ME Man Walking

It has been a long while since posting. Holding down a job, family and my inner world is tough, tougher when you have Myalgic Encephalitis (ME) and energy is the currency of consciousness and thought.

Like the world debt, the 3 debts of;
monetary debt;
energy debt and
environmental debt,
without these energies all becomes harder to do, there is collateral, damage and suffering, financially, prosperity and pollution’s death of a thousand cuts.

Well ME is similar as this, only embedded in the personal: physical, mental and conscious. Unhealthy and mind and body numbing.

When it struck me down at the end of 2005, all was lost, and quality of life stolen like a house repossessed by the bank.

See my first poem below on the first wave of devastation and energy starvation, just what will happen to our modern society on this planet soon?

Certainly, as I say in the title and at the end, I am not the voluntary lost, and I think we are all 'not the voluntary lost' in these times of 3 debts coming home, we will all feel like this before the end of my lifetime, not from an illness like my ME, but from the failure of our leaders to address the real 3 debt crisis. God damn it, we even have radar to see the icebergs, but we go on sailing the Titanic of our civilisation at as fast a speed as we can, straight towards the rock of reality that will hole us way below the water line.



Not the voluntary lost
Stage #1
My Myalgic Encephalitis ( M.E.)

I've got the decorators in, but I never invited them here.
They've torn back the wallpaper in uneven slices,
Left ruffled layers of dampened past memories hanging,
Then gone home with paint cans and brushes left out.
I've got the builders in, unwelcomed,
With plans I have not been informed of.
Knocking down walls, breaking plaster and cracking views,
Rearranging the rooms in my slowly ceasing mind.
I can't find my mental list of things to do;
I have looked in all the memory draws I can find,
Everything crammed in and covered by the shadowy weight
Of moving paperwork and once new clothes.
What's left has all been stir-shifted, piled up on the floor,
Or hidden under clueless dustsheets. . .. . ., or broken,. . .. . .. or skipped.
Even I seem different now, not the person I had been.
I haven't the physical or mental strength to move, to wave,
Drowning, stuck in this ocean of verbal inability, cut off.
Me... that is I... am not the voluntary lost.

Sustainability and Poems

Poems have the unique challenge; of trying to say what can not be said in words.

We ourselves are often left with the everyday chatter of the verbal mind, the oppressive history maker and commentator of our own media inner world. We need to become more sustainable, to hand over power and decision making to the non verbal aspects of our minds, bodies and soul.

For me, sustainability in ourselves is allowing the understanding that is presently gagged because it does not use words, to come out into the summer sun and kick its heals as did the mining ponies when they were brought up on their annual excursions from the always dark mine tunnels to the meadows up by the pit head.

We can in ourselves uproot and transplant the broken children of our emotions and spiritual lives, presently struggling in the cast out rocky unnourished lands, to stand in the fertile soils, the water chattered and sun drawn land of regrowth and loving care.

We can not command this to happen with sentences created in the mind, with agendas, policy statements and on-message dross. But we can use the word medium weapons of the oppressors by creating poetry that is dipped in the magic of humanity, keeping these vision and waking dreams alive in our heads. The rhythm of the words and their meaning trickle through, the mind drops its 24/7 tell tail security, and the words become meanings greater than the sum of the word count whole.

Here are 3 to go ............ do you want fries with that?



Do the Dead need a Passport?

Do the dead need a passport?
No rictus smile photo
No physical characteristic
No distinctions at all
All become the same, for once and ever more.
Memories in others conciseness.
Do we sit on their bones
Or stand upon their shoulders?



The Circus has taken over the Asylum

The Circus has taken over the Asylum,
Lifestyle is the new Entertainment,
Fast Food is the new Bread;
How's your appetite now that it's Formula Formulaic?
Desire is the everyday new Requirement,
Spending the new cut Drug,
Credit the new word for Debt;
Can you juggle or ride bareback?
If you can do neither, I am not interested:
Tough.........................................................................................................next................



Washing away those tears
Funeral of my father, January 06

We all see people differently from where we each do stand,
And sometimes too emotionally close
We suffer from intimate bad sight lines.
The cutting razor of challenging intellect,
The drive of our passion and our blood,
Divided us behind pools of stagnant unasked questions
And sea barriers of emotional soft unbidden soul drifted sand.
They hold back parental closeness
With a ruthless, smothering cold hand.

And time, the healer through learning,
Or pacifier through memories gradual loss,
Either sharpens one's true feelings,
Or blunts us with soft pillows of so much dross.
The Reaper's arm is moving closer
Father taken in this year's crop.
My love for the old man has flown stronger,
As the sands banks and marsh he was safe behind
Are swept away by the flood tide
Of my grieving, howls, tears and sobs.

Number 6 has left the Village.

Number 6 has left the Village.


......... a moment of quietness comes just before the patrol bubble hops into view to take away the dream of escape, and the open view across the sand and towards the clear horizon is now spoilt by the intrusion of this ultimate symbol of society's control of the individual,


Perhaps we all seek to lose the identity we are given minute by minute by our own internal dialogue, and hour by hour by our friends, work colleagues and the endless string of images from the TV, press, radio and the interweb. No 6 only had the village radio, a few fellow citizens, public meetings at the village hall, and the frequent meetings with the ever changing No 2.


Mental fitness has a State stamp of approval nowadays, like the physical fitness that is a requirement apparently to enter the upper hierarchy of moneyed life style for the business executives...

So some sort of mental and emotional attribute is something we all should encourage to face the tough years of a bottom grinding economy, but really we need mental strength to be realistic enough to know that we are all bozos on this bus. That we all give a meaning to one another, and that it is not always a pleasant and attractive face looking back at us from the mirror in the morning.

We need an appropriate attitude in the breakdown of the spoon fed, hyper re-enforcing world that is shaking to its boots.

What do you want?
Innnnnnfformmmmmmmaaaaation
You're not going to get it!