Poetry

Just a drum
A shaking rattle
The missing snake
Moves and dancing girls all over the place
My mother does business in Japan
The speaking trees
Environmental leases
Razor Guarding the wilderness of the American everglades
Stationary like a magic bean before a giant that pays the minimum age
A wage for the imagination is at Amazon’s doorstep
Terrified before 100s of offices worldwide about things the K says
Real before the invented
Crude before the demented
Timeless before the dead
On Social Media before the best read.

These are the times of the These Times
These are the times of the New York Times.

What they will say, only some people will know
As England goes down below
Hellish Realms for the Chinese people
Saddened by war again by steeple chasers
Hungry for The Commonwealth Games
And more things that fame in English has to say –
Not about the Americans in English land
When children go to the walking park with politician for some Saturday sand.

Is this a question John Lennon will understand
How about Ringo Starr so death defying with the McCartney man not to stand oaths before pass the final stone
Leaving is such an alone thing to do
I guess we’ll be here being beaten black and blue being forced to like some musician
They don’t care about us at Glastonbury
Maybe they are content with the Bible and Mary Berry.

So, I’m going to go and get my Bible and some self defence
And see if these wise kindnesses from other books make some comment, meaning, earning and noblest sense
Like the fat man said when he sold me some bread
And told me to travel the world as a well read man.

Then I will find the women better to please
Talking fine things on a Sunday afternoon’s time in a café’s ease
Something forgotten in the motions of the last few times
When war dominated our minds
Diamonds were so out of the ordinary
Women forgot to like their watches
Men dressed in drabby suits
And the photographer was never interviews.

Sell me four Gospels, please, annotate them like Milton
Leave the Old Testament in Arden’s back yard
Don’t borrow me from my millions.
One day strip them down and explain to me the things that John Said
When the Mayans are so skippy in the best laid plans on man.

How do we pray to them?
What are their names?
It seems they travel like the Hindoos
Keeping up twice as quicker with the fame.
Then I need a car and my own house too
Something borrowed from an unclean man
Then you can tap my machinery and quote me illogical
So I will win some races and be there on time at the restaurant
When I can afford a date with my fantasy girl
Lost one night on a deserted island
Far away from the TV
That said all these things triply.

That is for me
The misspent awkward word
Maybe then I help Jesus
Not say so many things Church absurd

One Day

I have the feeling I am not dressed correctly
Am I in need?
Pudsey on the dancefloor
Aunt Jemima to the local Nursery School…
… they played me like a football team
The dreamers
The people who saw the goals of Universities
Like men and please the right people
Stay on top of Church, State and Steeple.

I fell over
All the way down
And then down again
When I thought I could not get any lower
I was battered like a Cod piece to the floor for remission.
What if I caught Cancer and had to go to a commission?
Smoke, fire and abnegation,
Sir, surrounded by the crowd
Being allowed
I abused my freedoms since school –
Now.

Correctional facility
Too many computer games for me
Things I am hubristically aware of:
Shorts and shirt sleeve order to take care of,
Eastenders, Corrie and Charles, William and George.
Careful of the devil’s gorge
And the leap of faith required for tired old know it alls.

Testing my faith with the Conservative vs Ed Balls
He was quite an ensemble for her
I saw the pageantry where the Ice Man cometh
GWB and the marching band Tattoo:
This is for the Yankee models in you.

Do they need you in a pinstriped suit
I remember him like I licked his boot
Now. I am back at Church
Seeing life from the corner angle with the Angels
Living like a shadow of openness in the lurch
Creeping like a dowry of nature
Science and the creepers
Gardening and the jeeps carouseling across the deserts
Where the new men have not yet tried the Colonialising twirl.

Dream to jump
A person stretching out of my seat
Maybe I have Yogis to meet
Why can’t I just stay at home and get the job done?
Things they did to women with a bun in the oven
Maybe I have karma to collect from the witches in a celebrity Coven?
Time and the haphazard way
Of organising your thoughts like water.
Sadly, I am gladly without son or daughter –
Things that got in the way of complete collapse and devastation
No divorce for me, Mama: I’m still a one way success driven nation (boy).

Work and the development of futurity
Time for the hurt in me
Modern Slavery
Acts of Parliament ahead of her and I
Me, me, me
Narcissism and the recovery pose
Just this time – think of all you know
You, you, you
Who?

Time for the boy in you
I don’t look right without my toys and friends crew.
Have you seen where my ideal day went and what I have seen?
I would like to be there with you when you know what I mean (?).

Suck Sex

The intelligence
The weak legs
I have confidence problems
The lied about me in The Maya;
Said my pants were on fire
Aishwarya’s stocks were higher
Than Kim Basinger in my youth
Alcohol was not yet 100% proof
The blonde walks away
Pretty Woman (IMDb) has sway –
Boring 1980s is all I have to say!

The gang is due to meet soon
School is memory
Sand dunes
Arabic longing
Scenes and isness sightly
Those are some city lights.
I like to try
Grasping and clinging
Diving into the City
My guys, the sky and I.

There is a tower of knowledge
Some people tried College.
My parents left me with Buddha
He could not be my brother:
Am I the State Trooper’s keeper?
It’s time to see the city sleeper.

The largest social media company
Can’t keep me company
I am alone
All by my mobile phone
Bullying no-one for their clone
Letting companies alert that I will be moving home
… So much To Lettings
… dreams and forgettings
// Since 1993 when the bailiffs left me
Without my own home and a sad family …
Waiting to be number one.
There is no space for number 237
… or even 632//

Noble Amazon crew
Get a job selling books
Getting no dirty looks
Freedom and some freezing nights up late
Trying the mass media approach right now
Something about Krishna
Bart Simpson: “Don’t have a cow!”
The censors jumped
My sensibility said “Ow!”

Do you know how we can adapt
Stuck in so many traps
So I can publish and let the market be
Settled on the settee for who is domestic
Then I can engender gender, differences and sexuality
So the Free Market knows I am up to no tricks.

Sub-Ordinary

That’s the way you made me feel
Forget about it
Outside is inside
What’s mine is yours
It’s time for the Tower of London
Treat me like a forsaken child
As I imbecile the hours away
Seeking things that my mother would say
And never getting past 11.30 without some tea and biscuits.
Subordinate this and control me later
I may quit this job and become a waiter.
Settle some debts and pay karma back appropriately
For some skull drudgery
Before the Druids come back from lunch
I have a hunch they know where I hide.
No Time For “Rawhide!”
Will things settle down as I dine out at lunch
Coerced by the conditioned Church
In the centre of Colmore Row
Things my Ego should know
There’s not much rowing going on here
As I eat my sandwich and gobble down my fears.
They seem to know I am all mouth and ears
Handling my sob story about being so single
It’s just because they want me to compose a catchy jingle.
Jingle all the way to the bank, however
By the end of the month I sum up nicely
“I’m so clever”!

Serpentry

I coil like a serpent
Spent energy and mysteries awash the daily grind.
There are things I cannot find anymore,
The old way of life
Without the English sweet shop on the corner
Reminding me of the value of wood
And old Gobstoppers in bottle jars.

It seems we have come far and the progress is on the roads
That is no place for Toad from Toad Hall

I might see him at the community fair and the Old Ball,
Running around like a mindless chicken
Inclusion in The Fall.
That fallen man and that forgiven woman
Leven bread and three Hindu Havans: –
I will include them in my community pages
Working for less than Amazon rainforest wages.

A few pounds, some pence and lots of corporate sense,
This is no time for Little Miss Moffitt!
Can you fit like a glove around my romantic love
And sell me some verse for the drive by from the hearse.
These are things grounding themselves in you
As you take it all personally, the things you have been through,
Lashing out
Striking back
Like a hack attack
Not knocking on doors at University
Studying in doors for the truth of the universe within me.

I’ll see you at three
And read you there,
Something to help me stay up top and keep mindfully aware.
Just don’t reform all the schools of thought with one foul pen
Lest you fail before you begin to keep it all within your heavenly retention.

Strains

When the MAC is under attack
From the past
From the past
The echos of silent chambers resound around the battleless brain
Causing strains
Causing strains
Mental strains and regaining Paradise with Allegro and the motionless audience
Absorbing the Concerto in the final standing
When the Chinese are pounding the phones for an encore.
Always leave us wanting more, Shantideva
And the emptiness of following Krishnamurti’s chair
When the dies at the end of the Godfather
Leaving our souls aware of the Trilogy.

Saturday Afternoon at a Friend’s House

I walk the familiar road,
a soft December sun leaning over Weoley Castle,
light pooling on the pavement
like a blessing I did not ask for
but accept anyway.

The afternoon is ordinary –
a friend’s house,
a knock on the door,
the warmth of a kettle coming to life –
yet something in me moves
as if this small journey
were another chapter
in the long autobiography
I’ve been writing with breath and memory.

I carry no incense,
no mantra,
no visions of Maya or Albion today –
only the quiet knowledge
that every threshold
is a kind of pilgrimage
when the self is listening.

Inside, laugher rises,
cups clink,
the world shrinks to a living room
where stories drift like steam
from the mugs in our hands.

And I sit there,
not a a fragmented hybrid anything,
not as a mythic figure,
not as a seeker breathing in the world’s sorrow –
but simply as Rohan,
arriving,
present,
held in the gentle ordinariness
of a Saturday afternoon
at a friend’s house.

A small moment,
yet it settles in me
like a stone in a riverbed –
quiet, grounding,
part of a long story
I continue to walk
one step,
one breath,
one visit at a time.

Guru Mania

The teacher’s strike in school
Maybe because they think they are God
At least that is what the newspapers say
After they have travelled to Colonial-ville.

The mania for Guru is on the loose
And they drink the Kool-Aid juice
Of change without fairness and time for their clothes:
When will the scholars admit them to Oxford for Rhodes.

There is shouting there is bashing
The banners need to be repeated.
But if they get to half past three and go back to school
They will have been defeated.

The mirror is not so real until they review the Guru feel
And all they have been taken for granted of being
While the right way of tuition was there for the seeing.

All criticism and no pay
That is the modern Government burden,
What can they do but face the New Age warden
Who grants the diminishing of students and success
For all that sexual gradation and immense emotionality and address.
The Saddhu and war
There is no mention of the Haridwar stores
Where the whore is closer to Babylon
Than the minority women in the back streets of London.
Streets of harlots, streets of shame
Lanes of winners, lanes of the Maine Street.
Things my Guru told me I would meet
When he re-friend my Friend from the great barrier
So I could see the end of the world and the illness and terror.

All this the school is exposed to
The students sit for their exams
And then the teachers fall off their hobby horses
Worried about who can and can’t eat ham.

Teacher, Guru, God-lover and denied route back home
Leave the fellows at Oxbridge alone
They might know where the road leads with the phone.

This is the merger of meaning and savoir faire
Where the guru is in a third way parting
With the self that is still so aware.

Die For Me

Waiting for the exceptional revelation
Of my knowledge born of College elevation
Renders me stuck Art and darkness rebounding
Floundering
Debut
The news in you is the Good News in me
I am neo-Colonial Hindu advertised history.
Save me
Let me be
Just don’t tell me
What the schools needed to know:
An English throw, to wake me up
After I was jammed, in the photocopier room.

Die Cot & Me

The dichotomy does not concern me
Between me, myself and … … …
I said two things
So many to count on earth
You’d think something would give it worth
All the Muslim spoiler alerts.
#that’ssomethingforAziz
And the “BATTERY!!” in True Lies (IMDb)
4 sweet things for Krishna
Butter! If you please.
Save the time for the alloy wheels
And all those Limousines for Lakshmi
It’s either steel or it’s an ore
To get to know two turtle doves integrated On the level playing field  OFPlanetEarth