, it’s harder to relate
As underlings smile woodenly knowing deep within, they hate.
A disconnect is now complete the burdened weight too much
But worse befalls regression, just impossible to touch.
For what is now, is meant to be… from here I wear the Crown
And woe betides that snivelling sod who tries to take me down.

M.
16 April 2016
Auckland city

You are the breeze, the gale
You're the forces I inhale
The spume, the flying spume
From the flank of mighty whale,
You're the roar of pounding surf
On a mile of empty sand
And the hand that guides the albatross
From deep abyss to land.
You are the scent of sodium
In the still of ocean dawn
And the feather of the white seagull
Discarded on my lawn.
You bring a tear of sanctity
When I'm alone on stormy cliff
Through a thousand notes of harmony
In your howling seaward riff.*

M.

For Mark C. who kept the pride.*

What we've been is seldom seen
Through circumspection's view,
More's the like the broad's a ****
Before we seek anew.
Tunnel vision's sought derision's
Always hard to take,
Providing you too, seek anew
To give this guy a break!
For to dwell in negativity
On confrontation's rim,
May well court condemnation
From both noble and the grim.
So bite the grit n' cut the ****
And climb aboard, my friend
For one and all respect this call's
Rough justice in the end.
M.

Home – This warm familiar place
An ****** of every day to me
Where cooking smells and laughter dwell
The cat curled up on grey settee.
Noisy kids run in the hall
Sun beams hang in shafts of light
But dust motes in suspended drift
Reflect that something isn’t right.

Agitation twists her thought
He said he would…but didn’t then
Which led to heated, wounding words
That killed the mood and distanced them.
Home, where no one lies and cheats,
No one says those hurtful things
Unravelling the textured trust
Dispersing peaceful tranquilings.

No one storms into the night
With slamming doors and loud abuse,
Wracking sobs at kitchen sink
Unravelling to no good use.
Fearful, wide eyed, silent kids
Crept away to sanctuary
To furthest bedroom down the hall
Where silence helped the peace to be.

Home – that warm familiar place
That ****** of everything to me,
Where once, that ghost of happiness
Would dissipate from us to flee.

M.

Hovering in the shadow of an undisputed retinue
Loitering intentfully despite our dearth of luck,
Pursuant of dreams now diluted by reality
So diffused amidst corruption that we just don’t give a ****.

What could have been, but wasn’t, in a wash of crude contrition
Being torn between addressing all or chucking it to hell,
I ask you where, in lifetime, was compromise an issue
Particularly if confronted by the tolling of truths’ bell?

Perhaps we should or shouldn’t in the light of an admission
Confessionals so painful in the starkness of the day,
And cowardice worn covertly is not our choice of garnish
So darling heart, this suicide’s the penalty we pay.

M.
5 March 2016
Auckland NZ

Thought you had a thicker hide my succulent, enticing friend
Thought you may have grit your teeth to bring this to a sweeter end,
It’s just the way you frame your words, so eloquent and mystical
Plus sanity’s touch heavy hand in what was writ, logistical?
One would have thought a bigger girth, broader shoulders, squarer chin
Than to resort to hot retort of pressing BLOCK…thus cancelling?
Disappointing how it ran, how it voided all before
When, then, you might have easily... avoided showing me the door?
Still, I guess, what’s done is done. We both shall live another day
Where, hopefully, the sun shall shine allowing us both, out to play?

M.
13 February 2016

Americans live with fear.

Fear of being found out for what they are….an incredibly insecure people populating the most powerful nation on earth.

The power of Wall St. feeds their fear in the belief that the nation’s leaders and political machine have been bought and sold by big money.
In fact the only candidates registering positively in the current Primary elections are those who feed the fear. Trump feeds the fear every time he opens his big mouth.
Hillary engenders fear because she is a WOMAN who can, most probably, win the votes which will give her the Presidency in November next.

Americans fear the resurgence of Asia in China’s burgeoning thermonuclear militarist stance, the utter unpredictability of the simmering, India, Pakistan standoff
And the instability of the plump, demonic, demagogue armed with the atomic weaponry in the bleak wasteland that is North Korea.

Islam’s mobilisation scares Americans witless. The savagery of the Isis personifies all that is promised by an expanding worldwide Islamic threat.

And then there is Putin's Russia.

The encapsulation of American fear though, is painted graphically, starkly, by the nation’s absurd fascination, obsession, with the hand gun.
Everyone has a hand gun, in the car, in the office, in the mall, in the bedroom…..some even strap a hand gun on the hip to go to church.

Americans, first and foremost, fear each other.

Fear of the fear exacerbated by more fear.
Americans live with fear.

M.
Auckland NZ
13 February 2016

I don’t give a **** who runs the world
Just so long as they keep their anonymous women out of the picture
And don’t knowingly, crash cymbals on Sundays.

Whilst I’m ominously left of centre and kinda’ right of everywhere else,
I can’t help but watch the political circus perform.
Polititians everywhere, particularly, currently in the USA, are flexing their muscle, using the tools of their trade to the best advantage:
Coercion, persuasion, exaggeration, the blantant use of unsubstantiated facts, manipulation, outright lies and even overbearing bullying.
I hear them rant, I see them strut.
Their egos blooming like peach blossom,
Projecting themselves on the populace.
Preening their image with self serving eyes, loving themselves shining brightly on the podium in the morning sun.

But here today, gone tomorrow.
Their words hang, resonantly, like loud vapour suspended…then vanish.
The believing crowd gathers, sways, roars, disperses…and promptly forgets.

The circus is global, playing out its’ performance with expediency, bombast, and utter disregard for consequence, collateral damage incurred in achieving their immediate imperatives…to Hell with the tomorrow ahead.…
Occurring simultaneously everywhere…you can watch the circus performing daily in Amsterdam, Washington, Beijing, Kolcutta, Canberra, Munich, London, Capetown, St. Petersburgh, etc.etc.

Watching this, with a sense of disbelieving astonishment, I’m amazed that anyone actually bothers to take any notice anymore?

M.
11 February 2016
Foxglove farm, Taranaki NZ

A curling green tendril climbs from its’ birthing nest of rotting bird ****
The creeper wends its’ way up round and around the stalk of its’ slender tree host. Leading vigorously ever upward, it climbs toward the light of day. Upon bursting through to the sunshine, it explodes into a huge and suffocating dominance. Wrapping its’ leaders tightly together, writhing skyward, smothering all else. Blotting out the sun. Inhibiting its’ host tree, ultimately killing it ...and every other living plant located below it.

In late summer the creeper produces bunched, masses of frothy, green, seeded florets. Clouds of green plumed waxeyes flock en mass, to flutter, competing ravenously to feast on the banks of seed heads.
Once replete, with full crops, the tiny birds fly off to distant shaded woods there to indiscriminately drop their ****, unknowingly further spreading the insidious creeper pestilence.

I trudge through my wooded glades,
Indignantly I sever taproot after taproot with my trusty sharp blade
….and watch that creeper limply sag and die
With a glint of satisfaction in my grim and vengeful eye.

M.
6 February 2016
Foxglove farm, Taranaki, NZ

Thinking of the how and why, the wherefore and the who
Returns me inexorably to the serenity of you,
returns me to the values you hold there in your hand
When you smile your gentle smile and say you understand.
When you calm the stormy waters and sooth away the tears
And take my craggy face in hand to kiss away the years,
When you sit and share a moments time to sip a cup of tea
Reflecting on those little things that mean so much to me
...And when you smile into my whiskered face with those honest eyes I love
My world becomes as tranquil as that peerless sky above.

M.
Foxglove farm, Taranaki NZ
8 February2016

What do you see nurses? . . .. . .What do you see?
What are you thinking .. . when you're looking at me?
A cranky old man, . . . . . .not very wise,
Uncertain of habit .. . . . . . . .. with faraway eyes?
Who dribbles his food .. . ... . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . .'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . .the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . .. . . A sock or shoe?
Who, resisting or not . . . ... lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . .The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking?. .Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse .you're not looking at me.
I'll tell you who I am . . . . .. As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, .. . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . .with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters .. . . .. . who love one another
A young boy of Sixteen . . . .. with wings on his feet
Dreaming that soon now . . .. . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . ..my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows .. .. .that I promised to keep.
At Twenty-Five, now . . . . .I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . .. . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . .. With ties that should last.
At Forty, my young sons .. .have grown and are gone,
But my woman is beside me . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, .. ...Babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . My loved one and me.
Dark days are upon me . . . . My wife is now dead.
I look at the future ... . . . . I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing .. . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . And the love that I've known.
I'm now an old man . . . . . . .. and nature is cruel.
It's jest to make old age . . . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles .. .. . grace and vigour, depart.
There is now a stone . . . where I once had a heart.
But inside this old carcass . A young man still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells
I remember the joys . . . . .. . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . . . life over again.
I think of the years, all too few . . .. gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people .. . . . .. . . open and see.
Not a cranky old man .
Look closer . . . . see .. .. . .. .... . ME!!

Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within. We will all, one day, be there, too!

I’m blowing the whistle on they, those morally compromised fey
Who prey on the crowd all complaining aloud as collapsed mortgage fritters away.
Whilst the fat bankers dance a jig all the rip offs are ******* the pig
And at the end of the day, these protagonists say, “The Controllers here don’t give a fig!”
It’s the Federal Reserve that’s to blame and old Greenspan is floating in shame
‘Cos the system’s a sham and they don’t give a **** and nobody here’s naming a name.
Now the greed and the arrogance flows, how extensively, nobody knows
They all cover their bums and they snigger to chums as the de-frauded now come to blows.
For today’s finance, Government, sport and the God factory’s… all just a rort
On the verge of collapse or at least in prolapse, leaving truth and integrity…..BOUGHT!

M.
Auckland, 16 January 2016

This night a rich brocade of colour in the sky
Doth overwhelm all misery, so fetching to the eye,
Breathless in the scope of everlasting piling cloud
Embroidered in a golden cloaking, riotously aloud.
Abruptly surrendered to the racing pall of night
Where colour tones extinguish, now, to diamond points of light,
Where chill envelopes warmth with a shiver to the back
And the night consumes the majesty with a shrouding inky black.
Angrily I challenge the abruptness of the change
Where my spectacle of wonder died to darkly rearrange,
It's so typical of nature’s way to give and then to take….

****! …. Wake up fool…this attitude?..just give the world a break!

M.
13 January 2016

Spun on a thread, a gossamer thread
Hung on a dream in a watershed,
Shadows suspended in effortless time
Regretting those words left unsaid.
Regretting omissions, those hesitant thoughts,
Words bitten back by the tongue,
When clear expression could lighten the load
To sing every song left unsung.
So dimly, through deficits' dust laden air
In a shaft of brittle white sun
My confession remiss for omissions amiss
Paint bereft-ness before it’s begun.

M.
11 January 2016

"In peace our nations unite"
...to do exactly what?

Wring our hands in horror?
Write to the Gazette?
Retreat to the safety of our invisibility?
The sanctuary of our silence?
Quiver, hidden in the doubtful safety of the masses?

Most people will do this,
lament the tragedy and let it slide with a shake of the head and a frightened, pious silence...

When in actual fact.....
what we all should do is take up the drum and beat it deafeningly, furiously...and together, roar our fury to the powers that be....

That they take up the sickle and pursue these creatures to the end of the earth and deal to them once and for all!

Amen
M.

Ordinary people
Doing ordinary things
On an ordinary day
Slaughtered,
Suddenly.
Violently.
Causlessly.
Irrationally.
B­rutally.
So that
Jihadists
May salve their lust
For Power
And
Caste havoc
In their own
Misguided image,
...In the name
of their own
Perverted cause.

Allah the Almighty
Surely quails in horror
That they do thus
To the innocent,
In His name?*

M.
15 Nov 2015

Sparse grass adorns the hillside
Thinly green against the grey,
Where lurking bull ant wolf packs
Hunt where chirping crickets play.
Way too thin to waft in breezes
Way too thin to really count
Like bad dealerships in Chevrolet
Mostly struggle to surmount.
Like thin pacifists in fist fights
Race, back peddaling for the door,
When, in fact, the convenience
Is a bullet through the floor.
And hot starlets jiggle **** jobs
Strutting carpet, red as rose,
Imitating, superficially here,
Whoredom wishing to impose.
Those roaring Russians, in denial
As their cheating athlete’s pale,
All denied their right of entry
To Olympia’s Holy Grail.
And insipidly they all collapse
In fracking’s blatant wake,
Leaving gloating, fat Americans
Gorging merrily on steak.
Whilst the oceans are advancing
As the ice floes dissipate,
And the clamour is ignored
Though Island nations inundate.
Fractious currencies do vacillate
In global bouts of greed,
Where the rich are fatly richer
And the rest in desperate need.
Where all truth is but a fantasy
Which everyone ignores,
Where expediency is the answer
And future proofing snores.
Black distrusts the whiteness
Islam hates the Jew,
East and West at loggerheads
What hope now…. for you?
Oh sparse grass adorns the hillside
Thin green against the grey,
Where the morrow is a vaugary
And worrisome it’s way.

M.
Friday 13th November 2015

Tangents fly
As serpents die
Life ends as it begins,
The ups and downs
Terrain of clowns
Commits it all to sins,
So, go for broke
It's just a joke.....
'Cos he who loses...Wins!
M.

But....Wouldst thou see
Thy perjury
In pondering my
Soliloquy?
And should thou wear
Thy penury
If truth should prize
Thy concience free?

Then, writhing thus
For all to see....
Wouldst thou blush
A smile to me?
M.

The little towns near Egmont
That nestle on the plains
To gather close the winding roads
The homing trails and lanes,
The little towns near Egmont
That sleep the whole night long
Cooled by the scent of mountain breeze
Lulled by the sea wind’s song.

The little towns near Egmont
Will ever seem to me
Like stars that deck the evening sky
Or isles that dot the sea,
Like beads that sprinkle here and there
On Taranaki’s gown
Like figures in a rich brocade
Of yellow, green and brown.

The little towns near Egmont
Seen through a summer haze
How fair and fresh and free they lie
Beneath the golden days,
Not crowded in deep valley’s,
Not buried in tall trees
But open to the sun, the rain
The starlight and the breeze.

The little towns near Egmont
What busy lives they hold
With happiness and health to keep
Secure from heat and cold,
The comfortable homesteads,
The park like lands so fair
God keep them restful, clean and pure
As Egmont’s snow peak there.

Hanna Hair
Dawson Falls Lodge
Mount Egmont, Taranaki.
January 1926

This poem, hand written and forgotten, was written by a guest of the house, in a thick, ancient tome of comments and articles, secreted in a dusty corner of the beautiful and quaint Dawson Falls Alpine Lodge, nestled comfortably in the dense, high podocarp forest, far up the snow clad slopes of volcanic Mt. Egmont in Taranaki, New Zealand.

From its high vantage point on the mountain looking out toward the curving coastline of the vast Tasman sea, the lodge affords magnificent views of the sparse settlements and farmlands spread widely on the lowland plains before it. By day the smoke rises from farm house chimneys, by night the warm honeyed glow from scattered windows dot like an expanse of fire-flies amidst the velvet blackness extending out to the luminosity of the line of breakers pounding the distant coast.

This delicate work captures the sparse beauty of this magnificent rural place, it further affords a snapshot of that particular era and of the pioneer spirit and rugged endurance of the settlers who made this isolated land home.

Marshalg
Dawson Falls Lodge
26 October 2015

Loneliness walks hand in hand
With he who strides the long way forth,
With he who walks the path alone
Through solitary’s East and North.
Firm his sinewed hand so strong
That steers the compassed vessel back
Bridging pitfall’s chasm wrong
Through deft manipulation’s track.
Guiding they who pledge good faith
To fall then, by the wayside, weak,
Then in bridging disappointment’s song
Instead, he helps them to their feet.
So long that night of solitude
With stark decision’s crucial stack
When none would share that brutal loading
Weighing solely on his back.
Lonely is my leader’s song
Lonely as his dying day,
Would that he could share a word
Who would understand his way?

M.
17 October 2015

Touching the moment, this delicate moment
Touching the face with its’ sad falling tear,
Softly aware that strange feelings surround us
Cloyingly close with their aura of fear.
Fear of a mantle of misunderstanding
Fear of uncertainty choked in forlorn,
Cloaked in thick prejudice clad by constriction
All drowned in a sea of wet ignorance borne.

Where stand the rational reaching for reason?
How seek the humble in searching for more?
****** not the javelin of angers’ contrition
In weighing this moment, I humbly implore.

For thus sits the fabric of deep understanding
Thus lies the tantric of feelings unspoke,
Thus the true substance of one to another
Uttered in wisdom through words best unwrote.

M.
30 September 2015

Arbitrarily flung to instants of moment
Scattered free in the gleam of the eye,
Cast with abandon to scattergun’s chances
The wondrous pearls, I’ve occasioned to fly.
Together with detritus maudlin to moribund,
Together robustness’s wrongness in rouge,
This crimson lusting with anger’s green jealousy
In scattered intemperance now fawning to rude.
Spindrifts of coarse-ness in calico fabric
Flooding of richness and redness in heat,
Shadings of blue in palaegic intemperance
Now flung to eruptions of laughter complete.

Marshalg
28th September 2015

Jasmine flows in lemon scented tendrils
Wafting on breeze in honeysuckle air,
Drifting in promise of delicacy hovering
Caressing pubescent delights from despair.
Delicate flavours of spearmint and juniper
Tilt in a torment of honeyed delight,
Garlanded avenues sweet and deliciously
Titivate nostrils till sensuous night.

Amorous airs in the warm summer evening
Poignantly poised in the lingering scent,
Romantically touching the tremble of senses
Released in a sigh of exquisite content.

M.
22 August 2015

Shadowed in the deepest trench
Four good men stand and stare
At my white face now reflected,
As if I wasn’t there.
Through a barrier of ethnicity,
Down walls of wooden eyes,
To pass through halls of prejudice
That none of us disguise.
They see me through a spectre,
Depicted by a ruse,
Of elemental difference
Which neither party choose.
A product of upbringing
Incumbent in each race,
Between us lies discomfort
When we search each other’s face.

They are black and I am white
Our blood shares crimson red
We all love our wives and family
And we struggle till we’re dead.
Why we amplify this difference
Why we bear this manic cost….
Where a hue of pigmentation
Means all reasoned thought is lost?

There’s a sadness in the offing
There’s an air of quiet remorse,
For mankind to come to terms with this….
The beast must run its’ course.

Marshalg
In the deep northern trench
27 July 2015

“Whilst smiling to my face thou
Hast plucked the ****** from thy boneless gums”
Thus spake the venomous she,
When querying the quandary
Of “The Milk of Human Kindness.”

That altruism,
Proffered by many as sincerity
In a charity bequeathed
To the disposessed and less fortunate.
Is an act which may be, in fact,
Obliquely or brazenly,
A lure to enhancement
Of personal nobility sought.

“But the quality of mercy is not strained
It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven.
Twice blest… It blesses he that gives and he that takes.”

Thus so, is ****** upon the truly altruistic…
An interminable questioning
Of the Impetus Behind the Act ??
In order to mitigate
THE JUSTICE OF THE PLEA.

How stands Thee?

Marshalg
25 July 2015

Bent beneath this candle’s flame in shadowed cavern lost to light
I wrestle with my rationale to question what I seek is right.
To bend my beetled, battered brow, bent fist beneath my whiskered chin,
To worry, nay to question why…my daughter’s hand is right for him.

Complex are the reasons why he strives to seek her hand,
His dubious inflexion in the way he likes to stand…
Looming and superior he condescends to give
Long lectures of complicity in how wrong, mere mortals live.

There are fractures in the porcelain, thin cracking of the glass
And a chill wind blows within me should I let these questions pass.
For I doubt the man’s sincerity, distrust his very stance
And I’m loath to giving daylight to exposing this to chance.

I’ve come to a decision, hard, to snare his spiders web
With deceptions of complexity with potions, black and red.
Tomorrow as the daylight dawns I’ll paint the mountain's frown
In sowing seeds of conflict to bring this union down….
Endureth she of curve and grace, repaireth she who cries…
I’d rather this, than see her bleed, a lifetime wed to lies.

Marshalg
24 July 2015

All nations beat their own drum.

The US, China, Britain, Russia, Europe, Israel, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria, France, Germany and a whole host of others, have been beating their own drum in deafening cacophony since realisation dawned of their individual sovereign potentiality.

Every nation is manouvering for their own best self interest…and in this volatile environment of the Middle east plus the factor of the complete savagery and unpredictability of the rampaging ISIS Calithate….any outcome, anything is now possible.

Iran is the meat in the sandwich.

She squirms this way and that, buying favour here sacrificing loyalties there, switching, adjusting. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends at the drop of a hat. Writhing within herself attempting to find the path to the future in an incredibly difficult minefield of pressure from the onslaught from the East and the West….A crushing miasma of pressure from friend and foe alike.

Who can say which way she will jump? The only sane predictability is that Iran will leap to her own salvation, her own survival….and to Hell with the rest of the barging, braying self-obsessed world.

Marshalg 23 July 2015

Pandering to platitudes am I….
Running riotously adrift
To spice my day with pleasures.
Pleasures caste in portraiture so stark
Of thee my love, of thee.

In curvature of smooth refrain
And delving vortex of unimaginably fine dark fur.
Reclined in attitude of ease…
With mischief dancing about thy porcelain, painted lips.

Oh that I could die with this indelible art?
Slip away to this shrill cacophony of sweet,sensate spree?

M.

Recep Tayip Erdogan though Turkish to the core
Has loathing in his Turkish heart, ferocity and more
For the secular insanity’s of Bashar Al Assad
Determines chaos at his border with warring Syria is bad.
With incursions by the Kurdish to the ISIS foe at hand
And the umbrage taken by the Kurds at Turkey’s open border stand,
Where ISIS can permeate both back and forth at will
Allowing freedom for Jihadists, now, to raid, behead and ****.
Europe visualize this menace at their doorstep as a threat
But Turkey, playing both sides, leaves NATO, now side stepped.
Where our friends become our enemies and enemies our friends.
In this Middle East miasma ..... confusion never ends.

M.
27 June 2015

An ode to hospitality and the magnificence
of New Zealand’s majestic South Island.*


Pale Granite massif plummets down from snowline to Kaikoura coast
Where white waves seeth in ocean rage atop the green of dark abyss,
Below subducts Pacific plate to buckle mountain mantle’s boast
Titanic forces ****** beneath the wheeling flock of sea-tern’s hiss.

Cold winds blow from seaward swell of glaciation far to south
Where blue whales hunt the clouds of krill and ply this ocean’s constant roar
Through icy currents rich and deep resourced from white Antarctic mouth
Whence icebergs blue shall calve and drift, where seeking albatross do soar.

Frosty on this Winter morn, green rolling hills caress my eye
Deep shadows creasing valley clefts, round sunlit pastures highlit, mound.
From coastal dune transitioning to snowy mountain crags on high
The splendour of it all, my friend, entrancing me in sense-surround.

Blown red tussock streams to windward, ripples in concentric waves
Ripples in the mountain’s flank surmounting to the alpine pass.
Bastion of high country shepherd, striding forth with dog he braves,
The loneliness of isolate in isolation’s clawing grasp.

Tempest in the black beech forest thrashing leafage falls like rain
Rain in sheets cascades from clifftops, waterfalls in grand parade.
Hellish clouds embrace the fiords in hellish lightening flash refrain
Fiordland in majestic style in vaulting might of storm’s charade.

Grey light in the estuary, reflections in still water stand
Of fishing boats at wharfage in a timeless moment’s instant gaze,
Riverton in midday mode as fisherman’s coarse calloused hand
Prepares to launch beyond the spit to brave the sea, to snare the crays.

Comfort in a welcome smile, welcome in a warming fire
Luxury in the steaming sting of shower water piping hot.
Blue cod baked so perfectly with pinot noir to my desire
The sanctuary of “Land’s End”, quaintly, the very best New Zealand’s got.

Marshalg
“Foxglove”, Taranaki
25 June 2015

*“Land’s End”… An exquisite find, a very English bed and breakfast hotel located, remotely, at the very tip of southern lands end at Bluff.
A delightful discovery to complement, perfectly, the utter charm and grandeur of New Zealand’s wonderland....
The magnificent South Island.

M.

Oh ye student of Gothic complication
How dost thou writhe in a sea of nightly scented jasmine?
How dost thou cast off the shackles of thy piteous life lost?
To effortlessly shed the ruckfall of protagonists
...in a double narrative of well travelled refinement?

Linguistically intriguing it be. the richness therein enthralls.
A depiction of contemporary expression from a student of sleight of hand, wed in a rapture to the knowledge that whatever thou has written, shall flow through the fingers like a waterfall of soft white sand.
M.

Little is known and less is appreciated about the geographic, strategic and political significance of the Spratley and Paracel Islands situated midway across the South China Sea.

Disputed historically for ownership by Malaysia, Vietnam the Phillipines and China, amongst others, the islands are situated strategically across the major commercial sea lanes of the region and atop an ocean of vast, submarine deposits of untapped fossil oil.

China has used her muscle to occupy and claim these islands, together with unspecified, adjacent sea way area. She has claimed them as sovereign territory of the People’s Republic of China. Until this occupation the islands have been largely unpopulated and have had little or no military significance. Recently, however, Chinese constructors have been ruthlessly dredging the surrounding coral reef and building a 3000m long concrete runway for military purposes on the hugely expanded artificial island area created.
Chinese troops, in divisional strength, occupy and defend the new territory.

It is significant that all parties in the region are watching China and gauging her intentions. None less so than the United States Navy who have an aircraft carrier and supporting military vessels, stationed permanently nearby and conduct over flights of the island airspace testing sovereignty and Chinese reaction.
To date reaction has been muted….but this will definitely change.

China is frantically building to be the world’s next superpower, economically, industrially, politically and militarily.
...And, as this development comes to fruition in the very near future, it is inevitable that this distant, remote set of  South China Sea islands shall become the next global hot point of international confrontation.

China and the United States of America will go eyeball to eyeball, bristling with hostility, resolute and immovable, each waiting for the other to blink!

…..and we, the rest of the world, shall, again, tremble in our boots, breathlessly awaiting the outcome.

Marshalg
22 May 2015
AUCKLAND.

Dissatisfaction curls the lip, so felt,
Alas we deal with what we’re dealt,
Contradiction screams her song
Alas that she could be so wrong.
Potential oozes from my pores,
(Of course my dear, what’s mine is yours)
Surely there must be a way
To reach beyond my limit’s day?
Limitations frazzled paw
Allows me much… but then no more,
Restricting me to what I’ve got
Within this irritating plot.
Dissatisfaction curls my lip, so felt,
Damnation deals with what I’m dealt!
M.

But to pass from beige to puce to rose
bequeathes a choice, I do suppose,
A choice of whence thy shall or shan't
corral thy name or curse thy can't.
Hold it high or cast it out
Regardless, LET-THY-LOUD-VOICE-SHOUT !
....For he who wears his mantle thin
Forever then, be clad in sin.
M.

Birth is  a beginning
and death a destination
And life is a journey:
from childhood to maturity
and youth to age;
from innocence to awareness
and ignorance to knowing;
from foolishness to discretion and then, perhaps to wisdom;
from weakness to strength
or strength to weakness -
and often back again.
From health to sickness and back we pray to health again;
from loneliness to love,
from joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion,
and grief to understanding -
from fear to faith until,
looking backward or ahead,
we see that victory lies
not at some high place along the way,
but in having made the journey, a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning and death a destination.
But life is a journey,
from birth to death......to life everlasting.!

Sammy

Intangibly, it cometh and goeth.
Substanceless it slips in transition from one immeasurable instant to the next. Equitable to infinite space, in terms of distance, infinite time is a concept quite alien to the finite human mind. There is no proof of existence, it is a human conception with no sensory component, an illusion and utterly immeasurable in real terms with only a human contrivance to calibrate it....(and poorly at that).
Time is the silken zephyr on which we lay our dreams and aspirations. It is the currency of deep religion and is regarded as the ultimate sword hand of God. Incorruptible and absolute it brooks no favour, seeks no fame. Irreversible in it's cold implacable, unquenchability it merely, unfeelingly.... proceeds.
M.

But what would life be like without these encounters?
The spark of passion ignites that which is supreme in the patina of our days, of our years, of our very being.
It comes and it goes...but in going it hovers in a spangled irridescence just beyond the now and endures in this special place, until the day we die.
M.

While reading an article last night about fathers and sons, memories came flooding back to

the time I took me son out for his first pint.

Off we went to our local pub only two blocks from the cottage.

I got him a Guinness.  He didn't like it, so I drank it.

Then I got him a Kilkenny's, he didn't like that either, so I drank it.

Finally, I thought he might like some Harp Lager?   He didn't.   I drank it.

I thought maybe he'd like whiskey better than beer so we tried a Jameson's, nope!

In desperation, I had him try that rare Redbreast,Ireland's finest.   He wouldn't even smell it.

What could I do but drink it!

By the time I realized he just didn't like to drink, I was so feckin ****-faced I could hardly

push his pram back Home.

That giant wheel of life grinds around us
Sometimes it's sweet or so sour.
A meld of habitual habits
A mixture of ash amidst flour.
Concoction of humour in sadness
Of chuckles in midst of the tears,
Of ingratitudes greatest propensity
In stealing those yesterday years.
I guess there's good in the badness,
I suppose there's light in the dark
But the factor that burns
In the hope my mind yearns
Is that bitterness drowns the remark.

M.

But...Tantric mumbo-jumbo Joe
Issued from a dribbled lip.
Issued from a tortured mind
Which writhes in phraseology to slip.
....slip between the now and then
Slip between the right and wrong,
confused about reaction to
Our capacity to sing your song.
....that eerie tune of deep lament
Lament for what should be, but won't,
For we is but a subterfuge...
Who says it did but knows it don't.

M.