Terrific interview of Harley Schlanger by Garland Nixon.
See also The Geographical Pivot of History
Harley Schlanger is a prominent figure associated with the Schiller Institute, a political and economic think tank founded in 1984. He is known for his updates and newsletters related to the institute’s activities and its connection to the LaRouche movement.
x
…You will pay Alan your last respects. The date conflicts
With a meet proposed by a flirt. Two desires are thus at war
And their dispute wrenches you apart, surges like the current
In a battery being charged beneath the ground. Inexorably
The vortex drags you down, down into infernal regions.
x
Women’s voices there sound instructive but they interrupt each other.
One of them pronounces Manor House ‘Manna House.’
It’s bright for once, the manna scattered, spilling as if it were light;
The fiery pillars blazing overhead as the underground
Lurches through the underworld where all the blackness
Of night in the background shapes itself into grimaces.
It’s Christmas every day down here, or rather Christmas Eve,
x
And packed with Father Christmases feeling up your bits.
Christmas Eve herself has naked hips. Her nipples spout
Red Bull. The tube becomes her snake, while the Stations
Of the Cross remain closed because of planned engineering work.
However, there are plenty of others at which to disembark,
Their escalators only going down. There is no “up”. You rub
Shoulders with pickpockets, ogle those exquisite girls
x
Who lend new meaning to ‘untouchable’. The underworld
Is full, all the rush-hours of a life spent commuting
Happening at once. How are you to find your mother here,
Your lost daughter, your love? An ancestor asks you
To join the dead fathers’ brigade. Baron Samedi and his sidekick
Are chopping up pricks to feed to the zombies. They ask for yours,
But you seem to have lost it along with your freedom pass.
x
Are you already a zombie? The stink of long dead rat
Suggests that you are not. After all, you can still smell it.
One day, one day you will ascend, and, roseate, throw off
The pall to emerge a girl in a choir, utterly above it all
In some pre-Raphaelite shoal. This girl is obviously your soul.
That’s why you needed that bath, back by the snake-infested shore,
For now you are cleansed, and cleaner than you ever were before.
x
From THE RUNIAD Book 6 – Loki
x
…Hence, although, before, some among you may,
Through ignorance of what was best for you, have been deceived
x
By the perfidious pledges of Rome, yet now that you have tried
Both freedom and servitude, grant me how great a mistake you made
In choosing an imported dictatorship over your ancestral way of life,
For you have now come to realize how much better is poverty
With no master to wealth within the shameful bonds of slavery.
For what treatment is there of the most grievous sort that we
Have not suffered ever since these monsters came to Britain?
x
Have we not been robbed of most of our property,
And that the most precious, while for what is left we pay taxes,
Besides pasturing and tilling for them all remaining land?
Do we not pay a yearly tribute for our very bodies?
How much better it would be to have been sold to masters
Once and for all, than, while clinging to mere titles of nobility,
To have to ransom ourselves every year! How much better
x
To have been attacked and finished off than to go about
Weighed down by taxes! And yet, why do I mention death?
For even dying is not free of cost with them; no, you know
What duties we deposit for our dead. Death should be no tythe.
Death frees even those who toil in slavery to others;
Only in the case of these Romans do the very dead remain alive
For their profit…
x
From The Runiad, book 21 – epic poem completed earlier this year.
x
More than forty years ago!
My mother was a child prodigy as an artist. On one of her paintings my grandmother has written in pencil, “asked for by Sickert”. I am pleased with this painting of her crossing a ploughed field in full hunting kit as I feel I have managed it in my mother’s style.
ANIMAL CRACKERS
Anchored on the stumps of mountains,
Up soars Manhattan, that glittering assemblage;
A giant barge, steel-sided,
Cleaving rivers apart, and yet,
Wherever it can, nature insinuates itself.
Weeds negotiate cracks – even Manhattan
Almost approaches wilderness at
Inwood Hill, perched on its northern tip,
Where pheasants nest, foxes prowl
On slopes once occupied by the Indians.
Off its shore there are forests and wetlands,
Including the ponds of Jamaica Bay,
Breeding baldpates, pintails,
Greater and lesser scaup, skimmers, terns,
Glossy ibises, egrets, and even visited
By the bald eagle. All the same, New Yorkers
Would not know from watching it on the box
Whether a cow was sick or not
As any hillbilly might. To the urbanite,
Farm animals are desirable, with more correspondence
Concerning them than any other perversion.
You see less of animals than people. People
Give you diseases. Animals do not sue
For alimony, nor can they get you pregnant.
x
Recently my mother visited New York.
She cannot see what she looks directly at,
Yet at seventy-six she managed to get
From Gramercy Park to the Bronx Zoo and back.
Having been a vet, she was more alert
To Fragonard’s cow at the Met
Than handling and stuff like that.
The same was true for Dubuffet’s cow at MoMA.
Seated in the sculpture garden
Next to a Maillol, off to her right
She could see a goat. Picasso’s goat, I said.
Then I headed for the bookshop,
Telling her to stay put.
Back with a cut-price Muybridge,
I caught sight of her straightening up
Behind its metal rump.
Mother had goosed the goat,
Establishing when her kids would drop.
Luckily there were no guards about.
x
Read my book about my mother – The Best Deborah Stories – here
Nicholas Lafitte (1943-1970) and George Pitts (1951-2017)
There are two poets who should not be forgotten, one British and the other American. Here, I want to share my thoughts about their work.
*****
Poet of light, of the sea remembered behind clouds, where all water is one divine plasma imbued with light, Nicholas Lafitte, although at times deranged, could speak of madness with peculiar clarity:
Disintegration of the psyche
Proceeds along familiar paths;
The only therapy most likely
To succeed is a succession of hot baths
And early nights, good food and lots .
Of exercise . . .
‘Seven Last Words’
Breakdown is often accompanied by rant, and this is true of Nick, but some of his poems are fine rants – truly elevated ranting, as in other sections of his ‘Seven Last Words’. His poetry may be compared to that of Veronica Forrest-Thomson. It has the same wit, the same mischievous enjoyment of high-flown academic gamesmanship (although they differ in tone – Nick tending to the sonorous, Veronica to the chatty). They never met, so far as I know, – Nick was dead by 1970, the year she brought out her first book, Twelve Academic Questions. In her introduction to On The Periphery, published posthumously in 1976, she describes the theme of her book as the chart of three quests:
The quest for a style already discussed, the quest for a subject other than the difficulty of writing, and the quest for another human being. Indeed such equation of love with knowledge and the idea of style as their reconciliation is as old as art itself.
Nick’s aims were similar, though unlike Veronica he attempted a fusion of these three quests through a highly individual espousal of religion which he related to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Anglo-Catholicism’, albeit with the ‘Anglo’ taken out.
His early poems include exercises in sprung rhythm, villanelles in the manner of Empson, poems reminiscent of Charles Madge and Pound. They utilise phrases which echo Eliot and Wallace Stevens – and Nick died too young to step entirely clear of these voices, nor was it his intention to do so, for the ironic appropriation of a master’s voice was part of his poetic programme – as it was Eliot’s and, later, Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s.
Another major influence was the work of the German refugee, Fred Marnau, whose Wounds of the Apostles Nick translated forcefully but very freely indeed, perhaps improving on the originals.
Beyond these influences, what Nick had got was passion. His talent was for the Dithyramb – that choric hymn, in honour of Dionysus, vehement and wild in character. Nick’s Dionysus was Jehovah. This might have been his tragedy, for the stern God disapproved where the other might have laughed. Nothing could stem the torrent though. Even his most intensely worked poems convey an impression of haste which is quite likely deliberate: commas are often used instead of full stops, and there are gaps like pauses for swift intakes of breath – sometimes even the most crucial comma may be missing. This makes for a vulnerable ability so far as stylistic decorum may be concerned – after all, his entire oeuvre is in a sense juvenilia – yet the headlong pace aptly conveys the velocity at which ideas came to him, his keyed-up, sharp-nosed intellect – on to the next idea almost before the present one had registered.
Out of this torrent, like twigs thrown to the surface by the current, metaphors emerge with suddenness, each surprisingly precise. Take the start of one of his best poems, To the Rebellious Dead:
Ignore the sky this harvest, ignore the cry
Of the lapwing piercing shrivelled seed pods
For water, and the grasshopper’s freak
Mechanism unwinding on a summer log
Like a child’s toy, try to see the springtime
Amidst the energy and falseness of rebellion, standing
Like a helpless judge, time’s minister
On the seasonal circuit.
That the complex wiring of the intellect, lighting up at dialectical proposition, should not only respond to theory rejected or upheld but also be affected by fluctuations in the mere weather like a cheap watch, this struck Nick as some inexplicable rebuff, an unacceptable cock-up. With Quixotic zeal he tilted at this quandary, arming himself with dogma against any depression introduced by the rain.
Sometimes, to trap the beast of its argument, his poem will cast a net of words, enmeshing us and it in the jargon of logic, as in his Homage to Wallace Stevens. There is certain skill in the way deliberately convoluted syntax and polysyllabic vocabulary will be offset by simple images. These image intervals rescue poems which would otherwise strike us having clapped on too much rhetorical canvas. In this his style, or the stylistic query aroused, corresponds to the query meant – can ordinary things prove the salvation of the system-embroiled intellect? Thus the poems unify method and content.
Again and again, as one reads through his poems in chronological order, one is struck by the recurrent cycle of his torment: breakdown, then a period when the verse is little better than doggerel, possibly in the wake of ECT. Then gradually his mind returns to him, and a clutch of down-to-earth and often very moving poems materialises. Then, like a quasar, the brilliance intensifies; religious mania or passion, depending on one’s view, attains white heat, and becomes rant as his illness interferes with his poetics. Breakdown is again the result. This was the route which led perennially to his ‘interior Calvary’ – and perhaps the saddest thing about some of the later poems is the sense that he knew they were written on borrowed time.
What astonishes me is that he managed to express this personal torment in such universal terms. Light is the key metaphor here. His intuitive grasp of its significance, revealed in early poems written in Italy, becomes more defined after the agonies of hospital:
Light is that aweful
Organising concept that makes mockery
Of the rage for order, the fine frenzy For precision.
‘The Madman compares God to a Great Light’
‘ Rage for order’ is a recurrent phrase – taken from Wallace Stevens’s Idea of Order at Key West-a poem which serves as a theme for many of Nick’s variations, just as the melodies of earlier composers are elaborated upon by Brahms and Vaughan Williams. With Nick though the phrase takes on the aspect of an obsession and eventually stands for the obsession which is madness itself.
To return to his notion of light; it is the ease with which the light presents that which is seen, the light in a sense organising the display; stage-managing the show without difficulty, which his intellect found lough to acknowledge. Either you flick a switch, or the sun rises and only the clouds interfere. It is the simplicity of this operation which so scandalised this poet of passionate, complex ontology who demanded that his salvation prove more intricate than any advanced manipulation in higher mathematics. The same problem of some facile order, of an organising simplicity at loggerheads with the arduousness he demanded of his ardour, is expressed in his Poem for Jay:
Why do I connect at mind’s
Point rather than under heart’s or soul’s or spirit’s axis?
In another version of The Madman compares God to a Great Light (entitled In the Clinic, but not included in this selection since it repeats much of the verse of the former poem) there is this passage:
A dry time, season of blown
Branches and returning birds.
Beyond the routine agonies I watched
The awakening gardens. Natural
Beauty alarmed me, induced reactions
Simplified too far to confront the
Complex soul; I could not countenance
Simplicity. . .
In Nick’s view, modern man is pathetically bound to the complex; his demand being for the fiendishly difficult answer, his pose Lisztean, his strategy the intellectual snob’s. It is this clever, show-off’s attitude which forever debars him from an admission to the world of simple being, to a sensible caring for one’s body or the easy clarity of light; values which might save him if only he would deign to appreciate them. The egghead’s contempt for physical exercise or for hedonistic sun-bathing must cause some internal cancer of the spirit, eventually manifested as groundless anxiety. Nick sensed that such a neurosis was auto-generated. In Homage to Wallace Stevens man is shown to be trapped within solipsism. In a world made out of signs being can never be ‘the finale of seem’, as Stevens would have it. The very existence of the signified is called into doubt, with the ‘rage for order’ becoming no more than a semantic process, its urgency contrived by language. The irony of this situation is put over with force:
Why should I
Have melancholies which are unsayable and yet meaningful?
For example,
Depressions sombre the typewriter, the bowl of ash, the
Arc of space.
In this solipsistic construct masquerading as a world, his ‘God’ is himself, and yet, due to a theory of opposites compounded from a notion that ‘p and not-p’ are equally true in a universe contrived by language alone, also not-himself. And therefore he may be appalled by this inner God – and also cry out to him for salvation. It is the cry of the madman, beseechingly, to his own sanity.
I cannot go through
The jaws of my fierce God me,
he says in The Night of the Iguana, an impressive poem for which he shared the Birmingham Post Poetry Prize in 1965. And later,
Lord, hear my words. And let my cry enter your womb.
his God at this point becoming female and ‘other’.
Beyond this ratification of the schizoid state conceived as a dilemma of intelligence, an abiding quality in his writing is ultimately that of voice, or of voices I should say – for Nick could manipulate personae with the mastery ol a puppeteer. In his best work, the initially rather formal address conjures up an academically argumentative speaker. Then the voice changes and the speaker becomes less formal, yet somehow extraordinary; able to keep hold of some labyrinthine thread and keep hold of the accompanying listener – I say listener because the poems strike me as very much to be heard as well as read. Sometimes – engagingly to my mind – he lets his thoughts run on too fast for a tidy-up of the resulting lines, as in The Night of the Iguana:
Assume that all that
Matters, is the strength of, of the bond. . .
Such hesitations are the pauses of one thinking on his feet, speaking out as he thinks. They lend the voice a reality which is very much his own:
A
Silly point is that the unconsciousness is
a built-in tautologiser
i.e., compatibilises any statement with any state of the world.
The difficulty, the point of the logic of opposites, is
that it is not
Logical; the idea of ambivalence makes P and Not -P
Simultaneously true. Not just affectively but bonkerswise.
(And anyhow the image is a feel-see-think-judge filter).
The metalogic behind the logic of opposites is (for
Instance) that love-acts prevent you from admitting hatred, or
That the hypermanic reassures himself by saying:
“Look at me look at me i’m not depressed i’m not depressed”.
Ingenious, this metalogic, metacrap.
This was my Introduction to Near Calvary – Selected Poems 195-1970 – by Nicholas Lafitte – published by The Many Press 1992 (thanks to John Welch – another fine poet no longer with us). Next I am going to reprint a portion of my essay on the longer line that was first published in the Fortnightly Review:
I come now to Partial Objects by George Pitts, published by Jerkpoet in 2016. This is one of the most original books of poetry that I have come across. John Ashbery introduced me to this poet. Extracts from the title poem have appeared in the Partisan Review and in the Paris Review, but Pitts remains relatively unknown. This should not be the case. Pitts has made the longer line his own — taking it far beyond anything anyone else has ever done and freeing it from any equation with the sentence. This ambitious, longer work might be an elegy for his mother — who appears to have been a photographer’s model. Pitts himself has made a career in the fashion world and has made notable photographs of the female nude.
The book is dedicated to his mother’s memory, and the title is a Freudian term — to the infant the mother may be the breast at first, rather than her whole being — a part object. Equally, the penis may seem an object separated from the person — a part object again. But the poem can’t be pinned down to one subject — perhaps it’s a part poem — part the author, part the mother:
…She made a wish,
And there before her was her revised body, capable of ambiguity, and
Sharp discourse on the company of wolves. Nothing got past her,
____except the
Ellipsis of the day, the hollowing out of shed skin, and the subsequent
____coat
Of many colours of emotion.
Someone put a match to that coat, during the time period when we were
____ men.
And we weren’t crazy about being on fire for a cause, even though
It felt better without a coat on in the summer heat. It was the principle
____ of
The thing, to disintegrate in summer, to burn, to take leave
Due to the sweltering metamorphosis, one honestly needed more time
For a sex change, in order to inspect all the technology that would
Go into altering one’s view outside the eyes. But there was no allowance
For that, the clock was running, and the ambivalence that was widely
Documented, called on some thugs to smack you around a little bit,
Not to hurt you, but to bring you back to the bravery of making a stand.
(Partial Objects 1)
Pitts has a very good ear, and loves to mingle elaborate abstractions with simple terse phrases. There is a confident beauty that resonates throughout his poem, and he seems to relish the twists and turns of syntax. As the poem progresses, its lines and its sentences get longer and longer and one finds oneself immersed, drowning in its confident, surprising language, and happy to drown that way.
….Appearing armless by
Hiding her arms strenuously behind her back, was a pose she enjoyed
____ doing, and
She would do it whether the picture called for it or not. It was like being
____sculpture,
And being abject, both agreeable to her interior script, fussy with the
____ way her body
Presented itself, better strange or estranged, than to go through the
____ motions of cuteness
Or pander to the lowest rung in the bleachers. Fights always happen
____ there, fights with
The heckler who knows your name, and who knows a hundred ways to
____pronounce it badly,
Like a parrot with a vendetta….
(Partial Objects VI)
Sometimes, when reading the poem, I get the sensation that it is written by a hermaphrodite. Pitts is a respected photographer working for Vibe Magazine and for LIFE Magazine, and he seems to have grown up within the world of fashion. I suggest that the poem is womanly at times, as he seems to get inside a vocabulary of the opposite sex, whatever sex that might be that is opposite to anyone’s sex, if anything ever is. If I sound sexist this is not my intent: I am simply trying to convey the sensual ambivalence I feel in the poem’s passionate core. While the part object may be perceived as separated from the rest of the body, I also sense a fusion, this time of the breast and the suckling mouth. A lady told me recently that she is always being told how like her father she is. Here, in this poem, we experience the son as the mother. So the breast may be separate from both infant and mother, or all three may be fused into one.
The poem seems to slip categories, and its androgynous writing could be thought of as abstract, could be read as a story. Rather than residing utterly in language or, conversely, letting the narrative lead the reader on, there’s a sense of being inside a passage without anxiety about where it may be going, but then the passage does seem to be going somewhere; so it’s like playing ducks and drakes, skipping between language and event.
My copy of this book is 175 mm wide by 215 mm in height. So the ends of its long lines never need to be carried over onto a new line. I note that it has been reprinted and now the book is 205 mm wide by 205 mm in height — a square. Innovation such as this presents a problem for conventional publishers, who are now at threat from self-publication. I sense that longer lines are “in the air”. Both Carcanet and Faber have reduced the size of their fonts. This is not the answer. To accommodate the longer line, we need wider books.
Anthony Howell, December 2025
x
Blaise Florence Metreweli CMG (born 30 July 1977) is a British civil servant, currently Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), following the retirement of Sir Richard Moore. She is the first female chief of MI6.
Metreweli’s father, Constantine Metreweli, was born Constantine Dobrowolski, the son of Nazi collaborator Constantine Dobrowolski, in Snovsk in the Chernigov Oblast of the Nazi-occupied Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1943. He came to England with his mother, who then married David Metreweli in Yorkshire in 1947.
Constantine Dobrowlski became a Nazi collaborator, known as Agent 30 to the Wehrmacht. His activities as a collaborator over the next two years are recorded in a file running to hundreds of pages in the German Federal Military Archive in Freiburg im Breisgau. Having returned to his home district of Sosnytsia, he organised a 300-strong Ukrainian police unit which assisted in rounding up and killing Jews and Ukrainian partisans. He rose to become a local intelligence chief for the Nazis in Chernigov, having first collaborated with the Hiwi, before joining the Wehrmacht’s secret military police Geheime Feldpolizei in July 1942. He was dubbed “the “Butcher” by partisans, and there are accounts of him sharing in loot taken from Holocaust victims and condoning the rape of women prisoners. The Soviets offered a 50,000-ruble bounty—£200,000 today—on Dobrowolski, calling him “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people.”
x
Joe Adams: 28/02/2026
MI6 HEAD BEHIND THE NEW BLACK OPS
Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service Blaise Metreweli is trying to prove she is a credible threat to balance the threat SHE says Russia represents. She is also virulently anti-Islam. Well, “British Intelligence” has been a bit of a contradiction for some time. But all indications point to this spy queen having inherited her fascist Nazi forbearers vicious tactics.
I recco that we should keep a close eye on her, as she is quite possibly a considerable danger to humanity, and there is no one in Britain who has the stones to reel her in.
The terrorist assassinations in Russia by Ukraine, the increased targeting of energy facilities by KIev, and in Iran and Lebanon and Syria, I think we can see the fingerprints of this new head of MI6 in cyber/surveillance tech, one of her specialties. She is a veteran of Middle East ops. The plan to use Starlink units in Iran to foment riots I believe to be hers.
The alleged British and French plan to supply Kiev with a nuclear device is primarily aimed at derailing the ongoing peace negotiations and prolonging the Ukraine conflict, Alexander McKay, co-host of the Decline and Fall show, believes.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed that Paris and London have been deliberating supplying Ukraine with nuclear weapons.
Options under consideration allegedly involve a “covert transfer of European-made components, equipment, and technologies to Ukraine” to build a crude “dirty bomb,” as well as secretly delivering a French TN 75 nuclear warhead. The discussions go along with the staging of a disinformation campaign to portray the device as a domestically produced Ukrainian weapon, according to the SVR.
All of this and more originate in a twisted, pathological mind. Look carefully at your enemy, people. Do you see what I see?
Thanks Christopher Assad for posting this on FB.
x
MOBILITY
*
Unable to decide quite where to be,
I’m based in the car this Christmas,
Travelling from relation to relation. Think of me
As an eighty horse-power snail
Whose shell goes wherever it’s expected.
In between, I make my lar
From fuel bills and burger tissues,
Take the air by breathing through the heater.
Fingers dark with oil, tagged by Rollo foil,
Snug in my own condensation and ensconced
In the bygone odour of myself, I guess I’m well supplied,
What with the jump-leads, the damp-start
And the anti-freeze behind my back,
A trove of coins beneath each rubber mat.
If I require sustenance there’s melted peppermint
Pooled in the key tray, crumbs
Of chocolate smeared into the stubble.
These corroded tapes keep me company:
They squeak along to what they play.
Memory’s stirred by mud from walks, pebbles
From the shore, emptied nylon packets,
Ticket stubs and someone’s glove.
After each lunch, I roll off for the next supper,
Only to drift down some slip-road, screw back the back
Of the seat and cancel out all consciousness
Of getting there, of which route to take, of where I am,
Of where to exit, when to make my entrance…
x
Note: Lar is a local god or the shrine of such a god – as in Lares et Penates
x
AMEN
*
There’s a dog with antlers lying next to Santa.
Santa is out for the count. The dog’s antlers
Are made of felt. They only sprout while
His muzzle remains on the pavement.
Sort of sprout…You get the idea,
And what is this festive season about
But that? The idea that binds us together
So that the shepherds may bond with the Magi,
The Magi bond with the shepherds
Before the blessed manger. Pray for the dog
x
That he may profit from his antlers.
x
INNISFREE
x
When all my mum remembered
Was the isle of Innisfree,
I put her in an old folk’s home
And sometimes went for tea.
*
She couldn’t clean herself by then,
She couldn’t use the loo.
She only stroked her little dog
And asked me who was who.
*
I never sat with her for long.
I wanted to be free:
Dress up smart and head for town
To meet with Kerry-Lee.
*
Now Kerry-Lee wrote poetry:
Her poetry was fine.
I took her to a restaurant
And asked her to be mine.
*
She said, ”Though I’m from Canada,
I’ve lived for six long years
Up the valleys with a guy
Who never changed his gears.
*
I’m not prepared to settle down
With anyone just yet.”
She smiled the loveliest of smiles
And rolled a cigarette.
*
“Then sleep with me, at least,” I sighed,
“For money, if you like.”
So every Friday, after that
She’d visit on her bike.
*
You could say I was mad for her.
Neglecting my old mum,
I’d lie abed with Kerry-Lee,
While she got through the rum.
*
With Christmas over, mum took ill
And died within a week.
I drove up to the hospital
And kissed an icy cheek.
*
Before the crematorium
Had turned mum into ash,
Kerry-Lee had let me know
She didn’t need the cash.
*
Mad for Paul, she was, you see;
My colleague, where I taught.
Then everything got swallowed up
In one enormous nought.
*
And there being nothing I could do
About my mother’s dog,
I left her in the old folk’s home
Where things turn into fog.
x
MAKING A CAMP
x
We used to call it making a camp, firstly under a table
When we were nippers, filching a blanket out of the dog’s basket;
Later in the wood nearest home, leaning the stoutest fallen
Branches against a trunk. This was our hideout, where the gang
x
Would meet – as Turpin might have met his fellow highwaymen
North of prehistoric Loughton Camp in his dugout maybe.
Common enough, this Christmas. Against a tree again,
Staves draped in tarpaulin, some old mattress dragged therein.
x
There’s one in Down Lane Park. Soon the cops will move him on.
While underneath the railway, in that concrete cavern
To the left as you emerge from the underpass, several grim
Bedraggled tents shelter sleeping bags from the damp
x
Where fresh graffiti vies with last year’s for wall space.
x
(Seasonal poems, written over the years, and now all collected in my Shorter Poems.)
x
The deep artist stumbles backwards, backwards into a past
That can’t be seen. Because that artist faces the other way,
Anticipating horrors that progress would inflict upon us all,
As evidenced by the tractors that have come to block Whitehall,
Foreseeing the destruction of our green and pleasant land
By forces such as USAID obeying the command of shady NGOs
Owned by oligarchs so rich that they have morphed into lunatics.
x
So don’t delay degrowth. De-escalate the GDP.
No more artificial lawns, perpetually green, but
Denying existence to the earthworm, and leaving but a legacy
Of dirt. Do not buy into the myth that there’s no reason to
Suppose that economic advance cannot continue for
Another 2,500 years. Do not take the saw to another oak.
Do not allow Bill Gates and his ilk to run amok.
x
From the Illustrated Runiad, page 497 – Book 19
Olivia Clementine has recorded a marvellous conversation with Andrea; informative and truly intriguing. “You will hear about Andrea’s path from being a 19-year-old student in Paris, to journeying to the Himalayas to study with yogic masters, including her teacher the 16th Karmapa, to becoming one of the few Western women to live and practice at Indian cremation grounds. Andrea speaks with the directness of someone who has spent decades facing what most avoid—death, darkness, and the dissolution of the boundaries between pure and impure at what she calls: the gates of liberation.”
Andrea talks about skulls. I remember seeing skulls when I was seven years old placed in the porch of a church in Galtür in the Austrian Alps. Andrea is Austrian. I find it interesting how a quantum connection seems to link Alpine and Himalayan ritual.
I wrote my very first story inspired by these skulls when I got back from that holiday. It was a ghost story. I stayed in the church one night, and I watched as a ghost rose from his tomb, collected his skull in the moonlight and returned to his tomb. It was very badly spelt and my hand-writing was awful (still is), but my English teacher praised the story. I will try and find it. I think at some point it was typed out.
Andrea is the sister of Gwendolyn Leick – the mother of my son. Gwendolyn was a well-known scholar as well, and two of her literary works are published by Grey Suit Editions
PS About the skulls in the church, Andrea comments, “Anthony, that’s what we call a carner. Skulls digged up from abandoned graves kept in the church sanctuary. It also fascinated me a child.”
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