facing the crime section: whodunnit!
facing the sea: photograph in words
facing up: first thing in the morning
Failure: is this numb with expression because all the eloquence and care in the world would make absolutely no difference at all in the inexorable march to progress? Yes.
faintly apricot air?: the time of March
fall: after every inbreath of step there is an outbreath that loses balance to complete it
‘fallen and injured …’: there is a lot to be gained every time I am torn down
the fall of the curtains / folded on the desktop / and the constant / wondering of airliners: rock and, if I’m not really too much mistaken, uh, rolll … (to be read in a Stephen Fry voice)
familiasyncopation: the title runs together the Spanish word for family (which ends in the useful prefix ‘a’ which links) with syncopation to provide a gloriously arrhythmic portrait of a family meeting for midday dinner on a Sunday through the wide open windows of the apartiemento; I’m not even sure if all the noises I heard were from the same family, but that doesn’t matter, they were, they were;
fantasia: writing – the healer
fantasia: all the lives that have passed, living, the lives to come … the lost mind
far better: always the challenge is to stay with the wisdom which is natural and completely unspectacular but as pervasive as the world is wide, rather than the intoxication and excitement of the sense of power which promises effect but actually dissipates in the nearest available gust of wind
far too muscular: you too can have a body like mine
father figure – triptych: the guru works in mysterious ways
faulteous beings: Bodhisattvacharyavatara, Chapter VI – verse 67: Someone acts badly influenced by delusion, naïveté, infatuation, and another gets angry at them also out of ignorance, infatuation, blindness; of these two, which can we say acts without fault, and which is at fault?
Female Peasant Carding, 1875: Female Peasant Carding, 1875 by Camille Pissarro en plein ombre
a few reflections on / keeping your cow / in a large meadow / while walking round / the streets of Horsham: a pastoral
‘field of corn …’: I still try to be other than what I am, and thereby fall short of what I am, and what I could be, to others; somewhat
fifty-eight // and silent prayers: walking through life
fifty / years / old: a long time coming of age
the figure “46″ / in frosted glass: the timelessness of wonder
the figure “46” / in frosted glass: after the crudest discernments the possibilities of becoming beckoned alluring and hideous beyond the front door ‘oh, what have I done, what have I done …?’
‘filtered coffee …’: ‘one more cup of coffe ‘fore I go … to the valley below …’ (Dylan)
finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915: this peice follows my last visit to London: walking downhill from Plumstead to Woolwich and around and back, driving to Eltham to where my mother was cremated
fine: `heard out the window, and what did I see …?
fine droplets / across the glass: a glance-up joined with looking-up developes exponentially
the fingers: 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968); directed: Stanley Kubrick; actors: Keir Dullea
‘finished reading …’: the way to practise zazen during daily activity
first a mishap then clear vision: a trip of days or months or years, ambling ambling everywhere at all, is the only chance to realise the very ground you travel upon while getting back up from it
first Spring storm: the colour of when things being to echo
‘first thing / in the morning …’: the first proceed of the day – if only all the day and all of the night
fir trees: it’s never too fraught in life to see the beauty about
first dog / in the park: a parkoral
Fishermen at Sea, 1796: fetched from the swell of Fishermen at Sea, 1796; (The Cholmeley Sea Piece); William Turner
flat: the grill of a Holden FC wagon was wholly distinctive, the land towards Eastbourne as a distinctly mid-west coast American feel – and I don’t even know what I’m talking about, but there it is
flat blue / carpet: it’s funny how you notice some things all of a sudden
flow: being and know-thingness
fly: to get stuck is nothing; to move outside is everything
footfall: the beauty of watching Hammer Horror films on tv late at night with the sound down was that the drama happened by atmosphere rather than script; how else would a young man learn about love in this world too full of plenty …
footfall: the nearest I could get to Halloween; honestly, I just don’t get it!
‘… for better or worse …’: a Tony Benn-style of procedure
foreign affairs: the second track on Cluster and Eno’s ‘After the Heat’
for goodness’ sake: come on in, take a load off your feet, siddown, here’s your pipe and slippers, would you like a cup of hot chocolate …?
forgotten anything: ’tis the season to be airy
for so long: the landscape of a biography starting to find resolution. But will it resolve in time for the last chapter?
for / the first time: the ethic of what seems to be laziness
for the good of all: never ever let it be thought that the Good of All is achieved through management and target. Never.
Forword: the essentialness of a reader
found: … and I stilllllll haven’t found / what I’m looking for
Four Noble Truths: what more fitting way to conclude this meditating-occupation than the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths (there is suffering in life, suffering is caused by grasping, grasping can be loosed, by letting it all go) for liberation and Bodhichitta to extend that liberation universally …
the / Four Noble Truths / on a train: sitting through stations of realisation
the four whores of the apocalypse: askance from chapter three of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
fractured –: once your fractured there is still a crack no matter how well the pieces are put together again
frame: from Strange Tales #117, ‘The Many Traps of Baron Mordo’, February 1964; Lee & Ditko
free: as the next step I take
the freedom to … // … enjoy: an urge to seize the opportunity of the ashes of defeat – easier said than let
fresh destiny: dripped from “Dr. Strange Master of Black Magic!”, 1st appearance of Dr Strange in Strange Tales #110, July 1963 by Lee & Ditko
fresh start: all of the heartache, all the betrayal, all of the revenge, all the despair, let them all go, they are not the self
‘the fresh air of holidays …’: deep breath; ahhh
from Allen Ginsberg’s Journal, August 13th, 1944: all I added was the [and]
from behind: a happenstance
from lost / to open: ‘So take a deep breath / Pick yourself up / Dust yourself off / [Stop] all over again’ (with apologies to Dorothy Fields)
from my childhood: an epic stage-setting
‘from the …’: a lavish plate from an antique child’s story book
‘from the basement room …’: a portentious dream which inaugurated an sixteen year wrong turn in my career
from the / bedroom / window: the new reach of ‘hope for years to come’
‘from the cathedral window two stories / high …’: still in Totnes; ‘stories’ are definitely … sic
‘from under the awning …’: … may I become a fully Enlightened Buddha for the benefit of all mother migrating beings …
fully clothed: always nobility is far more alluring than flesh
furl-reach: “just talk to me – Mr Mystery …”
garden: … by the time we got to Woodstock …
gaze: the ayes have it
gazing at the night / as my eyes passed the jagged hole / my head disappeared: “Given the Chance / I’ll Die Like a Baby / On Some Far Away Beach / When the Season’s Over. // Unlikely / I’ll Be Remembered / As the Tide Brushes Sand in My Eyes / I’ll Drift Away. // Cast Up On a Plateau / With Only One Memory / A Single Syllable / Oh Lie Low Lie Low.” – ‘On Some Faraway Beach’ from the album ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’ (1974) by Brian Eno
gazing at the night / as my eyes passed the jagged hole / my head disappeared: re-aligned and lost again
gentle: alighting like a bird on the wind
gently straighten: “oh, my back; oh, my knees; oh, Noddy, let’s run away to sea,” said Teddy
getting fat in me old age: ageing gracefully, if I let my stomach out
getting rid / of old books: a consolation of getting older
the ghost with / open wound: a wail from the breakdown in 2010 which quietened and resigned and settled into an ectoplasmic blog
the ghost with open wound: needed re-configuring and formatting, to make sure the wailing and gnashing came in the right places and from the right people
gift: offered in silence
a gift
glamour of saṃsāra: Bodhisattvacharyavatara VI, 20 – There are those who take their enemies’ blows upon their chests, (taking them on the chin) (uras-ārāti-ghātān). It is they who are the victors, the heroes (te te vijayinaḥ śūrāḥ śeṣās), they who courageously disregard all suffering and pain in vanquishing the enemies such as hatred and so forth (pratīcchanto jayanty arīn). Ordinary warriors are just killers of the dead (mṛta-mārakāḥ).
glancing up from the text / searching for ground …: chapter 9 of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara is both a simple and necessarily complicated teaching about the nature of reality: the simple bit is understanding that nothing exists as it appears; the complicated bits are what to do with this understanding at every turn of attention
glass: well, this is as obvious as glass makes it, isn’t it?
glass: the soul of a window
glass: a universal
glass: a 35 year-sustained – and still silently blooming – echo
‘glass filled with redwine …’: always smiling
glide: views from the fifth floor library
‘glints off …’: a still life
g’morning: a call for letting be …
‘gnashing …’: experience of the huge
‘God, who am I …?’: picked over, cajoled, placed this way and that, gazed at the upper corner of the room, and eventually written from entry 33. of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962; Plath wrote this, I merely … Plath wrote this, but the failure is mine, all mine, I tellsya!
The Godfather III: // AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHH …: 1990, director: Francis Ford Coppola; actors: Al Pacino; Diane Keaton; Andy Garcia
the goldilocks stance: succinctitying
gold wedding band: this couple were handsome in their age of embracing both the global and personal events that life proffers them
gone black: ‘ … where are we now, where are we now …?’
good / enough: one of those little lifts in life that show you what an unnecessary production you made of it all
good going into / that gentle night: originally posted in the comments section to https://mlewisredford.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/letters-to-mum-iii-ongoing-term-eventually/ in response to – and using – Jana Smith’s lovely comments, 150814
good job: the most monumental pieces of work in my life or your life are the things I do to myself and to you without either myself or yourself ever noticing they were done but that we are both smiling slightly because they were …
good looking: I wish
good looking: I hate photographs of myself
good session: nothing happened honestly
gotcha: you can run but you cannot hide from my happenstance
gotcha: you can be but you cannot exist from my attention
gothic: ubiquity
gradually finding: that the identity that has crept up around my shoulders for the past 54 years, could suddenly slip off in a second; steady, steady …
grain: what may be hidden but is always there; companion chest of drawers to – ‘standing astride …’
grammar: such beauty reaches out through the ill-fit of time and the leather of briefcase
Grandad / Redford: the lineage of wonder and identity
granny: a micro saga spanning generations down to the daughter with disability
grasses: transfixed and transported
gravity: (2013); directed: Alfonso Cuarón; actors: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896: spanning the reach of the Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896 by Camille Pissarro, the eternal dialectic between nature and industry
Great Effort: like a huge zeppelin coming in to moor in a wide open field
great underbelly to the rooftops: power always always creates its own breathing environment …
‘the great wet side …’: early release …
greedy: here’s a tip
green: … on a hill
green and / luminant / to behold: ‘been fractured and occluded, for so long it’s not true …
green hills: a vertical
‘green plum jam on rye …’: perfect accompaniment to ‘filtered coffee …’
‘green post …’: apparently I don’t drink enough …
‘green post stamps …’: happy christmas everyone …
green top: archetype
green wine: early childhood is growth through history when infused with the talk of four decades previous
greeyn: sitting with all due regard
gre[wh]y / has Daddy left us?: “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream …” c’mon, who said this, who said this?
grey air: and the fields were all brown
grey and yellow: the lives of colours
grey sky: tick …
grey sky: a poet’s work is never done
Grizedale College: … sigh!
Grizedale College: oh, the bittersweet mourn for what might ever verge on opening up, which was beautiful-enough to pursue but nevertheless everly crepuscular
the Growing Man: The Avengers #69, October 1969; script: Roy Thomas; pencils: Sal Buscema; inevitable in 1969, actual in 2015
growth: the 19th century of a seaside town in a post-modern decline, which means … yep, knock it down and start all over again
grrr: wakey, wakey, the beginning of another beautiful day …
grrr: … still tustling
guileless naïveté – / a biographical / manifest -oh!: a little knot formed from the oak of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘candour ends paranoia’. The oak is now 86 years old. The knot has struggled to reach a branch for many years and has only recently unfurled some leaves. It calls itself naïve. It will soon be 53.
gully: the opening of climbing
gulp // spout // and recede: turning the obstacle to the path
guru: no intention to do anything but whole lifetimes created in the doing
gust of wind: “no ideas but in things …”
HA!: victory at last!
ha ha ha: askance from chapter four of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
half an hour: time may stand still but the cosmos still breathes very slowly
hand / in hand: the evening sun washes out the colours of cars enough for hands to hold each other
hands in pockets: an historical
handsome: what a looker!
handsome: is as handsome does
happening: would you like a drink?
happen//ing: the happy Taoist practising perfect calligraphy on the backseat of the bus …
happens: let the crafter of words sit in the front row until the show is over and then write write write to a deadline and an ending
happy birthday, my love: I still love my good friend
‘the happy Taoist practising …’: an urbanal
Hastings: neither all or nothing: what would you do if I sang out of tune …?
have: the triangular prison
Have:’maybe because I don’t watch tv anymore, ‘maybe because I am getting older, ‘maybe because there never do seem to be seers in their own time, but there seems to be no one to define our hearts – particularly now …
Have: the speculative identity of being
Have: just image George Bush’s disingenuous, grinning face (or Tony Blair’s slightly mad eye from trying too hard to be sincere, for that matter) while reading this poem, just … until the end
Have a Good Day: the magnetic polarities of doing and being
Have creates its magic spells / safe within the circle where / you can never lose and never win: whatever…
have got // can do: where do you work, ah, I worked at …
Have-relationships: finding the affirmation is nine-tenths of the contract
Have what, now?: I remember … my old Dad put me on his knee and said … actually he didn’t; and for this I think I will be grateful, eventually
Heathrow / Airport: airports are the best places to see the cardboard facings of society
H e a v e: the ape / tested the bone / tipped it one way / dust / tipped it the other / bones / bounce / raised the bone / smashed the dried skeleton / roared its victory over the environment / and launched the bone / skyward // in the blink of time / the spaceship / waltzed / to rendevous
heavy load: if you carry a pile of thorns around on your back, they will prod and prick you with every move you make, with every breath you breathe, until you just put them down
heavy shower …: an epigloteral
he Had: the man who wasn’t there
heirloom – break / after heavy shower: … do not ask what life can do for you, ask instead what you can do for life …
‘hello old friend …’: “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, / And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. / He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; / And I see him jump before me, when I jump into the bed. // The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow- / Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow; / For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball, / And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all. // He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play, / And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way. / He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see; / I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me! // One morning, very early, before the sun was up, / I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; / But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, / Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.” /// ~ Robert Louis Stevenson A Child’s Garden of Verses 1885
hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?: written for my eldest child when he was young
“…he paced about the bricks with / empty glasses…”: the meeting with my father that I never had, the conversation we never had in all the years we met since. This was ‘medium’ed by, and should be read listening to when reading, if I might make so bold – ‘Wehrmut’ by Cluster and Eno (although, for some reason, it is wrongly known as ‘Für Luise’ on Youtube)
Herbert Road triptych: like wha’ …?
here: there’s no getting away from it, there’s no getting around it, there’s no getting under it; prraise ye the way of pointlessness
here is a / whiney accumulaton of / wisdom: I know, I need a slap; but the pink bar, the pink bar
here today and …: … till we have built … Je ru sa lem …
Hever: the train doesn’t just stop at each station and then carry on – oh no, it continues backward and forward in time along the tracks while it waits; idling
highest / aspiration: do you difficult how sit it is easy to know?
Hill / Street / Blues: yes, from the opening titles; all the rest was merely commentary
hinged: askance from chapter five of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
hinged – From Hell ch. V: askance from chapter five of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; architecture always ever is so much more than trim, being the solidified air of encounter between Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ that still breathes to this day; I’m sure Victor Hugo said something about this at length in the beginning pages of Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I can never seem to find them
hint: I was never lost
hinted: names with which to conjure
‘his shadowy eyebrow …’: an emotional
history: all so much phlaff and piffle that the rest of the sentence cannot be concluded
”hmm …’ …’: a hmmnal but not quite a hymn
hold on: the eternal relation between adventicity
hold them: the more you grasp with want and need, the less you hold
holiday: the revolving comic rack, a dream-machine of new turnings and alleyways in the spaces between the plastic-wire pockets
holiday: what shall I teach them?; WHAT SHALL I TEACH THEM!
holiday: first of a four-part triptych – you’ll have to read them all to figure how that works; all set within Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex; while I was still working as a teacher and wondering when I could have the weight of my own communication
holiday: neh
honest: ah, but the air, the air
hot chocolate: the whole beauty of anything and everything is that because of its insubstantiality and evanescence, everything can change and nothing can be
‘hope for things to come’: looking out through windows is living; looking in through windows is history
horizon: we went to Lanzarote for a brief holiday – or did Lanzarote come to us through the medium of fuselage; either way … the further you travel the deeper you stay where you are; flying … still weird
Hotel Room, 1931 oh, go on, then, have a look if you must; have a hundred looks
hot summer morning: hmph-fing
hot summer / morning: still hmmph-ing, but so handsome about it, now; mornings have a habit of never lasting, in fact they barely arrive when they are already starting to get on – 34 years later
‘the hour before dinner – / the empire of dusk’ – poewieview #6: title gathered and arranged (ikebana-style) from the words of Chris O’Leary in his article on ‘There Is a Happy Land‘, 1966 – ‘there is a happy land/ where only children live …’
House by the Railroad, 1925: Edward Hopper passing
house / opposite: a study in linked dissonance
‘hovering …’: there’s almost nothing to say about this poem; its companion – ‘the blue misty hills …’ – has a little more time
the breaking open of the word …how / … // ?
‘how beautiful …’: the collapse of generations of smile into a single gene
‘how ‘do: the unecessary anxiety of being; a voluminous companion to the more succinct, but none the less widening, strangers published so long into the future as to be unforeseen …
how ironic: absolutely no distractions allowed
how much / to meditate: this is not a question and neither is it an answer
how to teach: about and dedicated to the former Principal of the former school (oh, sorry, Academy … what was I thinking) where I spent the whole 29 years of my former career which had calcified even as it flowered it’s most beautiful petals and eventually snapped under so much pretty weight and fell silent and unnoticed to the ground (and a good job too, it would have been a light, colourful mess in the corridor or the classroom); all of which I am required to not name if I’m to keep the paltry amount of money given for me to just shut up at long last; even after years of escape it seems I still bear a grudge – I really must find a honey pot for it somewhere …
HPB: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society and was much more warm and present than any of her photos would suggest
h’rk ‘eh ‘heh ‘hair ‘yeah ‘eh?: nu’ w’gh eye meen?
humm: in October 2014 we went to Amsterdam for a short break; we stayed both in and on a botel
hungry for a thread or two: the further you travel, the more you stay at home – and yet realise this
Hurst Green: quiet shock
Hypnopompia: “Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” (Chuang Tse – – or a butterfly)
I: between the role and the deep blue sea
I: breathing in, breathing out
I: flashed both from and within – Bodhisattvacaryavatara VIII, 9
I: from Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 42: In previous lives and former times, I myself have subjected just such pain, suffering and torment on other sentient beings, therefore, it is only just and fitting that I, the former perpetrator, who distressed, wronged and harmed all these beings, deserve the return, that I become the attacked, that this becomes my lot.
‘I am a secret / superhero …’: caught between the frames of desire and the pavements of obligation
I am a solid block of stone: thinking in the material world; finding identity in the material world; going round in corners in the material world; breathing with concrete lungs
I am a solid block of stone: the ghost within within the block of stone
I am not yet ready: “for she’s lived it ten times or more, she could spit in the eyes of fools, as they ask her to focus on …”
“… I / am Spartacus”: sign off
I am the / luckiest man alive: thank you, thank you; I am so happy to be here – and remember: I LOVE you all
‘I am the Riddler …’: and I thought for a long time that I was the Batman
‘I asked my Nan to write down her memoirs …’: I asked my Nan to write down her memoirs when she was in her early seventies. She worked at it for quite a time and produced a single piece of work about brushing her sister’s hair. It was written in the small well-formed handwriting which she had been taught at school. I had wanted her to produce hundreds of such pieces which I would edit into a magnificent story of a life worked through the 20th century but she produced no more. Which was perfect.
‘I become better and better at sitting …’: ignorance becoming aware of itself is such joy when done by practice, such tragedy when done by event
‘I came to Manhattan and saw …’: ‘and so, the end is near, it’s time to take the final curtain …’
‘I can hear it raining / but cannot see it …’: I did a training course once: we were told to find the benefits and the faults of a named technique, we passed ‘envoys’ (Learning Envoys) from table to table with our findings and then shared the peak of our work with the whole group (thus ticking someone’s professional development box), but we weren’t explicitly told what the technique was, just that it was an excellent way of sharing good practice …
I can say / that I do all sorts of dance: I started writing this with Sarah Jane Jacobson who used to run a blog on WordPress; I kept on demurring that she was too young and energetic for me, so it came to nothing; I’ve just re-found my parts and doodled with them bittersweetly
‘I can write …’: but mostly I live
‘I come from the brow …’: like the aryan invasion down from the steppes of central asia into the fertile lands of the Indian peninsula
I could smile: but I don’t much these days
I could step / more open: assimilattitude
I didn’t see it coming: … and I’m still not sure I see it coming clinging so forlornly to the hope that they’ll all come to their senses and wake up from the bad dream of the last quarter century
I do: c’mon now, Redford, what’s really important here, causes or effect, recognition or affect, plan or communication?
I do: ah, the leggies needed that
‘I don’t fit in.’: ‘better just face up to it
‘“I don’t know,” he said …’: … I was so in naïve when I went to university; companion to ‘snatched from his …’ & ‘noticed how her hair parted back …’
I don’t know what to do …: when you stand on the roof-edge wall there is a decision to be made … again and again
I don’t need to go out / onto the balcony to see behind me / to know what’s going on: prescience while sitting forward without moving
I don’t think I could do it anymore: how to manage the life out of the very breath that you breathe; how to become so grey that you end up being an idiot
iffyakan / getawaywi`it / you can `ave it: having and being
I find / you find your bones / on the outbreath: sigh!
if left alone: two dangling earrings …
‘if you want to rely on me …’: teachers are for life, not just for Christmas
I glimpse above the rooftops: the fear that soaks into the brickwork enough never to quite dry
‘I have shaken hands with a …’: …politician – it was a most anodyne experience; I was actually looking for the pupils of my 6th form class who might have chosen to attend a mock election debate instead but I couldn’t find them there either
I keep / waiting to be discovered and get lost in anticipation: *whistling* ♫ ♫
I’ll just read a chapter: the difference between reading and seeing
illusion: is it one is it separate is it both is it neither? It is none of these.
I love with all the history and lack of perfections at our command: there’s nothing so remarkable as so much overlooked
immeasurable love: “may all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness …”
‘the imperial buildings of Europe …’: … so grand and then so sad, so noble and so shameful, so hallowed and so exclusive, so glorious and so nasty
‘the importance of …’: … the cardigan
impressionism: witnessed between elbows at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, 030515: La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Garden, Edouard Vuillard, 1901, reworked 1935; Van Gogh’s Chair, Vincent van Gogh, 1888; A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh, 1889; Hillside in Provence, Paul Cézanne, about 1890-2; Corner of a Café-Concert, Edouard Manet, probably 1878-80
Impression of Winter: Carriage on a Country Road, 1872: Impression of Winter: Carriage on a Country Road, 1872 by Camille Pissarro – but redder and greyer in the book I found it in
I’m sorry but: … she was so beautiful in her discord
in 1978: actually I wore these really cool tan cowboy boots I had just bought as well – to find myself – exactly who was I looking for?
in a / single / lifetime / sitting: middle-aged snow, starting to slow down … wisely
in between: who says that vanity press is disappearing?
‘in black and white and dark purple …’: a pastellal
inbreath: freshly exhaled from Bodhisattvacharyavatara I, 7
‘in clear …’: Batman Topps bubblegum Black Bat series added a veneer to the world of possibility of being in a what-seemed-to-be this-is-the-only-way-things-can-be world
‘in clear oil air …’: there is always a higher chest
in desperation and worthless art: askance from chapter twelve of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
in deed: honnnnnnnned like the string from a lute, not too tight not too loose, from chapter 17 of the Arya Lalitavistara Sutra in which the Prince’s mother (who had died and gone to heaven) came to see her son after he had been practising austerities for six years and was on the point of dying; she feared he was taking his quest to extremes, but he calmly told her that (the point of the whole Sutra being called ‘Lalita’, a ‘play’) that he had to show, in human form, what the two extremes of living in life were, in order to then show the way between to two extremes to liberation 
Indian music / on the radio: the colour of music
‘indicating …’: veneer
indignantly: the lessons of Have start younger and younger – how else to Have an identity?
industrial estate: I was walking down the street one day …
“I need help”: … and within a week, after the Christmas break had finished, I couldn’t return to school, again, and by the following September I was retired; I no longer had the strength to be courageous and carry on despite all, nor, even, to apply for retirement through ill health – the very struggle nullified me, it’s difficult to find the motive when you’ve been nullified; I continue to dream, occasionally, of school – only sometimes actively stressful, but always, always, awkward and unsure of the conviction of my own thoughts, operating in an infrastructure that was created for communication but in an environment of a dysfunctional family that won’t talk about what it is all worried about and copes by carrying on as if everything were fine hoping that they remembered to dress that morning …
I need to keep my eyes open / in meditation: c’mon, now, wakey wakey, time to get up!
inexorable naïveté: a via negativa open as the sky
Infantino / district of Gotham: in 1964 Carmine Infantino was brought in to give the Batman character a new look and Gotham became a city you could sit at a cafe terrace in – what, you mean …
Infantino KO: … didn’t see that one coming
Infantino world: all the world is a pastel-coloured [Legion of Superheroes] comic panel when you are young, but when events and feelings as huge as a whale occur in the world the veneer of the panel peels back to reveal the Infantino-World underneath
ING IS BELIEVING: pr-extracted from ‘… finding my own true nature …’ V by way of apochryphy
Initiation: the start of a journey that is never sure if it is happening in the world or not
‘in my car I pass…’: driving up through Birmingham on the M6 to see my daughter…
inner / hegemony: `mornin’ guv’nor
in sisting / on sitting / in sitting: inculcating
an instinct: ignited the night I first watched the moon make its way across the sitting room white shag carpet; only sometimes remembered, but ever pulling like a tide
intent: from Detective Comics #370, Dec 1967, writing John Broome, art Sheldon Moldoff
interim: … the next step
‘in the bookshop …’: a step
‘in the centre of the bare room …’: it all depends on balance
in the / Citadel / Park / a leaf / new / ly fell: the fall of a turning leaf
in the gem shop / on the pier: stone and the strange colour pink
in the Java ‘n’ Jazz: the Java ‘n’ Jazz is a coffee shop that relaxes in the small village of Forest Row in Ashdown Forest
in the kitchen: this is what happens when you listen to Jazz FM while cooking with two-pronged attention
in the middle of silence and heat:: signed, sealed delivered … now she’s jumping on a trampoline
‘in the midst of winter …’: from a painting seen in a museum in Amsterdam which I cannot seem to track down
‘in the morning …’: … is the time when things are found new, after snow is another; a river is never new, never old …
‘in the summer-morning sun …’: colours cunningly disguised as words
in the sun: such momentality
introducing / the stranger: cover X-Men #11, May 1965; artwork: Jack Kirby
in turgid reflection: woven within and despite The Fighting ‘Teméraire’ tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 by William Turner
in verse / question / m a r k ?: always on the other side of where I think I am, looking through to where I think I should be; never gathered where I am
an inverse superhero: someone who achieves more – silently and unnoticed – through their secret identity than they do spectacularly with their superpowers
I offered you ignored: the spiral of a bad relationship, deep and woven into a tapestry of presumptive communication masquerading as a career of opportunity, professional growth and striving to be a beacon of excellence
ironing in the sun: and, yes, a certain irony as well
irretrievable / breakdown / of marriage: the wound behind cordial repose
is she / looking at me?: the propinquity of immanent serendipity
‘I should never want for something to write …’: sometimes, when I’m not trying too hard, and I write and run and forget about it, I return to what I have written and find that I make a lot of sense; if only I would listen to myself and keep running
‘I should never want for something to write …’: the craft of settling down into composition, the biggest hurdle to flow; published within the hour of being written
is Koestler important // ?: … not ‘comfortable’, ‘important’?
‘I stepped on a twig …’: intimacy is another world
is that so!: second part of the triptych scenes ’round a wedding: // you can only smell the candles / when they have been snuffed out
is there anything to write?: … `thought not
Is There / Life on Mars?: it’s a God-awful small affair …
Is There / Life on Mars? – poewieview #32: sky as high as the world – Life on Mars?
is this it // all the time: an immanenceoral
I survived: … for awhile
“I think I’ll have a nice sandwich”: apparently I say that a lot when I can’t be bothered to make anything else for lunch
… I think that / just about wraps / things up: have I left anything out?
it is complete: if only I could sit still
it is knowing what to drop once / everything has been collected together / that makes everything fit: in search of le mot just!
it is / where / I am: it hurts when I blink
it’s / not what you do or what you say / if it ain’t got that swing: and that’s what gets results …
it’s all about…;: … not being about anything in order to be about anything at all that it never was in the first place in order to notice what it is
I turn to wake up: written in the gathering dark cloud before I finally cut and ran down the street round the corner, and retired …
I’ve only just realised / after so many decades / that the smell of neglected land is lilac buddleia: complete and temporal unprepossessingessity
it was like: is not is is precisely where it should be and actually always was
it was / pleasant: onomatopaeic hyperbole
it was the breeze wot did it: Blow Up (1966); directed: Antonioni; actors: David Hemmings
‘I wanted to write a poem’: so I did, and I didn’t
I will: again: written after I’d returned already from my third breakdown and not in the slightest believing – still – that I’ll be able to be anything other than I ever was all along anyway, still … ho, hum
I will eventually drift tectonic: it’s not just all about me
I will teach everything / I will write everything / I will say everything / I will read everything: always always on the never never
Jackie’s slight smile: too quick to notice … given a second chance
Jackie’s smile: love and the city …
jackstraws: the quiet of picking little plastic tools from a jumbled mass on the table without moving any of the others while dinner was being prepared in the kitchen with a few bottles of stout
jagged panel: everything depends on which window you look through these days
Jean Miller kissed Salinger: a holidaybook romance
Jericho: this is not a poeview of Joni Mitchel’s piece of work; but the perspective of a few years that puts some space in there for air
JJ Cale / in a coffee shop?: being and writing
jknht: a pavemental (a sidewalkal?); early mornings in a city have so much space
the Joker’s face: classic contemplation: is it one, the other, both or neither?
Jon: Jon is my second son; he practises foraging for naturally available foods and sometimes takes me out if I look like I need it …
Jonathan: I was in a third room and heard no build-up
Jonathon: an early sublime critic
Joni Mitchell: the receding roads of Hejira
journal-ing: nh, shHHsh, I almost had somthing then
journal // then // sit: how to rupture with oneself enough to heal
Journey: end of life of the Buddha; narrated by Ananda, close attendant; itinerant life teaching from town to town, area of a few hundred kilometers around central Ganges; left Vaiśālī last, stopped just outside Kuśinagara, town dignitaries came to honour him, had known him before; ‘two trees’ are ‘sal trees‘ tall trunk, no branches until the canopy, northern India, 6th-5th centuries BCE (although there is dispute about this);
jump start: “Way down where the music plays / Way down like a tidal wave / Way down where the fires blaze / Way down, down, way, way on down …” – thankyouverymuch
junk: I remember once my Art teacher gathered all the stools of the classroom to the front of the class and made a haphazard pile of them there in front of the light of the large window; and then he tasked us, ‘right, I want you to draw the spaces in between the legs’; brilliant
just: it’s true, Trungpa Rinpoche manifested as the silence of his own death and is still teaching the completely simple lesson of ‘just’. As in ‘only’. And, boy, does he give me a hard time of it when I don’t listen!
just: …well, the answer for the distracted centipede is, ‘move THAT leg first…’
just: the fine-tuning of the universe
just: the tune of a fine universe
just: after the agitation the water settles down calm, still, level
just: plain ugly
just: The Horse Whisperer (1998); director: Robert Redford; actors: Robert Redford, Kristen Scott Thomas, Scarlet Johansson
just // am: a lifetime’s work in a single acceptance
‘just because you do not understand …’: there are SO MANY people that I need to speak to … AAGGGH! Dedicated to all those people who feel they have to talk it is, before anyone has had a chance to breathe the air, to those who have to Have the audience, to those who have to inflict their anxiety of being into the mouths of others to calm themselves …
just one, open, nerve,: this took ages to write, sat peacefully in the shade of a horse chestnut tree, watching the tourists wander up and down in the grounds of the Alhambra; just after I finished the piece, there was a pause, the crowds were quiet, and everyone heard the sound of a conker fall from the tree and burst its case – a perfect deep brown nut
‘just popping down / to the shops’: shops used to be explorations into the depts and waves of the mind to explore all the possibility that might be found there; then some diot thought that shops ought to be all about marketing and targetting so that now shops just give the same flat experience no matter what you buy
… just saying, is all I: result-led divided into value-led: don’t go; because it misses out the common denominator – the human art and need of cummunication … listen willya!
just saying, is all – III: the more something is reformed (upside down, with gardening gloves on) the more it gets broken; ask any plant
just saying, is all IV: // lost: ‘President Joe once had a dream …’ [c’mon, c’mon; people; anyone?]; like feeding Jabba the Hut: it hardly notices the input, but it just keeps getting bigger … and uglier
just saying, is all V: // … systematic and consistent disempowerment: this was written way beyond the warm hope that Jeremy Corbyn has rayed across the political landscape during his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party; whether he wins or not, there is still hope for the value in being human yet
just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …: as of September 2016 I am retired early from teaching – without prejudice – because I could no longer find any more inbreaths to keep practising; the encounter happened about three years previously, the humanomanagerialasphyxia virus took hold about 2001 beginning an odyssey with no resolve; now I teach myself to breathe again by embracing … no resolve; the next ‘just saying, is all’ will be about life inside the plastic bag over my head, I know it, I’ve written it, I’ve breathed it
just saying, is all VII: // `spolitical: get your eyes off my residuals, you’re embarassing me
just saying, is all VIII: keeping up toxic appearences: so, a man walks into a bar; clannnnnnng
‘just slip into life …’: made of the very fabric of life itself; the point of the Emperor’s New Clothes wasn’t that he didn’t have any clothes on and had been swindled, but that his vanity had led him to believe they were clothes beautiful and appropriate for himself, the Emperor – he didn’t have the wisdom to see that it is the way you wear life that makes it beautiful, not the status bestowed; of course the Emperor had beautiful clothes, but then so did everyone else …
just what: … well, what else is there to do, everything has been taken except anonymity
:just wondering …: … it’s been a while now, you know; if you wouldn’t mind, that is if you are not too busy …
just words wiped across a line: burst of whole ongoing autobiography
juxtaposition: stop – look – listen – breathe
keep the light off: “Down on my knees in Suburbia …”
Khandro Tsering Chodron: Khandro Tsering Chödrön (1929-2011) was recognised as a living dakini within Tibetan Buddhism, although she was always uncomfortable with the recognition and resisted being treated as such; she was very influential during her life, not because she taught or was learned or headed an institution, but because she dwelt in (not even exhuded that you might choose to react against it) a blessing and a peace that was completely un-designed, always spontaneous (sic) and as natural as a child’s experience; if anything, she was recognised for her devotion to her Spiritual Guide, even during the 52 years after his death – constant prayer, constant envelopment within the guidance and inspiration given; her presence made it real to believe, and dwell awhile in, the immense power and transformation of subtlety;
“King …”: nothing starts that it has to come to an end too …
King of the World: you need to listen to the wah-wah scratchit guitar at the beginning to smell the pine in the wind, the ‘creaks’ and spills which speak of the city behind the hills and the bass-line riff of the walk up to the cabin to really arrive in this track, then … by the end Fagen’s evening breeze escapes the valley through sheer airwave and Baxter flutters round it like a blind bird flying, flying and swooping …
Kirby’s landscapes: most of the images for this were reaped and harvested from The Fantastic Four #95, February 1970; plot: Stan Lee; art and storytelling: Jack Kirby; it was only after I put the finishing touches to the ‘billboards’ and ‘water towers’ in the last stanza that I realised it was all ABOUT Jack Kirby
Knapps: time goes into my heart
knees: a turnal
knees: most important in a portrait is seeing what is not noticed
a known from without the unknown: I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves, I know a song that will get on your nerves, and it goes like this: the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long
mlewisredford 