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Saturday 31 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 19

Love falls easy
On the eve of circumstance
We talk of change

He tells of miners
And of minders
Protection for the decision makers

We are country boys
Of late middle age
Not yet total familiar
With our obtuse journeys

I talk of diabetes
The patience of my grandfather
As he weighed his bread

He reveals the echo of his father
Lad, chew your food
Twenty-seven times before you swallow

Today he flies to Malta (he may have flown already)
Unlikely that we will ever meet again
But it was sunshine and he told me that he was gay

The suitcase is gone
The night is gone
(Echoes here of Bukowski)

The garden is neat
The swallows petit
All is freshness and light

Where is the gone
Is it the gone of the gone before
The gone of the past

A gone that drives writers to go on
Gone to go on with compulsion
No doubt the perfume is also gone
All remnants of scent are gone



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Friday 30 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 18

Body
Mind
Perception
Swell those great perceptions

A drink
Another drink
Feet tap to the music

A song
A video
Dialect 
& Futurama

Move
Across the stage
A better view

A clearer sound
Another drink
Friends in conversation

He sits alone
Picks at the words
Congratulates the singer

They talk of dance
Of Tango nights
Sublimity of movement

Through quiet streets
Down lamplit lanes
Paths across the garden

Late night TV
A bed of play and sleep
To wake so very early
Touch hold of this

One time
One more time of many
Love falls easy
On the eve of circumstance


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Thursday 29 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 17

Once, just once
When the race was won
She said well done
Then left alone

Founded on floundering sand
Landed, but swept
Wept & weeping
At the weepers stone

Held together
By a collection of tablets
A pay cheque
And some thing called love

Love
The welcome smile of welcome
Love
The hugs before & after dark

Love
Togetherness tied together
Love
A life ahead with promise

Catch hold of naught but air
Through your body
Through your mind
Through your great perceptions

Naught but air
To speak
To breathe
To entire embrace with love

Catch hold
Deft of touch
Secure of strength
Capricious of capacity



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Wednesday 28 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 16

Tears
Tears without a word 
Wordless so spoken
So far away they smart

We live, we love
We hide to seek out life's compassions
We love, we live
Strong to weak we eke out surplus fashions

Love to live
Mild & meek
We weep the tears
Tears of the bleak

Tears of the broken
And the ones
Awoken 
Yet at once departed

Deep curtains, hung capricious
Sentence unfamiliar voices to the dark
Stark outpourings
From the kestrel to the rise of lark

All the while the city lights flicker
Floodlit auditoriums for Sid Viscous
Down the rivers and the valleys
Transition town nights are suspicious

Deep curtains that hold the heat
Silence unfamiliar choices that bark
Marker lines
From the mountains to the sparks

No Game

How many more
Snatches at the mirror
How many more
Changes of home


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Tuesday 27 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 15

Time lost, time wasted
Time to dream
Time I could have tasted

Bare feet up on the dashboard
Clear blue sky overhead
All sunglasses and turned up stereos

Stop, go, stop, step out

Shorts
Mobile phone 
Insurance details
For the side-stream
Supplementary shunt

Shadows under the parapet
Loud roar of traffic
Muffled whirl of helicopter blades
Lorries pulled onto the hard shoulder

Go, stop, go

Are we really going
No, no not yet
No - I really don't think so

Drive by the same old faces
Find a place, take a chance
Finger dance
To Rod Stewarts Downtown Train

Fishermans' hat
They left the cat at home
Someone has to draw the dole
To pay for this short break they've stole
At the early onset of the summer

Tears
Tears that talk
Of broken
& somehow apart



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Monday 26 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 14

Down to the azure sea

But this is England
Where I travel from the North, my homeland
To the South, for most certain the land of others

Traffic slows
Accident signs flash
Last week
About to be replicated
How soon before
Frustration sets in

Wasted time
Wasted life
Wasted in dreams
Wasted while awake

In front 
O'Neil Transport of Ireland
All green and shamrock

To the side 
Arwel Thomas' Heavy Haulage
Heading for the bridge back to Wales

Steaming past, quite slowly actually
A young couple in their Hyundai Sport Coupe
With twin chrome exhausts surely entwined

A green triangle
Backdrop for a lighter green circle
Both cut through with wavy lines

A logo of sorts
For QDS
Deliverers of land regeneration

Stop, go, stop
I joined the queue at 9:45
Already it is 10:30


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Sunday 25 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 13

This had been Jimmy's lifestyle ever since escaping from therapy. Therapy that relentlessly told him that he had to learn how to be quiet, he had to learn to care, he had to learn that others needed his mothers love, and that she needed to give love to others. 

In therapy Jimmy was relentlessly told that he was not alone, but that had to learn to be alone. Jimmy had to learn that when his mother closed her bedroom door, with her lover in tow, that she was not forgetting him, not leaving him; except for those few frantic magical moments when she too would be lost to the world. 

Jimmy
Named by chance
O how we danced
Yes how did I dance
Boy did chance take me
Pride and circumstance
Came to that dance
The chance of time
Rhymed to shape me
A singer
A poet
A musician
A lover
A sage
All tied up with the rage
The rage
And the repetition
Of the mindful metaphysician
Trapped in his bar-less cage

Morning, morning light
I drive as if on vacation, light-headed
Attractive blonde turns her hand 
From the opulence of her leather clad metallic Jaguar convertible
She smiles, mischievous
Gestures for me
To enter onto her pubic highway
Wagner, played loud
This could be Mulholland Drive
From the blue mountains 



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Saturday 24 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 12

shoulder fixed before. Jimmy asked that Harry go see his doctor in the morning, insisting that he report back to the rest of the band by tomorrow evening; but for now he would have to sit out this rehearsal. 

In the studio Jimmy told Harry to listen closely to the lyrics, to concentrate on the words and not the music, pressed him to seek out the possible sources for the songs story, prized him to measure, to feel if the darkness was balanced by the light. 

Jimmy stood aloof at the microphone, began with a whisper, stepped slowly as if following a rivers swell, before becoming a raging torrent of repetition; repetition without rhyme or reason, but louder and louder, increasingly more tormented. 

Occasionally Jimmy would kick out; it appeared to come from a deep subconscious, or was a reflex that no one understood; the musicians played along, clattering cymbals, thrashing guitars; then a fall back, to the soft sublime steel slide mourning wail, a sound from the deep; a lost soul sound that echoed Jimmy's cry, as if a wolf cub parted from its mother. 

Jimmy's mother loved him but she could not forgive his love of so many others, she was the mother who named him Benjamin, for all the wrong reasons. 

Jimmy had been unable to explain his insatiable desire for love to his mother; so unable were they to talk that instead they fought; and when drink was present they fought with intolerant passion, their hatred, of the desirous love of the others lovers caused wild explosions. As animals they scratched and tore at each others skin, settled only by the drawn blood and the mutual humiliation. 

But Jimmy showed no remorse, to the point that he became a braggart about his beastly disregard for his mothers dignity. It seemed he wanted to strip her totally of her precious dignity, Jimmy wanted to see her bare and bleeding, he wanted his band to see her bare, bleeding and in tears; he wanted all the hangers on, all the down and out and dead beats to see his mother bare, bleeding and in tears; stripped entirely, uniquely stripped by Jimmy of her precious bloody dignity. 

Jimmy lived for music and drink and sex (he called it love). He live so that all his waking hours were entirely consumed by activity.


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Friday 23 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 11

You forget that you have been listening
As friends and silence drift and gently sway

Father and daughter laugh
This is easy conversation
The best of times
No more sitting on the fence

You forget that you have been listening
To tunes on the radio
Family preserved variations
Gulls back from the sea shore
Mottled cherry blossom 
Afloat on the breeze

That is all I could draw
Call it abstract if you will
But there is a go at tenderness
An attempt at insight
A feel for the message in a bottle
A search for a statement of intent

In between the French
And Spanish dictionaries
Serendipity plies her wares

Shadows of the sunset years
Angle-poise, poised upon the picture
Painted, painted just before the dawn

And that's where it stayed
Caught up in indifference
Trapped in some sensible profession
Shunted into the knackers yards
Left to become redundant, old iron
Until the sun rose on that cold day in December

Stillness, silence of the crystal, locked behind glass doors
Matched, as by the forces of equilibrium, by the matching cups and saucers
Jimmy yanked Harry's arm, you could hear the crack across the street
Passers by looked on with concern, had they never seen a dislocated 


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Thursday 22 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 10

By the apparent call for stillness

The artist looks up
With palette knife in hand
Speed painting, in a pastoral style

Back to that day by the river
Two boys at play
Discovered by a father often absent

All through the night the grasses remain
Grazed by ponies, sheep and foals
The forthcoming darkness and silence
Asks that rightful ownership once again descend

Not cured, but stable
Almost no palpitations 
This time of leaving

Death at the roadside
Stops instant
The self-indulgent postulations

I walk to the beach
Paul and Dawn get married
Sunshine dried earth
Cracks the pond-side track
The steel band serenades

Alone in the shade
Of trees and scrub
Sand, more as dust
Fallen timber refuse
Flung far from the Atlantic

In the Tennyson lounge
A pen & ink, of Happy Days
Linked to the wedding celebration
In the sunlit flooded garden
Beneath the gold statue
Of Napoleon on his crazy horse



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Wednesday 21 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 9

Slight breeze
Worn away boulders
Relics of the flood plain

The evenings horizons are transitory
What appears also disappears
Light falls exponential
Coldness gallops through

Strokes in haste; passionate youth
Joined together
By the pasts previous absence

Great stones, about to tumble
Balanced precarious
Dampness and cold
Sit close by, on the shoulder

Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
Free of all other species
Old posts by the highway
Fine grass in silhouette

Tune in; zoom in
Smaller than the midge
Slower than the slug
Faster than the ant

Bah, bah, bah
As if in time
It is their turn

Deep on the moor
Rise and flight
Of the Canadian Goose
Surely not, not a Canadian Goose

Messages, or symbols, or dreams

A sort of heavenly occasion
Disturbed only


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Tuesday 20 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 8

Trees
Horizon

I Sit, or am laid out, either way it is to take the humbler point of view

Yeos farm
Haddon Hills
Dunchideock
Robert & Janet
A good combination

Rock
Shared with moss
And the beginnings
Of a bilberry bush

Stems touched
Clung with water droplets
I wait for the artist
To gather his thoughts

Arches
Curves
Mist
Telegraph wires half out west

Quiet
Except for the babbling brook
Or the aeroplanes
On the cross Atlantic flight path

The occasional
Acceleration of a car
Travelling to or from the prison

A cavalcade
It is important to visit
While the light holds
For the portrait painter

Bent reeds


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Monday 19 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 7

Son number two over that range of hills
In cowboy black I sit alone
Almost on top of the world

Slight wind
Maybe a zephyr
Among the grasses
Across the page
Through my thinning hair

Aircraft noise, out of sight
We are dreamers, one and all
Cut through or cut into the dust
Party time, it is too cold to fall

East
And North
Further than the crows flight
Quieter than the crows squawk

It could be that night 
Summer evening up on Red Hill
That time, when
We were together

The sky was clearer
Yet I doubt any nearer
The time was dearer
We had no need to fear

Newly mown grass
Cocooned in bales of hay
Scent as fine as Yves Saint Laurent
White cotton blouse, weighed in

This is play
Time almost stood still
Smell of earth
All about the nostrils
Photographs
Of bluebells


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Sunday 18 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 6

Ineffective & frustrated
It cannot always be someone else's fault
Yet how I often I fancy myself to be blameless

Scents surround the stories
Soft words, softer when spoken
Book, half read, beside the bed
Letters on the side left unopened

Bones, intact
Breath approaches steady
Confidence attacked
Many times over

More often than not
The end came too soon
More often than not
The words could have been kinder

Pre school years
Post traumatic stress
Families gather
All along the vacation trail

I am told
That on a good day
You can see five counties
Albeit one of them is in Wales

Early evening mist, draped over the hills
A chill breeze drives over my shoulder
I may holler as much as I wish
Only the songbirds will hear

Sunlight slips into the grey western sky
Bluebells in waves down the bank
Old trunks reach up with new leaf
Rapeseed fields catch the eye

Email from son number one
 - Stay in touch


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Saturday 17 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 5

Shall I walk also
Return, to sit and talk
And laugh just as he did

Not easy to know where to start & if I do not know where to start then where should I enquire? What should I let be the forces to take me? It seems the big question always hangs about, there but not talked of; no venture to challenge, instead I settle for an I that enjoys breath and beauty. Yet is this sufficient, are there purposes to this life still to be explored, if so what tools should I gather, to gain the certainty of discovery.

Arthur cut up his bread
Weighed it, before and after the spread of butter
Taught me how to drink eggs - though I cannot do it now
A small man, five foot four at the most
Always clean shaven, thin grey hair neatly brushed
Often he wore a knee length, fawn raincoat
On top of a good, but old, bespoke tailor-made suit
His photograph, taken at Lands End stood by the signpost
That shows all the places that he and Elsie might have gone

We made each other laugh, I thought he had subtle humour, I was brash. More than humour we both had a desire for learning; Arthur Kaye told me of his going to management college, to learn business skills, because the factory owners son wasn't up to it. I told him about Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday, from my world of Electrical Engineering. Even then, thirty years ago I recognised in my grandfather a sense of calm and assurance that I continue to seek. Yet in his final days he became angst and angry, angry with the whole world; I was completely confused, some days I still am.

I have the energy to make her laugh
Though I doubt that to be uncommon
Equally I have the power, or reserve, to wish I had not gone a step too far
It is it seems, always about knowing where to start, where to end
Yes I do have untrammelled enthusiasm
Ability to become engrossed, carried away
Without thinking to understand about the serious implications of the detail
That will undoubtably follow. That is the hub of it
Laughter
Love



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Friday 16 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 4

Sea of deepest Prussian blue
Line of horizon, broken
By the rotunda of an island
A resting place for poetry or prayer

Tiredness strikes on the long road home
It is time to sympathise with the years

Gulls glide past the cafe window
I take Americano, strong & black
Stare wilful into the clear all day sky
To set out again - that is my intention

A face of disappointment
And once again she looks disappointed
Her already well overweight daughter
Opts for a second piece of pecan pie

Home
To the big skies
To the tree lined byways
Hedgerows in blossom
Home to the East
Where loves hold lies longing

Eight red lights
That don't quite reach the sky
Even tonight
When all is clear
When all is plain to see

Water, elemental
Steams over my body
Later
I will take a few lengths in the pool

Am I to understand
This thing called life
Am I to take the rest
As a sabbatical
As my grandfather walked



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Thursday 15 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 3

You give me the time
Time to sit
Or lay
Time to breathe
Or gaze

Time to write
Grant you
The peace
Inside & outside
The window

Windows darken
Skies close
To naught but absence
Matisse draws the evening to a close

Bright sunshine
Mild frost
Rabbits in the field
Mist rises over the pond

Sweet damp grass
Fresh dew of the morning
Blueberries, yoghurt, muesli
Hot buttered toast

Mist drawn away
Blue sky reaches unbroken to the horizon
Trees appear at the head of the field

Am I to be
Any less troubled
Or how to stay calm
When friction is obvious
Strongly felt

Sunlight through my window
Look, over the pond
Swifts in flight
Be dazzled by their skylight dance 


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Wednesday 14 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 2

Am I to tell
Of a late afternoon
Whose gift of joy
Was so swiftly taken
By the dark impounding clouds

Am I to bare my soul
Say that happiness fleetingly landed
But was unable to stay
Or gather to enrapture

Bare branches
Net curtains
Silver white sky
A painting by Mildred Bartee
Natures spring shadows
Hung on the alabaster wall

Blue sky
Jet stream
Rows of mountain bikes
Cigarette smoke wafts as
Smokers drift along the terrace

Still pond as reflector
Of the YKB above
As if by Magritte himself

Energetic birds
Sing and swoop
More delicate birds
Pick at the feeder

I eat seed with my breakfast
The plain white bowl
Sits on a painted table mat

A woodpecker
By an unknown artist
One whose royalties
Are sure to have expired


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Tuesday 13 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 1

Pull away
From fire and silver sunsets
Pull away
From ploughed and furrowed ground

Head towards
The clearer big skies
Head towards
The soft and gentle mound

Days
Days to dwell at the time of dusk
Days
Days to warm to the smell of musk

Sprays
Sprays at the core or windfall husk
Sprays
Sprays at the call for more childhood rusk

Sunlight
Sprinkled
Through the early summer leaves
Becoming of a variegated global motif

Blossom
Fallen with the falling rain
Becoming of a silken pink translucent emblem

Taken
Together
Parted
As ever

Time slips
Into dark
Time slips
I hear the lark


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Monday 12 January 2015

Back (In Mind) Across The Irish Sea

He told me his wife was having an affair
He had taken some time out to stay with his sister, herself a recovering schizophrenic
With a dedication to The Mass that he admired, he admired her dedication greatly

Earlier, and the reason I am writing this, he told me he had seen the light
He was staring out to sea, on the cliffs of his hometown near Donegal
He had become at one with peace, he had found inner love (my words not his)

He said that if I wanted to find it I had to be prepared, I had to make myself ready
It would be hard work but it would be uniquely fulfilling
He sold me on his story, which also included only ever telling the truth, the truth as he saw it


This is the final poem, I hope you enjoyed the journey
From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Sunday 11 January 2015

Return Ferry Cross The Irish Sea

How many more ideas might a man have that he hasn’t the time to write them all down
Moving across the horizon, speeding towards the mainland
Something about the paintings of John Miller’s seas
And his Cornish summer sandbars


From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Saturday 10 January 2015

Vacation, Vacation

I thought to take the train to Dublin, take a glass or two in the Palace Bar
Leave my place west of Killarney, out on the headland, past Dingle Bay
I’d meet a fair-minded legal couple who would tell me of their land
Of planting trees and building houses, for the returning poor folks to stay
I’d hear talk of a new kind of landlord, a guardian of his own destined way
He’d pay a Welsh man to carve his pastures, in the ideal of Capability Brown
His mission was tied into the desire for a legacy, to be achieved through land and book
He would read all that he could, such that one day he should write his own piece
So complete, and so succinct, so much more in the line of Hemingway and land
Than of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s labours, with the splintered souls of soul-less society


From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Friday 9 January 2015

Back Streets

I take myself out of the dereliction, feeling unsafe in the squalid world of the half-life
I retire to the Japanese coffee shop and art gallery, where jazz music plays soulful
I look back on my photographs of Beckett, and that wild phantom of a man whose name evades me right now
Yet twenty five years past I saw his ghostly portraits, back then I thought, as I think now, there is the man who captured the troubled soul
The French jazz singer seemingly achieves only that half-way point of angst, in her search for today’s equilibrium


From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Thursday 8 January 2015

Straight Lines; Obtuse Angles

Old rectangles came into my life today, in walls with windows, in hallways with stairs, in tall tales of Pythagoras on the road to Donegal
Thin slots, reminiscent of the rill constructed in another’s garden’, with log, with neoprene, with sand and water on the road to Nowhere
Alarm bells in square boxes guard the heavy wooded doors, elsewhere John Singer Sergeant is kept from public view, although if I recall he was on the road to Venice


From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
Read free in Ibooks on Itunes here
Listen free on soundcloud here
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Read and download for free from ISSUU here