Back to my land of verdant green
To feel the bite of winter chill
To know that while all this is so
That far off land enthralls me still.

That far off land of granite peaks
Of crystalline white massif high,
Of conifer which scale the *****
Of rocky outcrop to the sky.
The baking heat of desert mesa
Spread as far as eye can see
Sage bush in its fragrant aura
Tumble **** soon rolling free.
Squirrel dart on shale cascade
Of green grey slate on alpine flank
Bright blue birds in curious hover
...For this, my reeling senses thank.

Fishing boats in bright array
Adorn the West coast sheltered lee,
Crab and mackerel brim the bin
Of bearded fishermen with glee.
Pounding surf of North Pacific
Carves the rock of bastioned coast
Embryonic currents cold
Do modify the climate most.
Redwoods huge clad coastal ranges,
Bright geraniums do sing
From earthen pots outside the cafe
Hot coffee fragrant from within.

Hilarity as laughing people gather
Watch as yelling Serbs do sling
Huge silver fish across the stall
Amid Seattle's Pike's Place din.
Colour paints this market place
Flowers stacked in every hue
Noisy vendors bawl their product
Creamy ice cream cone for you.

Streaming dust in streaming hair
Scree slopes avalanche past for thrill
Mountain crevasse yawns aloof
As ATV's roar up the hill.
Wild terrain of wilderness
On mountaintop of forest fir,
Cougar, grizzly bear and wolf
In pack are found herein astir.
Atop the very precipice
We view the everlasting peaks
Magnificent in summer sun
Embalmed in snow when Winter speaks.

Freeways snake from coast to mountain
Clover leaf in junctions pile,
Forty ton trucks pull big trailers
Endless day for endless mile.
Barrel straight these concrete tarmacs
Stretching far as eye can see,
Headlong surge huge pickup trucks
But cautious eye for Sheriff be.
Roadside diners loud and raucous
Selling burgers, selling beer
Neon flashing through the night
Old ***** waitress' toothless cheer.

The years have clad our friendships well
Familiarity's warming hand
Allows resumption of our words
Despite the 40 year gap spanned.
Houseboat floats in crowded wharfage
Swimming through a clear cool lake,
Californian wine with friends
Hot chilli food and fresh bread bake.
Eye fillets grill on barbecue
See the distant mountain peaks
Summer snow endures aloft
Glows indigo as sunset speaks.

Endless skies of cobalt blue
Cloudless in the summer sun
Gracious denizens do offer
Generosity unsung.
Graciousness across the land
Across these people so diverse,
The wondrous gift of ready smile
Friendly hand and open purse.

History tells these people spoke
Electing leaders for their time
When sanity's quiet need arose
It was promulgated on the line.
With Washington and Lincoln
Through FDR to JFK,
The Presidents who bed-rocked
This Foundation for the nation's day.
Astounding, that exceptional men
Have carved this face from stone,
Have caste the global presence
That Americans call home.

I understand the feeling now,
Of pride and patriotic stance.
I understand the inner strength
Of America's great, true romance.

This poem bequeathed to our good friends who inhabit this land... Big Rich, Suzie and Mike, Our mate Stevo and Ian, Heidi, Wyatt and Cooper, Dear old Greg and his elegant lady, Holly.
But most of all, with gratitude and love, to our marvelous son Boaz and his lovely lady, Angela.

Marshalg & Janet
At "Foxglove", Taranaki... In the Southern hemisphere's mid winter.
2 August 2013

i'm actually writing in Turkish akimbo on the floor,
****** uncomfortable,
can't do the hunched monkey spine of Blitzkrieg...
the problem lies with my cat,
a Maine **** that's actually a bloodhound
come bed time... his ******* operatic meows
get to me... he will meow down any werewolf's howl
any night of the week, with 200 variations...
he's like a dog when bedtime comes,
he rapes his way into my room,
takes comfort in my writing chair,
keeps me up listening to βετo βετα's
between two selves - i call this the reason
for never stealing from Hinduism...
outside of Hinduism the economic model works
just as effectively as Auschwitz with cows...
come to petted animals, putting yourself
second doesn't... you get to see the many variations
of character in these buggering fur-*****;
****** got gassed, i see it as a natural karma...
because why would he have a Jewish girlfriend
who committed suicide with him the bunker?
i won't pity them... ****** knew the measure
of things, having been gassed himself
he knew the wounds: and so will millions who
thought world war i was fought in vain...
remind me... as once the northern invaders
accommodated the Roman alphabet and dropped
the runes... what you conquer you express
as an incorporation of certain qualities...
luckily the German work ethic was unshaken...
but it shook the English sensible life:
work! work! work! ready meals in between:
two favourites! two! cheese cauliflower and lasagne.
to keep up the once colonial Herrwettlauf in
charity limbo... you ain't donating to any Africans...
Bobbie Geldof fooled you...
it goes into milking the ivory skinned skin-heads
once retired... Africa is more than just a suntan...
it goes back into ensuring we don't work
in Chinese factories under lynching-contracts...
case no. 0 (or contract) - we'll just call you when we need you,
otherwise we'll contract the cheap steel and cheaper
salt from the Dead Sea:
new social order... after all that colonial piracy i'm sure
we can afford investing in a body mass indexes...
is this how efficiency is structured?
quality control and quantity control...
well, capitalism knows quality control...
but it does't have the foggiest about quantity control:
hence so much waste, and supermarkets throwing out
food into the gutter... the quality control is there,
but the quantity control is missing: always excess, always
excess, always excess... sure i get the Muslim
argument about drunken Brits in Spain and Leicester...
but what about those Saudi children speeding
in their sports cars? no one going to criticise them?
after 50 years... our shame will be a greater
instigator of global warming than a diesel engine...
cheeks puffing up into rose and rose and everything's
finally not so rosy as we thought.
so here i am, writing in uptight akimbo without
the writer's hunch of reverse Darwinism,
all because my Maine **** is acting like a bloodhound,
gets depressed before bedtime...
why are these animals needing my bogus company?
when it comes to music i'm selfish; ah! he
doesn't like the night and the modern orchestra of
grizzly exhaust engines doing the baritone with rasping
the new church bell (phlegm) with a hark uvula...
it's called Irish poker for a prayer...
the van de graaff toy generator is on in the darkened room -
then the typing ****** him off, he's off...
thank **** for that...
but why is it that the once infamous Axis strategies
are creeping into those that strove to defeat them?
we are getting Japanese karaoke culture,
we're getting welcoming euthanasia programs spanning
the dicta of Belgium and Switzerland,
as people want dignity in their death...
they're queuing up to the once known enemy...
maybe it's because these Axis powers were
never colonialists...
                                 just finishing watching Indian
Summers season two you get the picture...
god and the dodgy monkeys...
stay... sit! stay... sit! **** it, let's lynch that Eton ****
of privy accents... ol chap... ol chappy...
trot along... the turban bomber and half
the thought that a Pole learning obedience from
Russian and German would learn to be cinnamon
skinned in England... i'm almost suspecting the
Irish are the SS in the project.. generation of the Vietnam
saint soaked in gasoline... oddly enough
that has no place in Europe, apologies that i don't
share the sentiment... it's obviously the
counter crucifixion scene and emblem,
but only in: LET'S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN...
i told you be afraid of the blonde ferret...
i see the prognosis just like Britain exiting the European
union... California is not even America,
who gives a **** about the American Secular Vatican, anyway?
it will be like as if Canada was part of America
and resembled Scotland in the Jackshit Union...
gross the vote on the puppet...
the Democrats will get New York (the equivalent
of London) - i don't know how to twin Reading,
and that blue belt of remain campaigners linking the two,
half of who would speak as much of French
as an advert concerning the sales of socks...
or enough German to order a pint of beer in a Bavarian
pub... well, Canada would vote like Scotland,
one revolutionary figure (who was actually Muslim,
and never cared for African-American concerns
of Baptism... singing hallelujah was never part
of the do)... can't be replaced with another revolutionary
figure... he was never exactly a Martin Luther King Jr.,
more of Malcolm X than you thought...
that strip between London and Reading
will be translated into Ronald Reagan's resurrection...
a billionaire is more ridiculous than
an actor? well... who we going to call the pretty boy
and the favourite of media cartoonists? boots on the ground,
a society that doesn't practice dialectics is not
only rude, but out-of-date...
the debate of the park bench now resides in separate
stadiums, monologues that involve something
that physics unearthed: two sources of negativity
existing in two places, at the same time...
if this is a debate, then i got the postal code wrong...
the dialectics of knowing nothing became: i still know
nothing, but i have 4 million people supporting me.
i imagine the cavemen to be less subjective that we
try to imagine ourselves as resembling, Michael Palin
in the Sahara... cavemen worked on instinct, not on
appeal to the intellect... that thing
about the jokes of the vibrating lips and the index finger
moving against them to invent the Mongolian harmonica...
given the complication of urban life... well...
you'll hardly revise that bit... that part of life is gone...
i assumed that the more we evolved the less
naked we became... but given evolution and having
created this parasitic symbiosis with the natural
elements... the more i think of it: the more naked we're
becoming - the more dependent -
the original sin as conceived from the delusion that we
were disabled by our originally conception of nakedness...
it only comes now... once the dependency kicks in
and we're all in bow-ties and cocktail dresses...
hello Herr Fetish and page 3 milking of the farmyard
cows of our imagination - Islamic eye-fetish,
we heard of footfetish... must be about oral ***...
knees baby knees, Arab has eyefetish on your knees...
i have a fetish for hands... see how the cameraman zoomed
in on the hands of the women fencing?
once instinct governed us... and instinct's expression
of intelligence was: i challenge the alpha male,
i'll get **** with his concubines in the harem...
these days intellect governs us... and intellect's
expression of instinct is: i challenge the alpha male,
i'll whip up a horde of lawyers, file a lawsuit
and get away it because he nudged me in a supermarket...
honestly, i don't think educating people was a great
evolutionary step forward...
we have more law-prose liposuction on the pages of
history than a Tolstoy could muster a novel -
and because we taught everyone literacy,
the once necessary backbone of our economy,
the workers... well... let's just say that the Founding
Fathers made their muscles into oysters and molluscs,
floppy protein spaghetti... wiggle wiggle, yeah, wiggle wiggle, yeah...
defeating Communism in a place of the world that was
prone to some sort of religiosity, enzyme John Paul II -
i'd bruise his forehead and lips against those airport tarmacs
i'd get to be the inventor of sand-paper and
the Antichrist's assault on the biblical reference:
it only takes on saint to defeat the congregation... it starts with him...
or with that Calcutta Lady and Hitchens...
and oh... lookie here... up pops Hydra China:
America will be great again... but chances are...
the hot dog and the hamburger will never be re-invented...
watch the pendulum... op op oop oops here it swings
while the Hawaii communal laugh about starving
on coconuts.

Up and down strange alleyways,
We ride our bike into fences,
knocking over garbage bins,
spilling out all pretences.

Look at the side of my face as I speak,
my mouthed syllables’ suit.
Recognize the shapes I am known to make,
hear my clubs on mute.

Short runways are carpeted tarmacs,
take offs for toy planes.
Neon flags guiding us to square landing strips,
ignoring shin splints and ankle strains.

It's much too late again,
I'm in the bathroom practicing ****** expressions,
locking them into muscle memory
for my future confessions.

Let’s repeat the same mistakes,
until we have them perfected.
We’ll loop our lives,
what's not a refrain will be rejected.

The whiteness of the milky way
witness your name invariably
in the corner of chaos and order
Inside fragments of settled sediments

There are words that I await
to stream from the fountain
the base of the veined heart
Inside a core to be uncovered

Phrases that wish to be whispered
the nudges of intentions held back
collapsed and clasped in a clap
the ribboned truth that fades

Tell the tales of the indelible ounces
Pronouns and nouns of love and hate
Proverbs of the scent of your breath
The Jasmine that roasts your tongue
Let it's smell infuse my jumbled being
Tell the tales of the indelible ounces
Taboos and tattoos of eternal love
Traffic and tarmacs of the road travelled
The lavender that seduces your mind
Let it transfuse my animate system
Tell the tales of the indelible ounces
Songs and secrets of the bright sighs
Sums and seams of endurance
The cinnamon that spices your life
Let your kiss evaporate in my mist mouth
Tell tales of the indelible ounces
Nuances and notes of our untold story
Novices and nemesis of the unnamed race
The rose that savours your sweetness
Let your hands caress and weaken
As you tell the tales in indelible ounces

when violins play
sound becomes a miracle
taken: from a cat's gut
horses' swishing tails
tree spirits and spine rosin,
flying into the air
climbing infinite heights
to land in patterns
on these confluent tarmacs
of hearts and music

-cec

A car owner in Nairobi Accra, Ouagadougou or any African city
would, as one drives through potholes and ancient ragged tarmacs
be approached by beggars, street urchins and the poverty strickens
all with hungry faces and rags reeking of miseries and street lifes

With arms outstretched they beg pennies or two for a meal to survive
in the blazing sun hopeless lives look to the cars and those who drives
meal tickets wheezing past impervious to painful rumbling stomachs
in air-conditioned splendor they glide quietly past unmoved as stones

The poor wretched would hiss and snipe in ringing tones and anger
look at you useless person, you stink and you **** that dog you have
your mama is a *****, your father is a donkey and we **** your wife
you can't read and you **** yourself, you are a worthless *******

Some hunger crazed ones will throw stones and spit as cars speed on
again, again these desperados will exercise their right to free speech
Mister, you wet your trousers, you're fat like hippo and you smell
you and that woman, you look so ugly like charcoal and mud statutes

As they hurl insults and jipes at these car owners they found relief
with wide eyes and foaming mouths and rotten teeth they laughed
each cheering the other and high fiving as an original curse spews
it's the frustration of the wretched, it's the anger of those without

But worry not for we have these same forlorn and desperates here
angry, powerless, insignificant people watching successes drive
hating all those they feel is above them, hating those they envy
hating those they wish they could be like, hating their mediocrity

But they don't mill about on dusty roads screaming asinine insults
they go on computers and troll their targets, projecting their pains
flinging defamation and putdowns, hurling demented idiotic slurs
casting doom and despondencies,  accusing others of insecurities  

So like their African kinfolks, the wretched and the poor find relief
mediocre needs to release pent up frustration and pained anger
they need targets to hate and blame, they need distractions to ease
and the troll screen warriors and haters have the computers to thank

Their African kinfolks just want a meal not to waste time and energy writing **** to their envied, that is nonsense ****, they say!
These people too full for their bellies, what is wrong with them
them crazy, maybe their ***** done fall off, maybe they **** dogs
crazy western poor people, no wonder God give them long noses!

Who are we to judge, I'd say...it must be horrible to feel inferior....!!!

The light shade
The skin invisible
Sword blown in air
And necks splash blood
The land of beauty filled with blood
All over the ground
Not spears nor arrows
Sword nor machetes
Not bullet nor bombs
Lives shading and fading away.

The African world losing sight
Losing unity and love
It's been turned on to a shadow of pain
Striking hardworking souls
On the heads
Bodies lay on the tarmacs
Turning it red
Blood flood the way
Why
Why this Africa?
Lost love here here.

Cop26

To Glasgow, they came the high, mighty and the good
tarmacs full of private planes.
They all agreed we have to rescue the world
But first, we have to sell oil and coal
We can´t rely on windmills alone it is cold up north
Norway is set to have zero emissions in a few years.
Norway will still export oil; they have to have an income.
Brazil will stop logging the forest but not right now
Perhaps in 2150 or sixty at a stretch 70.
I was not there at the meeting, but it appears no one
spoke of the benefit of trains reliable prized.
As it is train tickets – since trains are privatized;
cost more than taking a short-haul plane ticket.
I don´t believe that anything they said is possible,
That is because we live in a capitalist thought- sets
grows and income is more important than flooding
and the disappearance of smaller island states.
Nothing will change before we sit fishing for cod
At the slopes of Himalaya.