Dubai Days manuscript

The Wolf in You



Apr 18


Drinks. Music. Bodily fluids.

Flow.

Grow out of need and necessity.

A candle melts.

A rusty knife cuts through bone and sinew.

The wolf in you
Smells blood and meat.

The World Watches


th
16 Oct 18


The explosions finally stopped. The officials and
personnel emerged from the plumes of dust and
debris. The watchers in the windows disappeared.
“Where are is the key?!”, hollered the eldest of the
officials. His rotund figure hovered over the mangled
bodies. A Turkish cadet ran forward with something
in his hand. It was a small ring.

By night time, the world had ground to a halt with
the news flying out of every news outlet on Earth.
What people had always suspected was suddenly
made flesh and laid bare. The stock markets crashed,
all sovereign states declared a state of emergency and
central banks, government officials and religious
leaders of every faith convened in frenzied meetings
behind closed doors.

Turkey buried the dead. Every scrap of evidence was
hauled away by the military. It was futile. The streets
thronged with the outraged and shocked billions
demanding answers of their leaders who it was
revealed, were mere play things for much bigger,
much more sinister forces for time out of mind.

There is no Home for those whose Hearts were
Ransacked One Time too Many

June 17

I’m not out of place.
I’m in the corner where you left me facing the
window on outer space to see my shame,
But I only saw the stars that clustered to make a
winsome smile on the face of God.
And after the long silence, this call in the darkness
through the ether
Says the weather is fine
But only after the storm has ravaged my home.
Your babies have grown and my heart has flown
low after every silent blow.
I am weary.
Tied to the labours of work, warmed by the wise
ones and playfully menaced by the obligatory
snakes that hiss and rattle.
They are toothless.
I have become immured in my own marshmallow
world.
I see a circle of siblings with ruddy cheeks and
redolent mischief and I smile.
There is a mad genius and a man of wisdom and
compassion.
There is an angel and a protector.
There are demons and detractors too.
All this secret love and casual shame for which I
have no time and no one to blame.
Warm nights on the balcony as the city hums under
the jagged stars,

I listen to music from my past and I reminisce
About the life that never was and I piece together
the fragments of my mind.
I no longer have a home.
I am not sure I ever did.
Has God forsaken the nomad because he has no
post?
Or has He freed him from the ties of guilt and
domestic burden, gloom and doom?
A poet has no care for a prosaic world.
Like characters from a novel by Marcel Proust
You keep talking about forgiveness confusing as
you always do forgiveness for trust.
My memory serves me too well and I’m just a
feather on the tide of your will.
There is no ill thought, ill talk.
The crows no longer fear the scarecrow.
My lassitude doesn’t hurt any more.
A chiliad comes over my crumbling bones.
I am moored on an island far from home which I
have no desire to escape.



These Worthless Gifts



June 18


Silence speaks volumes.

Is the stare askance better than the fall?

For all we know,

We are alone.

The milk in the saucepan

Froths and spills over sizzling
On the hot plate of the stove.

The birds outside flutter into the alcoves

Ducking out of drumming raindrops and sepulchral
gusts of wind.

The black and white split matters

Because facts matter and still factor
Into knowing the truth.

And we speak truth to power

No matter the swirl of bullets

About the parapet.

The suit does not make the boss.

Alcohol is weaning itself off you.

And the moss

Has shed its stones.
In the boarded-up garrets,

Reams of unread poetry lie like dusty bones.

The grimacing lock

Takes in a rusty key and the nails

Protrude from the hinges

Like thorns

And time scorns the squanderers
Who drag and dawdle at snail pace.

You lift your head to see the darkness of your
space.

They face the pointed inconvenient questions finally
asked.

Something crumbles

And someone stumbles.
A silence.

These worthless gifts are not wanted and lie
unopened.

This Land Belongs Not to You

Aug 18


You felt soul raped.

Gold dreams melt into the ether

And bloated corpses swarm the rivers

And the pyre burns

The being into ashes

That is blown away by the wind.

Empire of the sun
Yours sins are never done.

I’m flying home

To unfamiliar places.

Kiss me goodbye as I leave to be in the abyss

And don’t waste your flowers on me.

These parchments don’t serve me.

These people unnerve me.
I go from the maddening rabble

And the deadening monotony of mindless swarms.

This chair was warm

But now no more.

I adore everything that is abhorrent to my soul

And you my dear are too old for these strains.
Grape and grain.

Hell and high water.

An engorged moon

Glides across the sin-black sky

Between erect trees

And gnawing fleas and squirming maggots

And the soul yields
To the digital-wielding savages

And the tablets of the zealous disciples

And the haunting words of the prophets

Fall to the dusty ravages

Of time

And time and tide

Play hard bargains with memory.
Bury me

Under the tree

Where the sun sets

And no one comes.

I’ll take my chances with fairies

And make believe.
It’s the release

I seek

And fail to achieve

Through my transgressions.

My obsessions are lack lustre

And your human bluster

Bores me.















Time and God




May 17




The hands on the clock spin into a blur.

Beyond love lies nothing, God does concur.

Time Ate the Child




Mar 17




Time ate the child,

And spat out the man.


Hollow figures fashioned of clay

In the hallowed folds of god's hands.

A Symbolic Walk Through a Pitch Black
Nepalese Village


I'm walking along a dirt road in the Nepalese
countryside. There are no street lights, no houses
and no shops here. It is pitch black and utterly
silent. It seems almost symbolic of this juncture in
my life.

A bedraggled cur skulks past. The crickets chirrup
on their secret perches. Occasionally a moped
scoots by startling, and in fact delighting, me with a
sign of human life.

The night is muggy and pregnant with the
bewitching scent of jasmine mixed jarringly with
the pungent hum of dung.

In the far distant in this starry night , I can hear
from a house, a dulcet chorus of women singing - a
wedding or a festival perhaps ?

Writing this as I walk in the pitch-black Nepalese
night, I become disorientated and lose my way and
go off track of the dirt road veering dangerously
close to deep ditches and thorny brambles and
brackets that fringe the grasslands where bullocks
and goats sleep in huddles. I bring myself back on
course and carry on down my dark road to the neon
light and safety of my hotel.
A symbolic walk indeed.


Time is a Road that has No End

Apr 18


Time is a toad

Watching moss grow on rocks.

You know death and full stops.

Time is a road that cares for neither.

A road with no beginning

Nor end.

Time is Running Out



Apr 18


In the home where you lost your heart

For the very last time,

The rain rattled the windows

And the fog pressed its nose

Up against the panes.


The mirror doesn't recognise you anymore.

Nor do loved ones.

Scrambling over the rubble and debris of your life,

You search for signs of movement.



The coppice beyond the hill that you sledged down
in the winters past of a mythic childhood,

Is eerie and eerier still

The gravestones in the yard

Choked with ivy and lichen

And crumbled by the centuries.

The bracken, around the house in which you came
of age in,
Seems now like barbed wire,

The hedgerows, like the walls of a concentration
camp.



In later years, the fronds of familiar bosky

Would be replaced by the jagged fingers of palms.

And the gables of vestries of the town I knew as
home,

By stars and sickle-like crescents atop of fey
domes.



It was not the land that suffocated you.

It was the very air of this world that choked you.

The very ways of this life that stifled you.


After letting crown and country

Go to rack and ruin,

After getting wise to the realities and mentalities of
the street,

After rejecting home and hearth,

What was after all,

Worth preserving?

Nothing.
There's nothing left to run from

And nowhere else to run to

And time is running out...













Time



Mar 17


Time goes
To places unknown.
The blood splattered flags which are flown
Are never up for long
And all the unsung heroes
Lie down
And are swallowed by the earth.
Outcomes give wide berth
To all our cherished dreams.
Time chews away at the seams
And there is little Man can do to stave the tide and
save himself.
The world forgets
All the memories we held dear
In the razzmatazz of the vanity fair
Where humanity's foibles and folly
Dance a jolly jig
In the dizzying whirligig
Of life.

Toads



Nov 17


Not all of us can live lives of quiet desperation.

We cannot abide being anaesthetised of all
sensation.

Why can't we just hate what we want?

What's wrong with hate?
It takes courage to go against the grain,

To wear your pain like a weapon in hand.

Hate is as pure an emotion as any.

Deceptive toads are ten a penny.

Why are these people here?

Why are they allowed to do as they please?

Who gave them the right?
Who has let fools and crooks run the show?

Why must we follow where they go?

Tomorrow Where I am King



26th Aug 18


I remember tomorrow.
I was happy
To the marrow of my bones.

There was time
To ponder the moss growing on stones
And the smell of freshly-mown lawns.

I’ve forgotten all that was yesterday
And don’t much care for today.

Tomorrow is my time
And there I am king
Even if I am smaller than the head of a pin.

And there where I am king
My queen will gently come.
And my kingdom will be at one.

















Tonics and Poisons



May 18




Only the children we were

Know the wounds incurred

Of long-lost childhoods.

Is it a sane world

In which we find ourselves?
Those that failed us

Fuel the angst that ails us.

The volatile soul

Doesn't know or remember

The etymology

Of its own turbulence.

With shrill silence
We act out

The perceived hurt,

Perceived persecution.

Neither cowered nor defiant.

The limelight of love

Can supersede
The shadows of fear and resentment.

All sentiments

Can be coiled around

Our actions and choices.

When love can't be found,

Tonics and poisons

Do surround us.

Under the Moon



25th Oct 18


As the bloated moon

Groans into view,

Fools do fall in love

By the silvery light.

In the pitch black of the night,

They stumble into the ditch
Of romance and blind love

And sign away hearts

And sigh away dreams.

The moon it seems

Drools out love

From unsuspecting fools.

And Cupid draws out bow
And strikes the victims dead.

Unsurprised Disappointment


25th Sep 18


The I
In me
Sees
What I am.
Your lack of clemency
Draws from me
Only a moan,
A groan,
A sigh
Of unsurprised
Disappointment.

Upon Rivers



Jan 17























I found myself one day with a Nepalese friend by the
Bagmati River which runs through Swayambhu, a
temple complex on top of a hill in Kathmandu,
Nepal. The temple teemed with scrambling rhesus
macaque monkeys and bewitching sadhus - holy men
decked in hallowed Hindu regalia; marigold
garlands, the saffron robes denoting renunciation,
burgundy tunics denoting self-sacrifice, their bodies
evenly smeared in chalky-white ash symbolising the
cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

At Swayambhu, funeral pyres crepitated sending up
to the temple tops plumes of grey smoke as the
Bagmati River burbled past. The relatives of the
deceased stood staring solemnly at the licking
flames, etiolated by their grief. The sadhus looked on
philosophically with stoic awareness of their own
senectitude and mortality.



To connect to the higher consciousness that pervades
and surrounds us and the mysterious, seemingly
eternal nature of our existence, one need only spend
a few hours of reflection upon a river bank. I recalled
all the other major rivers I had stood at around the
world; the Thames, the Indus, the Liffey, the Tiber,
amongst others. Their inexorable link to the history
of humanity beguiled me, intertwined as it is with
human mythology, legend, trade and commerce,
theology and religious rites, husbandry and fertility,
sustenance and survival.



Here lies Rome and the River Tiber. The she-wolf
Lupa of Roman mythology is rescuing the brothers
Remus and Romulus from their cruel abandonment
and at its harbour wheat, olive oil and wine are being
traded by merchants down the generations.

Here lies the Indus snaking through modern-day
Pakistan and by its banks can be found strange stone
tools of cave dwellers of 15,000 years ago which

would pave the way for the Indus Valley Civilisation
period cities Harappa and Mohenjo-daro10,000
years later.


Here lies the Thames cleaving through London.
Under centuries of silt we find a decorated bowl from
3 millennia before the coming of Christ, before the
Celts of Stone Henge, before the Roman occupation,
before the Viking invasions, before the time of King
Arthur and Alfred the Great, the Normans, The
Anglo-Saxons and the 1000 year-long cavalcade of
British Monarchs that followed.



Here lies the Liffey meandering through the heart of
Dublin by the banks of which the Easter 1916
Uprising against the British was crushed and
immortalised in W B Yeats’ poem. The same river
that opens James Joyce’s legendary Ulysses and as
personified by Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegan’s
Wake, his swan song and parting masterpiece.

Other rivers yet unvisited – the Mississippi, the Nile,
the Amazon, the Yangtze, the Ganges – will no doubt
have their own magical tales to tell and historical and
anthropological morceaus of knowledge to yield.
It is not difficult to see why early civilisations
practised animism and paganism and worshipped
natural phenomenon like rivers. Rivers are the
arteries that course through the body of humanity. To

connect our present to the past and our past to our
future, to reach nourishing tendrils into the Jungian
collective subconscious and to open ourselves to a
higher consciousness, we need only spend some time
by a river. Humanity and its history abide there.





*** Inspired in part by the anthropologists:

James Frazer

William Halse Rivers
Bronisław Malinowski

Edward Evans-Pritchard

Margaret Mead